Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity. By ANDREW RADDE-GALLWITZ.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The problem of divine simplicity evidently was at the heart of the Eunomian controversy. Following his teacher Aetius, the bishop of Cyzicus argued that on account of his simplicity God could only be either ingenerate or generate. Given that he was the former, the Son, who evidently was the latter, could not be of the same or of a similar substance. Did the Cappadocians have a good answer to this straightforward and seemingly forceful argument? Considering the centrality of this issue for the final phase of the trinitarian debates in the fourth century, it is surprising how little scholarly effort has been devoted to its elucidation. The present study, a revised version of the author’s Ph.D. thesis originally written at Emory University, goes a long way to addressing this lacuna. Radde-Gallwitz has produced a book of impeccable historical and philological scholarship, which nevertheless at no point leaves the reader in any doubt that the ultimate objective of the work is squarely in the theological field. In other words, while he investigates models of divine simplicity in the early church, this question is not detached for him from the theological one of how God’s simplicity can and ought to be understood. It is for this reason that the structure of his work owes much to a preliminary philosophical and theological analysis of the issue it seeks to elucidate. The upshot of his analysis, which draws crucially on Christopher Stead, is this. In defending divine simplicity Christian theologians seem to face an unpleasant alternative: they either have to subscribe to what Radde-Gallwitz calls the ‘identity thesis’, i.e. the view that the various attributes predicated of God throughout the Bible all have the same meaning; or they opt for an extreme version of negative theology so that those predicates refer not to the unknowable God himself but to some lower layer or hypostasis of divinity. Radde-Gallwitz argues that, while this dilemma is perfectly present in theological developments up until the fourth century (and beyond), Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa must be credited with a highly original, alternative answer which, in spite of some shortcomings, ought to be taken seriously in contemporary reflection on this topic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".