8,184 research outputs found
‘In the Arche’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Apologia in Hexaemeron and the Neoplatonic Cosmos
No full textThe question of arche was of critical significance in Late Antiquity. Plotinus, who stood at the dawn of this period, famously argued that the cosmos has no temporal beginning (Enn. II.1.4). Not all his contemporaries would have agreed with such a thesis. However, it became a “dogma” of Neoplatonism that the world was beginningless.
When Gregory of Nyssa had to analyse Gen 1:1 in his Apologia (alas, a usually neglected work of Gregory), he was reluctant to associate the arche, in which “God created the heaven and the earth,” with any beginning in time. In this sense, he was not ready to accept Basil’s reading of Gen 1:1, whom he aimed to “defend” in that treatise. Neither did Gregory follow Origen, for whom the arche was Jesus Christ himself (Hom. Gen. 1.1). Gregory found his peculiar way of interpretation (and in doing this, he must have relied on Philo of Alexandria): he introduced a clear-cut disjunction between the world, which we know and experience, and another reality or order of things (the so-called “first creation”), which was (or rather eternally is) indeed created “in the arche”.
What is most important here (and what this paper will demonstrate) is that Gregory probably reacted in Apologia to a Neoplatonist criticism of Christianity and thus tried to make the Christian doctrine of creation intellectually acceptable to the critics by depriving Moses’ arche of any connotations of temporality. This paper also shows that, at the same time, Gregory subverted from the inside the Neoplatonist cosmology by making the eternal arche partly dependent on what is temporal and contingent.
Gregory makes quite a philological work to prove the atemporal character of that beginning. In particular, he claims that both Greek translations of bereshith (“in the beginning”) are complementary to each other: Aquila’s en kephalaio (“in the head”) points to the creation as being “in sum”; and the Septuagint version to the creation as “instantaneous and non-dimensional” since in the term arche, no “idea of dimension” is involved.
Where this creation takes place is an eternal reality in which there is no time, namely in God’s creative impulse (horme) or foreknowledge (probably, Gregory reads Aquila’s translation as speaking of God’s “head”). And the realm in which we find ourselves, this empirical world, is a gradual and ordered appearance of all things embraced by that horme. Even if, for Gregory, this “second creation” did presumably have a temporal beginning, Gregory “saved” Gen 1:1 from a too prosaic reading of it as simply indicating a starting point of the timeline.
The most provocative part of this paper’s argument concerns Gregory’s radical reversal of Neoplatonism and Platonism as such. If in the “first creation,” God eternally sees all things precisely the way they unfold in time, does it not mean then that it is not the becoming that reflects the ideal, and it is not the contingent that depends on the eternal but the other way round
The Rhetoric of Landscape in Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Song of Songs
No full textThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Brill via the ISBN in this recordAnalytical and Supporting Studies. Proceedings of the 13th International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (Rome, 17-20 September 2014)Series:
Vigiliae Christianae, Supplements, Volume: 150In this paper I want to take you on a walk through a garden. It is, to be sure, an imaginary garden; nevertheless, it bears a significance which extends beyond itself. Some of this significance concerns words and texts: for as we shall see, the garden is, amongst other things, a ‘garden of rhetoric’. The garden in question appears in the Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Song of Songs.[...
An Evening with Richard Claxton “Dick” Gregory, Civil Rights Activist, Nutritionist, Comedian, and Author
No full textGregory, Richard Claxton “Dick” (Born, October 12, 1932, St. Louis, Mo.), African American comedian and civil rights activist whose social satire changed the way white Americans perceived African American comedians since he first performed in public. Gregory’s autobiography, Nigger, was published in 1963 prior to The assassination of President Kennedy, and became the number one best-selling book in America. Over the decades it has sold in excess of seven million copies. His choice for the title was explained in the forward, where Dick Gregory wrote a note to his mother. “Whenever you hear the word ‘Nigger’,” he said, “you’ll know their advertising my book.” In 1984 he founded Health Enterprises, Inc., a company that distributed weight loss products. In 1987 Gregory introduced the Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet, a powdered diet mix, which was immensely profitable. Economic losses caused in part by conflicts with his business partners led to his eviction from his home in 1992. Gregory remained active, however, and in 1996 returned to the stage in his critically acclaimed one-man show, Dick Gregory Live! The reviews of Gregory’s show compared him to the greatest stand-ups in the history of Broadway
“Judge Me Gently”: Reflections on the Religious Life of John Milton Gregory, 1822–1898
No full text John Milton Gregory is familiar to many Christian educators through his 19th-century publication, The Seven Laws of Teaching. For most readers of this important book, little is known about the author himself. This article explores the religious life and theological foundations of John Milton Gregory, who was both author of The Seven Laws of Teaching and founding president of the University of Illinois. Utilizing his spiritual diaries preserved in his daughter's biography of her father and archival sources from the University of Illinois, this essay offers a theological and spiritual understanding of this important historical figure. </jats:p
David Gregory
No full textPhotograph - David Gregory, member of the Book Sub-Committee, part of the Town of Athabasca 75th Anniversary Committee, Athabasca, Alberta. The Book Sub Committee produced the book "Athabasca Landing: An Illustrated History
Kaplan-Meier survival curves by CLCA2, SPIC, and MIR4311 quartile in the Detroit AA cohort.
No full textKaplan−Meier plots for overall survival by (a) CLCA2 quartile, (b) SPIC quartile, and (c) MIR4311 quartile among 155 treatment-naïve TN tumors (56 deaths) in the Detroit AA cohort. Solid lines represent curves for Q1, dashed lines represent curves for Q2, dotted lines represent curves for Q3, and dash-dotted lines represent curves for Q4 in each panel.</p
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