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The Identification of Ex Nihilo with Emanation in Gregory of Nyssa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Harry A. Wolfson
Harry A. Wolfson
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

From the fourth century on, whenever Church Fathers stressingly point to the distinction between the Word and the world as a distinction between that which was generated from God and that which was created from nothing, they aim, we may assume, not only at the Arian contention that the Word was created from nothing but also at the Plotinian view that the world was generated, that is, emanated, from God. It is this double target that is aimed at by Athanasius in a passage where he contrasts the Word with the world. The Word, he says, is a “generated being” (γέννημα) or a “son” and, as such, he is “the proper offspring (γέννημα) of the essence,” “not subject to will,” and hence is one who “must always be.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , January 1970 , pp. 53 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1970

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References

1 Orationes adversus Arianos I, 29 (PG 26, 72 A — C).

2 De Fide Orthodoxa I, 8 (PG 94, 813 A).

3 Hexaemeron I, 7 (PG 29, 17 BC).

4 Enneads V, 8, 12.

5 Ibid. Ill, 2, 1. On “prior in nature” in the sense of “cause,” cf. Aristotle, Categories, 12, 14b, 11–13.

6 Ibid. V, 8, 12.

7 Ibid. V, I, 6. Among the examples used here by Plotinus as illustrations of necessary causality there is no mention of the example of a body and its shadow, which is used by Basil in the passage quoted above at n. 3. But it must have been a common example. It is thus used in the Arabic version of the Enneads, the socalled Theology of Aristotle (ed. Dieterici, p. 112, 1. 10).

8 Epistolae VIII, 11 (PG 32, 264 B).

9 For various attempts to identify creation ex nihilo with emanation, see my paper, The Meaning of Ex Nihilo in the Church Fathers, Arabic and Hebrew Philosophy, and St. Thomas, in Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Jeremiah Denis Matthias Ford, 1948, 355–70; Scholem, Gershom, Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschrankung Gottes, in Eranos 35 (1957), 87–119Google Scholar; my paper, The Meaning of Ex Nihilo in Isaac Israeli, in Jewish Quarterly Review 50 N.S. (1959), 1–12.

10 De Hominis Opificio 23 (PG 44, 212 C).

11 Ibid. 24 (213 C).

12 Refutatio Omnium Baeresium X, 33, 8, p. 290, I. 8 (ed. P. Wendland).

13 De Hominis Opificio 23 (209 C).

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid. (209 D — 212 A).

16 Ibid. (212 A).

17 Enneads V, i, 6.

18 Ibid. V, 2, i.

19 De Hominis Opificio 23 (212 B).

20 Cf. above at n. 10.

21 De Hominis Opificio 23 (212 C).

22 Ibid. 24 (212 D — 213 B).

23 Cf. above at n. 10 (plus at n. ii).

24 Cf. above at n. 19.

25 Enneads II, 4, 16.

26 Ibid, II, 4, 5.

27 De Hominis Opificio 24 (212 D).

28 Ibid. (213 A).

29 Contra Eunomium (PG 45, 461 B).

30 De Divisions Naturae III, 5 (PL 122, 634 B).

31 Physics I, g, 192a, 3–5.

32 Metaphysics V, 27, 1022b, 31.

33 De Generatione et Corruptione I, 3, 318a, 15; cf. Physics I, 9, 192a, 5–6.

34 Metaphysics VII, 7, 1032b, 1–2.

35 De Divisione Naturae I, 3 (443 A).

36 Ibid. III, 22 (686 CD).

37 Ibid. I, 15 (463 B).