Gregory of Nyssa

Today the church celebrates the life of Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 - c. 395 C.E.)

* A collect for today:
Almighty God, you have revealed to your Church your eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like your bishop Gregory of Nyssa, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; for you live and reign for ever and ever. Amen.

* A little history from the Internet School of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/gregoryn/ 

" - Gregory was bishop of #Nyssa from 372 to 376 and from 378 until his death. He is venerated as a saint in Roman #Catholicism, Eastern #Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, #Lutheranism, and #Anglicanism. Gregory, his brother Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nazianzus are collectively known as the Cappadocian Fathers."He spent his life in #Cappadocia, a region in central Asia Minor. Together, the Cappadocians are credited with defining Christian orthodoxy in the Eastern Roman Empire, as Augustine (354—430 C.E.) was to do in the West. Gregory was a highly original thinker, drawing inspiration from the pagan Greek philosophical schools, as well as from the Jewish and Eastern Christian traditions, and formulating an original synthesis that was to influence later Byzantine, and possibly even modern European, thought. A central idea in Gregory's writing is the distinction between the transcendent nature and immanent energies of God, and much of his thought is a working out of the implications of that idea in other areas--notably, the world, humanity, history, knowledge, and virtue. This leads him to expand the nature-energies distinction into a general cosmological principle, to apply it particularly to human nature, which he conceives as having been created in God's image, and to rear a theory of unending intellectual and moral perfectibility on the premise that the purpose of human life is literally to become like the infinite nature of God. "

* More information - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_of_Nyssa

#Episcopal #Saints #Anglican #Gregory #philosophy #EDOLA