St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa on the Trinity’s Activity in the Created World

Lewis Ayres argues that like Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa believes in appropriation. However, Ayres defines appropriation as the inseparability, not the identity, of the three persons’ activities ad extra. Hence the crucial difference between Augustine and the Cappadocians. While Augustine regard’s God’s essence as identical to each of God’s attributes, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa distinguish between the unknowable essence and the energeiai, God’s “energies” or “attributes and activities.” Anticipating Gregory Palamas by a millennium, these Cappadocians affirm that what remains unknown in the essence is knowable in God’s activities in the created world.

How is the Trinity knowable as Trinity? Basil states that God’s activity emerges from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit and thence into creation. Correspondingly, human knowledge of God is discovered in the Holy Spirit, through the Son, to the Father. Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of the Trinity’s activities in our world and human knowledge of the Trinity follows the same pattern. God’s attributes and activities (“names”) are central to Gregory’s spiritual life. Because the divine essence is known in the energies (Palamas), for Gregory of Nyssa the immanent Trinity is known in the economic Trinity, and so human communion with the three divine persons becomes possible. Moreover, the emergence of divine energies from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit precisely expresses in the created world the eternal relations of origin that unite the persons: the Father begets the Son, and through the Son breathes forth the Spirit (Gregory of Nyssa).