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From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa's Mystical Writings

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This text represents one of the first attempts at depicting St Gregory of Nyssa in English, as something other then purely an Neoplatonic Christian father. The book is an analysis of Gregory's works from the perspective that Christianity is something more then just the ideas of Numenius and Ammonius Saccas and even the wonderious Plotinus, warmed over. The work covers Gregory and Origen but more so covers what Gregory stated separated the Christian God from the Hellenic philosophy God of Plato and by proxy the Neoplatonic. The idea that God's essence (ousia) is not comprehensible where as the philosophers depicted God as the good over the demiurge as energy. And that the realities of God (the hypostasises, Father, Son, Holy Spirit) are unique as is the ultimate reality of God.
The unique in that God is not meerly something that is infinite in that it repeats itself after a certain point or event. But that God is infinite (as the Father hypostasis) in growth and newness. That God is never ending and does not repeat. This infinity is never ending. As Christians one must merge or Wed (if you will) with the infinite (though baptism) and become like God in infinite growth. Or as St Gregory put it from the words of St Paul. Heaven is glory to glory. Ever growing into greater happiness and then to greater happiness into greater happiness into infinity, forever. The growth itself is reflective, but does not to represent repetition or the creation of a pattern, since in God there is no end to the new or glory. Rather our lives are the starting point for which we can wed ourselves to the infinite. Thru humility or meekness mankind becomes part of the infinite.

As someone thoroughly interested in Gregory of Nyssa and his promotion of Paul's idea of apokatastasis, I was disappointed to read that Danielou seems to be the only Nyssa scholar (living or not) that believes that Nyssa was not a proponent of universal salvation (read: restoration.) His exclusion of Nyssa's sections from The Life of Moses that support apokatastasis was especially disappointing.

Altogether, though, I felt that the compilation was simply not a coherent stream of thought. Jumping from Imago Dei to the Song of Solomon was too much for me...I like my compilations to make a little more sense as I'm reading them--or at least have transitions from topic to topic that make the entirety of the reading a little more cohesive.