Infinite God

As Robert Jenson and Michel Rene Barnes have emphasized, Gregory of Nyssa’s theology (in, eg, Against Eunomius ) centers on a meditation on God’s infinity. Greeks were reluctant to say that God is infinite, since an infinite thing cannot, by Hellenic lights, have a nature. A nature is what defines, limits, circumscribes something. An infinite something cannot be anything at all. The problem is epistemological too: If something is note defined and delimited, it cannot be known. Knowledge grasps a fixed and finite set of characteristics.

For Greek thinkers, this is connected to the timelessness of God. Time brings development, change, movement beyond present limits. Since God is timeless, he is finite, limited. In-finite is the one negative that cannot be applied to God.

For Gregory, though, God is infinite.

There are no limits or bounds. Nothing hinders Him or interferes with him or defines Him by opposition. The God who is infinite is the Father, Son, and Spirit, who is infinite in His lively love and loving life. This is not a timeless infinite per se , but an infinity that transcends time. But it doesn’t transcend time in the normal way either, by negating time or becoming estranged from it. God transcends time because time’s limits are no barrier to his work, to the enactment of His purposes and fulfillment of His promises. Nothing keeps Him from doing something new, doing His will, accomplishing His purposes, and nothing can.

As Gregory puts it, “The uncreated nature differs greatly from the created. That is limited; this has no limits. That is bounded by appropriate. . . measures; this is measured only by limitlessness . . . and so evades every quantitative concept, by which one could bring the mind to bear. . . . In created life we can find a beginning and an end; but the Blessedness beyond creation accepts neither beginning nor end.”

Hellenic deities were motionless centers of moving time. Gregory says, by contrast, that God envelops time, and is always in front of it. He has always already realized completely His future. Gregory says God is not the motionless center of movement, but the God who keeps things in motion.