Heller M, Woodin W.H. (eds.) Infinity. New research frontiers (CUP, 2011)(ISBN 1107003873)(O)(327s)_MAml_

the “christian infinite” 267Principiis II.9.1). It is arguable – and indeed has been argued – that the first “Greek”thinker either to attribute to God, or to develop a philosophical description of, positiveinfinity was St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century.21. As a Christian, Gregory was bound to conceive of God’s infinity as a lovethat gives without need, rather than as the unresponsive speculative completion ofthe world’s necessity; as Trinity, the divine a[peiron is already determinate, different,related, and sufficient; it freely creates and wholly exceeds the world, being neitherthe world’s emanative substance nor its dialectical consummation. Whereas the Onespends its inexhaustible power in a ceaseless disinterested overflow into being, theChristian God creates out of that agape that is the life of the Trinity: God not onlygives being to difference but elects each thing in its particularity, is turned toward andregards it, and takes it back to himself without despoiling it of its difference. Thus, nomere metaphysical prescinsion from multiplicity can lead thought up to being’s highesttruth. To pass from the vision of the world to the theoria of the divine is not simplyto move from appearance to reality, from multiplicity to singularity, but rather to findthe entirety of the world in all its irreducible diversity to be an analogical expression(at a distance, in a different register) of the dynamism and differentiation that Godis. Difference within being, that is, corresponds precisely as difference to the truthof divine differentiation. Thus, the energy of desire drawing creation to God is not arecoil back from finitude, toward an unexplicated and disinterested simplicity whose“eyes” are forever averted from the play of being and its deficiencies, but answers –corresponds to – God’s call to what he fashions for himself, and what is in itself nothingbut an ontic ecstasy ex nihilo and in infinitum.22. All that said, what Gregory understands “infinity” to mean when predicatedof God is very much (at least on the face of it) what Plotinus understood it to meanin regard to the One: incomprehensibility, absolute power, simplicity, eternity. God isuncircumscribable (ajperivlhpton), elusive of every finite concept or act, boundless,arriving at no terminus: in Gregory’s idiom, “that which cannot be passed beyond”(ajdiexivthton) (Contra Eunomium III.vii). God is the perfect completeness of what heis; the boundaries of bounty, power, life, wisdom, and goodness are set only where theircontraries are encountered (Contra Eunomium I; De Vita Moysis I.5), but God is withoutopposition, as he is beyond nonbeing or negation, transcendent of all compositionor antinomy; it is in this sense of utter fullness, principally, that God is called simple. Tosay, moreover, that he is eternal is to say not only that he is without beginning or end, butthat he is without extension or succession at all (Contra Eunomium III.vii); the divinenature knows no past or future, no sequence, but is like an endless ocean of eternity(Contra Eunomium I); it is not time, although time flows from it (Contra Eunomium I).Extension, whether of time or of space, belongs exclusively to the created order anddistinguishes it from the unimaginable infinity of God, who contains beginning andend at once in his timeless embrace (Contra Eunomium I; III.vi). This is hardly anextraordinary aspect of Gregory’s thought, but it must be kept in view nonetheless,inasmuch as the difference between creaturely diachrony and divine eternity is also,for Gregory, the condition that makes union between the creature and God possible.Gregory’s understanding of the infinite is one of utter positivity and utter plenitude,in which the finite can participate without in any way departing from its finitude. Theinsuperable ontological difference between creation and God – between the dynamism