Gregory of Nyssa and Worth Without a Finish Line

The Argument

A Different Location for Human Worth

Gregory's doctrine of epektasis, developed in the Life of Moses, holds that the soul's movement toward God has no final stopping point, since God's nature is infinite and a finite creature can never exhaust an infinite object of desire. Worth, on this account, does not depend on reaching a fixed standard. It depends on the ongoing capacity to move toward one.

Every secular figure examined in this batch locates worth differently. Glasgow's characters inherit an endurance measured against pressures that eventually end, one way or another, in death or survival. Goldman locates worth in a completed act of self-definition against external authority. Gilman's narrator, by the story's final page, has no forward motion left at all, only a closed room and a finished breakdown. Gregory's account offers none of these characters a stopping point to measure against, since on his terms no stopping point marking the completion of human worth exists for anyone.

Set beside the Genesis argument, Gregory's epektasis extends the archive's covering vocabulary one step further: the coat of skins in Genesis 3:21 addresses a specific, completed act of covering, while Gregory's doctrine addresses an ongoing capacity that the covering makes possible rather than concludes. The two texts, four centuries apart, describe complementary halves of a single claim about human nature and its ultimate source.

Supporting Text

On Perpetual Progress