Imitations of Infinity: Gregory of Nyssa and the Transformation of Mimesis by Michael Motia (review)

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• Imitations of Infinity: Gregory of Nyssa and the Transformation of Mimesis by Michael Motia
• Bradley K. Storin

Imitations of Infinity: Gregory of Nyssa and the Transformation of Mimesis Michael Motia Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 288. ISBN: 9780812253139

In this fine new monograph on late antique intellectual history, Michael Motia broaches a question that scholars of late antique religion don't ask as much as they perhaps should: what precisely do late antique Christians think Christianity in Late Antiquity is? Put differently, why should anyone identify as a Christian and participate in Christian community and ritual life? For his part, Gregory of Nyssa (around 335–395 ce) provides a direct and succinct answer: "Christianity is mimesis of the divine nature" (On What It Means to Call Oneself a Christian 85 [GNO 29: 136], quoted on page 1]). And what does that mean? How can a human being (corporeal and finite) imitate the divine nature (incorporeal and infinite)? What exactly are Christians imitating, and with which practices and guidelines? Motia's learned study guides readers through the many nooks and crannies of Nyssen's thought and writings to reveal that, at least for this late ancient theologian, imitating infinity means infinitely extending the Christian's desire toward God. Mimesis was a program for Christian life.

Hardly configured in an intellectual vacuum, Nyssen's formulation represents his contribution to longstanding philosophical debates about the value of mimesis that began with Plato and continued throughout late antiquity. Motia's first chapter identifies two unresolved "mimetic tracks" (41) in Plato's writings—aesthetic representation and ontological participation. The former (articulated in the Republic and Symposium) involves a mode of desiring, or an "erotic," built on a love for beauty and truth, that manifests in literary, artistic, and argumentative representation. The latter (articulated in the Timaeus) involves an erotic, constructed on attraction to the intelligible order, that manifests in a creature's transformation into an image of the transcendent in order to participate in the divine nature. In the second chapter, we learn how the heirs of the Platonic tradition—Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and to a lesser extent Julian—attempted to resolve these two tracks in light of their own concerns. Whereas Plotinus welded them with a focus on intellectual activity and assimilation with the One (thus emphasizing the soul's ascent out of creation), Iamblichus did so with a focus on liturgy as the site of mimesis. For Plotinus, mimesis consists of thought and becoming like the object of contemplation; for Iamblichus, it consists of the ritual utilization of words and images and ecstatic transformation through prayer. Of course, philosophy did not have proprietary ownership of mimesis, and Christian writers had long championed mimesis as the proper human response to the divine, beginning with Paul in the first century. Motia's third chapter follows this thread, exploring Philippians and 1 Corinthians but also writings connected to martyrdom, asceticism, artistic representation, and theology. Mimesis, it turns out, is everywhere in early Christian literature, and its ubiquity makes the one chapter that Motia gives to it feel a bit like stuffing three months' worth of clothing into a carry-on suitcase.

This is all context, though, for a multifaceted discussion of mimesis in [End Page 279] Nyssen's view of Christian identity and practice. In Motia's fourth chapter, we learn that Nyssen's treatise On Perfection holds that a Christian is a Christian because she ontologically participates in the names that scriptural texts, particularly the letters of Paul, apply to Christ: "rock" (1 Cor 10.4), "inaccessible" (1 Tim 6.16), "image of the invisible God" (Col 1.15), and so on. Building on contemporary debates about the potency of language, Nyssen asserts that the names of Christ are containers for the uncontainable and, when the Christian makes space in her own soul for those names, she binds herself to the divine and consequently becomes an image for other Christians to imitate. Motia's fifth chapter, a difficult one for this reviewer to follow, treats physical space as a site of mimesis. Motia seems to be discussing holiness and holy space, but he frames the issue confusingly with queries...