Gregory of Nyssa, Father of the Fathers, and the First Seven Ecumenical Councils

The second council of Nicaea calls Gregory of Nyssa “Father of Fathers”. The purpose of this paper is to show how, starting from the first council of Nicaea and the role played by the bishop of Nyssa in the first council of Constantinople, his thought was incorporated into the following councils, particularly the second of Constantinople and the second of Nicaea, as a means of founding the unity of doctrine that developed in the councils themselves. These, in fact, all presented themselves as mere developments of the first of Nicaea, while dealing with different issues. But the perspective of Gregory’s thought makes it possible to grasp how the corpus of the first seven ecumenical councils can be treated as a single text, somehow a hypertext, in which the conceptual innovations, introduced to express the Trinitarian doctrine in a coherent way with respect to revelation, were then applied, thanks to tenacious and profound theological work, to Christology, soteriology, anthropology and, finally, worship. Such a path makes it possible to realize the relationship between Gregory of Nyssa’s thought and the seven early councils and, therefore, also to recognize its ecumenical value for the present day.