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He argued that the soul's journey toward God has no endpoint, because an infinite God offers infinite room to grow — a strange comfort to build a whole spirituality on.
The Dominican mystic who preached that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one, and that the deepest prayer is to want nothing.
Connection
Gregory of Nyssa apophatic mysticism (via Pseudo-Dionysius) Meister Eckhart — Gregory's idea that the soul's approach to an infinite God has no final stopping point fed, through the later writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius, into the mystical tradition Eckhart inherited — the sense that the divine is reached less by knowing more than by unknowing.
Ideas
Words
“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.”
“The perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness.”
“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
Key Moments
c. 380s CE
Condemns slavery in his Homilies on Ecclesiastes
381 CE
Helps finalize Trinitarian doctrine at Constantinople
c. 1260 CE
Born in Thuringia
c. 1310 CE
German Sermons
c. 1320 CE
Detachment and the Godhead
1326 CE
Tried for Heresy
Works
The Life of Moses
The German Sermons