St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395)

Bishop of Nyssa, younger brother of St Basil, and the most daring mind among the Cappadocians. He was a married rhetor before he was a bishop, was deposed once by the Arian party, and after the Second Council, in 381, was named by imperial law one of the bishops whose communion defined Orthodoxy. His Life of Moses reads the ascent of Sinai as the soul’s ascent into the darkness where God is, and his teaching of epektasis - that the soul goes on stretching toward God forever, because God is infinite and so is the journey - is his gift to the Church. His language about the restoration of all things is the one place the Church reads him with care rather than as he wrote it, and it says so. His Catechetical Oration and On the Making of Man remain foundational. Feast: January 10.