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Chapter 8 highlights a new development in Gregory’s thinking: his immersion in the Song of Songs, with its descriptions of the virgin bride longing for her bridegroom, which allows him to view the cultivation of the imago Dei as more than just a mixture of male and female virtues (as in the middle period). He now argues that the soul’s shifting identifications with male and female characteristics take place in a particular order during the course of spiritual ascent. This diachronic progression begins with the life of vice and passion (identified as “womanish”), which is replaced, through ascetical discipline, by the virtuous (“manly”) life and then finally superseded by the soul’s identification with the passionate Virgin Bride of Christ. The second part of the chapter seeks to address the following question: how is Gregory able to insist that there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus on the basis of Galatians 3:28 while also using gendered imagery to describe the transformations of spiritual ascent? By examining the ever-increasing intimacy between the bride and the bridegroom, it becomes clear that the soul’s erotic relationship with Christ results in the spiritual undoing of “male” and “female” for Gregory in the late phase of his literary career.

Chapter 7 is the first chapter in part C of the book, “Erotic Intimacy with Christ and the Maturation of Desire,” which sees the aging bishop, in the late phase of his literary career, retreat from ecclesiastical affairs and focus more intensely than ever before on the implications of diachronic progress in the spiritual life. Chapter 7 examines the expanded meaning of virginity: it now denotes purity of heart in a general moral sense and can therefore be applied to Christians who are married—as long as their desires are chastened and transformed through the practices of prayer and virtue. Gregory, at this point in his literary career, regards any form of sin (hamartia) as an act of spiritual infidelity against Christ, the incorruptible Bridegroom. The parthenia/porneia disjunction is therefore used to contrast the life of virtue and the life of vice (more generally understood), not simply sexual abstinence and sexual vice. Gregory also applies the theme of maturation to the conjugal life—a point so far overlooked in the secondary literature—which provides new insights into his understanding of the order (taxis) of love in the life of virtue. The chapter ends with a detailed elucidation of Gregory’s diachronically theorized account of spiritual maturation (which highlights the essential incorporation of erotic desire in the practice of contemplation) and examines his on bodily development (especially enfeeblement in old age).

Building on early encounters with a possible Neoplatonic echo in his poetics, this chapter explores how Montale adapted the ‘donna amata’ in Dante to an aesthetic wrestling with his times — the years from his first meeting with the Dante scholar Irma Brandeis in 1933 to the publications of Le occasioni (1939) and La bufera (1957). With the end of their involvement in 1939, Montale cast the relationship with Brandeis as an echo of the spiritual philosophy of his great forebear. From their meeting until plans to be united were abandoned with the introduction of the 1938 Racial Laws — Brandeis being American Jewish — and the coming of war in 1940, Montale’s poetry constitutes a spiritualised resistance to the Fascist Italy in which the poet lived as an inner émigré, a resistance in which being driven inwards by events also drove on the spiritual ascent.

This chapter investigates the role of powers in the fragments of Porphyry’s On Statues, which derive principally from Eusebius of Caesarea’s Praeparatio Evangelica. It argues that powers had a core role in the original treatise and that this role is to be considered in connection with Porphyry’s doctrines of twofold power and of spiritual ascent. Given Porphyry’s dynamic understanding of the hypostases, contemplating statues in the right way can serve as a springboard for the ascent of the soul. On this reading, On Statues appears to be not an early work from the philosopher’s youth in Phoenicia (or even Athens), as Bidez had proposed, but a mature work in which Porphyry engages in dialogue with Iamblichus.