Charlotte Köckert at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
Benjamin Gleede situates Gregory’s concept of simultaneous creation within the Christian tradition and discusses how Gregory goes beyond his predecessors: unlike Philo of Alexandria and Origen, Gregory develops an “evolutionary conception of the creation sequence” (103) by combining the concept of simultaneous creation with the idea of “progressive creation”. In doing so, he not only explains that the process of creation’s unfolding follows an inner order, but he also identifies the immanent intelligible powers (Logoi) that God embedded in creation at the moment of the world’s beginning and which henceforth govern this order. Gleede argues that for Gregory, the idea of “progressive creation” is necessary due to the fundamental difference between Creator and creature, between eternity and time: his “bundle-conception” of matter presupposes the successive emergence of form in matter; the world as an essentially temporal being cannot have a timeless, simultaneous origin for all its parts. Unlike his predecessors, Gregory integrates into his cosmological model the Christian conception of time as a limited teleological process that actually attains its God-given goal and whose beginning and end are set by God. This understanding of time differs fundamentally from that of the Platonists, who conceive of time as an eternal striving toward eternity that, despite all its teleological orientation, always falls short of its ideal.
more here.
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