Virtue epistemology focuses on traits of persons or their faculties or psychological processes in the analysis of basic epistemic concepts such as justification or knowledge. Virtue epistemology is a reaction to a style of epistemology that makes individual beliefs and evidential relations between beliefs the elements of analysis. Following the Aristotelian distinction between moral and intellectual virtues, virtue epistemologists, from E. Sosa and A. Goldman to A. Plantinga, emphasize the epistemic value of intellectual virtues without taking seriously, if not ignoring completely, the epistemic value of moral virtues. Linda Zagzebski was one of the first virtue epistemologists to speak of the importance of moral virtues for virtue epistemology, supporting a unified account of moral and intellectual virtues and arguing that moral virtues have the potentiality to have cognitive contact with reality. Yet, despite her effort to establish moral virtues as epistemically valuable, all she achieved was to define the cognitive value of moral virtues as the person’s ethical responsibility to develop and exercise the intellectual virtues in order to promote the advancement of knowledge. ― In this paper an attempt is made to reconsider the epistemic value of moral virtues and their importance for virtue epistemology. By employing Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of the cognitive value of love, we argue that moral virtues, understood as manifestations of love, not only have epistemic value but can also be so reliable that they may convert a true belief into knowledge.

Saint Gregory understood the mind of man as the most essentially human element of the human composit. It is that spiritual, intelligible element of human nature which is brought into being in the image of God. The image of God in man refers to human nature, but the image of God in whom man is created refers to the Person of the divine Logos. The mind is way in that expresses freedom of human nature. Free will of man or freedom (as possession of self) belongs to human nature, to man’s character as a being created in the image of God. In last analysis the mind according to Saint Gregory constitutes way of manifestation human freedom. The mind as image of God in man has not worth its self. The most important role of mind is knowledge of God. Man is made to exist from the very beginning as a creature in the image of God, so that the fundamental principle of his being is completed only in communion with God. For Gregory this in turn revels man’s nature and destiny to be in loving communion with the Holy Trinity through the ecstatic, transcending movement of the self into the personal, divine life of God. It is the knowledge of God in loving communion with him, God becoming man without ceasing to be God, so that man can become God without ceasing to be man. It is very significant that according to Saint Gregory the Theologian knowledge of God and communion or participation in God are bound together. More than that, knowledge of God and communion with God are explicitly considered as identical.

The first part of the text is a reading of the Biblical narrative of creation. It deals with the God’s speech “in the beginning” requiring a unique narrative position, a mystical communion with God, from which the narrative as testimony ensues. In the narrative, a thing comes into being from nothing through the God’s word of creation; only when it is called upon, in its own name, it is suddenly in being and time. But this is not the case with man who, on the other hand, aquires an ability of naming. So, man’s naming is a translation from God’s names, a translation of the language of things, its voicing in the language of man. The second part of the text discusses the implications of this particular narrative in the European intelectual tradition. It starts with the traditional conjecture that created things have in essence a structure of logos, i.e. their own language, and it attempts to show that this conjecture was given a new twist with the emergence of modern science, which fought to obtain the right to read the language of the book of the world, namely the language of things, without the authority of the Book of Revelation. But it was the same narrative, which also gave rise to an analogy between the Maker and the poet as a “second Maker”. The poet’s battle with God for the precedence of creation, however, sharpened in different modernist counter-poetics and, apart from man, also included the world and language.