the study and translation of Greek patristic works. Against this background, some of Gregory of Nyssa’s works which remained unknown to the West during the medieval centuries received their first Latin translations by leading representatives of Italian and Byzantine culture." These include the early Renaissance translations of De vita Moysis by George of Trebizond in 1446, of De vita Macrinae and De anima et resurrectione by Pietro Balbi between 1465 and 1473, and of De oratione dominica by the Byzantine scholar Athanasius Chalkeopoulos around 1465. In part due to the scholarship of Balthasar and Jean Daniélou, by the 1950s Gregory had become the subject of much serious theological research, with a critical edition of his work published (Gregorii Nysseni Opera), and the founding of the International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa. This attention has continued to the present day. Modern studies have focused on Gregory's eschatology rather than his more dogmatic writings, and he has gained a reputation as an unconventional thinker whose thought arguably prefigures postmodernism. Major figures in contemporary research include Sarah Coakley, John Zizioulas and Robert Jenson. In 2003, theologian David Bentley Hart published a book seemingly influenced by Gregory. Commentary on Gregory In 787 AD, the Second Council of Nicea, the seventh Ecumenical Council of the Church, honored Gregory of Nyssa: Let us then, consider who were the venerable doctors and indomitable champions of the Church [including] Gregory Primate of Nyssa, who all have called the father of fathers. Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote in his work on the history of evolutionary thought, From the Greeks to Darwin (1894): Among the Christian Fathers the movement towards a partly naturalistic interpretation of the order of Creation was made by Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, and was completed by Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries. ...[Gregory] taught that Creation was potential. God imparted to matter its fundamental properties and laws. The objects and completed forms of the Universe developed gradually out of chaotic material. Anthony Meredith writes of Gregory's mystical and apophatic writings in his book Gregory of Nyssa (The Early Church Fathers) (1999): Gregory has often been credited with the discovery of mystical theology, or rather with the perception that darkness is an appropriate symbol under which God can be discussed. There is much truth in this....Gregory seems to have been the first Christian writer to have made this important point. J. Kameron Carter writes