The Cappadocian Fathers

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The Cappadocian Fathers are three closely linked Greek theologians of fourth-century Asia Minor: Basil of Caesarea, called the Great; his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa; and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. They worked in the high plateau country of Cappadocia, in what is now central Turkey — a province of small towns, hard winters, and horse-breeding estates, far enough from the capital that its bishops had to make their weight felt by argument rather than proximity. In the two generations after the Council of Nicaea they gave the Christian doctrine of the Trinity the vocabulary it has carried ever since, and one of them opened a path of contemplative ascent that still runs under the whole later tradition of Christian mysticism.

The three were not interchangeable, and the difference in their gifts is part of why the movement held. Basil was the organizer and bishop — builder of a monastic rule, of a famous hospital and poorhouse complex outside Caesarea, and of the political alliances that carried the cause through a hostile court. Gregory of Nazianzus was the orator, a stylist of such authority that he is remembered in the Eastern churches simply as “the Theologian,” a title shared with only one other figure, the evangelist John. Gregory of Nyssa was the speculative mind, the least successful of the three as a churchman and by far the most adventurous as a thinker, the one who pressed the philosophy furthest and least apologized for it. Their family was already a hothouse of sanctity: their elder sister Macrina, formidable and unmarried, ran the household ascetic community and appears in Gregory of Nyssa’s writing as a philosopher in her own right, the teacher who instructs him on the soul on her deathbed.

The quarrel over words

The problem they inherited was, at its sharpest, a quarrel over a single word. The Council of Nicaea in 325 had declared the Son homoousios — of one substance, consubstantial — with the Father, against the teaching associated with the Alexandrian presbyter Arius, who held the Son to be the first and highest of creatures, made by the Father and therefore not eternal in the same sense. But Nicaea settled a slogan, not a grammar. The key Greek terms remained unfixed, and for two generations the churches of the East argued over whether the consubstantial formula made the three divine persons one being or merely one in close agreement. The word ousia (substance, essence) and the word hypostasis (subsistence, concrete existence) had long been used almost as synonyms; if Father, Son, and Spirit were three hypostaseis, that could be heard as three substances — three gods — and if they were one hypostasis, that could be heard as the rival heresy in which the distinctions of the persons collapse into mere names or modes.

The Cappadocian solution was to drive a wedge between the two words and hold the wedge in place. There is one ousia — a single divine nature or essence, undivided and entire — subsisting in three hypostaseis, three real and distinct modes of being that share that essence without partitioning it. The analogy they reached for, with some discomfort about its limits, was that of a universal and its particulars: as three human beings share one common humanity yet are three, so the divine three share one Godhead yet are three; but where three men are three gods only in a loose, divisible sense, the divine persons share an essence that is genuinely one and indivisible, so that the comparison breaks down at exactly the point that matters. What distinguishes the persons is not the essence, which is common, but their relations of origin: the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding. Gregory of Nyssa pushed this to its conclusion in a short treatise written to answer the awkward objection it invited — On “Not Three Gods”, addressed to a man named Ablabius — arguing that the three never act separately, that every divine operation begins from the Father, proceeds through the Son, and is completed in the Spirit, so that the unity of action testifies to the unity of nature.

This settlement is conventionally read into the revised creed promulgated at the Council of Constantinople in 381, which expanded the Nicene confession, strengthened the clause on the Holy Spirit — whose full divinity Basil had defended in his treatise On the Holy Spirit against those who would leave the Spirit’s status undefined — and gave Greek Trinitarian thought the standard form it has kept. Basil did not live to see it; he died in 379, two years short of the council that ratified the work of his life. The formula one ousia in three hypostaseis became, in the East, less a conclusion than a permanent grammar: the fixed structure within which everything afterward about the Trinity would be said.

Knowing by unknowing

The most relentless opponent the Cappadocians faced in these years was not Arius, long dead, but a later and more rigorous figure: Eunomius of Cyzicus, leader of a radical wing of the anti-Nicene party. Eunomius made a startling claim about language and God. He held that the divine essence could be captured in a single name — agennetos, the unbegotten — and that this name expressed God’s very being, so that the human mind, rightly instructed, could know God as God knows himself. Against this confidence both Basil and Gregory of Nyssa wrote long refutations, each titled Against Eunomius, and in answering him they laid down a principle that would outlast the controversy that produced it. The names we apply to God, they argued, do not seize his essence; they record our approach to him. We come to such names by epinoia — by reflective conception, the mind’s afterthought working on what God does and reveals — not by direct sight of what God is. The divine essence stays beyond every name.

Basil put the distinction in a sentence that became the charter of Eastern negative theology, in a letter to his friend Amphilochius of Iconium known as Letter 234: the operations are many and the essence simple, and we know our God from his operations — his energeiai — while we do not undertake to approach near to his essence; his operations come down to us, but his essence remains beyond our reach. The energies are God turned toward the world and genuinely knowable in it; the essence is God in himself, unapproached. Gregory of Nazianzus gave the same insight oratorical weight in the second of his five Theological Orations, Oration 28, delivered at Constantinople in 380: to conceive God is hard, he said, and to put him into words is impossible. This is the apophatic turn — theology by negation — set near the center of Christian thought.

It is in Gregory of Nyssa that the apophatic principle becomes a spirituality rather than only a defensive doctrine. He reasoned from the divine infinity: because God is infinite, he can never be exhausted or comprehended, and the soul’s approach to him is therefore endless. Each attainment, instead of arriving, opens onto a further reach. Gregory named this perpetual motion epektasis, the stretching-forward, borrowing the word from the apostle Paul’s image of straining toward what lies ahead — a soul forever leaving behind what it has grasped because it has glimpsed something further. There is no last step, no plateau, no rest that is not also a new beginning; the blessedness of the creature consists precisely in never being finished. Satisfaction would be a kind of death.

In the Life of Moses, written near the end of his life, Gregory read the prophet’s career as a map of this ascent. Moses meets God first in the light of the burning bush, then in the cloud that covers Sinai, and at last in the thick darkness — the gnophos — into which he enters to receive the law. Gregory takes the sequence as a deliberate progression: the soul begins in the illumination of first knowledge, passes into the cloud where ordinary seeing fails, and arrives finally in a darkness that is not the absence of God but his unbearable nearness. The higher the soul rises, the less it sees, until it knows God precisely by way of unknowing, meeting him in a luminous dark where vision and concept give out and only love continues. To see God, in this reading, is to recognize that he cannot be seen — and that recognition, far from a defeat, is the height of the climb.

The Greek inheritance

The debt to Greek philosophy here is plain, and the Cappadocians did not greatly trouble to hide it. They were men of the highest pagan education — Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus had studied together at Athens, then the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean — and the categories they used to think about essence, substance, and the limits of knowledge came to them from Platonism and from the Neoplatonism that was, in their own century, the living philosophy of the schools. The infinite, unknowable One of Plotinus, beyond being and beyond name, stands recognizably behind Gregory of Nyssa’s unknowable divine essence; the ascent of the soul through purification toward a vision that exceeds discursive nous has a Plotinian shape. Yet the borrowing was a bending. Where the Neoplatonic ascent ends in an absorption that erases the seer into the One, Gregory’s ends in an embrace that never closes, between a creature who remains a creature and a God who remains other. Where the One is a ground from which all things flow by necessity, the Cappadocian God is a Trinity who creates freely and loves. Gregory took the equipment of the schools and made it carry a doctrine Plotinus would not have owned.

The deeper Christian lineage runs through Alexandria. Clement of Alexandria had already insisted that God is known best by removing predicates, and Origen — the towering, controversial Alexandrian whose fusion of biblical exegesis with Platonic metaphysics shaped a whole school — supplied much of the speculative machinery the Cappadocians inherited, including the very tools of allegorical reading by which Gregory turned the Life of Moses into an account of the inner ascent. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus had together compiled an anthology of Origen’s writings, the Philokalia, early in their careers; their relation to him was filial even where it grew cautious. The Cappadocians stand, in this sense, as the point where the Alexandrian inheritance was disciplined into orthodoxy: the daring of Origen kept, his excesses pruned, the result made safe enough to become the common possession of the Greek church. The doctrine of the divine Logos, the language of true gnosis as a knowing that culminates in unknowing — these reached the later tradition with a Cappadocian stamp on them.

The apophatic line

The negative theology the Cappadocians fixed did not stop with them. It passed, above all, through the anonymous later writer who circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite — the Athenian convert of the Book of Acts, a borrowed identity that lent his work near apostolic authority. In his short, incandescent treatise on mystical theology, Dionysius distilled the Cappadocian intuition into a method: the soul ascends by first affirming of God every perfection (the cataphatic way) and then negating each one (the apophatic way), and finally negating even the negations, passing beyond both speech and silence into the divine darkness. The gnophos of Gregory’s Sinai becomes, in Dionysius, the technical heart of a system. Through the Dionysian corpus — translated, glossed, and revered for a thousand years — the language of the divine darkness entered the whole tradition of Christian mysticism, surfacing in the medieval Latin West in works such as the Cloud of Unknowing, and shaping the Eastern hesychast theology that Gregory Palamas defended in the fourteenth century — for it was precisely the Cappadocian distinction between the unknowable essence and the participable energies that Palamas raised into the central doctrine of late Byzantine mysticism, the uncreated light of Tabor as God’s energy genuinely given to the saints while his essence stays forever beyond.

Alongside this contemplative strand ran a practical one that mattered as much to the church’s life. Basil’s rules for communal ascetic life became foundational for Eastern monasticism and, through later Latin borrowing, left a mark on the Western rule of Benedict; his hospital complex, the Basileias, stands among the early institutions of organized Christian charity, a small city of the sick and the poor built on the conviction that the God beyond all names is met in the served body of the neighbor. The contemplative and the charitable were not, for these men, two enterprises but one: the soul that stretches endlessly toward God stretches in the same motion toward what God loves.

The texts and the scholarship

The primary Cappadocian corpus is large and survives well. The standard nineteenth-century English collection remains the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace — Gregory of Nyssa’s dogmatic treatises in volume V, Gregory of Nazianzus’s select orations in volume VII, and Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, the Hexaemeron, and the complete letters in volume VIII, including the pivotal Letter 234 on the essence and the operations. These translations, now in the public domain, carry the bulk of the corpus into English; the chief gap they leave is the Life of Moses itself, which received its first full English translation only in 1978, in the rendering by Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson for the Classics of Western Spirituality, after Jean Daniélou’s pioneering French critical edition of 1942 had reopened the text to modern readers. Daniélou’s study of Gregory of Nyssa, with its recovery of epektasis as the organizing idea of his spirituality, did more than any single work to restore Nyssa to the front rank of patristic thinkers; the wider scholarly recovery is well surveyed in Anthony Meredith’s The Cappadocians and in Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christianity and Classical Culture, his Gifford Lectures on how the Cappadocians remade Greek natural theology in the act of converting it. The Dionysian sequel, in John Parker’s Victorian translation, is held in the site’s library, where the apophatic method that began as a Cappadocian defense against Eunomius can be read in its fully systematic later form.

What the Cappadocians left was double, and the two halves answer each other. One was a settled formula — one essence, three subsistences — that closed an argument and gave a church its grammar, fixed enough to be recited unchanged for sixteen centuries. The other was the discovery that the same God whose nature could be so exactly bounded in language could not, in himself, be reached by language at all, and that the soul’s proper response was not arrival but ascent without end. The creed marks the limit at which speech about God must stop; epektasis marks the distance the soul keeps going after speech has stopped. To hold both at once — a boundary drawn with the precision of a council and a road that the council’s God guarantees will never run out — is the particular legacy of Cappadocia: the finished sentence and the unfinished climb, set side by side and meant to be kept together.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Basil Of Caesarea · Neoplatonism · Platonism · Apophatic Theology · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Christian Mysticism · Gregory Palamas · Monasticism · Origen · Clement Of Alexandria · Logos · Nous · Gnosis · Soul