Gregory of Nazianzus

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In the autumn of 379 a small congregation gathered in a borrowed house in Constantinople, a private chapel its owner called the Anastasia, the Resurrection. The city’s great churches were in other hands; for nearly forty years the capital’s sees had belonged to bishops of the party that denied the Son’s full equality with the Father, and the few who held the Nicene faith met where they could. Into that house came a sick, bald, ascetic Cappadocian in his fiftieth year, a reluctant traveller who would rather have stayed on his family estate, and from its modest pulpit he began to preach. Within two years the sermons delivered in that room had broken the long ascendancy of Arianism in the East, the room itself was remembered as the cradle of orthodoxy in the capital, and the man who preached them had been given a name the Greek church has withheld from nearly everyone else: Gregory the Theologian.

He shares that title, in the East, with exactly one other figure — the evangelist John, the apostle of the eternal Logos. The pairing is not loose praise. It marks Gregory as one of the two men whose words were felt to come closest to the inner life of God itself, and it rests on a single concentrated achievement: five sermons, the Theological Orations, preached at the Anastasia in 380, in which the doctrine of the Trinity received the form of statement that the Greek-speaking world has used ever since.

A Cappadocian education

Gregory was born about 329 at Arianzus, a family estate near the small town of Nazianzus in Cappadocia, the high inland plateau of what is now central Turkey. His father, also named Gregory, was bishop of Nazianzus; his mother, Nonna, was the dominant religious force of the household, and the family produced saints the way other landed families produced soldiers. He was a man of the schools before he was anything else. He studied rhetoric and philosophy at Caesarea in Cappadocia, then at Alexandria, and finally and above all at Athens, still in the fourth century the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean and the place where a young provincial went to be finished. There he formed the friendship that shaped his life — with Basil of Caesarea, the future bishop and organizer, with whom he would be counted, together with Basil’s younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, among the three Cappadocian Fathers. Gregory’s own account makes the friendship the center of his Athenian years: two provincials who knew only two roads in the city, the one to the church and the one to the lecture-halls, sharing a single mind between two bodies.

The education was thoroughly Greek and unembarrassed about it. Gregory had absorbed the rhetorical training of the second-sophistic schools and the philosophical idiom of late Platonism and the living Neoplatonism of his century; he could turn a period like a pagan orator and reason about being and the limits of mind in the vocabulary of the schools. Like Basil, he stood in the long debt the Cappadocians owed to Origen, the great Alexandrian whose fusion of scripture and Platonic metaphysics gave them their tools; the two friends had together, in their early years, compiled an anthology of Origen’s writings, the Philokalia. What Gregory did with this equipment was to make it carry the Christian doctrine of God without dissolving into it — to be a Christian orator who happened to command the whole apparatus of Hellenic eloquence, rather than a Hellenist who had taken on a creed.

He never wanted office. The pattern of his life is a recurring flight from ordination and a recurring capture. His father ordained him priest by something close to force at Christmas 361, and Gregory fled in distress before returning; Basil, needing loyal bishops to outvote his opponents, had him consecrated bishop of a wretched little posting station called Sasima, which Gregory never so much as visited and bitterly resented, straining the great friendship. He was by temperament a contemplative and a poet, drawn to the desert and the quiet estate, forced again and again onto the public stage by a church that needed his voice more than he wanted to give it.

The Five Theological Orations

The summons to Constantinople in 379 was the largest of these captures. The emperor Theodosius, newly come to power and committed to the Nicene cause, had not yet entered the city; the Nicene minority needed a champion who could hold the ground by argument, and Gregory was sent. The Theological Orations are the record of what he did there. They are five — conventionally numbered Orations 27 through 31 in his collected works — and they are addressed against two adversaries at once. The first is the radical heir of Arius: the party of Eunomius of Cyzicus, who held not only that the Son was a creature but that the human mind, rightly instructed, could grasp the very essence of God by a single name. The second is the party who conceded much about the Son but denied the same dignity to the Spirit, treating the third of the Trinity as a power or a creature rather than as God.

Against the first, Gregory opens not with assertion but with a warning about who may speak of God at all, and with a doctrine of the divine unknowability. To conceive God, he says in the second of the five, is difficult, and to put him into words is impossible — a saying he credits to a Greek teacher of divinity, meaning Plato, and then sharpens, for he holds that to utter God is in truth even harder than to conceive him. The mind may climb toward God; it may know that he is; it cannot seize what he is, for the divine essence outruns every name and every concept the creature can form. This is the apophatic turn set at the heart of Christian theology — knowledge that culminates in the confession of its own limit — and it is the exact countermove to Eunomian confidence: if God’s essence cannot be named, then no single name can be the master-key to his being, and the whole project of defining the Godhead out of existence collapses.

Having bounded the question, Gregory presses into it. The third and fourth Orations argue the full divinity of the Son, the eternal Logos begotten of the Father, against every attempt to make him a lesser or later being. The fifth turns to the Holy Spirit, and here Gregory says, more plainly than any Greek Father before him, what others had circled: the Spirit is God, of one substance with the Father and the Son, to be worshipped and glorified with them. He knew he was moving ahead of the consensus, and defended the slowness of the church to confess it as a gradual unveiling — the Father proclaimed openly under the old covenant, the Son under the new, the Spirit now dwelling among the faithful and disclosing his own deity by degrees. What held the three together was the formula his generation had forged: one ousia, one essence or nature, undivided and entire, in three hypostaseis, three real and distinct subsistences distinguished only by their relations of origin — the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding. The Orations did not invent this grammar, which the Cappadocians built together; they gave it its most luminous and memorable statement, and fixed the equality of the Spirit as part of the settled faith.

Constantinople and the council

The preaching told. By the time Theodosius entered Constantinople in November 380 he installed Gregory in the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and the following year the emperor convened the council now reckoned the second of the ecumenical councils, the First Council of Constantinople of 381, to ratify the Nicene faith for the East. Gregory presided over it after the early death of its first president. The council’s work was the work of his life: it reaffirmed the creed of Nicaea, strengthened beyond ambiguity the clause on the Holy Spirit, and gave Greek Trinitarian thought the standard form it has carried since. The final defeat of Arianism and of the radical Eunomian theology as forces in the imperial church dates from this assembly.

His own presidency ended in defeat of another kind. His enemies raised a canonical objection — that he had been consecrated to another see and could not lawfully be translated to Constantinople — and Gregory, never a man for the politics of synods and exhausted by the intrigue, refused to fight for the chair. He resigned the see and the presidency in mid-council, gave a bitter and brilliant farewell oration to the assembled bishops, and went home. Nectarius, an unbaptized civil official, was elected in his place. The man whose sermons had won the city kept neither the city nor the council he had chaired; he returned to Cappadocia, administered the church of Nazianzus for a time, and then withdrew to his estate to write. He died there on 25 January 390.

That which is not assumed is not healed

The retirement years produced the Christological principle for which, after the Trinitarian Orations, he is most remembered. The occasion was the teaching of Apollinaris of Laodicea, an able defender of the Nicene faith who had pushed the unity of Christ so far that he denied the incarnate Son a human mind, holding that in Jesus Christ the divine Logos took the place of the rational human soul. To Gregory this emptied salvation of its content, and in two letters to a priest named Cledonius he answered it with a maxim that became a permanent rule of Christology: what was not assumed is not healed; what is united to God is what is saved. If the Son did not take a full human mind, then the human mind — the very faculty most in need of redemption — was left untouched by the Incarnation. The logic is soteriological through and through: God saves what he becomes, and so he must become the whole of what is to be saved. A Christ short of a human soul would be a Christ who healed everything in the human creature except the part that fell.

This single sentence carried more weight in the later councils than any other line Gregory wrote. It set the terms within which the church would insist, against every later attempt to thin out the humanity of Christ, that the Savior was fully and completely a human being, mind and soul and body, joined without confusion to the fullness of God.

The incomprehensible God and the gift of deification

What ties Gregory to the long contemplative tradition is the use he made of the divine unknowability. The apophatic principle, for him, is not only a weapon against the Eunomians; it is the architecture of the soul’s whole approach to God. Because the essence of God exceeds the reach of mind, the creature comes to him not by capture but by ascent, and the ascent has no end — it climbs toward a light that is also, at its summit, a darkness, the unbearable nearness of what cannot be seen. Gregory keeps the apophatic and the cataphatic in tension rather than choosing between them: the Incomprehensible may be comprehended, he allows, but only so far as is possible and safe for a mortal nature, which is to say only as a glimpse that confesses how much it has not grasped.

The far end of that ascent he named with a word that became one of the master terms of Eastern Christian spirituality. Gregory is the writer who first gives theosis — deification, the soul’s being made godlike — its place in Christian vocabulary. The creature is not absorbed into God and does not become God by nature; it is drawn, by grace and through the Incarnation, into a real participation in the divine life, made a partaker of what God is without ceasing to be itself. Here the maxim against Apollinaris and the doctrine of deification meet and explain each other: God became human, in the whole of human nature, so that the human might be made divine. The Incarnation is the descent that makes the ascent possible; what the Logos assumed, he raises.

This is the Gregory who passes into the later mystical tradition, and he passes into it carrying a word of his own. Theosis — deification — takes its place in Christian Greek with him, and the Eastern theology of the soul’s divinization that grew over the following centuries built on his coinage as much as on his argument. Maximus the Confessor, the seventh century’s great systematizer, made Gregory’s text itself an object of thought: his Ambigua are sustained commentaries written to resolve the hard and obscure passages of the Theologian’s orations, and through that work Gregory’s account of ascent and deification became load-bearing for all that followed. The apophatic ascent he had first set against the Eunomians was drawn into a system by the writer who composed under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite and carried into late Byzantine mysticism by Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts. The line from the Anastasia chapel forward passes through this one bald, reluctant orator and his insistence that the God who cannot be named is exactly the God in whom the soul is meant to be remade.

The corpus and its readers

Gregory left a body of work in three forms. Forty-five orations survive — the five Theological Orations among them, alongside funeral panegyrics for Basil, for his own father, and for his brother and sister, festal sermons that shaped the Byzantine liturgical year, and that scorching farewell to the council. There are some 250 letters, models of the late-antique epistolary art, including the two to Cledonius that carry his Christology. And there is a large body of poetry, more than sixteen thousand lines, ranging from dogmatic and moral verse to the long autobiographical poem De Vita Sua, in which Gregory tells the story of his own captures and flights with an introspective candor rare in his age — the bishop who never wanted to be a bishop, looking back at a life spent being summoned. In the Eastern church he is honored as one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, beside Basil and John Chrysostom; in the West he is numbered among the Doctors of the Church.

The primary corpus survives well and is largely accessible. The standard nineteenth-century English collection remains the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II: Gregory’s select orations and his letters were translated for volume VII by Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow in 1894, and the volume — long in the public domain — carries the Five Theological Orations and the letters to Cledonius into English. It can be read in the Schaff–Wace text hosted by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and in the parallel Wikisource edition. For the Greek of the Orations with a learned apparatus, the indispensable older work is Arthur James Mason’s The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge University Press, 1899), a critical text with English commentary rather than a parallel translation, available in full as a public-domain scan. Among modern scholarship the fullest commentary is Frederick W. Norris’s Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning (Brill, 1991); the standard intellectual biography is John McGuckin’s St Gregory of Nazianzus (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001); and Lionel Wickham’s On God and Christ (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002) gives a readable current translation of the five Orations together with the two letters to Cledonius. The Cappadocian setting and the shared Trinitarian achievement are treated in Anthony Meredith’s The Cappadocians and in Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christianity and Classical Culture.

The whole of Gregory’s labor was the work of a rhetorician who fled every office his gift required of him. He was a man of the schools before he was a bishop, and it was as a speaker that he served the church: five sermons preached in a borrowed room, by a sick and unwilling Cappadocian who wanted nothing so much as his own estate, settled the form in which the Greek-speaking world would confess its God — one essence, three subsistences, the Spirit no less God than the Father. That grammar is recited unchanged after sixteen centuries. He asked in return only to be released to go home; the church gave him instead the name it had granted to one other man, and made the words of the orator who never wanted a pulpit the standard speech of its faith.

→ Related: Cappadocian Patristics · Basil Of Caesarea · Gregory Of Nyssa · Apophatic Theology · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Gregory Palamas · Christian Mysticism · Arius · Logos · Neoplatonism · Origen · Hypostasis