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Oxford Scholarship Online Exploring Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical, Theological, and Historical Studies Anna Marmodoro and Neil B. McLynn

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198826422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198826422.001.0001

Title Pages Anna Marmodoro, Neil B. McLynn

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University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Exploring Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical, Theological, and Historical Studies Anna Marmodoro and Neil B. McLynn Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198826422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198826422.001.0001

Introduction Anna Marmodoro Neil B. McLynn

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198826422.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords This introduction motivates the multi-disciplinary approach the book follows in exploring Gregory of Nyssa’s thought and historical context; and provides an overview of the chapters.

Keywords: Gregory of Nyssa, fourth century, Cappadocian theology, Aristotelianism, Platonism

This book project began from a lunchtime conversation between the two editors, a historian and a philosopher, where one was puzzling over the remarkable rise of Gregory of Nyssa in the 380s from provinicial obscurity to a series of imperial commissions at Constantinople, and the other wrestling with her surprise at discovering unexpected creativity in Gregory’s metaphysics. The first thing that struck us as we talked was how little we had to say to each other. Gregory’s public career simply does not intersect, in the written record at least, with his intellectual development. His thinking cannot be traced to specific historic crucibles, as can be done with Augustine or with his two Cappadocian contemporaries, Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. Although as much of his output as any of theirs is controversial (and, indeed, he writes against the same opponents as his fellow-Cappadocians), with Gregory there is much less sense of any particular opponents, and much less sense of danger or pressure.

But still more striking was the parallelism that emerged between our experiences with the scholarship, on Gregory the bishop on the one hand and Gregory the metaphysician on the other. The parable in the Udana, of the blind men and the elephant, came inescapably to mind. It is not merely that historians, clustered at their end of the beast, are handling quite different material from the philosophers who wrestle with the great mass at the centre. Still more, those historians dealing with the tusks find in their subject a plough, while those taking their cue from the trunk identify it instead as a ploughshare (the diametrically opposite positions taken on Gregory’s marriage might usefully be considered from this perspective). Those intellectual historians who start from the foot, meanwhile, find there a pillar, and emphasize the Platonic foundations of what they read, while those who puzzle over the body find instead a granary, filled from home-grown resources. Theological questions, too, can be incorporated nicely into the parable: the elephant’s head yields a thoroughly Origenist pot, while the ear suggests instead a winnowing-basket through which Origen is carefully filtered. (p.2) Insofar as it was designed to illustrate the petty disputatiousness of blinkered scholars, the elephant parable is utterly inapplicable to describe the current state of play concerning the study of Gregory of Nyssa. The regular International Colloquia on Gregory of Nyssa, now in their fourteenth iteration, provide famously inclusive opportunities for the exchange of ideas, and

the published proceedings represent models of collaborative research. Nevertheless, it seemed to us that there was something intrinsic to the Gregorian material that yielded the distinctive patterns which we had separately identified. Might it be, perhaps, that the very absence of demonstrable conflict in Gregory’s authorial initiatives, the comfortable position of strength from which the great majority of his writings were produced (it is easily forgotten that he was the first major Greek Nicene author to write with the knowledge that the imperial regime stood behind him), helps lend them their easy capaciousness, and creates space for modern scholars to develop their hypotheses more expansively than is usually the case? The historical Eunomius certainly seems to impose more rigorous constraints over Basil’s and Gregory Nazianzen’s Trinitarian writings than on Gregory’s. Such questions inspired the seminar series from which this collection is derived.

We have deliberately avoided any attempt at synthesis. Instead, we have tried to present in a single volume a set of fresh studies on Gregory from across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy, and have made a point of leaving the differences between the contributors in each of these fields unresolved. We believe that there is much fruitful work to be done exploring these various differences, and tracing them back to the aspects of Gregory’s writing that generated them.

In the opening chapter, John McGuckin accepts the challenge of presenting a life of Gregory, and situates him in both his historical and intellectual contexts. McGuckin outlines the main philosophical and religious controversies of the era, and particularly Gregory’s ecclesiastical involvement in the Neo-Nicene apologetical movement associated with the leadership of his brother Basil of Caesarea, which Gregory inherited in Cappadocia, with imperial approval, after 380. Further, McGuckin provides a review of how Gregory and his work have been received in later European and American scholarship. In doing so he both provides an introduction to the more specific debates concerning Gregory’s thought and intellectual personality that are contained in the rest of the volume, and at the same time sets out a position concerning Gregory’s contemporary standing against which Chapters 2 and 3 can usefully be read.

Neil B. McLynn discusses the relationship between Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. This happens to be one of the better-attested relationships between major ecclesiastical authors: eight letters from Gregory of Nazianzus to his namesake, covering a period of some two decades, provide our principal evidence, supplemented by an oration which he addressed to him, and some indications of their activities in Cappadocia during the 350s (p.3) and at the council of Constantinople in 381.

Yet this evidence has received very little critical attention. While the tensions between each of the Gregories and Basil of Caesarea, overbearing friend to one and overbearing brother to the other, have overshadowed their own mutual interactions, the rich surviving evidence concerning these interactions suggests—McLynn argues—a much more complex, boisterous, and dynamic relationship between them than the standard view according to which they stood shoulder to shoulder throughout their careers, united by shared ascetic experience and cultural interests, and by shared exposure to Basil’s domineering personality.

With Susanna Elm’s chapter we turn to Gregory’s later theological writings, and the light they shed upon the intellectual and historical contexts within which Gregory operated. Elm focuses on the Life of Moses, a key conceptualization of the perfect Christian life. The existing scholarly literature on the Life of Moses focuses especially on the extensive allegorical reading of Moses’ life in the second part of the work, which features prominently in discussions of late antique constructions of the priesthood, and, more generally, of masculinity, especially by scholars such as Virginia Burrus and Andrea Sterk. While building on these existing studies, Elm focuses on the first part of the text, namely Gregory’s paraphrase of the historia of Moses and the Exodus. She shows how much the first part of this text has to offer to our understanding of the times, by examining the ways Gregory suggests late antique Christian males in general should present themselves, in terms of their appearance and clothing. This presentation of Gregory as a prescriptive fashion guru has implications (much like McLynn’s very different study) for our assessment of Gregory’s style of leadership.

There follows a group of chapters examining the relationship between Gregory and Origen. Mark Edwards delves into another late theological work of Gregory’s: his Commentary on the Song of Songs, the centre of which is the figure of Christ, the Bridegroom. Edwards argues against recent interpretations of this text as a ‘rediscovery’ of the body as an integral part of the person, in accordance with Pauline teaching and in contrast to the (neo-Platonic) philosophy which disparages the body as a temporary vehicle of the soul, showing such views to depend on selective quotation of isolated passages in Gregory seldom accompanied even by a desultory study of Origen. A closer examination of both Gregory’s and Origen’s texts suggests that Gregory is the more Platonist of the two, at least if this term is taken to connote an indifference to history and a lower valuation of the written text as a medium of instruction.

Gregory’s indebtedness to Origen is further studied by Christopher Beeley. He argues that even more telling of the connections with Origen are Gregory’s late exegesis and the dogmatic works of the middle period of his career (above all the Contra

Eunomium and Antirrheticus against Apollinarius), as well as his early works on the Trinity. Beeley shows that Gregory’s doctrine and exegetical method were firmly established by the time of the dogmatic (p.4) controversies with the Eunomians and Apollinarians, years before Gregory turned to the great stories of the Old Testament. Beeley concludes that while Gregory’s debt to Origen is considerable, his doctrine and exegesis generally follow their own rationale, which both resembles and yet differs in important ways from that of his master Origen.

Ilaria Ramelli and Johannes Zachhuber investigate Gregory’s conception of the soul, as presented in On the Soul and Resurrection, and interestingly offer diverging interpretations. Ramelli is chiefly interested in situating Gregory’s treatment of the soul within the philosophical tradition of treatises On the Soul and in conversation with Origen’s complex psychology.

While Origen never wrote a work On the Soul (and had precise reasons for not doing so), he did write one On the Resurrection.

His older contemporary Tertullian composed both a work On the Soul and one On the Resurrection. Gregory opted for a synthesis, in one and the same work, of the philosophical genre On the Soul with the Christian (for him, Origenian) genre On the Resurrection, within the framework of a remake of a Platonic dialogue. Ramelli investigates Gregory’s views on the soul against the backdrop of Plato’s theories, focusing in particular on the soul’s resurrection (, or restoration) and on the role of the soul in Gregory’s so called ‘theology of freedom’. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the influence of Gregory’s views on Evagrius’ theories of the resurrection and of the subsumption of body into soul and soul into nous.

Zachhuber’s chapter too offers an account of Gregory’s understanding of the human soul, leading however to opposite conclusions from Ramelli’s. Zachhuber argues that the interpretation according to which Gregory’s view On the Soul and Resurrection is essentially Platonic must be rejected. He holds that while there are Platonic elements within Gregory’s doctrine of the soul, his attention to Christian principles, and especially his rejection of the soul’s pre-existence as well as his commitment to the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, lead Gregory to a view that makes the soul the power (dynamis) of its body and thus different from the way Plato conceived of it.

Morwenna Ludlow explores the question of the extent to which Gregory’s conception of spiritual formation illuminates his notion of the body–soul relationship. On the one hand, Gregory uses the trope of the flight of the soul from the material (including the material body); on the other hand, his spiritual writings show that he often thinks of spiritual practice as being inherently embodied. This tension has received a certain amount of critical attention, but Ludlow focuses on two areas in particular which have hitherto escaped analysis: first, Gregory’s use of the motifs from the visual arts (sculpting or painting the self); secondly, his ascetic writings De Professione Christiana, De Perfectione, and De Instituto Christiano. She concentrates not on Gregory’s concept of the spiritual goal, but rather on the subject’s progress towards that goal: the process of spiritual formation. Consequently, Ludlow focuses less on exceptional ‘moments’ of spiritual experience/prayer, which seem, in Gregory’s (p.5) thought, to be proleptic indicators of an eschatological goal, and more on everyday spiritual practice, as Gregory conceived of it.

In a chapter which offers a number of points of contact with Ludlow’s, Sophie Cartwright explores the relationship between vulnerability and self-direction in Gregory’s anthropology. In both On the Soul and the Resurrection and On the Making of Humankind, Gregory envisages human vulnerability as allowing us to ascend further than we otherwise would have done, and to gain a strength and power which we otherwise would not have had. This corresponds to an emphasis on self-direction in his political thought: we are created self-directing, so slavery is unnatural. These ideas initially imply that vulnerability is ultimately to be jettisoned in favour of strength. However, Gregory’s thought is more complex, Cartwright argues. Slavery can be jettisoned in the wrong way, and human ascent and realization of self-direction can occur in the wrong way; for slavery represents not only the slave’s vulnerability, but the master’s improper power. Cartwright concludes that for Gregory vulnerability and self-direction need to be mutually informing—held in a fruitful tension.

Chapters 10 and 11, authored by Andrew Radde-Gallwitz and Anna Marmodoro respectively, re-examine Gregory’s treatise To Ablabius—On Not Saying ‘Three Gods’, which is one of the most widely cited works of patristic Trinitarian theology. RaddeGallwitz argues that Gregory’s principal claim in the work is that the (unorthodox) idea that the three divine persons are three gods is rebutted by the unity of activity—as opposed to unity of nature—of the three persons. Radde-Gallwitz maintains that Gregory is concerned in the treatise with the semantics of the term ‘deity’ (theotēs), and that we can illuminate his etymological exposition of this term as a name of activity by taking into account hitherto overlooked parallels between this work and Gregory’s second book of Against Eunomius. Radde-Gallwitz concludes that Gregory understands the unity of divine action by analogy with the unity of any intentional action—an account of Trinitarian unity that he calls the ‘intentional action’ model.

Marmodoro on the other hand argues for a different interpretation: she holds that Gregory offers a metaphysical account of the Trinity, which employs an innovative distinction between stuffs (e.g. gold), which cannot be counted, and individuals (e.g. rings), which can be. Gregory identifies the nature of any natural kind with the totality of its instances: the nature of man is the totality of men; the nature of gold is the totality of gold in the world. For Gregory, the totality is more ‘real’ than the individuals into which it is articulated, which are merely the way in which the kind is present in the world. Gregory identifies God as the total quantity of divinity there is, which is thus one, and real. The Persons of the Trinity into which God is articulated are the ways in which God is in the world and can be comprehended by us. Thus, Marmodoro argues, Gregory solves the problem of the Trinity by treating it as a special case of the philosophical problem of the One and Many which his philosophical predecessors too, Plato and Aristotle, had addressed in different forms in their metaphysics. (p.6) In keeping the principles discussed earlier, we have deliberately refrained from adding a conclusion to the volume. The collection is conceived as an invitation to explore, rather than an attempt at synthesis. It is the editors’ shared belief (no matter how vehemently we might urge our own individual arguments) that all the questions raised in this volume remain genuinely open ones. Our purpose is therefore to encourage those using the collection to read as widely across it as possible, so that historians (for example) are tackling Marmodoro and Radde-Gallwitz, and philosophers McLynn and Elm. With Gregory of Nyssa even more than with most authors, the more genuinely open-eyed the exploration, the more fruitful it is likely to be.

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University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Exploring Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical, Theological, and Historical Studies Anna Marmodoro and Neil B. McLynn Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198826422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198826422.001.0001

St Gregory of Nyssa Bishop, Philosopher, Exegete, Theologian John Anthony McGuckin

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198826422.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords Chapter 1 gives Biographical background and studies the historical context(s) of Gregory of Nyssa and his close family members, situating them as aristocratic and long-established Christian leaders of the Cappadocian area. It offers along with the course of Gregory’s Vita a general outline of the main philosophical and religious controversies of his era, particularly his ecclesiastical involvement in the Neo-Nicene apologetical movement associated with the leadership of his brother Basil (of Caesarea), which he himself inherited in Cappadocia, with imperial approval, after 380. It concludes with a review of Gregory’s significance as author: in terms of his style as a writer, his work as an exegete, his body of spiritual teaching, and lastly, the manner in which his reputation waxed and waned from antiquity to the present.

Keywords: Nyssen family, biography, Origen, Neo-Nicene school, darkness, exegesis, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Eunomianism

Sketch of a Vita The saintly philosopher, rhetorician, theologian, and bishop Gregory (c.335–395), whom we commemorate and exegete in this volume, derives his title ‘Of Nyssa’ or ‘The Nyssen’ from the small-town episcopal see (now Nevsehir in modern Turkey) that his brother Basil, holder of the archdiocesan see of Cappadocian Caesarea, insisted that he take up to offset a dwindling number of his Caesarean suffragans. Basil wanted to insert a number of close friends and allies into obscure and newly created sees to counteract a down-sizing of his administration that was foisted on him, in controversial times, by an imperially ordered redrawing of church boundaries. It was this forced thrusting of Gregory into the political limelight in his mid-thirties that brought this refined and wealthy intellectual into the rough stream of history, not always to his heart’s content; but it ensured his lasting reputation among the Christians as a philosopher-theologian, one of the important ‘Fathers of the Church’.

His personal name, Gregorios, was a common one among Cappadocian Christians from early times and derives from a reference to the angels who were seen as ‘watchers’ over the believers. The family already had a relative named Gregory who served as a bishop in Cappadocia.1 It was also chosen by his mother, Emmelia, to commemorate the renowned third-century evangelist of their ancestral Cappadocian churches, Gregory Thaumaturgos, who was a (p.8) major patron saint of their circle.2 That missionary theologian was reputed to have been a personal and devoted disciple of Origen when the latter was teaching at Caesarea.3 Gregory Nyssen’s later dedication to the memory of Origen would be a notable factor of his personal intellectual style. In the longer term, it was his brother Basil’s great fame in the Byzantine world, reaching out also to Armenian, Ethiopian, Coptic, Latin, and Slavic Christianities, that kept Gregory’s reputation alive and venerated through the

course of history, though his works were chiefly read, after his own lifetime, in a rather narrow gauge: the Great Catechetical Discourse that he had prepared for neophytes to the faith was consistently popular, and so too the several ascetical treatises he wrote, which were favourites with later monastics. But the fifth- and sixth-century condemnations that fell upon the works of Origen cast a later shadow over his own repute, one that the light of Basil’s reputation stopped from ever becoming an overtly voiced censure. Gregory’s own deacon Evagrios (of Pontus) did not have such a saintly brother and fell more easily under the posthumous Origenian condemnations; formally named and censured in the anathemata of the Fifth Oecumenical Council of 553. Even so, the Oecumenical Council of 787 gave Gregory, in his own right, the designation ‘Father of Fathers’ (pater pateron). But let us take the story from the beginning.

Gregory was born into a high-ranking Pontic family that had roots over at least three generations as Christians4 and which, in the first quarter of the fourth century, held land and property at Neo-Caesarea, the metropolis of Pontus,5 which was his father’s ancestral town, but was also based further south at Caesarea, the Cappadocian provincial capital. The maternal side of the family was also significantly rich.6 In his Life of Macrina Gregory tells us that his mother, at the time of her widowhood, was paying property taxes in three separate provinces.7 Their country estate near Neo-Caesarea was called Annisa, and lay by the banks of the river Iris near its confluence with the river Lycos.8 (p.9) Their maternal grandfather9 had been ‘executed by order of the Emperor’,10 though the family does not seem to claim him as a martyr. In the persecution of Maximin Daia (306– 13) the paternal side of the family had certainly been targeted as Christians, and their paternal grandfather had suffered confiscation of goods, though not so drastically as to impoverish them, since Gregory Nazianzen tells how they had to ‘retreat to the forests of Pontus’, which is probably no more than ‘rhetor-speak’ for retiring to their country estate.11 From this time of resisting the persecutors, their grandmother Macrina the Elder emerged as a senior figure in the local church, claiming something of the status of a confessor.12 The family clearly bounced back from setbacks to both sides of the clan, possibly learning here the value of having property in more than one district and so not being under the power of any single imperial governor. The ability to withdraw to the Pontic countryside, avoiding the higher profile of the cities (and also claiming the tax benefits of declaring their estates ‘ascetical Christian retreats’) was a tactic the family consciously applied.13 Cappadocian Caesarea was a provincial capital of some significance; a guardian of the frontier provinces set on the high road east out of Constantinople; a civil base central to the important business of the supply of horses for the army. In ecclesiastical terms, it was a large archdiocesan church that had close ties to Armenia, but was also closely related to the affairs of the great see of Antioch that had at this period (like Alexandria) become a storm centre of the Nicene–Arian controversy. Basil was a key figure in this nexus of politics. Both Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus would also be called upon (especially after the death of Valens in 378) by the Nicene leaders in exile, Meletios of Antioch and Paul of Samosata, to rally the Nicene cause in the East after Basil’s death, and both then responded with alacrity to the summons.

Gregory was born sometime between 335 and 340.14 He has usually been classed as one of the younger of ten children in the family, five boys and five (p.10) girls; though we have no information about most of them.15 Maraval, however, has more recently proposed the proper number to be nine.16 His father was Basil the Elder, a professing rhetorician, involved in local politics at Neo-Caesarea17 and possibly Caesarea. The latter died relatively young between 341 and 345. The mother Emmelia’s18 care of the household was at first assisted by the children’s grandmother Macrina the Elder (d. c.340) who exercised an important influence on them, stressing their significance as Christian leaders of the region. The eldest son of the family was also named Basil (born 329), later to be designated ‘Basil the Great’ by his fellow rhetorical student Gregory of Nazianzus. Macrina the Younger (c.327–379) was the eldest sister who, in her mother’s widowhood, not only assumed the direction of the household19 but moved the locus of the family base to the Pontic countryside where, under the influence of her mentor, the ascetical bishop-philosopher Eustathius of Sebaste,20 she headed an extended ascetical community on the family properties21 and taught the younger children, including Gregory, who held her in the highest esteem as an intellectual.22 This was in marked contrast to his eldest brother, Basil, who effectively consigned her to a damnatio memoriae,23 consequent on his own severe falling out with Eustathius over doctrinal terms—even though Eustathius had been his own mentor inducting him into the ascetical life and that of clerical church politics as a rhetor-theologian (p.11) fighting against the Arian party of Aetios and Eunomios. Gregory credits Basil24 as one of those who also educated him in rhetoric. We ought also to imagine that Gregory’s episcopal uncle Gregory also had a hand in his training,25 as (most likely) did Gregory Nazianzen, at the period around 355 when he and Basil both returned from studies in Athens, and both functioned (at least for a while) as rhetoricians in Caesarea and Nazianzus.26 Gregory was the third of the brothers after Basil and Nektarios. Nektarios became a practising rhetor in his father’s tradition, but died young, after a hunting accident in which he drowned in his nets. The encomia written of him by Gregory Nazianzen

and Gregory Nyssa depict him as dying in the wilderness as an ascetic anchorite: but this is very likely a deliberately idealized form of depicting life on a Christian country estate as religious hesychia (for purposes of any local curial interest) on an estate now classed as a ‘monastery’.27 Nektarios certainly considered himself a rhetorician, even if he was enjoying life on his country estates at the time he died in the company of his slave, and too many commentators have followed the rhetoric too woodenly in assuming that all the leaders of this Cappadocian family became full-time ascetics. As we know from Basil’s ecclesiastical career, he too applied his rhetorical skills to great result in ecclesiastical affairs. Unlike Basil, who spent years at the schools of rhetoric, culminating in a long stay at Athens with Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory Nyssen seems not to have travelled far afield in his youth, but to have been educated in this densely connected local network of Christian intellectuals comprising the family’s larger kin system in Cappadocia. It is possibly this ‘local’ aspect of his education that gave him, along with the benefit of well-endowed libraries in the circle of the rhetoricians to which he belonged, a very great range of critical reading in his education, in preference to a stress on performance, which often encouraged superficiality of citation and in thinking in many Second Sophistic writers. This may account for the character of Gregory’s rhetoric that leans towards transcendental philosophy, rather than legal or classical constructs. It has made him one of the most important and intellectually elevated of the larger school of Second Sophistic rhetoricians.28 (p.12) Gregory himself seems to have regarded Macrina’s and Basil’s dedication to ascetical forms of Christianity, in the years after 355, with initial scepticism and impatience. But later thinking back to this time, from the vantage point of a bishop of some standing, he also tells the story29 how a dream caused his ‘real conversion’ to the Christian philosophy (by which he means accepting baptism and the canonical duties imposed on a believer) which he describes (in terms of tropes we need not take too seriously) as a turning away from the path of a rhetorician, to that of the Church. His mother had called for him to be present for the celebration of the feast of the Forty Martyrs in Pontus, around the year 360, and, tired after a long journey from Caesarea where he was caught up in much business, he says, he had been rather unwilling to attend all of the lengthy vigil ceremonies. After attending service for a short while, he sneaked away to sleep in the garden, and he recounts how he had a dream in which the martyrs came to him and beat him with rods because of the way he had dishonoured them. After he woke he resolved to accept baptism and assumed the clerical office of Anagnostes, or Reader of the Scriptures.30 The account mirrors, to a certain extent, the ‘dream episode’ in which Gregory Nazianzen sees a vision of two antique female figures (Chastity and Sobriety).31 Both thinkers represent an epistemology where divine revelations complete the purified strivings of the human intellect: ‘faith that gives fullness to reasoning’ as the Nazianzen put it. The Nyssen’s new clerical status would have afforded him exemption from many official civic duties and taxes, but returning to Caesarea he wanted to resume the career path of his father as a political rhetorician, and for his abandonment of a Christian, that is clerical, focus he was heavily criticized by both Basil and Gregory Nazianzen.32 The latter may thus be presumed to have had some hand in Gregory’s formative education,33 and indeed Gregory of Nyssa considerably aided his namesake’s episcopal career at Constantinople, later in 380. The younger Gregory seems to have had a rapid disillusionment in his rhetorical teaching career, finding (p.13) that his classes were more interested in making a good military career than in discovering any literary refinement, as he complained in a later letter to the rhetorician Libanios.34 Between 361 and 363 Julian’s efforts35 to hinder the careers of Christian rhetors served to give the Cappadocian circle only grist for the mill of resistance; though it may also have signalled the wisdom of retreat.

It is possible that at this period, around 365, Gregory married Theosebia36 though others37 have regarded her as one of the sisters of the family, a virginal ascetic deaconess. The more obvious reading of the ambivalent evidence is that Gregory was married to Theosebia. For many centuries church historians preferred to think it almost inconceivable that a bishop would be married at this era, but it certainly was possible,38 though not something a rhetor would normally highlight in his own work.

We know of Theosebia from Gregory Nazianzen’s Epigrams 164 and 197 and from Letter 19739 where he writes in consolatory terms to the younger Gregory after her death,40 and speaks of her being an ideal ἱέρεως σύζυγος using a term which can equally mean sister or spouse—but is here precisely connoting ‘fellow-worker of a priest’. The Nyssen himself never mentions her, but the most likely reading of the term σύζυγος referring to his priestly ministry is, it would seem to me, that she was his wife.41 Gregory Nazianzen also calls Theosebia the ‘child of Emmelia’. Anna Silvas has taken this evidence to argue recently42 that the ‘obvious’ reading must be (since, admittedly, there cannot be two separate Theosebias mentioned in Gregory’s Epigrams and Consolatory Letter) that Gregory was indeed married, but that Theosebia was not the wife, but Gregory’s sister who took charge of his household at Nyssa, and led the community of virgins there. But if Theosebia married Gregory she would, of course, have immediately ‘become’ Emmelia’s daughter as well, according to the kin rules of such times; and the status of being Gregory’s wife would also give her a church role (p.14) as πρεσβυτιδα or head of the deaconesses (that is a σύζυγος—yoked with a priest) which is how Gregory Nazianzen honours her, on hearing of her death.

Daniélou supposes that Cynegios was the child of this marriage, the young man whom Gregory wants to have Libanios educate later in 380.43 At the same time that he was married, then, Gregory also composed (as if in apologia) a celebration of his family’s ascetical dedication, in the Treatise on Virginity. This is mainly celebrating Basil and Macrina. Basil knew that he could not persuade Gregory to adopt the same ascetical lifestyle.44 The ‘virginity’ (παρθένια) that Gregory so earnestly desires throughout that treatise and laments that he never achieved (because the married life in the world has its special difficulties) has often been taken as evidence he did not find married life very agreeable; but again παρθένια here ought not to be understood as celibacy as much as the philosophical σωφροσύνη to which he aspires and which, he admits, the other ascetics have clearly demonstrated both bodily and noetically in their lifestyles.45 Macrina’s influence, perhaps the fact that their father’s library had been relocated here, and maybe the Cappadocian famine of 36946 all seem to have drawn Gregory back to Annisa for some time where he occupied himself in further extensive studies of the rhetorical classics and a wide review of the philosophical schools: but surely also at this period begins his deep acquaintance with the writings of Origen of Alexandria. With the exception of Gregory Nazianzen he is probably the most well read of all the Christian theologians of this age. He read Plato and shows dependence especially on the Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic, and Timaeus. He closely studied the manuals of Middle Platonism from Posidonius, and Daniélou has argued47 that he is especially impressed by Plotinus’ sense of mystical ascent, Porphyry’s logic and ontology, Iamblichus’ cosmology, Stoicism’s ethics, and the Hellenistic scientific treatises. He closely follows parts of the opera of Philo Judaeus. As a Christian, Gregory stood for a broad church, as long as the Nicene fundamentals were accepted. He never felt it necessary to denounce his love of literature and books, or apologize for his wide reading, as if he were a sophistic ascetic. Nor did he wish to draw ecclesial allegiances in a narrow remit as did many of those around him.

In 370 his mother Emmelia died, and Gregory’s Letter 19 testifies to the way Macrina served to console the family at this time.

In the same year Basil won the contested election to become the Metropolitan Bishop of Caesarea and (p.15) immediately started to call in the favours of his family and friends.48 In 372, to offset the imperial redrawing of the boundaries of the Caesarean archiepiscopate, which Basil saw as an attack on his ability to command allegiances to the Nicene cause (but which others saw as merely a ploy to sustain his political influence) he appointed his friend Gregory of Nazianzus to the see of Sasima (which the latter refused to occupy), and his younger brother Gregory to an equally little crossroads town on the diocesan borderlands that had never possessed independent episcopal standing beforehand. Nyssa was 10 miles outside Caesarea. Eusebius of Samosata, possibly urged to it by a complaint from Gregory,49 wrote to Basil criticizing him for burying so great a talent in so unsuitable a locale. Basil replied that he was pressured to do this, but made the prophetic remark that his brother would bring more renown to the name of the town than ever the town could bring honour to him.50 It proved to be the case.

As a church politician the Nyssen was in many ways more like Gregory Nazianzen than his elder brother. He felt that reconciliation with those who were of the same substantial mind was possible. Basil rebuked him on several occasions, for his tolerance of the party of Marcellus of Ancyra (the ‘Old Nicenes’) whom he (and several others in the region) regarded as ‘Sabellians’; and when Gregory proposed to join a party of reconciliation set to go to Rome in 37651 to seek there a settlement of the dispute over the rightful incumbent at Antioch, Basil again vetoed him as being naively over-trusting, not a suitable foil for the wily Damasus of Rome.

In Basil’s early years in office, the imperial court, although it was generally pressing for the Homoian Arian cause in church politics, felt it was better to leave him alone. It needed security in Caesarea because of its closeness to the Armenian kingdom, and Basil was known to have standing in that Church. But his younger brother was a different matter and the Nyssen attracted attention as a Nicene at the Synod of Ancyra in 372, at which even his decision to attend had annoyed Basil.52 In the winter of 375 their Arian enemies moved (p.16) against them, an attack orchestrated by Demosthenes, an old enemy of Basil’s from the days when he had engaged in extensive speaking engagements against the Arian philosophy, and who now occupied the office of imperial Vicar of Pontus. He brought charges against Gregory on the grounds of an irregular ordination and the financial mismanagement of church assets. Basil had personally ordained his brother, overruling any local disagreement, and the charges could be made to stick, presuming an Arian majority at the adjudicating synod. To ensure this Gregory was called to defend himself at a synodical trial at Ancyra. An armed guard sent to bring him there by force was frustrated by Gregory’s claim that he had to seek urgent treatment for a bronchial illness brought on by their rough treatment of him (which was a counter canonical charge they could use if necessary). Meanwhile, Basil attempted to call in every influence he could to secure the dismissal of the charges. He held a synod of his own bishops at Caesarea53 and also sent letters entreating intervention to the

aristocrat Abourgios at Constantinople.54 Even so, in 376 Eustathius of Sebaste, now implacably opposed to Basil,55 was instrumental in assisting Demosthenes’ plan for a synod to be assembled at Nyssa itself.56 Again refusing to appear at this, which was held under the presidency of Anisios and Ekdikios of Parnassos, Gregory was deposed from office and the Emperor Valens may have issued a decree for Gregory’s banishment to Seleucia.57 An account of his continuing harassments in this time of exile after 376 is preserved in the letters of encouragement Gregory Nazianzen sent to answer his complaints about the conditions of exile.58 After the sudden death of Valens in 378 the tide turned for the Nicene party and under Gratian Gregory was reinstituted as orthodox Bishop of Nyssa. His third epistle59 recounts his triumphant reception back among his people.

By 378, then, he already enjoyed a reputation as a Nicene confessor. On 1 January 379, his brother Basil died,60 relatively young, like his father, and Gregory served the funeral liturgy.61 His funeral panegyric for Basil was widely admired, naming Basil as someone ‘great among the saints’ and ‘a man of (p.17) universal fame’. But this also caused the Neo-Arian party to remount a reactive campaign of blackening Basil’s name, which set Gregory on a path of composing apologetic additions to his brother’s treatise Against Eunomius. In September of 379 he attended a synod of Nicene leaders gathered at Antioch62 which was held in the (vain) hope of resolving the continuing crisis (between Paulinus and Meletios) over the rightful Nicene episcopal incumbency of the city. It was here he met and befriended the renowned rhetorician Libanius. The Synod of Antioch produced a confession of the deity of the three persons of the Trinity as well as accepting key documents of Roman confession: a result of the mission Basil had sent to Damasus of Rome in 376. The council also gave to Gregory a mission of attempting the continuing reconciliation of the internal Nicene divisions.63 On the way back to Nyssa from Antioch he diverted to Annisa (which he says he had not visited for eight years past) to pay his respects to his sister Macrina. When he arrived, in July 379, he found her on her deathbed and was able to make his farewells.

The conversations he had with her over two days he subsequently made up, in the style of the ‘Last Days of Socrates’, into an encomium of her great standing as a philosophical ascetic, calmly facing death in the hope of immortality.64 The Life of Macrina thus features her as a key character but is basically his own consideration of the arguments for and against the immortality of the soul. He served her funeral rites and laid her body in the small church at Annisa that Emmelia had built as the family mausoleum and in honour of the Forty Martyrs.65 At this period Gregory invested in considerable publishing to secure Basil’s memory. He added sections to Basil’s own Hexaemeron, wrote an important treatise on anthropology entitled On the Making of Man, as well as composing a Hexaemeron of his own. At Pascha of 379 he issued his Third Homily on the Holy Pascha and we have a series of other such treatises liturgically related in the years following. His treatise from this same period, On the Soul and Resurrection, in which an account of Macrina’s death also appears,66 is also a considered philosophical essay dedicated to the memory of his elder brother.

When he returned to Nyssa in August of 379 he found considerable unrest in his see, and complaints came at him from several sides. Arian sympathizers remained unpersuaded; but even the Nicenes of his party and among surrounding hierarchs were disturbed at the way he had been advocating the (p.18) reception of dissidents into communion ‘without sufficient examination’.67 It may be an indication of the continuing unpopularity of the Marcellan party, or the fact that the local hierarchs of Cappadocia resented him exercising a super-local authority on the basis of his commission from Antioch. This same factor would later account for a larger falling out he had with Helladius, the metropolitan of Caesarea, after the council of 381. He was soon drawn into further unrest caused by the church of Ibora in Pontus (near to his family estates) which called upon Gregory to superintend their episcopal election after the death of Araxios, to ensure a Nicene would be chosen. In the course of the process the people (with the connivance of the local leaders) then proceeded to vote for him and rioted when he would not concur.68 However, by this time he had emerged as a renowned Nicene advocate and had gained the confidence of the court of Theodosios I and could not be pressured this way. In early 380 Gregory was involved in the issue of the disputed succession at Sebaste after the death of the famed Eustathius. The latter had been doggedly opposed to the Neo-Nicene elevation of the hypostatic deity of the Holy Spirit, and so to claim his see for the full Nicene cause would have been a triumph. It has often been thought that Gregory was successful in this enterprise, placing his younger brother Peter in the see, but his letters reflecting on the event subsequently are full of the difficulties encountered and the rudeness he experienced and how he had to justify his own orthodoxy there.69 Diekamp70 thinks he was embroiled at Sebaste for up to two months. He has many complaints about the poor standard of food and lodgings.71 Maraval72 thinks that he may have lost the fight at this stage and only ousted the elected disciple of Eustathius after the Council of Constantinople in 383 when he was then armed with imperial authority—putting his brother Peter in place on that occasion.

In 380 Gregory was summoned to attend Theodosios’ Council of Constantinople set for the following year. To assist Gregory of Nazianzen’s efforts in preparing the Nicene case there, he sent on to the capital his own deacon Evagrios of Pontos, who

would serve as an amanuensis while the elder Gregory composed the Five Theological Orations.73 Evagrios would shortly move on to become one of the leading monastic philosophers in Egypt, taking the Origenistic themes of his two episcopal teachers to more explicit heights than either of them openly dared. When the council gathered in 381 the (p.19) younger Gregory was present in the capital and wrote amused accounts of how fevered the atmosphere was, with even his barber and baker giving unsolicited theological opinions on the metaphysics of the Trinity; a theme taken up more formally in Gregory of Nazianzus’ First Theological Oration.74 Before the Council opened he preached a commemorative sermon for Basil in Caesarea.75 In pre-conciliar symposia at the capital, later in 381, Gregory read to an assembly of theologians that included Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome, Evagrios, and Cyril of Jerusalem the draft of his masterly treatise Against Eunomios.76 He possibly wrote, at this time, his short treatise On Essence and Hypostasis which has come down as Letter 38 in Basil’s epistolary corpus. It was Gregory Nyssen who was chosen to deliver the opening oration when the Council convened, which is, sadly, no longer extant. Shortly into the proceedings Meletios of Antioch, who had been given the presidency of affairs, died suddenly. Gregory of Nyssa was once more called on to deliver the funeral oration for this last great Old Nicene protagonist.77 When Gregory of Nazianzus was elected in Meletios’ place he also offered the Consecration sermon for his friend. The Funeral Oration for Meletios has survived, though that for Gregory has been lost.

In 382 the creed now commonly designated as Nicene-Constantinopolitan was issued from the imperial chancery. It is possible that Gregory was consulted in the wording of the additional clauses relating to pneumatology. These follow a moderate and reconciliatory line, teaching the deity of the Spirit78 (as he and Basil had advocated), but carefully avoiding explicit mention of the homoousion of the Spirit (the cause for which Gregory Nazianzen had wagered his episcopate at Constantinople 381, and lost).79 The Nyssen is not explicitly listed as among those present at the council of 382,80 but he was certainly present at the synod held in the capital in 383, where he delivered his oration On the Deity of the Son and Holy Spirit.81 He was, at the same time, designated by the imperial court as one of a select (p.20) number of outstanding bishops of the international Church who could be looked to as a standard of orthodox belief.82 For Cappadocia these were named as Gregory, his local Metropolitan of Caesarea, Helladios, and Gregory’s friend Otreios of Melitene.83 It was an association that soon resulted in a severe falling out, as Helladios clearly resented Gregory’s interference as a ‘roving bishop’.84 One result of his imperial favour was that he secured from the emperor the decree banishing Eunomios.

The Synod of Constantinople in 383 also seems to have appointed him as a Superintendent Visitor to the see of Babylon in Arabia. Honigmann surmised that this was a mission to reconcile the disputed episcopal election at Bostra between the claimants Agapios and Bodagios.85 After a fruitless visit there he reported that its reform was beyond his capability. He describes the official imperial conveyance that was put at his disposal for the journey as ‘both our monastery and our church’.86 This schism was still the subject of interventions at the Synod of Constantinople in 394. As part of this journey he visited the church of Jerusalem ‘at the request of the heads of the holy churches in Jerusalem’. The plural of reference there suggests that the Bishop Cyril, though restored to his see, had not been able to win over the support of the core Nicene party in Palestine. They remembered his ordination had been under the Homoian Arian Akakios of Caesarea, and his many ambivalences in the time of struggles. The Council of Constantinople in 382 had to reaffirm Cyril’s legitimacy over again. In trying to settle the disputes at Jerusalem Gregory found his own orthodoxy called into question; especially about his views of the full humanity of Christ. He composed a defence of his ideas,87 but the whole trip soured him and embittered his views of the way they conducted traffic to the holy shrines,88 not seeming to address the moral decadence that attended the pilgrim trade. Writing later to three aristocratic women, Eustathia, Ambrosia, and Basilissa, whom he had met in Jerusalem, he insists that pilgrimage is useless in deepening reverence or faith, but certainly exposes the traveller to many moral dangers, and is an especially dubious practice for unaccompanied females. It was a theme he also developed in his apologetic (p.21) treatise On Those Who Travel to Jerusalem, which gives a lurid account of the hardships and dangers of travel in that period.

In late summer of 385 he was asked by the court to offer the funeral oration at the capital on the death of the imperial Princess Pulcheria, and only a few weeks afterwards to deliver the oration on the death of her mother, Theodosios’ Empress Aelia Flacilla Augusta. Here he also met an unnamed philosopher with whom he held some colloquia that were later written up as his Treatise on Fate. In this same period, probably in 386, he also composed his Great Catechetical Oration to set a standard for (Nicene) baptismal initiation of converts. It grew in the composition to be a veritable ‘short manual’ of theology that had a long afterlife in church history. He wrote friendly letters to the rhetorician Libanius.89 He wanted to send him his treatise

Against Eunomius.90 In the 390s he dedicated his elegant Fifteen Homilies on the Song of Songs to the ascetic deaconess Olympias (the later patroness of John Chrysostom) whose friendship he had gained in his many visits to the capital. Some think that his Life of Moses also belongs to this late period of writing.

His final years are obscure. Some time after 381 he built a martyr shrine at Nyssa, lovingly described in one of his letters.91 His last appearance in history is as one of the members of the Synod of Constantinople held in 394 under the presidency of Nektarios, to readdress the continuing schism at Bostra. His name is listed between the metropolitans of Caesarea and Iconium.

It is an interesting indication of the growing power of Constantinople as an imperial Christian see, for up to this time Arabia had been under the canonical remit of the Antiochene church. The imperial Prefect Rufinus also used the occasion to have the assembled bishops congregate to consecrate his newly founded church in the suburbs, at which Gregory preached his oration (oddly called) On his Ordination. He self-deprecatingly contrasts the painted border decorations in the church with the glorious gold of the dome, suggesting that his oration, as a minor painting element, will be less powerful than those of his predecessors, but useful nonetheless for adding to the overall harmony of the scheme. His death is customarily located circa 395 and his saint’s festal day is observed in the Latin calendar on 9 March, and listed in the Greek Menologion for 10 January.

Gregory as a Writer Gregory seems to have been much more of a voracious reader than a writer until the death of Basil made him come out into the limelight to defend the Neo-Nicene cause, along with his brother’s reputation which was being mocked by Eunomios of Cyzikos. After Basil’s death many leading Nicenes (p.22) of his region demanded that he take up Basil’s mantle himself, and use his status as learned confessor for the faith to good effect in the favourable environment after 378. As an intellectual he thus rose out of the context of the last stages of the Arian conflict, into becoming a more free-ranging author than either Basil or Gregory Nazianzen were able to. His wide reading as a scholar was then put to good effect.

As a Spiritual Master

Gregory’s so-called ‘mystical’ writings have had a long influence on Christian spirituality and have been treasured by monastics of all traditions. We can also call these works his philosophy of spiritual consciousness, and not be too eager to drive an anachronistic wedge between Christian spirituality and a lively late antique philosophical investigation of noetic intuition.

For this era of the Late Platonic School, as adapted by the Christians, saw a highly refined reopening of the issue of teleotic transcendental epistemology. Its characteristic key notion was the ascent of the Nous to divine communion.

Gregory continued the tradition of Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, which reads the concept of the noetic Eros as an intellective divine energy set by the Logos in the soul’s inner construct, so that it longs in its deepest being to find union with the Logos in ascentive spiritual purification and communion. Alongside the late Platonic philosophers, Gregory closely studied Philo’s Life of Moses, the works of Origen, and the Syrian monastic asceticism of the heart92 as represented in the Spiritual Homilies of Macarius93 to reach his own view of the ascent of the Nous. He also seems to have read widely and he makes a more systematic plan of the threefold stages of divine ascent: through apatheia, or dis-passion, the moral mastery of the pathemata in the life in the body, to a stasis of gnosis, or increasingly infused knowledge where one’s deductive insights owe less and less to material deductive extrapolations and more to noetic intuition, and thus on into the possibility of theoria.

This theoria he sees as mirroring the transcendent incognoscibility of the Godhead in the only way a creaturely consciousness can, that is in an endless advancement or headlong fall (προκοπή) into the divine darkness. This, in turn, would later be designated ‘the Cloud of Unknowing’. Along with Origen and Evagrios, Gregory certainly has a right to be called one of the founders of the Christian mystical tradition; a movement where he (p.23) dynamically and creatively transfigured his biblical and philosophical sources into something new and powerful.

As an Exegete

Gregory interprets Scripture as a not-uncritical disciple of Origen. Like Gregory Nazianzen and his brother Basil, who collaborated in Pontus in making the Philocalia Origenis (which was a manual of exegetical instructions abstracted from Origen’s works), the younger Gregory was well aware that the great Alexandrian philosopher’s reputation was growing clouded in the estimate of his contemporary Church. Cappadocia was in the ecclesiastical remit of Antioch, where the school of Theodore Mopsuestia and (in Gregory’s day) Diodore of Tarsus laid immense stress on an exegetical style purged of allegorical excess and of heavily Christocentric readings. Both of these things had been highly characteristic of Origen’s approach, and the Nyssen does not want Origen’s exegetical tradition to sink with the Antiochene attacks. Problematically, the Origenian school at Caesarea Maritima had also over past years been associated with the Arian movement. As does the Philocalia Origenis, Gregory took Origen’s Peri Archon Book 4 as the charter for a Logo-centric reading of the biblical text:94

one that valued the literal meaning, as clarified by a fit and proper grammatical investigation and exposition, but one that essentially understood the sacred writings as being full of hidden mysteries that were meant to be seen in their full implication only by those who were spiritually gifted and illumined. The text was charged with meanings on multiple levels,95 and Gregory took seriously (more passionately certainly than his brother Basil who writes in his Hexaemeron an account of Genesis that would have pleased any Antiochene) the charge that a scriptural interpreter was ever called to the heights—that is the exposition of how the text, through temporary and passing material symbols, led the spiritually (p.24) enlightened reader to an ever more refined and elevated knowledge of the immaterial and inconceivable triune God. A subtle exegetical philosophy (for he sees divine enlightenment of the mind as a cardinal aspect of philosophicalcosmological awareness96) underlies most of what he writes. The Bible is never present to him merely as margin illustration.

In the course of his career (unlike Gregory Nazianzen whose theoretical approach he otherwise closely mirrors) he also turned quite explicitly to works of commentary on scriptural books. In his early and middle stages of episcopate, therefore, Gregory wrote: Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, eight Homilies on the Beatitudes, a Discourse on 1 Corinthians 15.28, eight Homilies on Ecclesiastes, a discourse On the Titles of the Psalms, Homily on the Sixth Psalm, additions to Basil’s famed work Hexaemeron (a Genesis-based account of the six days of creation), and a specific work of his own on the creation story, On the Making of Mankind. In his later episcopal career he composed two masterpieces of biblical theology: the Commentary on the Song of Songs, which has an eye on Origen’s masterpiece of the same title, and his Life of Moses which similarly seeks to outdo Philo. Both latter pieces set out to recast the earlier Alexandrian theology in the light of a clear restatement of orthodox Neo-Nicene Trinitarianism.

Gregory is a very careful reader of the text before him, as the recent study of his Life of Moses by Conway-Jones has shown.97 Many of his later readers have not been so careful either about him or the scriptural symbols he deals with. It has been such a trope, for example, that in the Life of Moses the Nyssen wants to speak about the mystical ascent of the Nous to the heavenly darkness that Sinai represents, that it comes as something of a shock to see Conway-Jones’s statistics that Gregory openly refers to that idea only in three paragraphs of his work, while he gives no less than thirty-two paragraphs to an exposition of how the whole ascent of Moses to the top of Sinai was in order that he should be given the pattern of the ‘heavenly tabernacle’ so as to take it back to Israel as the archetype of its worship. This is exactly what the ancient Sinaitic text is concerned with, of course, establishing the cultus, which the Church from earliest times took as a symbol of its own worship. And it is certainly the focus of the Nyssen, though many commentators have been led aside from his agenda, preferring to follow their own eisegeses. Indeed too many have separated the philosopher, the mystic, the liturgist, the exegete, and the dogmatician, when all too clearly the Nyssen’s character and intellectual agenda make of all of these things a single skopos or intentionality. (p.25) Gregory brings a sharp re-emphasis to Origen’s overarching point that Scripture conveys many revelatory messages, but has a relentless overall skopos (purport) of teaching moral refinement, and an inbuilt akolouthia (or proper way of reading it) that is designed to help individuals of different abilities and spiritual sensitivities to make a progress from material historical symbols to higher divine truths.98 As does his own disciple Evagrios, Gregory sees a triadic pattern of the ascent of the Nous taught throughout the great passages of Scripture: first comes the need for a repentant purification of the mind, then a growing awareness of the profundity of the spiritual message contained in a given story (theoria), and then a dawning realization that its ultimate significance far exceeds the human capacity—a darkness of the intellect which is, paradoxically, a much closer drawing-near to the essential mystery of the Ungraspable God. It was for this overarching conception that Daniélou called Gregory: ‘the great master of Christian mystical theology’.99 Again, we may also call this the whole telos of his epistemological philosophy.

In his treatment of the Psalm titles Gregory especially highlights those that bear the rubric ‘Unto the End’ (eis telon). He says that this illustrates a generic principle that Scripture is given by God for a teleotic principle of utility (opheleia) to humankind, serving the human need for ascentive return to the ‘end’ or Telos of Divine Communion (koinonia, theosis). Just when a modern reader may raise an eyebrow, wondering if he did not realize the phrase was probably just a musician’s rubric, he goes on, insightfully, to say these rubrics show how obvious it is that the historical order and context of these psalms has been disrupted, and jumbled out of sequence. This demands, he goes on, that a reader must now think what ought to be the ‘proper sequence’ (akolouthia), since that will fundamentally determine one’s reading. He then offers a fivefold division operative among the psalms: beginning with those that teach basic virtues and cleansing from passions, and rising up in stages to those that evoke a very intimate sense of divine contemplation. Gregory’s development of Origen’s approach to the Song of Songs as a story of ascentive Soul-Eros gave him a profound way to synthesize the late Platonic ‘divine cosmology’ with the Christian story of Redemption through the Incarnation of the Logos.

Gregory’s master works are probably his Contra Eunomium (where he shows himself equal to the other great Cappadocian architects of the doctrine of the Trinity), his Life of Moses, his Homilies on the Song of Songs, On the Beatitudes, On the Christian Institute, The Great Catechetical Oration, (p.26) The Life of Macrina, On the Making of Mankind, On the Lord’s Prayer, and On Virginity. But he also left a large body of pastoral writings that show him as a careful and attentive local pastor, contrary to the cliché that has grown up (following on Basil’s complaints against him from his early career) that he was inefficient. His Epistle to Letoios100 entered the Eastern Church’s lists as one of its great Canonical Epistles, setting terms for the treatment of penitents. He advocates here the importance of discretion in dealing with public sinners, setting out a distinction used ever since in Christian pastoral care between ἀκριβεία and οἰκονομία. Others among his sermons were historymaking in their import: not least among them his two orations on behalf of the poor101 which are among the earliest Greek philosophical writings advocating the integral value of the human person as εἰκών θεοῦ, and thus inherently possessing universal rights to life and dignity. His Homily on Ecclesiastes 4.1 is one of the very few instances in patristic literature where an orator explicitly condemns slavery as inherently immoral.102 His treatise against the evils of usury103 shows him to good effect as one of the sincere philoptochoi bishops of this period. His many other homilies exegete the Scriptures in highly intelligent and insightful ways, and also illustrate the growing number of festivals that the Christian Church was adopting at this period: such as the feasts of the Apostles, Christmas, St Stephen’s day, and Ascension, which he had seen personally at Constantinople and popularized in Cappadocia, enhancing them for the monastics by his festal orations. Many of his writings show that towards the end of his life the ascetics looked to him as a patron and theoretician; and that same concern is demonstrated in several letters.104

Gregory’s Intellectual Legacy Moore, in the preface to his 1893 translation of selected treatises of Gregory, writes: ‘That none of the treatises of S. Gregory of Nyssa have hitherto been translated into English, or even (with one exception long ago) into French, may be partly due to the imperfections, both in number and quality of the manuscripts, and by consequence of the editions, of the (p.27) great majority of them.’105 That very diffidence about his manuscripts, of course, also reflected the later Byzantine suspicion (propagated to defend his reputation as an Orthodox saint) that his opera must somehow have been infiltrated by heretical ‘Origenists’ at certain points. They could not account for his range of opinions in any other way and still keep him in the canon of Orthodox Fathers. A critical edition of the works was planned by the Benedictines but the materials gathered for it were dispersed in the course of the French Revolution. This was why Migne had to have recourse to the very dated edition of the Jesuit Fronto du Duc (first collated in 1615) so as to reprint in his Patrologia Graeca volumes of Gregory, the Morel edition of 1638. This was not replaced as a comprehensive collection of the Opera until the magnificent multi-volume critical edition prepared by Werner Jaeger and his associates from the latter half of the twentieth century onwards.106 The Complete Works are listed in the Mateo-Seco Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa107 with a useful cross referencing between the Jaeger edition and that of Migne. The exact chronology of Gregory’s works is still not clear, or generally assured on all points, but is infinitely more clarified than before the work of Jaeger. A complete catalogue of works, in suggested order, is also given in Mateo-Seco.108 The general ‘neglect’ that Moore speaks about at the end of the nineteenth century109 was broken down after the appearance of the Migne editions of Gregory’s works, taking him to a larger audience (at least of specialists). The great Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar lamented the undeserved smallness of Gregory’s audience in his seminal work presenting Gregorian theology and philosophy, written in 1942.110 Two years later Daniélou added to Balthasar’s picture of a great undiscovered power of early Christian theology the stress on Gregory’s significance as one of the greatest of early Christian mystical writers.111 This began a wave of serious re-engagement with the Nyssen, beginning with continental patrologists and philosophers, that has continued to the present day. Volker, Muhlenberg, and Canévet were significant figures in this revival.112 The much more sophisticated work of (p.28) classicists and historians of philosophy across the later twentieth century blew away the remaining influence of Von Harnack who had thought any permeation of Greek philosophy in the church tradition was tantamount to a betrayal of the Gospel.113 It also stopped theological writers from lazily assuming that Platonism and Aristotelianism was ‘all of a piece’ in late antiquity. This opened up the way, perhaps for the first time since late antiquity, to appreciate what a masterly synthesis, adaptation, and profound set of changes the Origenian school (with Gregory of Nyssa as one of its leading figures) had made of the weaving together of biblical, Jewish, and philosophical materials to create a new school of thought. Synthesis came to be no longer seen as merely the sum of the parts of its borrowings, and Gregory thus re-emerged as a highly creative thinker who had, in fact, set the tone of the later Byzantine Christian experience; especially in regard to its doctrine of spiritual consciousness.114 The Byzantine monastics had already seen this in antiquity, but even their access to the manuscripts was hampered by political conditions as the Empire progressively lost its schools and scriptoria. The sad state of transmission is shown clearly in Paisy Velichovsky’s lament for his inability to access the writings of the Greek spiritual fathers even on Mount Athos in the eighteenth century.115 In the latter part of the twentieth century a

group of scholars (comparable to what was happening in the revival of Origenian studies) came together to devote themselves collectively to a series of learned Symposia that would aim at producing a regular series of monographs devoted to Gregory’s works and thought.116 One of the latest fruits of their labours is the fine Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa published by Brill in 2010. This gives a useful account of significant modern works in the ‘Gregorian Revival’.117 An excellent edition of the Gregorian Letters in English has also recently been published by Anna Silvas.118 This present volume is itself part of that revival, and a testimony to the ongoing significance of Gregory’s life and thought for contemporary readers.

Notes:

(1) EpistleLetters, Volume I: Letters 1–58.Roy J. Deferrari. Loeb Classical Library vol. 190. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926].

(2) Basil repeats his grandmother’s claims to spiritual lineage from him. Cf. Basil, Ep. 204.6.

(3) Thought by many to have been the ‘Theodore’ who wrote the Letter of Thanksgiving to Origen outlining the curriculum of the Christian School of Caesarea.

(4) As he tells us in the Vita Macrina. The family retained traditions that Gregory’s maternal grandfather was executed and his property confiscated in that persecution (303–11), and that they had assisted in the mission of Gregory Thaumatourgos.

(5) Vita Macrina, 20.20–1 in Ascetical Works: Saint Gregory of Nyssa, trans. V. W. Callahan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999).Niksar (6) Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 43.5–8.

(7) Vita Macrina, 7.4 (trans. Callahan 167).

(8) Annisa is possibly modern-day Sonusa or Ulukoy in Turkey. The ancient rivers Iris and Lycos are the modern Yeşilırmak and Kelkit Çayi rivers. Further see P. Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 62. Annisa was a little less than 300 miles from Nyssa, and 19 miles west of Neo-Caesarea. When Gregory travelled there by road from Nyssa, it took him ten days. Cf. Epistulae, ed. Georgius Pasquali, Gregorii Nysseni Opera, VIII/2 (Leiden: Brill, 1959), 19.63.4–6. He describes its beauties in the Letter to Adelphos. Further cf. T. A. Goggin, The Times of St Gregory of Nyssa as Reflected in the Letters and the Contra Eunomium (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1947), 45; W. M. Ramsay, The Historical Geography of Asia Minor (London: Murray, 1890), 254–70, 326–7.

(9) The husband of Macrina the Elder.

(10) Vita Macrina, 20.

(11) Gregory of Nazianzen, Oration 43.5–6.

(12) Vita Macrina, 2.

(13) This is not to imply that the household of Macrina and Basil, while in Annisa and its surrounds, was not a genuine ‘monastic’ endeavour; but simply to note that the location of such an ascetic endeavour on family land was more than likely used to greater tax advantage for the rest of the (larger) estates—which are clearly being used by other members of the family who have not dedicated themselves to asceticism. Even late in life Gregory of Nyssa writes about ‘owning’ Annisa: In XL Martyres. PG 46.785A. (14) G. May, ‘Die Chronologie des Lebens und der Werke des Gregor von Nyssa’, in Écriture et culture philosophique dans la pensée de Grégoire de Nysse, ed. M. Harl (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 51–66.

(15) EpR. Pouchet, Basile le Grand et son univers d’amis d’après sa correspondence (Rome: Institutum Patristicum ‘Augustinianum’, 1992), 583–9.To Youth on the Manner of Profiting from Greek LettersTractatus (16) On the grounds that the Suda over-literally interprets the statement in Vita Macrina, 13, where Basil is called the firstfruits of Emmelia’s faithful offering to God, and her last son Peter of Sebaste is called there the ‘tithe’. Cf. P. Maraval, ‘Encore les frères et sœurs de Grégoire de Nysse’, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 60 (1980): 160–6.

(17) Vita Macrina, 21.

(18) Gregory of Nazianzen gives us her name at Epigrams 161 and 164.

(19) S. Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

(20) His regular visits to Constantinople, on the Via Pontica highway running from the Byzantine capital to the eastern frontier at Satala ran through Neo-Caesarea, where he made the connection from the early 340s with Basil the elder’s family.

(21) She ‘embraced a philosophical and immaterial lifestyle’, as Gregory puts it: Vita Macrina, 11.

(22) Ep.A. M. Silvas, Gregory of Nyssa: The Letters (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

(23) He very pointedly omits her name even when it would have been normal to focus on it, as when he credits only his grandmother and mother for having influenced him deeply in the faith. Cf. Ep. 204, St. Basil: Letters, trans. A. C. Way (New York: Fathers of the Church Inc., 1955), 76.

(24) He calls him ‘my master’ and says, in the preface to his Hexaemeron, that all that is good in the work should be credited to the influence of Basil and what is bad, to the faults of his pupil. His letter to Libanios however admits that his benefit from Basil’s teaching was of short duration. In Ep. 13.4 he says that he did not have famous teachers of rhetoric, as Basil did, but he can claim some merit from his association as Basil’s student.

(25) Cf. Basil’s Ep. 59.1.

(26) Cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 43.25.

(27) In many places of pre-economic-crisis Greece, it was enough to build a small oratory on one’s land to be able to claim special tax relief as a religious foundation; which (partly) explains the many tiny model church shrines dotted over the countryside.

(28) L. Meridier, L’Influence de la seconde sophistique sur l’œuvre de Gregoire de Nysse (Paris: Hachette, 1906).

(29) In XL Martyres, PG 46.785A. (30) Gregory uses the motif of a revelatory dream that falls upon him resting in a garden again in the Vita Macrina.

(31) Cf. J. McGuckin, St Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (New York: SVS Press, 2001), 53, (32) Ep.N. McLynn, ‘Among the Hellenists: Gregory and the Sophists’, in Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, ed.

J. Børtnes and T. Hägg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 213–38.

(33) Though he was only six years older than him, Gregory Nazianzen had attended the Athens academies for ten years with Basil, and like Basil had engaged in some rhetorical teaching when they returned to Cappadocia. He criticizes the younger Gregory in his Epistle 43 drawing a sharp contrast between exegesis of ‘grace-filled’ scripture and ‘arid’ secular literature.

(34) Ep. 13.14.

(35) The Edictum de Professoribus prohibiting those who did not believe in the ancient gods from exegeting the classical texts celebrating them: meant as a purge of Christian teachers from the greater schools.

(36) Cf. J. Daniélou, ‘Le Mariage de Grégoire de Nysse et la chronologie de sa vie’, Revue des études augustiniennes 2 (1956): 71–8.

(37) Further see Silvas, Gregory, 4, 98–100.

(38) In his poem De seipso et de episcopis, Carmina, 2.1.12. vv. 620–7, Gregory Nazianzen finds it a matter of criticism that a young bishop of the Antiochene province served an important role at the Council of Constantinople in 381 (opposing him) so soon after his nuptial rites. Nektarios his successor was also married. We ought not to presume silence on the subject meant celibacy.

(39) Gregory Nazianzen, Ep. 197, ed. Silvas, Gregory, 100–1.

(40) E. Venables, Gregorius Nyssenus, in Dictionary of Christian Biography vol. 2, ed. W. Smith and H. Wace (London: Murray, 1880), 762.

(41) P. Devos, ‘Grégoire de Nazianze témoin du marriage de Grégoire de Nysse’, in Il Symposium Nazianzenum, ed. J. Mossay (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1983), 269–81.

(42) Silvas, Gregory, 99.

(43) Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. 13–14.

(44) Basil, Ep. 14.1.

(45) De Virginitate, ed. M. Aubineau (Paris: Cerf, 1966), 3.1. The reference to ‘difficulties’ does not mean he was ‘unhappily married’, it is a rhetor’s way of contrasting public life (including the married status of family and political duties) with the life of bodily and noetic sophrosyne one accepts with the total dedication only a monastic can give to it.

(46) Which made the countryside a far better option than a city.

(47) J. Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique (Paris: Aubier, 1944).

(48) διάκονος ἀναξιόπιστοςBasil, Ep. 58.

(49) Though I think it equally likely that the ‘Brother Gregory’ who here complained to Eusebius of Samosata about his poor see (Sasima) was actually Gregory Nazianzen.

(50) Ibid.

(51) Ibid.

(52) Ibid. 100. The agenda here was possibly to reconcile the party of Marcellus of Ancyra, the ‘Old Nicenes’ which Basil detested as tantamount to the Sabellian heresy. Cf. ibid. 69.2.

(53) Ibid.

(54) In Ep. 225 Basil stresses how all the proper rites were observed so there was no irregularity at all since the see of Nyssa was within his own archdiocese. He says that his brother Gregory was ‘totally constrained’ to accept the see, not from any ambition of his own.

(55) Possibly now detesting Gregory also for his attempt to speak up for the reconciliation of the Marcellans.

(56) Ibid.

(57) Ibid.

(58) Gregory Nyssen, Ep. 18; Gregory Nazianzen, Ep. 142. The younger Gregory compares himself to a stick driven around aimlessly by every current of the stream. The elder Gregory replies by comparing him to a sun that gives life to all who look on it.

(59) Migne lists it as Ep. 6.

(60) The traditional date from the Greek Menologion. Others put it in September 378. Further see Silvas, Gregory of Nyssa, 33–9.

(61) Gregory Nazianzen, Ep. 76.2.

(62) Vita Macrina, 15.

(63) Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. 5.2. The Council also sent a commission to Gregory of Nazianzus, then at Seleucia, to go post-haste to establish himself at Constantinople and preach the Nicene faith there—resulting in his famed Five Theological Orations (27–31).

(64) Vita Macrina, 17–18 (65) Ibid.

(66) Giving the treatise the subtitle Makrinia. Cf. Migne PG 46.11.f, though its opening words celebrate ho polus en hagiois basilios.

(67) Ep. 5.

(68) Ibid.

(69) Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. 19.15–18.

(70) F. Diekamp, ‘Die Wahl Gregors von Nyssa zum Metropoliten von Sebaste im Jahr 380’, Theologische Quartalschrift 90 (1908): 348–401.

(71) Possibly a sardonic knock against the heavily ascetical form of Eustathius’ episcopal establishment.

(72) Maraval, ‘Biography’, in The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, ed. L. Mateo-Seco (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 111.

(73) Gregory Nazianzen, Orationes, 27–31, ed. A. J. Mason, The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge: Cambridge Patristic Texts, 1899).

(74) Oration 27.

(75) Ep. 14.

(76) Jerome, De Viris Illustribus, ed. A. Ceresa-Gastaldo (Firenze: Nardini Editore, 1988), 128.

(77) Socrates Scholastikos, Historia Ecclesiastica, 4.26; Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio Funebris in Meletium Episcopum, ed. A. Spira in Gregorii Nysseni Opera IX (Leiden: Brill, 1992).

(78) Though using terms of ‘association in worship and honour’ up until then associated with the Homoian (Arian) Christologians.

(79) Gregory Nazianzen set out the necessity of sustaining the homoousion of the Spirit (cf. Oration 31) to complete the doctrine of the Trinity, and it caused such disturbance at the council that Theodosios probably pressured him to resign.

Ironically it was Gregory who, in retirement, left the largest account of the conciliar proceedings of 381 and interpreted the intent of the bishops there as having ‘meant to endorse’ his pneumatology: a version of events which has become standard on his authority. Further see McGuckin, St Gregory of Nazianzus, 360–9.

(80) He may still have been present, as Maraval thinks (Brill Dictionary of Gregory, 113) since Theodoret (Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.8.10) says that this regathered the majority of the attendees of 381.

(81) PG 46.554–76.

(82) Codex Theodosianus, 1.3.6.9 (De Fide Catholica); Socrates Scholastikos, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.8.

(83) To whom Gregory writes Epistles 10 and 18.

(84) As recounted in Gregory’s Ep. 1.3–12, To Flavian, where he tells how Helladius snubbed him at a festival in Cappadocia.

(85) Cf. E. Honigmann, ‘Le Concile de Constantinople de 394’, in Trois mémoires posthumes d’histoire et de géographie de l’Orient chrétien by Honigmann (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961).

(86) Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. 19.

(87) Ibid. 3. Cf. P. Maraval, ‘La Lettre 3 de Grégoire de Nysse dans le débat christologique’, Revue de sciences religieuses 61 (1987): 74–89.

(88) Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. 2.

(89) Ibid.

(90) Ibid.

(91) Ibid.

(92) J. McGuckin, ‘The Prayer of the Heart in Patristic and Early Byzantine Tradition’, in Prayer & Spirituality in the Early Church, vol. 2, ed. P. Allen, W. Mayer, and L. Cross (Queensland: Australian Catholic University. Centre for Early Christian Studies, 1999), 69–108.

(93) There are opinions that put the dependence the other way round.

(94) R. P. C. Hanson, ‘Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture Exemplified from his Philocalia’, Hermathena 63 (1944): 47–58.

(95) Further see J. Daniélou, ‘Les Sources bibliques de la mystique d’Origène,’ Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 23 (1947): 126–41; Daniélou, ‘L’Unité des deux Testaments dans l ‘œuvre d’Origène’, Revue des sciences religieuses 22 (1948): 27–56; Daniélou, ‘Origène comme exégète de la Bible’, Texte und Untersuchungen 63 (1957): 280–90; Daniélou, ‘Exégèse et typologie patristique’, Dictionnaire de spiritualité 4 (1960): 132–8; Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, trans. D. W. Hibberd (London: Burns and Oates, 1960). Also K. J. Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedure and Theological Method in Origen’s Exegesis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986); E. Dively-Lauro, The Soul and Spirit of Scripture within Origen’s Exegesis (Leiden: Brill, 2005); J. McGuckin, ‘The Exegetical Metaphysic of Origen of Alexandria’, in What is the Bible? The Patristic Doctrine of Scripture, ed. M. Baker and M. Mourachian (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 3–20.

(96) Cf. M. Harl, Origène et la function révélatrice du Verbe Incarné: Patristica Sorbonensia (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1958).

(97) A. Conway-Jones, Gregory of Nyssa’s Tabernacle Imagery in its Jewish and Christian Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

(98) For a concise overview (with relevant bibliography) see P. M. Blowers, ‘Gregory of Nyssa’, in Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. D. M. Kim (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP, 2007), 481–5; also S. Taranto, Gregorio di Nissa: un contributo alla storia dell’interpretazione (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2009).

(99) Daniélou, Platonisme, 6.

(100) Ep. 31, ed. Silvas, 214–25.

(101) De Beneficientia, ed. A. Heck, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera IX (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 93–108 (PG 46.453–69) and Quatenus uni ex his Fecistis mihi Fecistis, ed. A. Heck in Gregorii Nysseni Opera IX (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 111–27 (PG 46.472–89).

(102) In Ecclesiasten Homiliae, ed. P. Alexander, Gregorii Nysseni Opera V (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 335–58 (PG 44.664–80).

(103) Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Usurarios, ed. E. Gebhardt, Gregorii Nysseni Opera IX (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 195–207 PG 46.433–52.

(104) Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. 6.10; 18.5; and 21.2.

(105) W. Moore, introduction to Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises etc,. ed. W. Moore and H. A. Wilson (Oxford: Parker, 1893), vii.

(106) Now 16 volumes, ultimately destined to be 18. See: <http://www.brill.com/products/online-resources/gregorii-nysseniopera-online>.

(107) The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa (Leiden: Brill, 2010), xix–xxii.

(108) Ibid.

(109) Présence et pensée: essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse (Paris: Beauchesne, 1942): (110) Ibid.

(111) Daniélou, Platonisme.

(112) W. Volker, Gregor von Nyssa als Mystiker (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1955); E. Muhlenberg, Die Unendlichkeit Gottes bei Gregor von Nyssa: Kritik am Gottesbegriff der klassischen Metaphysik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966); M. Canévet, ‘Saint Grégoire de Nysse’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ed. M. Viller et al., vol. 6 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1967), cols 971–1011; Canévet, ‘Exégèse et théologie dans les traités spirituels de Grégoire de Nysse’, in Écriture et culture philosophique dans la pensée de Grégoire de Nysse, ed. M. Harl (Leiden: Brill, 1971).

(113) Further see Gregor von Nyssa und die philosophie, ed. H. Dorrie, M. Altenberger, and U. Schramm (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 107–27.

(114) J. McGuckin, ‘Byzantine Philosophy’, in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (Supplement 2012–13), vol. 1, ed. R. Fastigii (New York: Gale Cengage, 2013), 195–8.

(115) J. McGuckin, ‘The Making of the Philokalia: A Tale of Monks and Manuscripts’, in The Philokalia, ed. B. Bingaman and B. Nassif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 36–49.

(116) Symposia GregorianaThe Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, ed. L. F. Mateo-Seco and G. Maspero (Leiden: Brill, 2010), x n. 5.

(117) Ibid.

(118) A. M. Silvas, Gregory of Nyssa: The Letters (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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Oxford Scholarship Online Exploring Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical, Theological, and Historical Studies Anna Marmodoro and Neil B. McLynn Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198826422 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198826422.001.0001

The Two Gregories Towards Nyssen from Nazianzen Neil B. McLynn

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198826422.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords Eight letters from Gregory of Nazianzus, over two decades, provide our principal evidence for his relationship with Gregory of Nyssa, supplemented by an oration which the former addressed to the latter, and indications of their activities at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Though one of the better-attested relationships between major ecclesiastical authors, it has received little critical attention, no doubt because the tensions between each Gregory and Basil of Caesarea, overbearing friend to one and overbearing brother to the other, are more straightforwardly interesting. But the standard view that the two Gregories stood shoulder to shoulder throughout their careers, united by shared ascetic experience and by shared exposure to Basil’s domineering personality, has little to recommend it. In this chapter each item in the dossier of evidence for the relationship is reviewed; it is argued that these texts suggest a much more complex, boisterous, and dynamic series of interactions.

Keywords: Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, Council of Constantinople, Arianism, rhetoric, correspondence

The three great bishops of fourth-century Cappadocia, Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregories, his brother of Nyssa and his friend of Nazianzus,1 responded to the same theological questions and reacted to the same political issues, their writings informed by similar levels of classical literary prowess and their actions shaped by similar aristocratic reflexes.2 Not least important, for the historian, are the interactions between the three of them, which yield rich material for the study of the dynamics of elite families and friendships.3 But here discussion is dominated by Basil of Caesarea, and his separate dealings with each of the two Gregories. So axiomatic to the existing literature is Basil’s place at the apex of the Cappadocian triangle that it receives little explicit notice. With him rests all initiative: he lords it over his younger brother and his old schoolcompanion, as over his family and friends in general, long before he is a metropolitan bishop.4 Each of these unequal relationships is (p.30) easily translated into a compelling psychodrama. Basil thus goads and provokes his friend from Nazianzus, pushing him eventually into a post which drives him to mutiny; having piled derision upon his brother’s peacemaking initiatives, meanwhile, he installs him in a subordinate capacity in a second-rate see, and watches resignedly as he then succumbs to a coalition of enemies.5 Such readings are further encouraged by the fact that the two Gregories emerge upon the world stage only after Basil’s death.6 The third side of the Cappadocian triangle, the relationship between Basil’s brother and his homonymous friend, has received very much less attention. A pioneering paper on Gregory’s relations with Basil and Nazianzen devotes seven of its eleven pages to the former (and employs the latter principally as a marriage witness).7 A recent trilogy on the Cappadocians is also

instructive: some thirty-three pages discuss the friendship between Basil and Gregory Nazianzen, twenty-seven the dealings between Basil and his brother, while those between the two Gregories are scattered piecemeal across ten—which yield the conclusion that ‘the friendship between the two had long revolved around their awkward relations with Basil and the tribulations they felt they had experienced because of Basil’s schemes’.8 This chapter will argue that the relationship was both more substantial and less straightforward than such assessments suggest. In particular, it will be suggested that their dealings helped them both at a critical stage, as each sought to establish his own unconventional career path in the Church.

The documentation that connects the two Gregories is not much less impressive than that illustrating each of their dealings with Basil. It derives almost entirely from the letter collection of Nazianzen, but is substantial. Gregory of Nyssa, with eight letters, comes in the third rank of Nazianzen’s correspondents, far behind Basil (who receives twenty), and some way after Nazianzen’s provincial governor Olympius and metropolitan bishop Theodore, the chief actors in the drama surrounding his retirement (with thirteen letters each); he belongs with Nazianzen’s schoolfriend Philagrius (ten), his cousin (p.31) Amphilochius (nine) and his great-nephew’s teacher Eudoxius (eight).9 Moreover, like the letters to Philagrius and Amphilochius (and unlike the sequences to Olympius and Theodore, which reflect a short period of intense exchanges), those to Gregory cover the two decades from Nazianzen’s early years in the priesthood to his final retirement—a considerably longer span, indeed, than the correspondence with Basil.

The earliest attestation of the relationship, however, does not emanate from Nazianzen, but is a letter that he received from Basil (Ep. 14), an instalment of the correspondence between them that followed their homecomings from their studies in Athens (Basil had returned in 356, and Nazianzen probably the following year). This letter, which belongs somewhere in a sequence of mutual provocations and recriminations, is most plausibly dated to the immediate aftermath of Basil’s expedition to Syria on the trail of his philosopher-guru Eustathius, probably in 358.10 It seems to show the three Cappadocians already embedded comfortably in a triangular relationship, with Basil explaining to his ‘comrade’ that although he had learned of his resolve to ‘meet’ him (the word is frustratingly imprecise)11 in a letter from ‘my brother Gregory’, who wrote of his own longstanding desire to do the same, he had been unable to delay his departure from Cappadocia (Ep. 14.1). The two Gregories have thus seemed already to be in submissive harmony, with parallel plans to participate in Basil’s experiments in asceticism.12 But the letter resists any such straightforward reading. In the first place, Basil presents himself in two consecutive sentences in two very different situations: first ‘it is now necessary for me to go to Pontus’, where he could look forward to a future release from ‘wandering’; then, disappointed in the vain hopes he had harboured of his comrade, ‘I departed for Pontus in search of a way of living’ (Ep. 14.2). Most of what then follows is a report of the ideal conditions for the prayerful life that he had discovered.13 At the end of the letter, however, he is again ‘now hastening there’ (Ep. 14.2). There is thus a double perspective: writing from Pontus, Basil invites his addressee to read the (p.32) letter as one posted just before his departure.14 The reason for this is most probably to be sought in the tension that marked the exchanges between the two Old Athenians following their return to Cappadocia, exchanges which the disciples that each was courting would be following closely; theirs was a struggle for ascendancy conditioned by the rules of friendship, and (especially after advertising his desire to work closely with Nazianzen) Basil could not afford to be seen to disregard these rules. Instead, the contradiction was buried in the beautiful put-down that is here contrived. Nazianzen had just made the difficult decision to step back from his obligations to his parents and city and yield partially to his friend’s demand that he join him in his initiatives, but the news is relegated to a postscript in someone else’s letter.15 It is not surprising that Basil’s letter drew a savage riposte from Nazianzen.16 An abrupt departure to Pontus also explains why, and how, Nazianzen’s message should have been reported to Basil by Gregory (whom Nazianzen had probably not yet met, although he clearly knew him by name). Gregory was at Caesarea, where his brother had briefly taught him before his expeditions first to the East and now to Pontus.17 If Nazianzen had sent word of his decision to Basil’s presumed base at Caesarea (and we forget at our peril the role played by the bearers of these messages, disciples whose experiences with the recipient would be reported back), Gregory would therefore have taken delivery, to receive it and forward it to his brother with his own next letter, which may well have envisaged a more ordinary meeting.18 Basil’s careful exposition of the indirect means by which he had learned of Nazianzen’s belated resolution would become in this case an even sharper snub, for he would be quietly ignoring whatever message his friend had actually sent. The letter becomes in this case an instrument in the contest for moral superiority being played out between the two returned Athenians during the late 350s. But it also suggests (p.33) the room available to Gregory at this decisive period to stake out a position for himself. With Basil established only periodically at Caesarea during the five years following his return from Athens, Gregory had the opportunity to develop his own version of his brother’s Christian commitment, and to do so in an environment which provided better access to books and more plentiful opportunities for disputation—Basil would later evoke ‘those meetings and

debates, the encounters between learned men in the agora’ which had made the city famous.19 In Caesarea, he remained within reach of both his brother and the latter’s friend, and would doubtless feel the stimulus of their occasional manifestos and proclamations; but he was at a safe distance, far enough to permit him to explore such heterodox avenues as Plato and matrimony.

The next instalment in the dossier, a letter from Nazianzen to Gregory, and the first direct testimony of relations between them, belongs to the next decade, when Basil and Nazianzen were both now presbyters, in the churches of Caesarea and Nazianzus respectively; Gregory himself, still at Caesarea, had become a lector there. The letter could in principle be dated anywhere in the seven years after the death of Julian, but makes most sense in the immediate aftermath, when the questions that he had raised about cultural identity still mattered most urgently—not least to Nazianzen, who becomes in the letter an unexpectedly vehement spokesman for the apostate’s position. His addressee had, he complains, abandoned his position as lector in the Christian Church, to take up a post as rhetorician; and the letter argues with great force, and with a steady parade of classical erudition (quotations from Hesiod and the Pythagoreans, enclosed by two soundbites from Euripides’ Phoenician Women), that in doing so Gregory was betraying his Christian faith. The letter has customarily been read as a straightforward response to a straightforward situation, for Nazianzen claims merely to be stating directly, in plain words, what all others ‘are insinuating in whispers’ (Ep. 11.2):20 that Gregory has ‘preferred to be called a Professor of Rhetoric rather than a Christian’ (Ep. 11.4). He might quibble, and claim ‘in rhetorical style’ that he had been a Christian while practising rhetoric, ‘a believer when engaged among the boys’, but Nazianzen refuses to allow him this, directing attention to the offence that he had caused and the opportunity he had given for people to think and to speak the worst of him (Ep. 11.6). The letter thus presents itself as a response to a scandal that has been breaking out around Gregory. The interlude as a professional rhetorician has meanwhile become established as a stage in Gregory’s career, and has helped shape understandings (p.34) of his ambitions and aspirations.21 Commentators have duly speculated upon why Nazianzen, rather than Gregory’s brother, should be leading the charge, and how he had come to do so.22 However, there is no indication that anyone had invited Nazianzen to intervene. Nor (although by this time the two had almost certainly met)23 is there anything in the letter to suggest an established intimacy. The letter’s opening seems instead to imply the opposite. Nazianzen boasts, with Paul, of his noble quality of experiencing equal vexation with himself and with his friends when either planned badly—and ‘since all are friends and kinsfolk who live according to God, and walk by the same Gospel’, Gregory had no reason not to listen to him (Ep. 11.1–2). The explanation would be entirely gratuitous were the two in fact close friends; instead, Nazianzen seems here to be establishing his credentials. Moreover, the letter is anything but a private admonition. Nazianzen adopts the grand manner, and speaks not merely in his own person and on his addressee’s behalf, but ‘on behalf of the whole priestly order, and I may add on that of all Christians’ (Ep. 11.11). This was therefore a manifesto intended for wider circulation. The subject matter was one of immediate and enduring interest to Nazianzen, whose own impassioned condemnation of the Emperor Julian’s attempt to exclude Christians from teaching in schools ‘testifies eloquently to how deeply he was offended by Julian’s edict’.24 Although he here argues the directly opposite case, the letter can plausibly be interpreted as a sequel to the orations against Julian, an expression of his determination to remain at the centre of the debate.

But what exactly had Gregory done? The wording of the letter rewards close attention. Nazianzen does not say that he has resigned his ecclesiastical office. The scriptures that he ‘used to read to the people’ have either been thrown away or else hung above the hearth, like seafarers’ tackle or farmer’s gear during the winter: the latter is compatible with an intention to take them up again. The engagement with rhetoric is presented in general terms, too, and the rhetorical question put in Gregory’s mouth—‘was I not a believer when engaged among the schoolboys?’—does not suggest that he now occupied a formal post.

Instead, the imperfect tense might disguise a single intervention, a guest performance in a friend’s auditorium. Gregory was on good terms with (p.35) a least one prominent sophist in Caesarea, and teaching professionals had reason to welcome, in the period after Julian, gestures of support from those public intellectuals who were prepared to argue the compatibility of the traditional curriculum with the Christian Scriptures.25 Basil of Caesarea’s Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature can be seen as the product of just such an invitation.26 Gregory, a well-known Christian voice through his role as a lector in the city’s cathedral, would be an equally helpful guest. On this reading, the letter becomes evidence not of Gregory’s retreat into conventional careerism, but for his creative exploitation of the opportunities open at Caesarea, opportunities that were beyond the direct reach of the presbyter at Nazianzus. The overblown claims (and careful erudition) of the letter might suggest an attempt to provoke Gregory into a correspondence. Both men stood to gain from this. They had in common, already, cultural ambitions that were incommensurate with their formal ecclesiastical positions, but were not competing for the same territory; controversy of this sort could enhance them both.

Mutual enhancement is central to the next text in the dossier, which places the two men together: Nazianzen’s Oration 11, entitled in the manuscripts To Gregory, Brother of Basil the Great, when he Arrived after the Ordination.27 The occasion was a festival for certain (unidentified) martyrs somewhere in the territory of Nazianzus, which Gregory had decided to attend. And Nazianzen improvises the occasion around him, bathing him in a fulsome spotlight: he hymns the faithful friend, as a sturdy shelter, a fortified palace, and a haven of refreshment; all the better (interestingly) if he was a paragon of learning too, ‘both ours and what was once ours’. The terms in which he introduces Gregory make it clear that the visitor was not known to the audience.

Both men were now bishops, installed by Basil in sees created in his campaign to maintain his primacy when the province of Cappadocia was divided in 372.28 Gregory’s see of Nyssa was in Basil’s own province of Cappadocia I, while his friend had been appointed to Sasima in what was due to become Cappadocia II, but found his title to the place vigorously contested by Anthimus of Tyana, the new metropolitan, who was understandably jealous of his authority.29 By the time of this oration (which must belong (p.36) to some point in the summer of 372), Nazianzen had returned home, to the family estate in the hills above Nazianzus which had been his base for the previous few years; it is likely that the festival was held in the immediate vicinity.30 His position was ambiguous, for he remained within a day’s journey of his see, and in abandoning Sasima he by no means surrendered his authority as a duly consecrated bishop. In hosting this festival he was creating an opportunity to exercise his episcopal functions and advertise his episcopal status, and also to express his grievances.

It is unlikely that Gregory arrived expecting to enjoy the attention that Nazianzen immediately heaps upon him. The opening hymn to faithful friendship reviews the ways in which the relationship was enhanced by the friend’s intelligence, education, and godliness, and caps this tricolon with a fourth consideration: how much the more delightful if the friend came from another friend of equal excellence. A deft scriptural allusion (‘more fragrant than the myrrh that graces the priest’s beard and his garment’s collar’) introduces a joint portrait, with Gregory playing Aaron to his brother’s Moses, both forging ahead eagerly towards the Promised Land (Or. 11.1). This does not mean, as commentators have tended to assume, that Gregory had been sent as Basil’s envoy.31 Rather, Nazianzen was emphasizing the connection for the benefit of his audience, especially those Christian landowners whom he had recruited as his ascetic disciples, and who had only a few months earlier seen him submit to Basil, and heard him proclaim his readiness, ‘all because of friendship’, to put his oratorical powers at his disposal (Or. 10.3).32 For having twinned the two brothers, he immediately prises them apart with a series of merciless questions that explore possible reasons for the visit. Had Gregory come as an ally, albeit belatedly, too late indeed, to help heal wounds? Was he, from ‘brotherly love’, ashamed of ‘the tyranny’? Or was he rather himself playing the potentate, displeased at the host’s ‘disobedience’? (Or. 11.3) Whose side, in short, was Gregory on? These questions throw no light whatever on the actual intentions behind the visit, but allowed Nazianzen to present his own situation in a dramatic and intelligible manner, and to proclaim his readiness to mount a defence against any accusation of ‘disobedience’ (a more congenial charge than those which Basil himself had launched) for abandoning his duties at Sasima.33 (p.37) Having steered his hapless visitor into the prosecutor’s chair (and Gregory’s reactions, surprise and confusion, are an integral part of the performance recreated in our text) Nazianzen suddenly halts proceedings: the occasion was not a trial but a festival. Appealing beyond his visitor to the rest of the audience, he makes a series of impassioned pleas for appropriate behaviour: they too should fight the martyrs’ good fight, battling the incursions of temper, of chatter, and of pleasure. Despite the abruptness with which the preacher changes direction, this is closely related to his earlier comments.34 For he is here demonstrating the irrelevance and absurdity of any charge of disobedience: the speech itself reveals him playing the part of a responsible pastor committed to leading his flock forward, looking for God’s partnership in the business of shepherding and preserving it. The anonymity of the martyrs prevents us, or any of the text’s readers, from making any inconvenient geographical identifications and objecting that this bishop might be imposing his authority upon the wrong flock. Instead, there is a universal declaration of theological intent: here, indeed, Nazianzen declares his commitment not merely to upholding the Trinity but to taking the fight to the ‘enemies of the Spirit’ (Or. 11.6).35 The phrase will have resonated: Gregory, and no doubt other well-informed listeners, will have been aware that Basil was currently working strenuously to establish common ground with Eustathius of Sebaste, chief spokesman for the enemies’ position.36 And above all, Nazianzen has moved to the moral high ground by the close of his speech: his God is now the ‘God of Peace’, the spirit of Brotherly Love, inspiring us to overcome our petty grievances with his ‘new commandment’ of mutual love, and rewriting the script of the speaker’s recent behaviour, ‘to be subjected to tyranny through fear, to withdraw in accordance with reason, and to be bold again through reason’.37 This is altogether a dazzling performance, beautifully calculated to deflect any awkward questions about what sort of episcopal authority Nazianzen might be claiming to wield.

(p.38) But what was Gregory doing at this assembly? He had presumably received an invitation; but he seems from the speech to have been the only bishop to have accepted. And in making the journey (his first to Nazianzus, in all probability) he was lending his authority to Nazianzen’s experiment in episcopal displacement. It might be suspected that there was deliberate provocation of his brother here, for during precisely this season Basil was inveighing against the ‘conspiracies’ that Gregory was fomenting ‘everywhere’ against his authority.38 But crucially, on this occasion Nazianzen’s bravura spared Gregory the need to declare himself, or subscribe to any conspiracy. Had Basil read the text (and one must wonder about the circumstances in which it was preserved and circulated) he will nevertheless have drawn his own conclusions.

The most mysterious phase of Gregory’s career is the three-year period that he spent in exile from Nyssa, from (probably) early 375 to (probably) late 378.39 Gregory himself would hold the Emperor Valens personally responsible for his banishment;40 his brother Basil, in his fullest account of the issue, pins the blame instead upon the vicarius of Pontus, Demosthenes, but in another letter suggests that a cabal of bishops were the instigators.41 The discrepancy between these versions has seemed unimportant, since Gregory is presented so clearly as a victim, driven into hiding by the whole homoean establishment of Church and state. But the evidence, consisting mostly of Basil’s occasional commentaries on his brother’s plight, is compatible with a much less dramatic scenario.42 The complaints, about the procedures at Gregory’s appointment and his management of church finances, suggest local critics, and these need not have been heretics.43 Certain members of the community had ‘broken away from’ Basil, presumably (since there is no indication that he visited Nyssa again) at the time of the installation.44 Those ecclesiastical authorities previously responsible for Nyssa (a chorepiscopus and his team, we might reasonably suppose) may well have been sidelined by Basil’s installation of his brother, and they will have been well placed to monitor the new regime there. A single complainant apparently sufficed to set proceedings in motion, and (p.39) Demosthenes issued Gregory with a summons, delivered by ‘soldiers’ (that is, probably, government officials) from his staff, to his tribunal at Ancyra;45 a church council was also convened there, perhaps deliberately in order to pre-empt any appeal to an ecclesiastical court.46 Gregory prudently pleaded illness and removed himself from his see.47 His ‘exile’ was thus selfimposed absenteeism; no further justification was required for the eventual installation of a replacement (who seems to have had some local support) in 376.48 The brief letters that Gregory received from Nazianzen during this period have rarely been examined as evidence for the circumstances and character of the exile. This is hardly surprising, given that the three notes that have most confidently been assigned to Gregory’s time of troubles (Epp. 72–4) together amount to less than half the length of Ep. 11, and none of them provides any circumstantial detail. But we should reflect that in the same period there survive no letters at all from Basil to his brother, and there are no good grounds to suppose that a significant trove is missing. Nazianzen’s notes moreover comprise the largest single sample of letters from the mid- to later 370s to be included in his collection, so must be supposed to have seemed significant to him when he compiled the anthology in the mid-380s.49 The most explicit message, urging patience in the face of heretical incursions (Ep. 72), poses a serious chronological problem.

Nazianzen writes in the early springtime, responding to news of these onslaughts from Gregory; but Basil makes it clear that Gregory had already left Nyssa in the immediate aftermath of Epiphany, too early in the Cappadocian year for even the most optimistic declaration that winter was over.50 The note should therefore be assigned to the previous spring, when the preliminary moves were being made against Gregory. The confident prophecy that the current spate of heretical hissing would soon subside would prove egregiously erroneous, but a more notable feature of the text is that Nazianzen is quoting Gregory back to him (p.40) (‘as you write’) on the serpents’ emergence from their holes. That Gregory should have shared his anxieties with the conspicuously marginalized Nazianzen is significant, especially since there is no sign that he did so, either now or later, with his brother (who was also his metropolitan bishop).51 Nazianzen’s dramatic breach with Basil over his refusal to resume his duties at Sasima remained unhealed, and his isolation was increased in 374 with his father’s death, which inevitably sharpened questions about his own episcopal status. Calculation might be suspected here: in inviting a response from Nazianzen Gregory was associating his own situation with embattled theological truth, rather than with the grubby provincial politics that his brother might easily be seen to be playing.

The even shorter note, Ep. 73, follows directly after Ep. 72 in all the different branches of the manuscript tradition, and was probably bracketed with it in the original edition. This again is presented as a reply to a message from Gregory, and bears quotation in full: As to the subject of your letter (περὶ ὧν ἐπέσταλκας), these are my sentiments. I am not angry when overlooked, but I am glad when honoured. The one is what I deserve, the other is a proof of your respect. Pray for me. Excuse the brevity,