Gregory of Nyssa

Anthony Meredith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134815111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Gregory of Nyssa provides a concise and accessible introduction to the thought of this early church father with new translations of key selections of his writings. Anthony Meredith presents a diverse range of Gregory's writings:

• his contribution to the debates of the period about the nature of God in argument with a form of extreme Arianism
• his discussion of the nature and work of the Holy Ghost, against the so-called 'Spirit fighters'
• his defence of the humanity of Christ against those who denied it (notably Apollinarius)
• the nature of fate and other philosophical issues.

1
INTRODUCTION

LANDSCAPE

Gregory of Nyssa was born in about 335 AD in the Roman province of Cappadocia, a somewhat barren region to the north east of modern Turkey. It had been annexed by the emperor Tiberius (14–37 AD) in AD 17 on the deposition of the last native king, Archelaus, in that year. Initially governed by a prefect, like Judaea in the time of Christ, it rose in status in AD 72 and enjoyed the advantages of being a consular province, and so it remained until its division by the emperor Valens in 371/2—an event fraught with considerable consequences both for Gregory himself and for his friend and namesake, Gregory of Nazianzus.

As to Cappadocia's religious history prior to the advent of the Christian gospel, we are remarkably ill-informed. A reference in Gregory of Nazianzus' oration 18:5 on the death of his father rather suggests that there existed in Cappadocia a sect named Hypsistarians, to which his father belonged¹. It appears to derive from the appellation of God as Highest and may well represent an attempt to offer an understanding of God which would please Jews and Pagans alike—a sort of fashionable syncretism which could be applied to Adonai and Zeus indifferently. If this is the case, it suggests that there existed forces in Cappadocia, well before the arrival of Christianity, which favoured a generous attitude to the surrounding culture.

The Cappadocians mentioned in the second chapter of Acts were the first Christians there, and we must assume from the opening verse of 1 Peter that the faith continued there perhaps a hundred years later. Further, in his Ecclesiastical History 6.11, Eusebius mentions a certain Alexander who previously had been bishop in the land of the Cappadocians and subsequently became bishop of Jerusalem, in which place he ordained Origen. Clearly there was some form of organized Church in Cappadocia well before the middle of the third century, before the arrival from Caesarea sometime in the 250s of the ‘Apostle of Cappadocia’, Gregory the Wonderworker.

Even the graphic and laudatory account of his pioneering exploits left to us by Gregory of Nyssa,² should not be allowed to obscure the importance of the conversion of Cappadocia prior to the arrival of Gregory Thaumaturgos. Even so, what he actually discovered when he arrived in Cappadocia is hard for us at this distance of time to reconstruct, above all because of the paucity of our evidence. Yet Gregory Thaumaturgos is interesting and important for two reasons: (1) He brought with him the teachings and theology of his master, Origen, who died not long after 254 in the aftermath of the Decian persecution (250–251). Origen's influence, everywhere present in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, is doubtless due in no small measure to Gregory Thaumaturgos;³ (2) Gregory (the Wonderworker) was responsible for the conversion to the faith of Macrina the Elder, the paternal grandmother of Gregory of Nyssa. In the course of his letters, Basil often refers with great respect to this same Macrina the Elder.⁴

Gregory of Nyssa himself came from a large family⁵ often children, five boys and five girls. Of his five sisters we know the name of only one for certain, Macrina the Younger. (The Theosebeia, mentioned by Gregory of Nazianzus in his Letter 197.6 as being a σύζυγος was in all probability Gregory of Nyssa's wife, not his sister.) Her influence upon her brother was considerable. He wrote her Life and used her deathbed as the setting for his dialogue On the Soul and Resurrection, his own version of Plato's Phaedo. Socrates becomes Macrina, talking to her brother about the nature of the soul and of its destiny after death, and about the relationship between the Platonic belief in the natural immateriality of the soul with the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body.

We know the names of all but one of the boys of the family—Basil, Peter (later bishop of Sebaste in Armenia), Naucratias (killed by a boar), Gregory himself and the missing fifth brother. The family was distinguished and propertied, Christian and cultivated.⁶ Basil certainly enjoyed the benefit of an extensive university education under the most celebrated ‘rhetors’ or professional teachers of the day—Libanius, in Constantinople⁷ and Himerius at Athens, where he spent the years from 351–356 in the company of his soul friend, Gregory of Nazianzus.

On the face of it Gregory's own education was far less cosmopolitan. Apparently he attended none of the great universities of the day, and was entirely dependent upon Basil for his cultural and philosophical training. In a letter to the sophist, Libanius (number 13), Gregory mentions Basil as the pupil of Libanius and as his own ‘father and master’. This being the case it must be admitted that Basil did a very competent job in training his younger brother. Gregory may have lacked some of his great brother's flair as a leader, and his political sense in the difficult years prior to the second ecumenical council of Constantinople, but he is no way inferior to him either in his use of sophisticated language or in his powers of speculative thought and spiritual insight. What is surprising is the fact that, although he lacked the training and expertise of Basil, he moved so much more sympathetically in the thought world of his day.

On several occasions in his treatises Basil expresses his unease with the pointlessness of much contemporary education—an attitude we never find in his younger brother, except when he wishes to attribute heretical opinions to the influence of Aristotle.⁸ We must assume not only that he had a subtler mind, but that he had at his disposal sources of information, in the shape of a library, which enabled him to supplement his own less elaborate education, although any attempt to reconstruct its possible contents is doomed to failure from lack of evidence. Indeed, one of the peculiarities of Gregory from our point of view is the almost total absence in him of reference to, or direct citation from, his non-Christian sources—a marked contrast with Augustine in the West, who seems at times to be eager to display his pagan culture, above all in the City of God.

In another significant respect Gregory differed from his brother. Basil was not only a monk himself, he also finds a place as one of the greatest of all monastic legislators, whose influence stretches well beyond Cappadocia. He left behind him two sets of Rules, Longer and Shorter, together with a collection of aphorisms, known as the Moralia. As far as our sources go, we can be fairly certain that despite his evident sympathy for and understanding of the monastic and ascetic life, Gregory of Nyssa was never a monk himself. At some point he married,⁹ a move he seems to have regretted, and was therefore barred from a monastic vocation. His wife's name was probably Theosebeia. It also appears from a letter written to him by his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, that at some period between 362 and 371, he became a teacher of public speaking (rhetor) and, further, was much in love with his chosen profession: ‘You had rather be thought of as a rhetor than as a Christian’ (Letter 11) wrote Gregory Nazianzus. It is slightly ironical to find the most rhetorically self-conscious of all the Cappadocians criticizing his friend and namesake for just this particular weakness, especially when his own letter contains two quotations from Hesiod and from Euripides, writers never cited by Gregory of Nyssa himself.

Be that as it may, other forces were at work, which brought this elegant and retired life to an end. In 372 the emperor Valens, no friend of Basil, divided the province of Cappadocia in half, giving it two capitals, at Caesarea (modern Kayseri) and Tyana. This meant in practice that Basil's sphere of influence was greatly reduced and, in order to compensate for this reduction in authority, he created at least two new dioceses at Sasima and Nyssa, to which he appointed his friend and his brother respectively. It can hardly be said that either appointment was ‘happy’.

Gregory of Nazianzus spent practically no time in his see, which was exceedingly minute, though his possession of it was used against him at the council of Constantinople in 381. In 380 the strongly pro-Nicene Spaniard, Theodosius, became emperor in place of the Arian Valens, and shortly afterwards had Gregory made archbishop of Constantinople, in place of the Arian Demophilus, a position he was not long allowed to enjoy. Gregory had contravened, it was maliciously alleged, canon 15 of Nicaea, which had forbidden translation from one bishopric to another, and he was forced to resign. Even then he did not return to Sasima, a place he evidently regarded with great disgust, as he himself tells us in his Poem about His Life (at PG 37.1059, lines 439–445). Instead, he spent the remaining years of his life administering the see of Nazianzus, orphaned by the death of his father in 374. Gregory of Nyssa was hardly more successful as a bishop. Basil has little but pity and contempt for his younger brother's inadequacies in his new post.¹⁰

Fortunately his brother's strictures could not reach beyond the grave and Basil's death in January of 379 may not have been wholly unwelcome to Gregory. We know nothing of his activities at the council of the 150 Fathers held at Constantinople in 381; but evidently his abilities and orthodoxy made a deep impression on both the emperor and on the other Fathers. Three facts reinforce this impression. He was chosen to deliver the funeral oration on Meletius, bishop of Antioch, the first president of the council, who had died in the course of the first session. Then, after the close of the council, he was selected to be one of the promoters of the orthodox teaching, above all on the deity of the Holy Ghost, in the Roman pr0ovince of Pontus.¹¹ Finally, at a slightly later date, he was selected to deliver funeral orations on the emperor's little daughter, Pulcheria, and his wife F(P) Flaccilla.¹² These three assignments indicate the high regard in which Gregory's rhetorical abilities were held in both religious and secular circles.

The period up to 386, following Basil's death, was filled with intense, literary activity. It is to these seven years that we must date his elaborate reply to the extreme Arian, Eunomius. Further, he produced a continuation (and partial correction) of his brother's commentary Homilies on the Six Days of Creation (In Hexameron) with his own work of the same name and his On the Making of Man, each with their characteristic Gregorian search for order and connexion (

and

κολουθ

α) in the divine activity. Finally, we have also his deathbed dialogue with Macrina, called On the Soul and Resurrection, which is surely intended to remind us of the death of Socrates, movingly recorded in Plato's dialogue, the Phaedo.

All these great works illustrate two sides of Gregory's character. He was clearly a man deeply devoted to his family, above all to his brother and sister. Yet this very devotion was certainly not uncritical, and this critical spirit found particular expression in his subtle corrections and modifications of his brother's writings. For although Basil knew much about contemporary science and philosophy—a fact which is evident by a cursory reading of his nine Homilies on the Six Days of Creation—he adopts a distinctly guarded, if not actually hostile, stance towards it. For him it is ‘the vain learning of this world’. Gregory, on the other hand, despite his more limited and apparently inferior learning and formal education, is more sympathetic than is his brother to ‘culture’ and, above all, to philosophy.

Two illustrations will help to underline this point. At an earlier stage in his life, while Basil was still alive, Gregory undertook the important task of giving a theoretical justification of the monastic life, for which his brother had composed his two sets of Rules. This Gregory did in his earliest known writing On Virginity, in the course of which he offered an account of the principles on which the consecrated life rests. Part of the strength and complexity of this fascinating work results from the fact that it is never quite clear for whom precisely it was meant. Nor is it clear whether by virginity, Gregory means the physical condition of being a virgin, or the state of interior disposition of purity of heart and self mastery as Gregory, on occasion, suggests, for example in chapters 7 and 15. In the former case it is restricted to the religious, in the latter it is potentially open to everyone. Even so, as an exploration of the principles upon which the practice must rest, it is a very valuable exercise.

Second, in their respective accounts of the exegesis of Genesis 1, Basil is remarkable for his knowledge of the various abstruse physical theories that the astronomers and cosmologies of the day offered to account for the beginning and structure of the physical universe. Gregory is clearly far more interested in trying to discover within the scriptural narrative the inner connection of events, the ‘akolouthia’.¹³ For Gregory, Moses' account of the order of creation is itself dominated by a belief in the progressive development of the universe; and the work of the exegete is to discover this order—‘taxis’.

Gregory's belief in the ordered nature of reality implies an unwillingness to believe in sudden eruptions of the divine into the world, and a lack of stress on the miraculous, supernatural element in religion. Both nature, and the growth of the individual towards perfection and towards God, are conceived in an ordered and orderly fashion. But it also reflects something of the Stoic belief in the same principle and in the omnipresence of a detectable order in the world system. Something of Gregory's insistence on the omnipresence of God in the world and his interpretation of psalm 138/9 illustrates his debt to a form of Stoicising Platonism, which believed in the existence of a universal, spiritual principle, the soul of the world.

BACKGROUND 1

Gregory's interest in, and influence by, the classical world of late antiquity was by no means restricted to rhetoric and fine writing, to which reference has already been made. In his work On the Christian Discipline¹⁴ he observes that he had been criticized by some people for having abandoned ‘the grace that comes from above’ in favour of secular learning and logic. D...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THE EARLY CHURCH FATHERS
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 DOCTRINAL ISSUES
• 3 GREGORY AND PHILOSOPHY
• 4 GREGORY AND SPIRITUALITY
• 5 EPILOGUE
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index