Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus: Essays on History, Theology, and Culture

by Christopher A. Beeley (Editor)

Overview

Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus offers a collection of cutting-edge research on one of the leading figures in the early church. Long recognized as a chief architect of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the definitive articulator of the doctrine of the Trinity, Gregory "the Theologian" has been strangely neglected in modern patristic research. In recent decades Gregory has become the subject of careful study by scholars in a variety of humanistic disciplines, including theology, church history, classics, art history, and literature, and has attracted the renewed attention of Eastern and Western theologians and church leaders as well.

This book, the newest volume in the CUA Studies in Early Christianity, presents original works by leading patristics scholars on a wide range of theological, historical, and cultural topics. It offers illuminating new readings of Gregory's writings, ranging from the systematic theology of Gregory's poetry to the Trinitarian doctrine found in his Festal Orations, and from his artful self-presentation in the mode of classical historiography to his later influence on Byzantine theologians and emperors.

The book honors the work of American scholar Frederick W. Norris, who led the way in revitalizing the study of Gregory among English-speaking scholars. Its contributors are Christopher A. Beeley, Paul M. Blowers, Brian E. Daley, S.J., Susanna Elm, Everett Ferguson, Ben Fulford, Verna E. F. Harrison, Andrew Hofer, O.P., Vasiliki Limberis, Andrew Louth, Brian J. Matz, John A. McGuckin, Neil McLynn, Claudio Moreschini, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard, Andrea Sterk, and William Tabbernee.

ABOUT THE EDITOR:

Christopher A. Beeley is Walter H. Gray Associate Professor of Anglican Studies and Patristics at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of The Unity of Christ: Continuity and Conflict in Patristic Tradition, Leading God's People: Wisdom from the Early Church for Today, and Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God, winner of a John Templeton Award for Theological Promise. He is the editor of the Patristic Monograph Series published by CUA Press and is a director of the North American Patristics Society.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

"The authors give welcome attention to many of Gregory's writings that were previously understudied, especially his verse and letters. . .The assembly of such luminaries is an important reference for all scholars of the theologian and students of early Christianity." -Religious Studies Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813219912
Publisher:	The Catholic University of America Press
Publication date:	09/30/2012
Series:	Studies In Early Christianity
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER A. BEELEY is Walter H. Gray Associate Professor of Anglican Studies and Patristics at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of The Unity of Christ: Continuity and Conflict in Patristic Tradition, Leading God’s People: Wisdom from the Early Church for Today, and Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God, winner of a John Templeton Award for Theological Promise. He is the editor of the Patristic Monograph Series published by CUA Press and is a director of the North American Patristics Society.

Read an Excerpt

RE-READING GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS

ESSAYS ON HISTORY, THEOLOGY, AND CULTURE

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The Catholic University of America Press

Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-1991-2

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Chapter One

Brian E. Daley, SJ

Systematic Theology in homeric Dress Poemata arcana

In the American academic world today, it is customary to distinguish between "systematic" theology and theology in its historical or scriptural forms. Whatever one thinks of the validity of such distinctions—and from a Christian perspective, at least, they raise serious questions—one must recognize that the project of forming one's religious understanding of God, the world, and the human journey into a single, coherent whole began long before Barth or Tillich, or even Thomas Aquinas. From Varro to academic Platonists, scholars and thinkers in antiquity showed a perennial instinct not just for research and speculation, but also for tying together the strands and wisps of previous human learning into an organic body. Augustine, in his Enchiridion, attempted this for our understanding of the Christian Gospel, and the great summas of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries adapted this systematizing instinct to the technical discourse and the intellectual cut-and-thrust of the new universities. Gregory of Nyssa, too, in the 380s, attempted something of the sort in his fascinating but enigmatic Catechetical Discourse, at once an echo of earlier Christian apologies (and Athanasius's treatise On the Incarnation) and his own, more ambitious attempt to show, in one short treatise, the persuasiveness and inner consistency of Christian faith and practice, despite the apparent foolishness of the message. What I want to suggest here is that his family friend Gregory of Nazianzus undertook this same synthetic task at roughly the same time, but from his own theological perspective and in his own characteristically artistic way: not in an oration or even a set of orations, but in the set of eight medium-length poems, written in Homeric dialect and the classical hexameters of epic and didactic verse, that together have come to be known as the Poemata arcana or [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]: "poems on ineffable mysteries."

Writing didactic poems on technical, scientific, and even theological subjects was not a new pastime for learned Greeks in the late fourth century. The language, grammatical forms, and galloping meter of the Homeric epics had been used to convey moral and religious messages by Hesiod at the beginning of the eighth century before the Christian era and for speculations on nature by the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles. The third-century BCE scholar Aratus of Soloi wrote a long poem on the constellations, the Phaenomena, in the same style, and later philosophical theologians—the third-century BCE Stoic Cleanthes, in his Hymn to Zeus, or the authors of the collection of Orphic Hymns, which may have been put together as late as the third century of our own era—sang the praises of all the major gods, all the hidden divine forces in the universe, in dactylic hexameters. In a more narrative style, the Homeric hymns and their highly refined echoes by Callimachus, the third-century Alexandrian, retold traditional Greek religious myths in the same poetic form. The Latin tradition of didactic poetry, written also in hexameter, began with Lucretius's De rerum natura in the early first century before Christ, and was continued elegantly by Virgil in his Georgics a few decades later. The Latin Christian writer Juvencus, a Spanish contemporary of the Emperor Constantine, wrote a biblical epic paraphrasing the four Gospels around 330, an effort that was followed in the mid-fifth century, in Greek, by Nonnos of Panopolis's hexameter versification of the Gospel of John, in twenty-four books, and in the sixth century by Arator's Latin epic based on the Acts of the Apostles. Augustine of Hippo composed what was probably the first non-biblical Christian didactic poem in Latin: his early Psalmus contra Partem Donati (394), a narrative of the origins of the Donatist sect written not in classical epic meter, but in an accentual rhythm and simple language apparently intended for congregational singing.

Greek Christian didactic poetry began, in fact, probably in the 360s, with the work of the grammarian Apollinarius of Laodicaea, father of the bishop of the same name who came to be regarded as the first Christological heretic. In response to the Emperor Julian's decree of June 17, 362, banning Christians from teaching Greek literature in the schools, the elder Apollinarius is said to have written an epic in twenty-four books on the "antiquities of the Hebrews" from the beginning of Genesis to the time of Saul, as well as other Biblical paraphrases in dramatic and comic meters; the fifth-century Christian historian Sozomen assures us that it was only contemporary prejudice in favor of earlier authors that prevented these works from being regarded as equal to the best classical literature in style and dramatic power.

This same desire, born out of the challenge posed by Julian's edict to the growing class of cultivated Christian Hellenists to create a new body of literature, Christian and orthodox in content but fully conforming to classical Greek forms and standards, seems to have been one of Gregory of Nazianzus's main motives in composing his own poetic corpus of some 19,000 extant lines. This enormous literary productivity seems mainly to have been the work of Gregory's last years, after he had retired from being bishop of the Nicene community in Constantinople in the early summer of 381 and had returned to his ancestral estate of Karbala, in rural Cappadocia. Gregory's poetry includes works of widely varying length and content: long, dramatic narratives of his own earlier life and experiences, written either in Homeric epic language and meter or in the Attic iambic form used for dramatic dialogue; treatises on the virtues or the ascetic life; and what we might term "occasional verse"—soliloquies, prayers, epigrams, verse letters, epitaphs—many of them in the more complicated meters and dialects of Greek lyric poetry. Among the most celebrated of these compositions, in the world of Byzantine connoisseurs and copyists, were the eight "mystery-poems" or Arcana we are discussing here: eight dense, solemn works in the sophisticated style of classical Greek didactic poetry, which together present us with a coherent overview of the core of Christian doctrine, as seen through the lens of Gregory's peculiar version of the Cappadocian theological project. More than any of his forty-four orations or his 249 letters, they seem intended to offer us a comprehensive view of Christian faith as an organic whole.

As I have already mentioned, synthetic prose summaries of a particular approach to philosophical or theological doctrine were not a new idea in fourth-century Greek culture, and most of those that still exist, in fact, tend to follow the same general outline. One of the most complete syntheses that has come down to us is the textbook of school Platonism or Didaskalikos, attributed in the manuscripts to an otherwise unknown Alcinous, which has often been identified, in modern times, as the lost Eisagoge of the second-century Middle Platonist Albinus. This manual, which presents itself as an introduction to the Platonic tradition of philosophy as the means for "freeing and turning around the soul" in its quest for wisdom, begins with a brief sketch of the rudiments of epistemology and logic and concludes with a summary treatment of ethics and politics. In its central chapters, however, it deals with the origin and constitution of the world we live in: the "first principles" of reality, namely matter (§8), intelligible forms (9), and the transcendent "primary intellect" we call God (10); and the created or composed world of sensible beings, including the human person. The human soul, which is intended to be in control of its body, is created by the "primal God" (23.1), and is immortal (25) and self-determining (26), not programmed in its choices by the fate that sets the rules of the universe (26). Choosing and embodying the good is the heart of human virtue, and the key to real happiness (27), which consists in gradually attaining "likeness to God." (28)

A similar handbook, digesting the central teachings of fourth-century neo-Platonism, is Sallustius's On the Gods and the Universe, probably the work of Flavius Sallustius, consul in 363 and a friend and protégé of the Emperor Julian. Although the work does not mention Christians, it may well have been inspired by Julian's program to reorganize the teachings and practices of traditional philosophical paganism in ways that would compare favorably with Christian catechesis and charitable activity. Arguing that real piety has to be grounded in philosophical sophistication (1), Sallustius—like Alcinous—presents the divine being as changeless, impassible, and incorporeal (1–2); myths and traditional conceptions of the gods must be interpreted allegorically against this philosophical background. The "first cause" is unique and above knowledge (5); the gods known to humanity come forth from it in an intelligible order (6) and exercise their influence in an eternal, ordered universe (7). The soul is naturally immortal (8) and uses the body as its instrument, acting freely in a world framed but not wholly determined by fate, and guided by divine providence (9). Evil, in this universe, is not a substance, but a privation of being and order (12), caused by erroneous human activity. The soul becomes virtuous by following reason (10); prayer and sacrifices express the soul's yearnings, although they do not change the minds of the gods (14–16). The universe will never be destroyed by the gods, but although souls may move on to inhabit other human bodies after death (20), they can, through virtue and reason, purify themselves from all corporeality and come to dwell with the gods (21).

Even more clearly than Alcinous' handbook, Sallustius's treatise presents the reader with an ordered view of the divine being, the universe and its natural laws, the human person, the heart of virtue and religion, and the future we can look forward to—with a systematic summary of the pagan counterparts of what Christians would call theology, the doctrine of creation, anthropology, ethics, prayer and the sacraments, and eschatology. Anthony Meredith recently offered the persuasive suggestion that Gregory of Nyssa's Catechetical Discourse, composed perhaps twenty years after Sallustius's handbook, may well be loosely modeled on its structure and be intended to offer educated Christian readers, still smarting from the challenge of Julian's decree to their sense of worth as Greek intellectuals, an alternative that put the Christian "myth" of salvation through Jesus' death and resurrection into a coherent and intelligible form that does justice to what reasonable people seek to know about God, the world, and ourselves.

Gregory of Nazianzus's Poemata arcana, probably written during the first two years after the theologian's retirement from the throne of Constantinople in 381, is thus almost exactly contemporary with his namesake's synthetic essay. The cultural and religious context of both works, then, was identical; so it is more than likely that a strong sense of the need, in the wake of Julian's cultural and religious challenge, to present a cohesive panorama of Christian doctrine in terms likely to impress cultivated believers and pagans as attractive, engaging, and spiritually profound would have lain behind this Gregory's effort, too. The result, however, is utterly different in his hands, and thoroughly revealing of the different interests and styles of the two Cappadocian theologians. While Gregory of Nyssa attempts to retell the Christian narrative of redemption in a way that would appear philosophically compelling to Platonists, Gregory of Nazianzus draws instead on his well-honed literary virtuosity and his love of classical poetic and rhetorical forms; equally important, his conceptual model for the collection is not a handbook of Middle Platonic or neo-Platonic philosophy, but the great Christian synthetic work of his own chosen theological forebear, Origen's De principiis, which provides these eight poems with the thematic frame on which Gregory weaves his own distinctive doctrinal fabric.

As is now well recognized, Origen's work has an unusual (though, in antiquity, not unique) structure, which we must recognize if we are to grasp its full meaning. Origen sketches out what he understands as the basic contents of the apostolic teaching or "rule of piety" in the treatise, not once but twice. De principiis 1.1 to 2.3 offers the reader a relatively straightforward account of what Origen understands to be the basic doctrines necessary for progress in the Christian life, buttressed with the scriptural grounds for asserting them: God as an incorporeal, spiritual being, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the role of each of the persons of the Trinity in the divine economy; God's work of creation; the nature of rational creatures, capable of turning from God because of their freedom; the goal of creation's history, which is the restoration of all created intelligences to union with God in knowledge and love, through enlightenment and purgative suffering; the nature of embodiment and the purpose of the material world; the role of the material world and bodies in the final state of creatures, in which "God will be all in all" (1 Cor 15:28). Having finished this survey in princ. 2.3, Origen takes up the same sequence of key doctrines again in the second part of the work (princ. 2.4–3.6), now elaborating on his argument with a noticeably anti-Gnostic twist, to emphasize the unity of both testaments, the origin of the material world in the providence of the one God, the freedom of the created mind to determine its own fate, and the involvement of the body in final salvation. In the third part of the work (book 4), he turns to the related problem of how to interpret the generally accepted body of Christian Scripture—as a whole and in its particular texts—in light of this broad doctrinal structure, which is itself built up from Scripture's inspired teaching. Finally, in the work's last chapter, Origen briefly summarizes the whole structure of Christian doctrine a third time: now under the rubric of God's unique incorporeality, in which the believer is called to share to an increasing degree. As we participate knowingly, through faith, in the utterly incorporeal life of God, our present life—and even our understanding of the text of Scripture—is gradually set free from the limitations imposed by our present existence as embodied intelligences.

When one compares the content and structure of Gregory's Poemata arcana to that of the De principiis, the similarity strikes one as unmistakable, even though the presentation and coloring of the content are, just as unmistakably, Gregory's own. The first poem, which deals with the characteristics of the ineffable divine substance, is itself entitled "On First Principles"—a title that the earliest Byzantine commentator on the poems gives to the entire collection. The title apparently refers to the fact that this divine substance, as the poem makes clear, the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or Mystery at the origin of all things, is irreducibly manifold in its singularity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Poem 2, "On the Son," is an extended reflection on the eternal, immaterial generation of Son from Father (lines 13–21), and on the enduring paradoxes of the Son's incarnation for our sakes (61–80). Poem 3, "On the Spirit," closely parallels Gregory's fifth Theological Oration (Or. 31) in acknowledging the difficulty of finding a clear statement of the divine and hypostatic identity of the Spirit in Scripture, and goes on to reflect on the mutual inherence of Father, Son, and Spirit as "three lights" (71), exercising "a bright-shining single rule" (79) and sharing "one strength, one thought, one glory, one might" (87–88). Poem 4, "On the Universe," offers a survey of the beings that constitute the visible and invisible cosmos, and emphasizes, against all forms of ontological dualism, that everything in the world—even the matter and form that are its metaphysical principles—have a beginning in time, and are the creation of the one and only God. Before the created universe, God existed without temporal succession, contemplating his own beauty and "gazing on the forms of the world that would later come to be, but which were present to God" (68–69). In Poem 5, "On Providence," Gregory rejects two widespread ancient ways of explaining the unrolling of events in history—pure chance and fatalism—and argues, with a sharp glance at those who believe in astrology, that it is God the Word who "steers all these things," above and below (34–36). Poem 6, "On Rational Natures," paints a panorama of the world of angels and demons: created intelligences that naturally find moral change harder than we do (53–55), but that are still capable of turning away from their proper end. Lucifer's fall, which came from aspiring to "the royal honor of the great God" (57), led him to envy human creatures and ultimately to "drive them out of Paradise" (65); Christ has refrained from simply annihilating him and his cohorts, but has limited his powers, and Gregory holds out the possibility that someday even the stubborn Lucifer will "pay his penalties," his rebel "substance" consumed by the purging fire of judgment (92–93). In Poem 7, "On the Soul," Gregory summarizes the view of human nature he shares with the other Cappadocians: the soul is "a breath of God," mingled with earth, "a light hidden in a cave" (1–3), divine and immortal as an image of God, and created to mingle mind and matter as "the godlike king of earthly affairs" (60). Gregory goes on to tell the story of the fall, in terms similar to those of his oration "?n the Theophany" (Or. 38): the first pair were tricked into tasting prematurely of the fruit of "perfect discrimination between good and evil" (108–9), something beneficial to those who are "full-grown," but dangerous for complete beginners (109–10). Poem 8, "On the Testaments and the Appearance of Christ," then takes up the rest of the narrative of salvation: God's gift of laws to humanity, grounded in the plan of his Word (4–7); the decision of the Word to "empty himself of the glory of his immortal Father" (39–40) and to become the son of a virgin: "a strange son, born without father, yet no stranger, for it is from my stock that the immortal one, now mortal, came" (41–42). Echoing Gregory of Nyssa's Catechetical Oration, the poet speaks of the "veiled" appearance of this "new and different Adam" (53), which led the "seemingly wise serpent" to assault him, only to encounter God (56–57). After summing up the Gospel story in terms that again remind us of his Christmas Oration—the humble birth of Christ, his circumcision and baptism, his work as mediator, his gift of the Spirit to all peoples—Gregory concludes this poem on the divine economy, as Gregory of Nyssa concludes his Catechetical Oration, with a brief reflection on baptism, as the way in which—like Israel on the first Pasch—he receives "the best of seals, flowing from God, coming from Christ the giver of light" (92–93). This gift, offered now to all humanity like the air and the open sky, allows Gregory to lift his gaze and "move my feet on the path back towards life" (95).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Abbreviations vii

Gregory of Nazianzus: Past, Present, and Future Christopher A. Beeley ix

Part 1 Theology

1 Systematic Theology in Homeric Dress: Poemata arcana Brian E. Daley, SJ 3

2 Illuminated from All Sides by the Trinity: Neglected Themes in Gregory Nazianzen's Trinitarian Theology Verna E. F. Harrison 13

3 Gregory of Nazianzus and Biblical Interpretation Ben Fulford 31

4 Deciphering a Recipe for Biblical Preaching in Oration 14 Brian J. Matz 49

5 Gregory's Baptismal Theology and the Alexandrian Tradition Everett Ferguson 67

6 Gregory of Nazianzus, Montanism, and the Holy Spirit William Tabbernee 84

7 Gregory Nazianzen and Philosophy, with Remarks on Gregory's Cynicism Claudio Moreschini 103

Part 2 History and Autobiography

8 Historiography as Devotion: Poemata de seipso Suzanne Abrams Rebillard 125

9 The Stoning of Christ and Gregory of Nazianzus Andrew Hofer, OP 143

10 Bishops Behaving Badly: Helladius Challenges Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa Vasiliki Limberis 159

11 The Tax Man and the Theologian: Gregory, Hellenius, and the Monks of Nazianzus Neil McLynn 178

Part 3 Legacy

12 On the "Play" of Divine Providence in Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus the Confessor Paul M. Blowers 199

13 Gregory the Theologian, Constantine the Philosopher, and Byzantine Missions to the Slavs Andrea Sterk 218

14 Emperors and Priests: Gregory's Theodosius and the Macedonians Susanna Elm 236

15 St. Gregory the Theologian and Byzantine Theology Andrew Louth 252

Part 4 Epilogue

16 St. Gregory the Comic John A. McGuckin 269

The Works of Frederick W. Norris (excluding Reviews) 277

General Bibliography 285

Contributors 305

General Index 309

Index to the Works of Gregory of Nazianzus 313

Index to Biblical Citations 317

Editorial Reviews

"The authors give welcome attention to many of Gregory's writings that were previously understudied, especially his verse and letters The assembly of such luminaries is an important reference for all scholars of the theologian and students of early Christianity."—Brian Dunkle, Religious Studies Review

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