Gregory of Nazianzus (Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

Brian Matz, Boersma, Hans, Levering, Matthew, Hans Boersma, Matthew Levering

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780801049088
• eBook ISBN: 9781493405725
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

An Accessible Introduction to Gregory of Nazianzus

Brian Matz, a respected scholar of the history of Christianity, provides an accessible and erudite introduction to the thought of fourth-century church father Gregory of Nazianzus. Matz explores Gregory's homilies, especially those that reveal Gregory's affirmation of the full deity of the Holy Spirit, and shows the importance of Gregory's work for contemporary theology and spirituality. This work demonstrates a patristic approach to reading the Bible and promotes a vision for the Christian life that is theological, pastoral, and philosophical. Gregory of Nazianzus is the fourth book in a series on the church fathers edited by Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering.

1
Gregory as Pastor and Theologian

In American baseball, there is the expression “called up to the majors.” Every American baseball team in a major league has one or more minor-league teams from which they draw players from time to time. The minor-league teams allow players further time to develop needed skills or to give them an opportunity to heal from an injury before joining or returning to the major-league club. When a player is asked to move from his minor-league team to the major-league team, it is said of the player that he has been “called up to the majors.”

In 379, Gregory was called up to the majors. For nearly two decades, he had been toiling away in relative obscurity as pastor in the rural town of Nazianzus in Cappadocia. Prior to that, he had spent nearly a decade away from home studying in Caesarea, Alexandria, and Athens. The biographical sketch of Gregory’s life in the introduction surveyed the events of those earlier years that contributed to his formation as a pastor and theologian, including especially his interest in rhetoric and in the integration of classical and biblical literature. In this chapter, we look more deeply at four particular stages in his life: his baptism, his theological interests during his shift from studying in Athens to serving as pastor in Nazianzus, the flowering of those interests during his Constantinopolitan pastorate, and his experience at the Council of Constantinople in 381. These transitions, if we may speak of them as such, shaped his identity as a pastor and theologian. Indeed, they help explain why Gregory was more committed to a pastoral theology of purification rather than to pastoring as such, and they explain why Gregory preferred the solitary life of retirement to the duties (and the ecclesiastical politics) of the pastorate.

Gregory’s Baptism

According to Gregory, he was baptized during his travels from Alexandria to Athens in 348. He discusses the events surrounding his baptism, and the baptism itself, in three extant texts. Analysis of these three passages yields rich insights into his theology of baptism. Gregory provides the greatest number of details about the events in his poem De vita sua. The story is told again, albeit with less fanfare and detail, in another of his poems, De rebus suis. He discusses the matter a third time in the funeral oration on his father (Or. 18), where he mentions the role both his mother and father played in bringing him to the Christian faith and to ministerial work. There is a fourth text by Gregory in which he refers to his baptism, but it says only that he had, at one time, been cleansed by God through the Holy Spirit.1 The paucity of material in this passage limits its further usefulness here.

The poems De vita sua, lines 112–209,2 and De rebus suis, lines 307–21,3 tell the story of Gregory’s journey from Alexandria to Athens to study rhetoric. Gregory left Alexandria during the winter, an unseasonable period for sailing, as he later admitted. The ship nearly wrecked twice during a horrendous storm, leaving Gregory to consider at one point, “Those murderous waters were keeping me away from the purifying waters which divinize us.”4 After a period of some twenty days, the whole event was brought to a conclusion by the aid of his own prayers, those of his parents (made aware of his plight through a dream), and those of his shipmates.5 “It was at that moment [that] I gave myself to God, and the sacred promises I made delivered me from the raging ocean.”6 Gregory’s shipwreck story parallels a number of other maritime stories in Greek literature, a point not lost on a number of past readers of Gregory.7 Comparison has also been made between Gregory’s account and the apostle Paul’s near-death experience at sea while en route to Rome, per the account in Acts 27. There appear also to be connections between the De vita sua account and the Homeric epics, a not unimportant point considering Gregory’s lifelong desire to merge the best of his Greek education with the explication of Christian theology.8 One should also be aware of a similar story in Ambrose’s panegyric for his brother Satyrus, in which Satyrus sought baptism and receipt of the Eucharist only after a near-death experience at sea. However, Gregory would not have known Ambrose’s panegyric,9 so it seems best to conclude both drew independently on the Homeric and biblical sources.

In addition to the historical and literary dimensions of his baptism, Gregory articulated three important elements of his baptismal theology in these texts. First, Gregory understood that baptism committed him to a certain way of life. It is perhaps this reason, more than any other, that caused him to delay baptism as late as he did. Later he would chastise those who put off baptism while still deliberating whether to accept a life of virginity and admonish those who sought to time baptism to their deathbed.10 Gregory shared the commonly held understanding that baptism had direct consequences on one’s post-baptismal life. It was neither a casual decision nor one to be made in haste. His adventure at sea provided him several insights concerning the consequences of his baptism. For one, his delay in deciding between an ecclesiastical or rhetorical career had come to an end. His baptism, as well as his father’s role as bishop in Nazianzus, would inevitably create a situation where he would be asked to succeed his father in the ministerial work of the church there. Although Gregory often rebelled against these pressures, he knew from the day he cried out to Christ while in the midst of the Mediterranean Sea that the call of his baptism was to the service of the church.11 What is more, beyond the practical matter of vocation, there was also a spiritual commitment that accompanied baptism. Gregory wrote in De vita sua, “I turned to you [i.e., Christ], my life, my breath, my light, my strength, my salvation, the source of terror and affliction, but the benign healer too, ever weaving good into the dark pattern. . . . If I escape a double danger, I shall live for thee; if I am abandoned, thou wilt lose a worshipper.”12 Gregory prayed for Christ’s intervention in the midst of the storm, and this turn to Christ was offered in the form of an exchange. If Christ saved him from death at sea, Gregory would live for Christ on land. He would become an additional worshiper of Christ, a commitment that would begin with baptism.

Second, baptism is connected with the way of life and the decisions of one’s parents. Gregory addresses this matter broadly in Or. 40.28, but the texts relating his near-death experience at sea give the specific context in Gregory’s own life. The perils at sea and his consequent decision to receive baptism were an occasion to remember his mother’s dedication of him to the church while still in infancy. He writes simply in De vita sua, “I said, ‘I am yours, Lord, from times past and even now, accept me once again.’”13 Gregory’s first acceptance was his dedication by his mother, Nonna. His mother had prayed that she would have a child and that, if given that gift, she would dedicate him to the service of the Lord.14 Much to Gregory’s chagrin, he was not as free as his brother to pursue whatever occupation he wished;15 Nonna wanted Gregory in Christian service. When Gregory recalls his sea journey in Or. 18.31, he writes, “Indeed I was suffering this way, but my parents were suffering as well, experiencing through the night a vision of danger, and they were aiding me from the land through their prayers in causing the waves to subside. When we returned, the timing of the prayers was reckoned to the time we knew the events transpired.”16 Gregory may have been delaying baptism and roaming about the educational landscape just to avoid what his mother believed was inevitable. In the end, however, he acknowledged that it was the prayers of his mother at his birth and of both of his parents during his perils at sea that led him to safety and, ultimately, to baptism.

Third, baptism provides tangible benefits from God. Foremost in Gregory’s mind here was divinization. In De vita sua, he writes, “All of us feared a common death, but more terrifying for me was the hidden death. Those murderous waters were keeping me away from the purifying waters which divinize us.”17 Similarly, in Or. 18.31, “While all of us were fearing a common death, the fear for me was the death of the soul, for I was in danger of departing wretched and uninitiated, yearning for the spiritual water among the murderous waters.”18 The seawater was drowning out the waters of baptism for Gregory, and it was the baptismal waters he sought for spiritual life. The notion of theōsis, or divinization, is a ubiquitous element in Gregory’s anthropology.19 There is no enjoyment of God’s presence without it.

The gift of the Spirit is another one of the tangible benefits a Christian receives at baptism. Gregory writes in De rebus suis, “I was fearful because my soul was as yet uninitiated in heavenly rites, for lack of the salutary washing which brings to human beings the grace and illumination of the Spirit.”20 It is the Spirit for whom Gregory yearned in his search for the spiritual life and for the divinizing waters.

After evaluating these elements of Gregory’s baptismal theology from the accounts of his own baptism, it is important not to overlook a handful of comments Gregory made about his understanding of being a Christian. In De vita sua 195, Gregory indicates that he was with Christ before the frightful sea and that even in the midst of the peril, he was with Christ.

One may ask what Gregory understood to be the difference between his Christianity before the sea journey and after arriving in Athens. Earlier it was mentioned how Gregory believed that the waters of baptism were divinizing, and that he was in great peril of a “hidden death” (ho kryptos, 163) without baptism. It seems that Gregory counted himself among the catechumens prior to boarding the ship and that he had become a full-fledged member of the church only after receiving baptism.21 More interestingly, perhaps, one may wonder what he believed would have been his status in the afterlife if he had died at sea without having been baptized. This is not clear. In Or. 40.22, Gregory discredits the belief that one’s desire for baptism is sufficient to God in place of actual baptism. He also teaches in 40.23 that people who foolishly delay their baptism would suffer punishment in the afterlife, although this was a punishment that was somewhat less than that experienced by those who held contempt for baptism and somewhat more than that experienced by those who were incapable of receiving it. We should conclude from this, then, that Gregory surely expected to suffer in the afterlife if he died without receiving baptism. But would the punishment last for eternity? Gregory did not support the universalist view of salvation that one finds in Origen and perhaps in Gregory of Nyssa.22 On the contrary, in Oration 40.36 Gregory states unequivocally his belief in eternal torment for nonbelievers despite the views of others he knew who believed such torment did not exist, based on the mercy of God.23 Thus, to him, the idea of a universal salvation was based more on a conception of God’s mercy than on any careful reading of the biblical text. Thus, one may conclude, he either believed that his failure to receive baptism would result in an eternal suffering or that it would eventually cease with some form of annihilation of the soul, since a restoration to God was not possible. Thankfully, he received baptism and thereby avoided whatever consequences may befall those who refrain from receiving it.

From Athens to Nazianzus

We turn now to a second, significant transition in Gregory’s life. That is h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Gregory as Pastor and Theologian
• 2. Preaching Purification
• 3. Preaching Pastoring
• 4. Preaching Contemplation
• 5. Preaching Baptism
• 6. Preaching Love for the Poor
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Scripture Cited in Oration 2
• Appendix 2: Scripture Cited in Oration 45
• Appendix 3: Scripture Cited in Oration 40
• Appendix 4: Scripture Cited in Oration 14
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover