Self-Portrait in Three Colors

Gregory of Nazianzus's Epistolary Autobiography

Bradley K. Storin

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780520304130
• eBook ISBN: 9780520972940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

A seminal figure in late antique Christianity and Christian orthodoxy, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus published a collection of more than 240 letters. Whereas these letters have often been cast aside as readers turn to his theological orations or autobiographical poetry for insight into his life, thought, and times, Self-Portrait in Three Colors focuses squarely on them, building a provocative case that the finalized collection constitutes not an epistolary archive but an autobiography in epistolary form—a single text composed to secure his status among provincial contemporaries and later generations. Shedding light on late-ancient letter writing, fourth-century Christian intelligentsia, Christianity and classical culture, and the Christianization of Roman society, these letters offer a fascinating and unique view of Gregory’s life, engagement with literary culture, and leadership in the church. As a single unit, this autobiographical epistolary collection proved a powerful tool in Gregory’s attempts to govern the contours of his authorial image as well as his provincial and ecclesiastical legacy.

1

An Epistolary Autobiography

MAKING A LETTER COLLECTION

In late 383 or early 384, Gregory of Nazianzus sent a packet of letters to his great-nephew Nicobulus, who had recently begun his studies of rhetoric and classical literature in Caesarea, the capital and metropolitan city of the province Cappadocia Prima. Gregory had recently retired from a long and tumultuous career in the church as a priest and bishop, a career that saw him move from the margins of provincial politics to the center of Roman imperial power and back out again to the social periphery in his later years. Now, it seems, he intended to spend his remaining days at Arianzus, his family’s property near his hometown, attending dinner parties and weddings, conversing with his peers, enjoying the otium in which he could compose new literary texts and edit old ones, and perhaps even pursuing stints of ascetic renunciation—in other words, living the life of a provincial Christian elite in his waning days. These last years of his life are obscure to modern historians (the year of Gregory’s death—390—is known only because of a comment that Jerome makes in his De viris illustribus),¹ but there is little reason to suspect that Gregory’s quotidian existence then was anything other than calm and easy.

Nicobulus had asked for some of Gregory’s letters to use as models for his own epistolary composition, the first subject of study at the start of his advanced education.² “You’re requesting flowers from the meadow in late autumn,” Gregory responded, “and arming the aged Nestor with your current demand for something expedient for eloquence from me, who long ago abandoned the delight of all discourse and society” (Gr. Naz., Ep. 52.1). Retirement was the goal now, but nevertheless the task that Nicobulus put to his great-uncle was no “struggle of Eurystheian or Herculean proportions, but one quite gentle and suited to me, collecting for you as many of my epistles as I can” (Ep. 52.2). What Gregory sent, it turns out, was a massive collection, likely consisting of more than 240 letters, all selected for their demonstration of eloquence, or elite learning. One even provided Nicobulus with a cheat sheet of sorts, a theoretical overview of what Gregory thought to be the definitive features of his signature style (Ep. 51). And yet, upon thumbing through this collection, Nicobulus would have encountered not only letters written by Gregory but also some written by Basil, Gregory’s longtime acquaintance and the nearly five-year deceased bishop of Caesarea. Gregory explained the inclusion of Basil’s letters thus: “Since I’ve always preferred the great Basil to myself, even if the opposite would have seemed true to him, still now I prefer him because of the truth no less than because of our friendship. I therefore offer my epistles with his set down first. For I also desire that we be linked with each other in every way while simultaneously providing a model of measure and moderation to others” (Ep. 53). Eloquence and friendship with Basil—that’s what Nicobulus would find on display in this enormous epistolary anthology, one of Gregory’s final literary publications.

In trying to understand why Gregory put together his letter collection, readers might be tempted to stop there, to chalk it up to Nicobulus’s request, to see the young student as the sole intended reader of the work. The collection’s first two letters, however, indicate that Gregory had a broader audience in mind. Epistula 53, quoted in the previous paragraph, notes that the friendship between him and Basil displayed in the collection offers a model not just for Nicobulus but for unnamed and unspecified “others.” An additional clue appears in Epistula 52: “Each writer, more or less, has a signature style: my words are instructive in maxims and precepts whenever permissible. A father in eloquence always appears in a legitimate child no less than parents do in most of his bodily characteristics. Well, such are my features” (Ep. 52.3). Gregory has made Nicobulus a conditional offer: Should he absorb the principles and stylistic intricacies of these epistolary models, he will surely inherit Gregory’s eloquence and prestige. The very words with which Gregory holds out this inheritance, though, subtly summon the reader to investigate Gregory’s style and to discern his literary ancestry, for which he has provided ample evidence in the collection. A young student without a strong work ethic, as one letter reveals (Ep. 175.1), Nicobulus could not have been expected to follow the literary trail. It was his Caesarean educators—men with years of training in eloquence and robust teaching experience—who Gregory hoped would do the work. They must also have been the “others” that Gregory mentioned as those who would benefit from the model of friendship provided by the collection’s depiction of him and Basil.

The letter collection itself reveals the identities of these men. Gregory praised Bishop Helladius of Caesarea, Basil’s successor, as a “lover of eloquence” (Gr. Naz., Ep. 167.3) and asked him to introduce the young Nicobulus to “the keenest of teachers” while personally overseeing the “training of his character for virtue” (Ep. 167.1). Those teachers, it turns out, were Stagirius and Eustochius, two rival sophists in Caesarea. Nicobulus had sought to enroll in Stagirius’s school at the behest of his father (Ep. 190.3) and with a letter of recommendation in hand from Gregory himself (Ep. 188). However, the older Eustochius, who had been a classmate of Gregory’s in Athens, took umbrage at being overlooked and sharply accused Gregory of betraying their long friendship; he demanded that Gregory send Nicobulus to his school instead. Gregory capitulated to his old friend (Ep. 191) and begged an understandably peeved Stagirius to release the student (Ep. 192). As a sophist and the head of a school, Eustochius focused more on administrative matters than on the direct instruction of students; the day-to-day pedagogy fell instead to the young rhetor Eudoxius, who himself had had a long relationship with Gregory, receiving letters of recommendation from him at the beginning of his career (Ep. 37–38). Among many other tasks, Eudoxius’s responsibilities included keeping parents and guardians informed about the students’ progress, and indeed a series of letters from Gregory reveals that the two had open lines of communication about Nicobulus’s work (Ep. 174–80, 187).³

These four men—Helladius, Eustochius, Stagirius, and Eudoxius—were armed with the literary proficiencies and tools needed to suss out Gregory’s literary ancestry, not that it was any well-kept secret, for Gregory had repeatedly told anyone who would listen of his long and storied education in Athens.⁴ The point of Gregory’s subtle invitation was not to get them to solve an already-solved mystery but rather to induce them to behold in the letter collection his eloquence and the role that Basil had played in shaping his character and the course of his life. The early 380s saw pro-Nicene Christians making a concerted effort throughout Cappadocia and neighboring provinces to posthumously monumentalize Basil’s life and holiness. After his death in 379, Basil had become a regional saint, for whom the devotional epicenter was naturally Caesarea, the city that he had shepherded for almost a decade. Now, in late 383 or early 384, Gregory not only publicized his claim to have had a special relationship with Basil but also produced a collection featuring texts written by and to the provincial icon, previously unknown to others and endowed with an air of intimacy. The interest of Helladius and Nicobulus’s other Caesarean educators must have been piqued.⁵

Nicobulus, Helladius, Eustochius, Stagirius, and Eudoxius were, in all likelihood, not the collection’s only intended readers. Gregory had already published a series of texts, which will be discussed frequently throughout this book, that engaged audiences in Cappadocia, Asia Minor, and the imperial capital Constantinople. His most famous autobiographical poem, Carmen 2.1.11, often referred to as De vita sua, explicitly addresses a Constantinopolitan audience, as does his retrospective self-defense Oratio 42.⁶ Other polemical poems of his took aim, for reasons to be discussed later, at bishops who participated in the Council of Constantinople during the late spring and early summer of 381.⁷ His eulogy for Basil (Oratio 43) was delivered in 382, three years after the latter’s death, before an audience of civic and provincial elites in Caesarea and subsequently circulated in textual form among broader audiences. By the time when he was producing the letter collection, then, Gregory already had a reading audience for his works that consisted of civic, provincial, and imperial elites. Additionally, as the collection itself shows, he stood at the center of a robust epistolary community whose members exchanged letters on a regular basis, sometimes for no other reason than to keep the lines of communication open. This community also provided the venue for late antique textual publication and circulation.⁸ Writers sent either drafts of their work to epistolary correspondents for review, as Gregory of Nyssa did when he sent an early version of Contra Eunomium I to his brother Peter,⁹ or polished texts to addressees as a way to publicize their writings, as Jerome did when he sent his Vita Pauli to an addressee also named Paul (Hier., Ep. 10.3) or as Gregory himself did when he sent a copy of his Philocalia to Bishop Theodore of Tyana (Gr. Naz., Ep. 115).¹⁰ Letter writers even passed along texts by contemporaries, with or without the author’s permission, and thereby further disseminated them and increased their audience.¹¹ By sending his letter collection through Nicobulus to Helladius, Eustochius, Stagirius, and Eudoxius, Gregory had, to all intents and purposes, published it.

With this wide-ranging, even open-ended, audience in mind, Gregory’s statements about the collection’s design and purpose take on a new shine. Here Nicobulus, the Caesarean educators, and any other readers throughout Cappadocia, Asia Minor, Constantinople, and potentially farther afield would encounter a collection showcasing, on the one hand, Gregory’s elite education and eloquence and, on the other, the profound level of intimacy that he had shared with Basil of hallowed memory. How the collection performs these self-presentations will be analyzed in later chapters, but the implication of this statement deserves pause. To this broad audience of elite readers, Gregory openly acknowledged that the collection was subjected to an editorial oversight guided by self-presentational concerns. Less explicit but no less important were the techniques that he used to enact his editorial task. What criteria informed his selection of letters or his determination of the roster of addressees who would populate the collection? In what order did he think the letters should be arranged? To what extent did the act of compilation lead to other editorial actions, such as polishing the prose or even revising the content of certain letters? Did he write new, fictional letters to addressees, deceased in late 383 or early 384, as if they were, in fact, old, authentic letters written to people who were then alive? That he designed and published his own letter collection according to explicit self-presentational principles raises a host of questions that the collection itself, as well as its various manuscripts, does not satisfactorily answer. Yet those questions persist and point us to a fundamental reality. This collection, of more than 240 letters addressed to 90 individuals and communities, is not the result of Gregory wistfully riffling through his archives in search of any and all letters of which he might still possess a copy. Rather, it is a carefully curated assemblage of letters chosen for how they portray Gregory both alone and in relation to his addressees. It is a single literary self-portrait, an epistolary autobiography.

GREGORY’S AUTO/BIOGRAPHY

The letter collection was not Gregory’s first autobiographical effort—far from it. Several have already been mentioned. Carmen 2.1.11 stands as his autobiographical masterpiece, a long and deeply apologetic narration of his life from birth in 329 or 330 until late 381, when the poem was composed, but there are many others too, most written around the same time as Carmen 2.1.11.¹² Both his epideictic and his apologetic orations address discrete episodes in his life and situate their praise, blame, conflict resolution, or celebration in the specific autobiographical context set out in the text.¹³ The apologetic orations in particular blur the boundary between self-defense and self-writing, something that also occurs in Gregory’s panegyric and eulogistic orations,¹⁴ which use biographical narrat...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations
• 1. An Epistolary Autobiography
• 2. The Architecture of the Letter Collection
• 3. “The Most Eloquent Gregory”
• 4. “Father of Philosophers”
• 5. “Basilist”
• Epilogue
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index of Gregory’s Epistulae
• Index of Subjects