Gregory of Nazianzus

Brian Daley

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134807277
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Histoire antique

This book brings together a new, original survey of the significance of Gregory's life and work with translations of eight beautiful and profound orations. Gregory of Nazianzus portrays a vivid picture of a fascinating character of vital importance who deserves to be regarded as the first true Christian humanist.

The eight orations, each representing a different aspect of his writing, are examined alongside a selection of his shorter poems in verse translation, letters, and a translation of Gregory's own will. Author Brian Daley offers extensive commentary on the works translated and an ample bibliography.

With an extensive introduction to Gregory's life, thought and writings, and including detailed notes, this study places Gregory in his correct historical context, and gives students access to a deeper understanding of this fascinating figure from the past.

1

Introduction

By almost any criterion, St. Gregory of Nazianzus is a complex figure. Like a number of the most influential of those early Christian writers whom we call “Fathers of the Church,” he lived in an age—the last three quarters of the fourth century—in which it was, for the first time, legally and socially permissible to be a public Christian intellectual. The body of works that he left us spans the entire range of Greek literary forms but deals almost exclusively with Christian themes: 44 highly elaborate “orations,” including sermons for liturgical solemnities, panegyrics on great figures of the Christian past, funeral orations for friends and family members, polemics against his enemies, treatises on doctrine, and personal apologiae for his own life and ministry; 249 letters, on a variety of subjects, some familiar in tone, some dealing with business matters, some ornate and courtly, but all written with the terseness and elegance that classical antiquity expected in the letters of a trained writer; and some 17,000 lines of poetry, including solemn hymns in Homeric language and style, extended narratives of the “epic” of his own life, didactic expositions on classical and Christian virtue, personal prayers, epitaphs for friends, and wry personal comments on illness, aging, and human foibles.

Gregory’s literary ability was regarded so highly by the learned connoisseurs of medieval Byzantium that they ranked him with the great stylists of classical poetry and prose. The eleventh-century scholar Michael Psellos, for instance, speaks of his own hope to write a rhetorical treatise some day, using Gregory as sole model, “since in ideas he surpasses Demosthenes, in quality of prose Plato, and so is superior to both of them, and bears first prize against all comers.”¹ Desiderius Erasmus, in the sixteenth-century West, was first impressed by Gregory’s Greek style and only later discovered his importance as a defender and formulator of Trinitarian orthodoxy.² Yet, in the Greek Christian theological tradition, since the early fifth century, Gregory is generally known as “the Theologian”: along with John the Evangelist and the tenth- and eleventh-century spiritual writer Symeon “the New Theologian,”³ one of only three to bear that epithet by general consensus. All were thought to be exemplary in their ability to speak of God in Christian terms, to develop a vocabulary and a set of concepts for thinking about the reality of God’s saving and transforming presence in human history. Of the three figures, Gregory is the only “theologian” to claim eminence on both literary and strictly religious grounds—to write works of theology that are also deliberately constructed as works of art. No wonder that he was, as Jacques Noret has argued, “the most cited author, after the Bible, in Byzantine ecclesiastical literature.”⁴

And Gregory is not only a complex figure in terms of his work. Living in an age in which personal self-disclosure was becoming a new literary form, he has a great deal to tell us about his own life, his feelings, and his judgments; yet, he remains always something of an enigma, hiding as much as he reveals about himself through the literary conventions and allusions in which he recounts his experiences. Like Augustine, his younger contemporary, Gregory shows in his writings the high value he places on friendship and family; yet, he often appears in these same works as a troublesome son and a difficult friend: suspicious, oversensitive, self-pitying, demanding, dark in his views of humanity and the world. The older son of a local bishop in rural Cappadocia, Gregory was involved in pastoral leadership from the beginning of his adult life, was ordained bishop of a small Cappadocian hamlet in 372, and found himself unexpectedly at the head of the pro-Nicene community in Constantinople during the first year of the reign of the Emperor Theodosius, in the autumn of 379. His orations and letters show him—again like Augustine—as an active, energetic pastor, deeply engaged in theological controversy, ecclesiastical politics, liturgical leadership, and the care of the poor. Yet, he frequently portrays himself as a hermit out of his proper place, an ailing contemplative forced into action, a pacific loner ill-suited to the conflicts of public administration, a rustic permanently ill at ease amid the sophistication of the Eastern capital. His early retirement from office as bishop of Constantinople was the fulfillment of his dreams, Gregory assures us; yet, his accounts of the events that forced him to retire are clearly tinged with anger and regret. In reading his works, we must thread our way carefully through the details of Gregory’s emotional, dramatic, often self-justifying presentation of himself, to try to discover the man, the priest, the theologian, as others in his day might have known him. Like few other figures from Christian antiquity, Gregory of Nazianzus embodies for us both the challenge and the allure of coming to recognize faith, culture, and distinctive human traits embodied in the literary production of a single person: a giant in the developing tradition of Christian reflection on the “mixing” of the human and the divine; a man full of human learning, frailty, and passion and enlivened by an unshakeable faith in the nearness of God.

Gregory the Man

Gregory was born into a family of landed gentry on a country estate called Karbala, near Arianzus, a village in the hilly center of the Roman province of Cappadocia, sometime between 326 and 330.⁵ His father, also named Gregory, had been raised in what seems to have been a Judaeo-Christian sect called the Hypsistarii, the servants of the Most High God;⁶ his mother, Nonna, came from a wealthy local Christian family and was the sister of Amphilochius the Elder, a respected lawyer and man of letters and a friend of the noted pagan rhetoricians Libanius and Themistius.⁷ Gregory the Elder had become a Christian shortly after marrying Nonna, thanks to her good example and strong persuasion;⁸ shortly afterward, probably in 329, he was chosen—50 years old and still a layman—to be bishop of Nazianzus, a small town some eight miles to the northwest of the villa at Karbala, where Nonna’s family seem to have owned property.⁹ Gregory’s father built a church for the faithful of Nazianzus and clearly took his pastoral responsibilities there very seriously throughout his life. Gregory’s own efforts in Oration 16 to defend his father’s Nicene orthodoxy render clear, however, that the elder Gregory was not always well versed on current theological debates.¹⁰

Although Nonna and Gregory the Elder seem to have remained childless for a number of years, they eventually had three children: Gorgonia, who seems to have been the eldest, Gregory, and Caesarius. Gregory tells us that before his birth, his mother prayed earnestly to have a son, like several mothers of Old Testament prophets; having been shown in a dream that her prayers would be answered, she dedicated Gregory to God’s service as soon as he was born, a promise he regarded as the origin of his vocation.¹¹ His sister Gorgonia, whose holy and ascetic life Gregory portrays in her funeral oration, eventually married a senior military officer named Alypius, who also became a Christian shortly before his death. They had at least three daughters¹² and lived near Iconium in Lycaonia, the next province to the southwest, where Nonna’s family seems also to have had connections.¹³ Caesarius, the youngest child, studied philosophy and the natural sciences in Alexandria as a young man and became a physician; after completing his studies, he settled in Constantinople, developed a successful medical practice, and eventually became senior doctor (ἁρχιατρός) at the imperial court and a wealthy man.¹⁴ During the brief reign of the “apostate” Emperor Julian (361–363), Caesarius remained in his official post, despite his older brother’s fears that he stood in danger of being pressured to abandon his Christian faith.¹⁵ Obviously a rising star in the ranks of the civil service, Caesarius became the chief financial officer of the province of Bithynia in 368, where he lived through the disastrous earthquake of October 11 of that year.¹⁶ Soon after that event, Caesarius died, still unmarried and in his mid-30s. His death was an event that seems to have been an enormous shock to his older brother: Gregory later wrote, “I died to the world and the world to me, and I have become a living corpse, as devoid of strength as a dreamer. Since that day my life is elsewhere …”¹⁷

Gregory’s life took an even more intellectual turn than that of his younger brother. After the usual elementary studies in Nazianzus and several months under the instruction of their uncle Amphilochius at Iconium, Gregory and Caesarius were sent—probably for most of 346—to a school of grammar and rhetoric in Caesaraea, the provincial capital. These linguistic and literary studies had been, for almost a millennium, the core of Greek and Roman education: young men, for whom alone such formal education was normally possible, were set to study the classics, with the object not only of acquiring the habits of correct speaking and writing, of idiom and orthography and punctuation, but of learning to judge literary eloquence, to cultivate taste, and eventually to become “eloquent” in the complex discourse of Hellenic culture: capable of moving and persuading their peers, of forging the social ties and conventions that alone preserved the fabric of the political body.¹⁸ For the two young brothers, expected to take their place as members of an educated Christian elite in the empire of Constantine’s descendants, education necessarily meant both absorbing the heritage of Greek literary and philosophical culture and deepening their own intellectual identification with the Church’s tradition of faith: a hybridization of humanism and theology that was only in its beginning stages but that was to be the central preoccupation, in a variety of ways, of Gregory’s future life.

After the two brothers had spent perhaps a year in the provincial capital, their parents decided to send them still further afield for cultural formation. The first stop was another Caesaraea, “maritime Caesaraea” in Palestine, which John McGuckin has called “the closest thing in the fourth century to a Christian university town.”¹⁹ In that metropolitan city of the Roman province of Palestine,²⁰ long associated with Origen’s exegetical school and library, and with the continuation of the tradition of Origenist learning under Bishop Eusebius, who had died only a few years before their arrival, all the passion and exegetical subtlety of the mid–fourth century debates on the nature of Christ’s divinity were doubtless running at high tide. Aside from some comments in his funeral oration on Caesarius,²¹ however, Gregory tells us little about his stay in Origen’s city; he seems to have spent time learning rhetoric from the noted stylist Thespesios, for whom he later wrote a graceful epitaph.²² Very probably, though, he first made the acquaintance here of Origen’s exegetical and theological works, which would later have a powerful influence on the theology and scriptural interpretation of all three Cappadocian Fathers.

By the end of 348, Gregory and Caesarius moved on again to the great metropolis of Alexandria, the intellectual heart of the Hellenistic world for both literary and scientific studies—hence, a magnet for the scientifically inclined Caesarius—and as the center of the continuing Origenist tradition of exegesis, represented by the lay scholar Didymus the Blind. In Didymus, if he ever actually met him, Gregory would have found not only a representative of Origen’s intellectual legacy but a supporter, unlike most fourth-century Origenists, of the theology framed in the creed of Nicaea, just coming to be taken with full seriousness as a normative expression of apostolic faith. At the same time, Didymus was not an Apollinarian and insisted (like Origen) on the central role of a human soul in the constitution of Christ, the incarnate Son of God.²³ Possibly Gregory and Caesarius too may have met or heard Athanasius the bishop, then resident in Alexandria after returning from his second exile, in the West in 346. Gregory’s encomium on Athanasius (Or 21), written shortly after he himself became Nicene bishop of Constantinople in 379, shows no sign of personal contact; still, in offering Athanasius as a model for an orthodox pastor, the work could well hint at an early, distant impression that had been made on Gregory’s mind.

Toward the end of 348,²⁴ Gregory made up his mind to move on to Athens to continue his studies, leaving Caesarius behind in Alexandria.²⁵ In his poem On his own Life, Gregory describes it as an impulsive decision,²⁶ and his choice to cross the eastern Mediterranean by boat at the beginning of winter was, as it turned out, imprudent as well. The poem describes in epic style a serious storm south of Cyprus, lasting almost three weeks, in which the little ship lost its water cistern overboard and would probably have foundered if it had not been joined by a Phoenician merchantman, whose crew lashed the two ships together to give them a stability that saved them.²⁷ Gregory recalls his own anguish and fear for his life and tells us that the prospect of dying unbaptized made the danger of shipwreck all the more terrifying for him:

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. That was my lament and my misfortune. For this I kept sending up cries and stretching out my hands, and my cries overcame the pounding of the waves.²⁸

In dramatic terms, Gregory describes turning to God as his only hope and consecrating himself personally to God for the future, if he should survive, as his mother had consecrated him before his birth:

Despairing of all hope here below, I turned to you, 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 … Yours, I said, I have been formerly; yours am I now. Please accept me for a second time, the possession of your honored servants, the gift of land and sea, dedicated by the prayers of my mother and by this unparalleled crisis. If I escape a double danger, I shall live for you …²⁹

It was a promise not only to seek baptism but t...