The Cappadocians 0881411124, 9780881411126

Citation preview

The

CAPPADOCIANS ί·ψ ·δ·

by

’s s e m i n a r y p r C R E ST W O O D , N E W YORK

v l a d im ir

2000

e ss

Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meredith, Anthony. The Cappadocians / Anthony Meredith, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Cappadocian Fathers. 2. Basil, Saint, Bishop o f Caesarea, ca. 329-379. 3. Gregory, o f Nazianus, Saint. 4. Gregory o f Nyssa, Saint, ca. 335-ca. 394. 5. Christian saints— Turkey— Biography. 6. Theology, Doctrinal— History— Early church, ca. 30-600. I. Title. BR67.M46 1995 270.2’092’2-dc20 95-15076 CIP

THE CAPPADOCIANS

Copyright © 1995 by A nthony M eredith SJ

ST VLADIMIR’S SEMINARY PRESS 575 Scarsdale Rd., Crestwood, NY 10707 1-800-204-2665 First printing 1995 Second printing 2000

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

IS B N 0 -8 8 1 4 1 -1 1 2 -4

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

Editorial foreword

vii

Preface

ix

Bibliography

xi

Abbreviations The background

xiii 1

1.1

Geography and early historyof Cappadocia

2

1.2

Christianity in Cappadocia

3

1.3

The conversion of Constantine

6

The roots of Cappadocian theology

10

2.1

Plato

10

2.2

Origen

13

Basil of Caesarea

19

3.1

Life

20

3.2

Monasticism

24

3.3

Doctrine and the life of the Spirit

29

3.4

Conclusion

35

Gregory of Nazianzus

39

4.1

Family and life

39

4.2

Man of letters, theologian

42

4.3

Spirituality

47

4.4

Epilogue

49

Gregory of Nyssa

52

6

5.1

Life and works

52

5.2

Spiritual teaching - the influence of Origen

54

5.3 5.4

Reaction to Eunomius The Life o f Moses

62 67

5.5

The Homilies on the Song o f Songs

78

5.6

Dogmatic theology

90

The Cappadocian achievement 6.1 The Cappadocians and the Trinity

102 102

6.2

The Cappadocians and the person of Christ

110

6.3

The Cappadocians and Hellenism

114

Epilogue

124

Index

128

Editorial foreword St Anselm of Canterbury once described himself as someone with faith seeking understanding. In words addressed to God he says Ί long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.’ And this is what Christians have always inevitably said, either explicitly or implicitly. Christianity rests on faith, but it also has content. It teaches and proclaims a distinctive and challenging view of reality. It naturally encourages reflection. It is something to think about; something about which one might even have second thoughts. But what have the greatest Christian thinkers said? And is it worth saying? Does it engage with modern problems? Does it provide us with a vision to live by? Does it make sense? Can it be preached? Is it believable? This series originates with questions like these in mind. Written by experts, it aims to provide clear, authoritative and critical accounts of outstanding Christian writers from New Testament times to the present. It will range across the full spectrum of Christian thought to include Catholic and Protestant thinkers, thinkers from East and West, thinkers ancient, mediaeval and modern. The series draws on the best scholarship currently available, so it will interest all with a professional concern for the history of Christian ideas. But contributors will also be writing for general readers who have little or no previous knowledge of the subjects to be dealt with. Volumes to appear should therefore prove helpful at a popular as well as an academic level. For the most part they will be devoted to a single thinker, but occasionally, as is the case with

the present volume, the subject will be a movement or school of thought. The Cappadocians are the three great patristic figures of the later fourth century: St Basil the Great, St Gregory of Nazianzus and St Gregory of Nyssa. Considered as a group, these men were a major force in the defence and development of Christian orthodoxy after the Council of Nicaea. Considered individually, each ranks as a major theologian in his own right. Western Fathers such as Augustine and Jerome, and Origen in the East, have been well served in English by learned and helpful monographs and introductions. But, and surprisingly, nothing comparable exists for the three great Cappadocians. Aspects of their teaching are treated in several well-known histories of doc­ trine. Excerpts from their writings also exist in English. Yet, in spite of their importance in the history of Christianity, there is no single English study of them, either rudimentary or scholarly. The present volume therefore fills a noticeable gap and will be wel­ comed by patristic specialists and by students of early Christian thinking. Brian Davies OP

Vlll

Preface The appearance of an introduction to Cappadocian thought in this series hardly needs an apology, unless it be for its brevity. There exists in English no work devoted to the three Fathers with whom this study deals. Indeed, apart from their treatment in histories of doctrine by J. F. Bethune Baker, R. P. C. Hanson, A. Harnack and J. N. D. Kelly, it is hard to discover any account of their varied contribution to the history of Christianity. Much modern writing has been devoted to exploring the spirituality of the three, espe­ cially of Gregory of Nyssa, but very little of this is available to English-speaking readers. Fortunately, there do exist translations of some of the writings of all three, notably those contained in the Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and more recently in the Classics of Western Spirituality. Apart from On the Holy Spirit, and his Letters translated by R. de Ferrari in the Loeb Classical Library, little of Basil is easily available. Gregory of Nazianzus is even less well served. This is a pity, for the Cappadocians lived and wrote in a period of great interest and importance for the history of the Church and for the development of Christian doctrine. They lived in the immediate aftermath of the conversion of Constantine in 312 and of the Council of Nicaea, and it was largely through their efforts that the challenges presented by both these events were resolved. They also lived in a period during which the nascent monastic movement expanded and forced thoughtful churchmen, like Basil, to devise a set of rules which could contain and direct what was in danger of becoming a wayward and potentially anarchic force on the fringes of the Church. It fell to Basil, and to his brother Gregory of Nyssa, to show the harmony between the ideals of Pachomius, Antony and the followers of Eustathius of Sebaste on the one hand and the

ascetic and contemplative ideals of Plato and Origen. The spiritual idealism embodied in the ascetical treatises of Gregory of Nyssa displays to a marked degree the marriage between non-Christian and Christian understandings of the way of holiness. The harmoni­ zation of the Gospel with the values of Hellenism must rank as a, if not the, major achievement of the three Cappadocians. Hellenism is all-pervasive. The style, the literary forms, the thought of all three writers show their debt to Hellenism in many ways. This is not to say that the Cappadocians were prisoners of alien wisdom. Rather, they used the forms and language in order to give shape and structure to the Hebraic ideas of the Gospel. This feature is above all evident in their treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity. For, although the idea of a threefold Godhead of three co-equal persons was something a philosopher of the school of Plato could hardly accept, the attempt to clarify and justify the unity and trinity of God made use of categories derived from Aristotle and Plato. The Cappadocians, therefore, each in their different ways, made sub­ stantial contributions to the spiritual, intellectual and dogmatic life of fourth-century Christianity. This influence, above all in the field of Christian doctrine and spirituality, has been lasting; while their reworking in the light of the Council of Nicaea of the inherited teaching of Origen possesses an interest all of its own. This preface ends with a few words of thanks to several people who in their different ways have helped in the making of this book. First of all I should like to thank Fr Brian Davies, without whose initial invitation and persistent reminders the book might never have been written. My thanks are also due to Fr E. J. Yarnold for his characteristically acute criticisms of the first draft. I am also much indebted to the reader for the book, for whose painstaking and extremely helpful criticisms I am very grateful. If the result has any merit, much of it is his ‘fault’. Finally I should like to express my gratitude to one now dead, who encouraged and inspired my interest in the Cappadocians more than twenty years ago: Colin Macleod. Whatever value this work possesses comes largely from the patient and acute unselfishness of these four. For any faults and errors I am alone to blame.

Bibliography Primary sources As yet there is only one series which includes all the known writings of the three Cappadocians, the Patrologia Graeca (PG), edited by J. P. Migne (1857-66). This itself was based entirely upon the work of previous scholars, notably, in the case of Basil, on that of the Maurist Benedictines. Basil is in PG 29-32; Gregory of Nazianzus in PG 35-38; Gregory of Nyssa in PG 44-46. Over and above this complete corpus, the writings of Gregory of Nyssa have been appearing in the Leiden edition (= GNO) begun by Werner Jaeger in 1920 and now numbering 13 volumes, of which, for the purposes of this book, the following are most often cited: Contra Eunomium = GNO 1 and 2. Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum = GNO 6 (in 15 sermons). For study purposes the most useful edition of the Life o f Moses is in Sources Chretiennes (SC), ed. J. Danielou (Paris, 1968), and of the Catechetical Oration (sometimes known as the Address to Catechists), ed. J. Srawley (Cambridge, 1903). For Gregory of Nazianzus: the five Theological Orations (= Orations 27-31), ed. A. J. Mason (Cambridge, 1899); and Letters, ed. P. Gallay (Greek with facing French translation) in the Bude series (2 vols; Paris, 1964). For Basil, the Letters have also been edited in the Bude series, by Y. Courtonne (3 vols; Paris, 1957). There is also an edition of On the Holy Spirit by C. F. H. Johnston (Oxford, 1892).

Finally, in SC there is an edition of Basil’s three books Contra Eunomium (= SC 299 and 305), ed. B. Sesboue; and of On the Holy Spirit (SC 17 bis), ed. B. Pruche.

Modern works There is no general or scholarly account of the Cappadocians in English. J. Quasten, Patrology 3: The Golden Age o f Patristic Thought (Westminster, MD, 1951-86) is useful; as also is J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (5th edn; London, 1977) with the bibliography on p. 279. So too are the bibliographies provided by Frances Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon (London, 1983), especially for ch. 3, pp. 368-81. Even so the majority of the books listed there are in either French or German and upon specific aspects of the Cappadocians’ works. Two are particularly useful: Paul Jonathan Fedwick (ed.), Basil o f Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic (Toronto, 1981); and Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Meta­ morphosis o f Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven and London: Yale, 1993).

XU

Abbreviations CE Contra Eunomium ET English translation GNO Gregorii Nysseni Opera, Leiden edition HE Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica) LXX Septuagint Greek Old Testament PG J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Graeca SC Sources Chretiennes

xm

To the memory o f my father and mother

1 The background

The lives of the three Cappadocian Fathers, Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, belong to the latter two-thirds of the fourth century. The conversion of the Emperor Constantine shortly before the battle of the Milvian Bridge occurred in 312 and was followed by the Edict of Milan, which granted freedom of worship to the Christians. In 325 there had occurred the first ecumenical council of the Church at Nicaea, at which the ‘318’ fathers (cf. Genesis 14:14)1 had decreed the full deity of the second person of the Trinity. It might have seemed to the outside observer that all the problems of the Church had been solved by these two momentous events. Christianity was no longer a forbidden faith, under constant threat of persecution, as it had been during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian (284-305). The substance of Christian believing, likewise, was no longer under discussion or indeed at risk from the heresy of Arius and his followers. But although this is true, the peace was apparent rather than deep or real. The Church may have been no longer on the run. Nevertheless its relationship to the society and culture of the day was far from clear. Did the fact, for example, that Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus both studied in the secular university of Athens mean that the Church’s relation to culture was straight­ forward? Was there an unbroken continuity linking together the culture of Greece with the vision of the Gospel? Secondly, we should be quite wrong to suppose that the decisions of Nicaea were as self-evidently accepted and clear as later generations came to think. On the contrary, the victory of Athanasius and his party at

Nicaea was short-lived. He and his supporters were all in exile ten years after the end of Nicaea, and theologians of a very different cast of mind found considerable favour at the court of Constantine (306-337) and his son Constantius (337-361). In other words, the crucible experience of the Church was by no means at an end, nor was the definition of its faith. It is within this framework of the deepening and sharpening of the beliefs of the Church that the Cappadocian achievement is to be found.

1.1 GEOGRAPHY AND EARLY HISTORY OF CAPPADOCIA The district of Cappadocia lies to the east of central Asia Minor. It is a large, mainly mountainous region about 8,000 feet above sea level. The main river is the Halys (the modern Kizil Irmak). Cappadocia was bounded on the north by Galatia, on the south by Cilicia and on the east by Armenia. It had been a Roman depend­ ency since 191 bc ; and thereafter, up to its complete annexation by Rome in ad 17 (cf. Tacitus, Annals 2.42), it had been subjected to a not wholly unsuccessful programme of Hellenization. In ad 72 it had been united to the neighbouring province of Galatia, but this had not lasted, and it regained its independence not long after. In 371/372 the Emperor Valens, largely for reasons of administrative convenience, divided the province into two parts, First and Second Cappadocia - a move big with consequences for the Cappadocians. It was a barren country then and now. It exported grain and horses and imported wine.2 There were few large cities, the prin­ cipal ones being Caesarea (modern Kayseri) in the middle and Tyana, the home of the pagan sage Apollonius, in the south. The run-of-the-mill inhabitants had a poor reputation in antiquity. They were, in the words of a malicious epigram, more deadly than snakes,3 and as little likely to speak intelligently as a tortoise might be to fly.4 This fact alone makes the general education of the Cappadocian Fathers that much the more surprising. It should also warn us against supposing that their elegant discourses, letters and sermons would have been accessible to the ordinary Cappadocian. The suspicion of the elitist character of much of their writing is reinforced if it is remembered with what scant success the attempted Hellenization of the province had been attended. Even in the late fourth century there existed a local ‘Cappadocian dialect’

(cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29.74), and the great German histor­ ian Theodor Mommsen is doubtless correct in asserting that ‘Cap­ padocia was hardly more Greek at the beginning of the imperial age, than Brandenburg and Pomerania were French under Freder­ ick the Great’.5 In so far as the bulk of the ordinary people were Christian at all, it was hardly a Christianity of the sort that would have appreciated the elaborately honed language of Basil or either Gregory.

1.2 CHRISTIANITY IN CAPPADOCIA ‘Residents of Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia . . . we hear them telling in our own tongues the wonderful works of God’ (Acts 2:9,11). The existence of Jews in Cappadocia probably furthered the spread of the Gospel; it may also have given rise to a strange sect, the Hypsistarians, to which Gregory of Nazianzus’ father belonged before his conversion (cf. Oration 18.5), and may indicate an attempt to blend together Y hwh and the Greek god Zeus, the highest, into a common monotheism. If, as has just been suggested, the Christian religion owed its origin in Cappadocia to the Synagogue, the respect felt for Gregory Thaumaturgos (‘the Wonderworker’) by the three Cappadocians should not lead us to think that he was the first apostle of Cappado­ cia. A remark at the opening of 1 Peter indicates the existence of Gentile converts to the Gospel by ad 100: ‘Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappado­ cia, Asia and Bithynia . . . ’6 A chance reference by Tertullian at the end of the second century to the persecution of Christians in Cappadocia is the only light thrown on the subject before we hear of the missionary labours of Gregory Thaumaturgos (210/213-270/ 275) upon which Basil and Gregory of Nyssa laid so much emphasis and which won for him the title ‘Apostle of Cappadocia’. The extraordinary reverence in which Gregory was held by his spiritual offspring is clear both from the flowery encomium of Gregory of Nyssa and from the generous praise Basil accords him towards the end of On the Holy Spirit. In chapter 29 he writes: ‘Where shall we rank the great Gregory and his words? Shall we not number with the apostles and prophets a man who walked in the same spirit. . . although when he arrived in Pontus he found only seventeen Christians, he soon brought all the people, whether in town or country, to the knowledge of God.’ To these apostolic

labours he added certain natural miracles, to which the two brothers gave possible independent witness. It is hardly to be wondered at that they were so devoted to him, for Basil is witness to the fact that it was to Gregory that his own grandmother, Macrina the Elder, owed her conversion to Christianity. Macrina’s own role in the formation of Basil is well illustrated by his Letter 223, in which (section 3) he explains to his friend Eustathius of Sebaste the completely received and traditional character of his own faith, ‘which I received as a child from my blessed mother (Emmelia) and from my grandmother Macrina’. Our knowledge of the life of Gregory depends almost entirely on three sources. One of them, Gregory’s Address to Origen, is the most contemporary document and probably the most reliable; the other two are three brief notices about him in Eusebius’ Ecclesiast­ ical History (HE 6.30; 7.14; 7.28) and the Panegyric by Gregory of Nyssa composed a century or so after the death of its subject. However, they differ in details, the most important being that while Eusebius and Gregory himself locate his student days in Caesarea, whither Origen went in 231, Gregory of Nyssa seems to know nothing of this sojourn and can at least be interpreted as placing the period in Egypt. This discrepancy apart, on one central and vital point all three witnesses are united: Gregory’s master during this period was Origen. Origen, Eusebius informs us (HE 6.30), ‘in­ stilled into them [Gregory the Wonderworker and his brother Athenodore] a passion for philosophy and urged them to exchange their former love for the study of divine truth. Five whole years they continued with him, and made such progress in divine things that, while still young men, they were deemed worthy of the episcopate in the churches of Pontus.’ Gregory of Nyssa also mentions Origen by name as the master of Gregory’s Christian faith (GNO X. 1.13.11 = PG 46, 905D) - a remarkable fact when it is recalled that on only one other occasion does Gregory of Nyssa mention by name the one theologian to whose influence upon him practically everything he wrote is an eloquent witness.7 But apart from the combined witness of Eusebius and Gregory of Nyssa that Origen’s influence was effective in deflecting Gregory from the love of pagan learning, we learn nothing more exact from them about the precise character of the education he received from Origen. For that we have to turn to Gregory’s own Address, which contains much interesting material about the structure of a univer­ sity course in third-century Caesarea. Apparently it began with a thorough study of the techniques and practice of dialectic (chapter

7); after the mind had been trained, it was ready to devote itself to the pursuit of physics, the study of the laws of nature. And then it was ready for the most serious part of the first section of the course, ethics (chapters 9-12). The aim of this part was not a purely intellectual mastery of the principles of moral philosophy, but, more importantly, ‘likeness to God’ - an ideal which owes much to Plato’s Theaetetus (176B). This moral excellence is not, however, viewed by Origen as being the end of the course or indeed of life. Beyond it lies theology, which contains two sections on the study of Greek philosophy and the exegesis of the Bible. Not that Gregory professes himself an uncritical admirer of Greek philosophy. He admits its lack of self-consistency and its consequent failure to convert others to its tenets (chapter 14). On the other hand it purifies the mind of dreams and encourages us to move upwards and be ready for the study of Scripture (chapter 15). The Bible is regarded as the infallible source of knowledge. Several important principles underlying Origen’s treatment of Scripture are here enunciated. Above all he insists that the Christian theologian should not commit himself uncritically to any one system of philo­ sophy. The theologian must be prepared to be eclectic. Further, the words of Scripture may only make an entrance into souls that are properly prepared. It is our - moral - distance from God that makes his words opaque to us. The moral demands upon the would-be exegete are in the tradition of the Greek philosophers, who also insist on the importance of moral purity if knowledge of the truth is to be arrived at. In this area, as in many others, Origen foreshad­ ows the views of the Cappadocians. In another important respect he also does this, in refusing to separate theology from spirituality and from the moral life. Gregory owed much to these Origenistic insights. To what extent did it also influence his own theological positions? His opposition to the views of Paul of Samosata, which we can reasonably infer from his presence at the Council of Antioch in 264, where Paul was condemned, probably for a mixture of modalism and adoptionism, suggests that like Origen Gregory was a strong advocate of the real and eternal distinction among the three persons of the Trinity. His Address hardly provides us with any very clear picture of his theological views, and we are thrown back on Gregory’s Creed recorded for us in detail in the Panegyric (GNO X .l.17.24-18.25; = PG 46,912C-913A). The highly orthodox character of this creed has led some to the conclusion that it hardly represents the views of its supposed author - a suspicion which is supported to some extent

by a statement of Basil (Letter 210.5) which attributes to Gregory the view that the Son could be described as a creature. Even if, as Basil charitably suggests, Gregory spoke in this way for the sole purpose of winning over others to orthodoxy, it is hard to reconcile this view with the near-Nicene character of the creed recorded in the Panegyric. It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that there must be some truth in Basil’s account. Why else would Basil have recorded a view so much at variance with his own, unless it were at least commonly held among the people of Neocaesarea to whom he was writing?

1.3 THE CONVERSION OF CONSTANTINE The conversion of Constantine shortly before the decisive battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 and the Edict of Milan of the following year were in fact and symbolically events of the greatest signific­ ance for the Christian Church. It marked the end not only of the persecution of Diocletian, which had raged somewhat intermit­ tently since 303, but also of the many uncertainties which had attended the Christians for the previous two and a half centuries. Henceforth, under the patronage of the first Christian Emperor, they were able to meet together in public and to hold property, and their leaders might even use the public system of transport.8 In some ways, however, it must be admitted that the enjoyment of imperial patronage was a mixed blessing. Constantine’s enthusiasm for his new-found faith, mixed with his own desire to rule and secure religious uniformity, made him take part in the major religious controversies of the day. For example he intervened in the Donatist controversy - unhappily. His desire to restore, or create for the first time, doctrinal uniformity and peace in the East led him to summon the first ecumenical council of the Church at Nicaea in May 325. But here also, state intervention in the affairs of the Church - a perpetual feature of the Constantinian era - was in no sense either decisive or totally beneficial. Another important result of improved Church-state relation­ ships could be discerned in the area of general culture. But apart from allowing a greater freedom, it is hard to say with great precision how exactly the changed atmosphere affected the educa­ tional practice of Christians. Well before the ‘peace of the Church’ many distinguished figures had benefited from the current classical curriculum. Although it is true of the second century that the

culture of Tertullian and Cyprian was largely if not entirely acquired in the time prior to their conversions, and the same may perhaps be claimed for Clement of Alexandria, it is quite clear that Origen at Alexandria at the end of the second century, and Eusebius at Caesarea in the middle of the third, were not converts and were also exceedingly well versed in the ‘spoils of the Egyp­ tians’ (cf. Exodus 11:2; 12:35). As we shall see, all three Cappado­ cians received liberal educations, two of them, Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, at the university of Athens. This fact alone serves to distinguish them from their predecessors. Even so they were to discover with a mixture of sadness and bitterness that this privilege was not one on which they could afford to rely, for in June 362 the neo-pagan Emperor Julian issued his School Law, which effectively deprived practising Christians of the right to teach in schools and universities.9 The effect of the Cappadocians’ education upon their writing is discernible in several important ways. Ancient education was heavily rhetorical in intention and in content. Its principal, though by no means sole, aim was to produce effective speakers. The central authors read would be the poets and orators of anti­ quity, above all Homer and Demosthenes, and only after that would progression be made to mathematics, astronomy and natural science. The effect of this stress on rhetoric can be discerned in every page of all three Cappadocians. Our ignorance of the state of philosophy in fourth-century Athens makes it hard to state with any degree of accuracy what Basil or the Gregorys would have learnt there. Some modern writers like Cyril Mango10 and G. C. Stead11 give the impression that the Cappadocians were shallow and derivative in their learning and defective and eclectic in their philosophy. How much science did they in fact know? Basil’s nine Homilies on the Six Days o f Creation and Gregory of Nyssa’s treatment of the same theme in In Hexameron are our main sources on the subject of Cappadocian learning as distinct from literary culture. Although it is doubtless true to say that Basil is at pains to distinguish his position from that of his pagan contemporaries, nevertheless the very effort to do so implies a considerable familiarity with pagan learning. Again, on the more strictly philosophical front, it is doubtless true that none of the Cappadocians can be regarded as a philosopher in quite the same sense as Plato, Aristotle or Plotinus. The reason for this is clear. The premises from which the Cappado­ cians argue are the truths of revelation, which they are endeavour­ ing to explore and understand. In this enterprise they were far from

being innovators. Origen had endeavoured to do the same in On First Principles (c. 231) as Gregory of Nyssa’s Address on Religious Instruction or Catechetical Oration attempts to do a century and a half later.

Notes 1 318, the traditional number of those present at Nicaea, is taken from the number of Abraham’s servants in Genesis 14:14; in fact there were only about 220 there. 2

For a fuller account of Cappadocia in the imperial period see M. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History o f the Hellenistic World (Oxford, 1941), esp. pp. 571ff.; also A. Η. M. Jones, Cities o f the Eastern Roman Provinces (Oxford, 1971); S. E. Kirsten, ‘Cappadocia’ in Reallexicon fiir Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart, 1950ff.), II; W. Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Oxford, 1962), p. 76. For the horse-exporting interests of the Cappadocians in general, cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Letter 17.15 with the notes of P. Maraval ad loc. in the SC edition of the Letters (363) (Paris, 1990).

3 The epigram on the theme ‘the snake it was that died’ comes from a sixth-century bc poet, Pseudo-Demodocus, in Anthologia Lyrica Graeca I, p. 52, no. 4. 4

Pseudo-Lucian, Epigram 43.

5 For a discussion of the language of the period and the survival of native dialects into the sixth century ad see K. Holl, ‘Das Fortleben der Volksprachen in Kleinasien in nachchristlicher Zeit’ in Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Kirchengeschichte II (Tubingen, 1928). The citation from T. Mommsen is from his Roman History 5.8. Gregory of Nyssa also refers to the existence of a Cappadocian dialect in his time in Against Eunomius 11.406. 6

Gregory of Nyssa in Letter 17.15 refers to the legend, current in his time, that the Gospel had come to Cappadocia through Longinus, the soldier who is said to have pierced Christ’s side as he hung on the cross. Maraval ad loc. (cf. note 2) says that Gregory is the first to attest this belief.

7

Gregory of Nyssa, prologue to Commentary On the Song o f Songs: GNO VI. 13.2.

8 For evidence on the imperial postal service cf. Pliny, Letters X.45, 64 and 120; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 10.5.23; Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 21.16.18 (on its abuse by bishops); Gregory of Nyssa, Letter 2.13.

9

For Julian’s School Law of June 362 cf. vol. 3 of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Julian, p. 116. Even the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus, not on the whole a favourable critic, describes the measure as cruel: Res Gestae 22.10.7.

10 C. Mango, Byzantium: The Empire o f New Rome (London, 1980), pp. 169ff. 11 G. C. Stead, Philosophie und Theologie (Stuttgart, 1990).

2

The roots of Cappadocian theology

The Platonism of the Cappadocian Fathers came to them largely through Origen. Origen, as we have seen, had been the revered teacher of Gregory the Wonderworker, whose teaching had been responsible for the conversion of Basil’s grandmother Macrina (cf. Basil, Letters 204.6; 223.4). The enthusiasm felt by Basil and Gregory Nazianzen for Origen found expression in a collection of extracts from the writings of Origen, published around 358 under the title of Philocalia. The extracts deal largely with such subjects as the freedom of the will and the interpretation of Scripture and were probably intended for the benefit of the intelligent student who wished to harmonize his faith and the secular philosophy and learning of the day. Yet, despite this reverence for him, overt reference to Origen in the writings of the three Cappadocians is exceedingly rare. Gregory of Nazianzus refers to him once in Letter 115 (about Philocalia ), Gregory of Nyssa twice,1 and Basil twice, once by name in O n the H o ly Spirit (29.73) and once negatively and not by name in H om ilies on the Six D ays o f Creation (3.9).

2.1 PLATO Behind the figure of Origen stands the figure of Plato. Even so this must not blind us to the fact that certain areas of Plato’s thought made no impression at all on either Origen or the Cappadocians. The critical spirit which impregnates the earlier dialogues is almost entirely lacking, save perhaps in the tentative way Origen presents

his conclusions. More importantly, we hear nothing in any of them of Plato’s political concern. Plato’s disgust with a system that put Socrates to death in 399 bc led him to try to create a new social order; to this end he visited Syracuse to enlist the help of the tyrant (dictator) Dionysius; to this end he composed the Republic, Politi­ cus and Laws; but of this we find hardly a trace in later Platonism and nothing whatever in the patristic use of Plato. Instead we find both in the Fathers and in their pagan contemporaries a preference for a relatively small number of passages, a fact which has led to the interesting suggestion2 that there existed at this period a Platonic anthology. The fact that such an anthology has never yet been found may simply point to its non-preservation. Were it to be discovered we should be able to speak with greater certainty about the intellectual methods of the Cappadocians. Platonism as it had come to be understood in the period of which we speak included three basic ideas, all of which exerted consider­ able influence on the Fathers of both East and West, (a) There existed an ideal world of changeless patterns of reality, known as Forms. Their existence was postulated in order to account for the world of time and change. At the summit of this ideal world there was a supreme Form, sometimes termed the Good, as in the Republic, sometimes the One, as in Parmenides, sometimes simply Being, as in Timaeus, and sometimes Beauty as in the Symposium. They were held to account in some way for the character rather than the existence of time- and space-conditioned reality, (b) This timebound reality of the visible world was related to the eternal world of perfect Forms in various ways. Plato had used the expressions ‘participation’ and ‘imitation’ to express this relationship. In his account of the making of the visible world in Timaeus Plato makes it quite clear that he does not believe in any doctrine of creation in the strict sense of that word. God, he there tells us, looks at the perfect Forms and then imposes their shape upon the pre-existent matter, even as a stamp might be impressed on clay. Plato’s account may help to explain why things are as they are, but not why there is anything at all. (c) Every human being possesses within himself an eternal soul, which is the principle both of life and of desire. The trapped finite spirit is drawn upwards by an inner dynamism of eros in order to regain its original heavenly home. This natural desire for the good and the beautiful needs to be released and reactivated by a moral and spiritual training or askesis, which helps it to regain the primal vision by growing once again the ‘wings of the soul’ which had been lost by the fall of the soul in the beginning of time. This

ascetic and spiritual journey is vividly traced for us in Plato’s analogy of the Cave in Book 7 of the R epublic and in the upward motion of eros in the S ym p o siu m . As Andrew Louth has well illustrated in his Christian M ystical Tradition ,3 the influence of the Platonic spirit upon Christian theologians has been immense. Some sort of ascent imagery is an essential element of most attempts to systematize the religious experience, whether this be thought of as the ascent of a mountain or the climbing of a ladder. In both cases the upward urge is never automatic and demands the complement of serious moral effort. This means that although the invitation to make the effort is open to all, in practice realization of the impulse of eros is restricted to a few. Even so, Christians learnt from Plato not only the importance of strenuousness in the service of God and of the realization of the ideal, but also something of great importance about the nature of the end to be pursued. Strenuousness and the knowledge of like by like are common ideas in the R epublic. The very idea of ‘turning round the eye of the soul’ (cf. R ep u b lic 7.518C) is no easy or immediate process. And, further, as we have seen, it issues in a firm refusal to divorce truth from life. But not only is the process of moral conversion one that demands time and energy, it is also true of the enlightenment of the mind. Not only is the mechanism two­ fold - the mind must be exercised and the light from without must shine upon it - but the conjunction of moral progress and intellec­ tual growth means that Plato cannot have thought of ‘truth’ as a static possessed piece of information. It is and must be bound up with a growth and progress to even more truth. There is no evidence in Plato to suggest that he thought that either the mere acquisition of information or some sort of mystic vision would ever be able to still the restless quest of the mind for more and deeper knowledge. Although Plato never professed a doctrine of the infinity of the good, his doctrine of progress is not all that distant from Gregory of Nyssa’s teaching on epektasis, the eternal growth of the human person towards and into God. Indebted though they were in their spiritual idealism to what they had learnt from Platonism, the Cappadocians were not uncritical of their inspirer. Unlike Plato they insisted on a strict doctrine of creation, which extended to the whole of non-Trinitarian reality. Though they were by no means the earliest to stress this doctrine, it plays a very large part in their system. Plato assumed in Tim aeus the eternity of matter. They denied it. Secondly, they all at least verbally rejected the Platonic teaching, which we find in Phaedrus,

about the fall of souls from a pure bodiless condition to that of being embodied. Thirdly, all three distanced themselves subtly but decisively from the general Platonic view of a ‘great chain of being’. Plato and his followers among the Middle Platonists and Neoplatonists had organized reality hierarchically, with the simplest realities at the top and the most complex at the bottom. It was assumed that what was at the top of this ‘chain of being’ was both ‘more real’ and also ‘more simple’ than what came from and after it. The clearest example of this stratified vision of reality comes in Plotinus, who organizes the whole universe in a descending order of hypostases the One, Spirit or Mind, and Soul. The temptation to assimilate the Christian Trinity to such a system was great, but was in the end firmly resisted by two distinct though related moves. The Cappado­ cians insisted in the first place on the equality of all three members of the Trinity. In other words, the fact that the Father was the source of the Son did not mean that he was superior to the Son as God. This is a point to which we shall return later. Secondly, the chain was broken by the consistent refusal of the Cappadocians to allow of any intermediary between creator and creature.4 Between the two there was only an unbridgeable distance.

2.2 ORIGEN (185-254) In the sixth book of his Ecclesiastical History Eusebius offers us a most sympathetic portrait of his great hero, Origen. There he is portrayed as both an ardent Christian and an enthusiastic student of philosophy. Eusebius relates that when Origen was only seventeen years old he was with difficulty restrained by his mother from following the example of his father in offering himself for martyr­ dom in the persecution of Septimius Severus in 202. On the other hand his ardent Christian faith was matched by an almost equal enthusiasm for philosophy, which he studied under the most dis­ tinguished philosopher of the day in Alexandria, Ammonius Saccas (175-242). Ammonius also taught Plotinus (205-270), but left no writings of his own behind him - a fact which makes it hard to assess the extent of his influence on his two distinguished pupils. Origen’s wedding of faith and philosophy was the flowering of a tradition that had flourished at Alexandria since the days of Philo (20 bc- ad 45) and Clement of Alexandria (ad 150-215). Philo’s mixture of the Bible and Plato is clear from this:

they [sc. the bodily eyes] see only the objects of sense and those are composite, brimful of corruptibility, while the divine is uncompounded and incorruptible. It is the eye of the soul, which receives the presentation of the divine vision . . . So when you hear that God was seen by man, you must think that this takes place without the light the senses know, for what belongs to the mind can be apprehended only by the mental powers. And God is the fountain of the purest radiance and so when he reveals himself to the soul, the rays he puts forth are free from all shadow and from intense brightness. (On the Changing o f Names 3-6) The Platonism of the passage is apparent. Philo clearly translates the appearance of God to Abraham into the language of light, of intellectual quest and vision. Republic 7 and the analogy of the Cave are not far away. God is light and we need light in order to see him. The power of vision is linked to our own willingness to purify our own images of God. A final point of comparison should be noted. Philo writes in section 2 of the same treatise ‘He [Abraham], who is in the intermediate stage, is always pressing forward to the summit, being not yet perfect’. Moral perfection as well as intellec­ tual perception are necessary for him who would know God, and the scheme is one of ascent and desire. Desire, ascent, purification, vision - all of these are essential ingredients in the quest of the knowledge of God, and we have met them all before in the Republic and Symposium. Origen’s own position on the possibility and nature of the knowledge of God is outlined sufficiently clearly in the first chapter of On First Principles. For Origen God is an incorporeal, spiritual being, completely devoid of any material characteristics. ‘He is in truth incomprehensible and immeasurable’ (1.1.5). Origen then proceeds to give an exceedingly pure picture of the divine nature, though couched in language which, with one significant modifica­ tion, echoes Republic 6 and 7, especially the latter. For whatever may have been the knowledge which we may have been able to obtain about God, whether by perception or reflec­ tion, we must believe that he is far and away better than our thoughts about him. For if we see a man who can scarcely look at a glimmer or the light of the smallest lamp and if we wish to teach such a one, whose eyesight is not strong enough to receive more light than we have said, about the brightness and splendour of the sun, shall we not have to tell him, that the splendour of the

sun is unspeakably and immeasurably better and more glorious, than all this light he can see? In this passage Origen presents us with an interesting fusion of Hellenic and Christian motifs. On the one side we find him compar­ ing the true light of God with the sensible light provided by the sun, to the disadvantage of the latter. In this he is clearly following in the footsteps of Republic 7. On the other hand we find him distinguish­ ing his position from the misplaced arrogance of Celsus and the visionary tradition of the Greeks. In the passage just cited from On First Principles Origen limits the extent of the mind’s knowledge of God to an awareness of the effects of God, the rays of the sun. The absolute God himself remains in this passage shielded from the sight of created intelligence.5 In Against Celsus 6.66 Origen again tackles the problem of the possibility of knowing God, this time in answer to the objections of Celsus, who is quoted as saying that the Christian position must lead to an affirmation of our ignorance of God. To this Origen replies in a Platonic way by arguing that to remain in the realm of idols and pictures is to be a prisoner of darkness - again a clear reference to Republic 518A - but that to rise above that realm is to enter into the area of light. ‘Anyone who has followed the rays of the Logos is in light . . . which has led the mind of the man who wants to be saved to the uncreated and supreme God.’ Origen then fuses the message of Plato with two scriptural texts, Matthew 4:16 and Isaiah 9:2 - ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.’ He then concludes rather unexpectedly, referring to the light, ‘that is the God Jesus’. A similar expression of the view that Christ Jesus is the end of the Christian pilgrimage occurs in Against Celsus 7.43, where, after citing the question of Philip from John 14:9, Origen continues: ‘Anyone who has understood how we must think of the only begotten God, the Son of God, the firstborn of all creation, and how that Word became flesh, will see that anyone will come to know the Father and Maker of the universe by looking at the image of the invisible God.’ We ought not, however, to be beguiled into supposing that by the expression ‘Son of God’, or indeed by ‘Jesus Christ’, Origen means us to think of the historical figure as the end of our pilgrimage. In Origen’s scheme it is the Logos, the Word of God, who is the central element in his understanding of the person of Christ. Even so, despite the abstract and intellectual impression created by Origen’s theology, we are not to think that he has no place for or

interest in the senses in their approach to God. It is to him above all that Christian spirituality owes the idea of the spiritual senses. Although, in the language of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Origen’s God has no ‘body parts or passions’, Origen does not intend us by this to fall into some emotionless agnosticism about the nature of God. He developed, partly in order to counter such a conclusion, partly to make sense of certain scriptural texts, and probably for the first time, the doctrine of the spiritual senses.6 We find him doing this in a passage from On First Principles (1.1.9). In the sixth beatitude the pure of heart are promised the vision of God. But if God is in principle invisible, how can such a promise be fulfilled? This difficulty was also felt by Gregory of Nyssa, who proposes a different doctrine in his sixth Homily on the Beatitudes. Origen says that we are to see God not with the eyes of the body but with those of the soul. He justifies his contention that such senses do exist by appealing to the Greek version of Proverbs 2:5: ‘You will discover a divine sense.’ Finally in Against Celsus 1.48 he explicitly argues that there is a direct parallel between the bodily and spiritual senses. ‘There are many forms of this sense: a sight which can see things superior to corporeal beings . . . a hearing which can receive impressions of sounds that have no objective existence in the air, and a taste that feeds on living bread that comes down from heaven.’ The argument of the passage is that the purified spirit of the saint can rise above sense to experience in some direct way the Word of God.7 A final and important Platonic element in Origen’s spirituality is his belief that the natural desire for God that each possesses can be both purified and released by moral ascesis and by mental disci­ pline. We may indeed attempt to divert or distort the natural desire for God implanted in each one of us, but we cannot destroy it. The ‘love’ mysticism which is to be found in Plato’s Symposium is taken over by Origen and reworked in his Homilies and Commentary on the Song o f Songs. The main and suggestive differences between Plato and Origen are that (a) For Origen the ultimate goal is union with the Word of God, either for individuals or for the whole Church. For Plato, on the other hand, the end is contemplation of the idea of absolute beauty, (b) Although the motive in both Origen and Plato is love, what that means for Origen is the love of the bride (the human soul or the Church) and the bridegroom (Christ, the Word), while for Plato, marriage imagery is wholly lacking; and although the ultimate vision is conceived somewhat coolly, the journey there is through the stage of homosexual love.

‘Without ceasing’, writes Origen, ‘the soul searches after the bride­ groom, the Word, and when it finds him it looks for him again, like an addict, in other things as well.’6*8 We are persons of desire and that desire finds its completion and resolution in the presence and contemplation of the Word. In a striking image Origen describes the Word as the ‘theological wine’ after which the soul thirsts (cf. On First Principles 2.11.3; Commentary on John 1.30.205). Origen was a Platonist, but he was no wooden or uncritical rehearser of Plato’s teachings. Some points of contrast have already been noticed. There were some areas, however, in which Plato’s influence remained a potent and not altogether beneficent force. Two particularly call for notice, (a) Plato observes in Republic 6 that the number of philosophers will never be large, simply because the demands of the life of philosophy cannot be met by all. Origen, likewise, in the preface of On First Principles, makes a similar distinction between the serious Christian and the mere camp follower, (b) Origen regarded even the historical Jesus as little more than a medium through which the devout Christian must pass if he wishes to arrive at the more serious and central aspects of the Lord. In other words, history is treated by Origen as a transitional stage, through which we must go and in which we must not rest.

Notes 1 Cf. Chapter 1, note 7. 2

Cf. Chapter 1, note 10.

3 Andrew Louth, The Origins o f the Christian Mystical Tradition (Oxford, 1981). 4

For an interesting discussion and rejection of such amphibious real­ ities, as he calls them, see Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius III.10.41, a quotation, though unacknowledged, from Plutarch’s treatise On Isis and Osiris 360D-F, probably derived from Eusebius, Preparation fo r the Gospel 5.5.1.

5 For a perceptive discussion of this issue see J. Dillon, ‘The knowledge of God in Origen’ in R. van den Broek, T. Baarda and J. Mansfield (eds), Knowledge o f God in the Graeco-Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 1988). 6 The most substantial treatment of the spiritual senses in Origen is to be found in K. Rahner, ‘The spiritual senses in Origen’ in Theological Investigations 16 (ET; New York, 1979), pp. 81-103. Rahner discusses both the originality and the sources in his writings of Origen’s teaching on this subject. He sees in Origen’s reply to Celsus a development of the doctrine to be found in On First Principles. He also traces the

influence of Origen’s usage both upon Basil (PG 31, 413-416) and in the prologue to Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary on the Song o f Songs (GNO VI.12.14ff.). 7

For further confirmation of this understanding of John 6:33 in Origen, cf. his exegesis of ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ in On Prayer 27.2.

8

Origen, Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology o f His Writings, ed. Hans Urs von Balthasar, trans. Robert J. Daly (Washington, 1983), no. 768, p. 276.

3 Basil of Caesarea 330-379 (or 377)' INTRODUCTION The second ecumenical council met at Constantinople in May 381. Basil had been dead at least two years, possibly four, by then, yet it would not be unfair to see his hand in the deliberations and final creed of the council, the creed which has survived with a significant addition to this day as the eucharistic creed of the Eastern and Western Churches. It was he more than any other single figure who had ‘managed’ the hostile Emperor Valens and his governor Demosthenes.2 Perhaps more remarkably, he had held together, by a mixture of ‘economy’ and bullying, the various factions within the Church, who were in basic agreement about the central message of the Gospel, the deity (godhead) of the Word of God. He rebuked at one time the great Athanasius of Alexandria (297-373) for the latter’s intervention in the affairs of the embattled church of Antioch; and on another occasion he was equally severe with one of his spiritual mentors, Eustathius of Sebaste.3 Even his own brother Gregory of Nyssa was not spared; Basil castigated his political naivety in several letters.4 Yet, politically sensitive though he was, his theological activity was not restricted to a peace-keeping exercise, in which his own convictions were either minimal or without any effect on the outcome of the debates he witnessed. Since its formulation in 325 the Nicene Creed had had a chequered history. In the period between the death of Constantine and 360 the Church had wit­ nessed more than twelve councils. None of these was then or later regarded as ecumenical, but their very variety of tone indicates the muddled theological atmosphere of 23 years. We can isolate three

distinct features. First there was the desire evident in most of these lesser councils to avoid two contrary extremes, Arianism on the one side, with its denial of the full deity of the Son, and a form of Sabellianism on the other, which threatened to deny any independ­ ent existence to the Son and Spirit. This latter view is connected above all with the name of Marcellus of Ancyra (d. 374), a man whom all followers of Origen were at one in disliking. Within these two extremes, of denying the divinity of the Son and of denying his eternal distinction from the Father, there was considerable free­ dom. Secondly, there arose in about 350 a movement led by Aetius and known as Anomoianism. The term derives from the Greek word for ‘unlike’; and the central idea behind the view of Aetius, and of his disciple Eunomius, was that the Son was unlike the Father. More will be said of this view later. Thirdly, in reaction to this last position, there appeared in about 356 yet another party, the Homoiousians. This party held that the Son was neither of the same essence as the Father - the position of Nicaea - nor of unlike essence from him - the position of Aetius - but of like substance with him. The leaders of this party were all bishops, including Eustathius of Sebaste and George of Laodicea. It was from this last-named group that Basil of Caesarea came. His subsequent insistence on the true and permanent distinction among the three persons of the deity owes something to his earlier membership of this group.

3.1 LIFE The materials for a life of Basil are copious. Aside from his own writings, among which are to be found some 350 letters, we also possess panegyrics from his brother and his friend, scattered notices in the letters and writings of the two Gregorys and the notices on his life in Socrates’ Ecclesiastical History (4.26). With the exceptions of Cicero and St Augustine, we probably know more about him than about any other ancient writer. Basil was born in 329/330 of a moderately wealthy family Of landed aristocrats in Cappadocia. His father, Basil the Elder, was a teacher of rhetoric, his mother, Emmelia, a native Cappadocian. The Christianity of the family came from Basil’s paternal grand­ mother, Macrina the Elder, so called to distinguish her from her granddaughter of the same name, Basil’s strong-minded sister.5 There were four other sisters, whose names have not been

recorded, and four brothers, Basil, Naucratius, Peter, Bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, and Gregory of Nyssa. Basil’s earlier education was carried on under his father at Caesarea, and then, as we learn from Gregory of Nyssa and the church historian Socrates, under the celebrated pagan teacher of rhetoric Libanius at Antioch.6 There survives a correspondence which purports to be between Basil and Libanius and which, if genuine, throws a good deal of light on the relationship between pagan and Christian during the fourth century. After Antioch we find Basil at Athens at about the age of 21, studying avidly with his friend from Cappadocia, Gregory of Nazianzus. Here he spent probably five years till 356 or 357 and was taught by two of the leading masters of the day, one a Christian, Prohaeresius, who later lost his post as a result of Julian’s School Law of 362, the other a pagan, Himerius. Rhetoric would not have meant simply the power to speak well on certain stock themes of the type provided by the rhetorical handbooks of the day. Basil’s nine Homilies on the Six Days o f Creation reveal something of the extent of his familiarity with the science of his day. As S. Giet points out in his introduction to the Sources Chretiennes edition of this work, it indicates a ‘vast erudition’; and even if much of this was borrowed from earlier writers, it would be quite unfair to dismiss Basil’s scientific attain­ ments as some recent writers have done.7 Side by side with a fairly intense literary education, Basil and his friend practised a life of more than usual ascetic rigour. The student life of the pair of them is described in almost hagiographic terms by Gregory of Nazianzus in his Oration 43, a panegyric on his friend. Basil’s baptism occurred in 357. Its relative lateness was fairly characteristic of the period and owes something to two features, the growth of the catechumenate on the one hand and on the other the difficulty involved in the forgiveness of post-baptismal sin. The Emperors Constantine and Constantius were both baptized on their deathbeds. Shortly after this Basil embarked on a tour of the monasteries in Egypt, arriving there not long after the death (356) of Antony of Egypt. However, as we shall see, the ideal of the solitary life never seems to have appealed to Basil. He had been fired with the desire for the religious life partly through the influence of his friend Eustathius of Sebaste, in whose theological circle he initially moved, and partly through the influence of his powerful sister Macrina, who according to Gregory of Nyssa won Basil from letters to the life of perfection. In 358 Basil and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus collaborated in

the production of the Philocalia, an anthology of extracts from Origen designed to show the harmony between, and usefulness for the intelligent Christian of, the study of alien wisdom. The main themes treated are the nature of God, the understanding of Scrip­ ture and the freedom of the will. For the last two topics the Philocalia drew heavily upon On First Principles and Against Celsus respectively. Those for whom Basil compiled these extracts no longer needed to feel that being a Christian meant intellectual poverty or intellectual suicide. The next we hear of Basil is his appearance at a synod held in Constantinople in 360. In Against Eunomius I.65ff., Gregory of Nyssa provides an elaborate defence of his brother’s behaviour at this meeting. He is clearly aware of the fact that there was a question about Basil’s strength of character or presence of mind at the synod, because he challenges the accuser of his brother’s behaviour to explain the fact that Basil is everywhere highly esteemed, while the same could not be said of Eunomius. It was on this occasion that Basil appeared for the first time as a member of the so-called Semi-Arian or Homoiousian party. Its members, prominent among whom were his master in asceticism, Eustathius of Sebaste, and Basil of Ancyra, came to prominence about 356 and endeavoured to oppose the extreme Arianism of Eunomius with­ out at the same time joining the ranks of Athanasius and the supporters of the Nicene Creed. They taught that the Son was of like substance with the Father, neither the same nor different from him. Even if Basil belonged to their number at this period, he later left them and emerged as a strong supporter of the Creed of Nicaea. Basil’s reply to the Apology of Eunomius appeared c. 364 and marks an important stage in his development. Eunomius’ argument has as its main aim the assertion that the Son is unlike the Father. The Father is by nature, and therefore by definition also, unbegot­ ten, and because this is so the Son cannot share the nature of the Father.8 To this assertion Basil and the other Cappadocians are at one in replying that God is beyond the reach of definition, a position that bears a curious resemblance to Arius’ view about the nature of the Father. Basil’s insistence on the ultimate mysterious­ ness of the divine nature was not itself a novelty. Plato had taught, in a celebrated and hackneyed passage in Timaeus, that it was hard to know and difficult to communicate the nature of God to all. Later Platonists went even further, and by the beginning of the Christian era we find writers as diverse as Philo the Jew and Celsus the pagan holding very similar views about the inaccessibility of the

divine nature. Clement of Alexandria was the first orthodox Chris­ tian writer to have stressed the incomprehensibility of God, and on the pagan side we find the last and greatest of the followers of Plato of this period, Plotinus, maintaining the unknown and unknowable character of the supreme One (cf. Ennead V.5.6). What dis­ tinguishes Basil’s approach is less the idea of incomprehensibility than its controversial use. He found himself compelled to defend himself against the charge of agnosticism in consequence and developed a distinction between the incomprehensible being and the comprehensible activity of God. The Emperor Jovian, a supporter of the Nicene party, died after a reign of barely a year and was succeeded in 364 by Valens, who posed great problems for the Nicenes by his strong support of the Arians. It was in this uneasy situation that Basil took over the see of Caesarea and, according to tradition, was consecrated there on 14 June 370. During the eight years of his episcopate he set himself several distinct though connected aims. Above all, he strove for the fragile mixture of peace and truth within the Church itself. In practice this meant a reinstatement of the Creed of Nicaea as the basic standard of belief. This entailed two separate exercises, the exclusion of the Arians and Anomoians on the one side, and on the other an attempt to interpret the creed in such a way as to satisfy the wishes of Athanasius and his ‘party’ of ‘Homoousians’ and also the ‘Homoiousians’ who suspected that Athanasius and the Westerners held too unitary a view of the deity. It was perhaps with this pacific end in view that Basil offered as an analogy of the Trinity the sharing by all three persons in the same class. He seems to have invented this model and, as we shall see in Chapter 6, it had unhappy consequences. Despite his preoccupation with ecclesiastical politics and his desire to neutralize Valens’ attempt, as Basil saw it, to curtail his authority by dividing up the civil diocese (province) of Cappadocia and so depriving Basil of the larger part of his own jurisdiction, Basil did not forget the needs of his congregation, to whom he preached series of homilies, including an important one On the Six Days of Creation. Nor did he forget their temporal needs. In the tradition of the landed gentry to which he belonged, as well as in that of Christian charity, he set up hospitals for the poor, providing for their needs himself and exhorting others to do the same. His social concern, together with his care for the monastic life, mark him out as a wonderfully innovative figure among the bishops of the period. His death on 1 January 379, worn out by hard work and

illness - Gregory of Nyssa’s account strongly suggests that he suffered from a complaint of the liver (cf. PG 4 6,797B) - deprived the Church of someone whose contribution to its life had been striking in many fields.

3.2 MONASTICISM Writing in 1928, in the Bampton lectures for that year, K. E. Kirk has this to say in his Vision o f God: ‘Few historians fail to realise in Saint Benedict the true spiritual heir of the great Cappadocian.’9 St Benedict himself clearly recognized this, when he wrote in the epilogue to his own Rule (= Rule 73) that his monks, in addition to the Bible, should be urged to read ‘the conferences of the Fathers and their institutes and lives and the Rule o f our holy Father BasiV. At the root of later monachism stands Basil, and at the root of his own theology, above all his pneumatology, stands his understand­ ing of the life of the Spirit. But what were the roots of his understanding of this in his own tradition and what was the extent and character of his own contribution to it? Three elements underlie Basil’s peculiar vision. Something has already been said about the Platonic tradition, especially as it was mediated through Origen and perhaps also through Plotinus. The natural implanted love of God needed to be trained and released before it could soar upwards and find its home with the absolute beauty of God. This is the basic theme of Origen’s Homilies on the Song o f Songs and of the first of Basil’s Longer Rules. But this moral and spiritual vision, elitist and grand though it was, did not in Origen find its expression in physical withdrawal from the city or the world. It was ascetic, but not yet monastic. This further element found its first home in Egypt in the middle of the third century in the life of St Antony, whose pursuit of perfection and of God led him to take the unusual step at that date oifuga mundi, flight from the world. As we have seen, Basil made a tour of the monastic foundations of Egypt, shortly after Antony died in 356, and shortly before setting up his own monastery in 357/358. He never, how­ ever, mentions Antony by name, and we can only assume that whatever veneration Basil felt for Antony, the system he embodied of solitary withdrawal never appealed to him. This may have been because he saw only too clearly the dangers of the solitary life in the encouragement it gave to the histrionic elements in human nature. But he was also aware from his friend Eustathius of Sebaste10of the

existence already in Asia Minor of a force of a powerful and potentially destructive character, of enthusiastic but as yet unor­ ganized communities of wandering ascetics, who had been con­ demned at the Synod of Gangra for their antisocial behaviour.11 As yet such movements had no fixed place within the structure of the Church. They did not owe their existence to the inspiration of bishops, and they certainly did not consider themselves as owing them any allegiance. It is no small measure of Basil’s sagacity that he saw the enormous power for good locked up in a movement that had been condemned for its antisocial behaviour - wearing unisex dress, avoiding the normal assemblies of the faithful, refusing to work. His political sense is manifested in his ability to use this inspiration for a lasting good. He saw quite clearly that the good in it could not survive without order, and many of his Longer Rules are an attempt to harness enthusiasm to a higher and more long­ term good. Basil’s own particular contribution to monastic life - to ‘philo­ sophy’12 as he frequently called it - can be measured by remember­ ing the words of Scripture with which he connects his ideal. For Antony the central, evocative text had been Matthew 19:21, recorded as the source of his withdrawal in Athanasius’ Life o f Antony 2, ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor’. For the wandering ascetics the ideal of continuous prayer had found expression in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, ‘Pray con­ stantly’. For Basil, Acts 2:44 seems to have stood at the forefront of his ideal: ‘And all who believed were together and had all things in common.’ Above all in Rule 7 he stresses the essentially communal nature of the ideal to which he invites his monks. Withdrawal there must be, but not solitary withdrawal. In fact so hard did he set his face against such an expression of zeal that he appears much harsher than St Benedict, who is prepared to tolerate it, even if only, as his Rule points out, ‘after long probation in the monastery’. Basil appealed in his enthusiasm for the corporate ideal to Acts 2:44 and on occasion to Acts 4:32.13 But, important though this was for him, it could be claimed that the communal ideal had flourished before Basil among non-Christians, among the Gymnosophist sadhus of India, and, more importantly, among the Pythagorean communities of south Italy, for whom Iamblichus had composed his On the Pythagorean Life some time before 326, the probable year of his death. Scholars have detected the influence of Iamblichus’ writing on Athanasius’ Life o f Antony, and it is therefore not improbable that at least some literary influence filtered through

from Iamblichus to Basil. Even if this be admitted, Basil offers us, in three important particulars, modifications of the austere and aristocratic ideal evident in On the Pythagorean Life: the impor­ tance of manual labour, the need and value of obedience to the superior of the community, and the centrality of fraternal charity. The Greek philosophical tradition set small value on working with the hands. The word banausos (artisan) was a term of disap­ proval and usually applied to the lower classes. In Plato the word has overtones of ‘meanness’ or ‘lack of nobility of soul’ and we never find Aristotle and later writers in the Platonic tradition Plotinus, Porphyry or Proclus - advocating, having much to say about, or writing in favour of, manual work. The Christian tradi­ tion from the beginning was less aristocratic. Joseph was a car­ penter (Matt 13:55) and Jesus himself practised the same trade (Mark 6:3). It was St Paul’s boast, voiced on several occasions, that he had burdened none of the communities who owed their conver­ sion to him, labouring, as he did, with his own hands (cf. 1 Cor 4:12; 1 Thess 2:9). According to Acts 18:3 he was a tentmaker. The majority of the leading apostles were fishermen. With such antecedents it is hardly surprising that manual labour was held in honour among Christians. St Paul had written to the Thessalonians ‘If anyone will not work, let him not eat’ (2 Thess 3:10), and even teachers were not exempt from this general rule, as we learn from a passage from the Didache or Teaching o f the Twelve Apostles of the early second century. Manual labour also played a significant part in the life of St Antony - in obedience, Athanasius tells us in the Life, to the text from St Paul just cited. Despite the caricature of Christianity as being a religion of illiterate peasants, it does remain true that the majority of the early believers were not particularly wealthy, noble or cultivated. It is also true that the earliest ventures into the monastic life had been undertaken by ‘rude mechanics’. With these facts in mind it is surprising to find the highly educated and well-born aristocrat Basil himself engaging in manual labour. In Gregory of Nyssa’s Life o f Macrina, it is related that Macrina was instrumental in inducing her brother Basil to abandon the life of the rhetor and to devote himself instead to a programme of poverty and manual labour (chapter 6). In an interesting letter written to his former friend Eustathius of Sebaste some time after 370, we find Basil extolling the austere lives of the monks he had met on his travels, and above all of Eustathius himself. To such a life Basil felt himself called (Letter 223.2, 3). In Letter 22 O n the perfection of the monastic life’, probably written

in 356, he writes that those who are lazy, and can work but do not, should not eat. The same subject is treated in Rule 42 of the Longer Rules, where Basil insists that the labour undergone is for the benefit of others and not for one’s own. He understands the passage from St Paul to refer to the danger of idleness, not to the need to work for oneself. It was against idleness, also, that in chapter 48 of his Rule St Benedict could write: ‘Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore the brethren ought to be Occupied at definite times in the work of the hands.’14 Basil did not ‘invent’ the idea of religious obedience. Pachomius in Egypt had already done so. He does, however, lay great stress upon it and in the Longer Rules he insists not only on the duty of the superior to correct others but also on his own need to be corrected (Rule 27). Power is not to be used autocratically. Its prime purpose is the instruction and spiritual advancement of the subject (Rules 30 and 31).15 It is possible here also to trace a connection with the Pythagoreans, who were required to listen and obey for five years before being admitted into full membership of the ‘order’. Basil probably also had another motive. His travels had taught him that ascetics left to themselves were in great danger of histrionic selfadvertisement and excess. Against this evil, common life and obedience were seen as valuable protection. A third important feature of Basilian monachism was the stress on fraternal charity issuing in love for the poor. This element in the ascetic life must be seen as a conscious response to the call to love of neighbour in the gospels, ‘and thy neighbour as thyself (cf. Matt 22:39). This is by no means to suggest that fraternal charity had played no part in the life of the Church during its first three centuries. Ignatius of Antioch salutes the church at Rome as ‘pre­ eminent in charity’ at the beginning of his letter to the Romans. Further evidence suggests that in Rome too in the third century much was done for the poor; the story of St Lawrence hints at this. But though the practice of the Church may have been all very well, the theology of the Church was silent. Origen, for example, does indeed cite Matthew 22:37-40, but only to prove the basic harmony between Old and New Testaments. Gregory of Nyssa, though, composed two sermons O n beneficence’, and Gregory of Nazianzus wrote O n love of the poor’ {Oration 14). It is not going too far to see in the concern of the two Gregorys the influence of their brother and friend. / Care for the poor in some form was not restricted to Christians. It was a mark of the well-to-do aristocrat of the period and is praised

by Libanius and Julian. The distinctive feature of Christian phil­ anthropy was the view of the poor as the special representatives of Christ, and this view made the love of Christ the ultimate principle of charity. This is well brought out in the third of Basil’s Longer Rules. Having cited the central text from Matthew, he illustrates and expands its meaning by use of John 13:35: ‘In this shall all know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’ He then goes on to cite the passage from Matthew 25:40, which identifies the poor with Christ himself. Several of his sermons, delivered while still a priest, touch on the subject of helping the poor. Sermon 6 on the text from Luke 12:18 (T will destroy my barns and build greater ones’) is largely concerned with castigating the sin of avarice. Avarice, he writes, is a disease, one of the side effects of which (section 1) is to lead to misanthropy, to forgetting the common nature we all share. Sermon 7, addressed ‘To the rich’, contains a similar message. The search for money can never rest satisfied and is accompanied by a positive mania for saving. In section 3 Basil says he knows some rich people who will fast, go without, pray, but never offer even an obol, a very small coin, to help those in need. Finally, in Sermon 8 (Tn a time of hunger and drought’) we are offered a vivid account of the physical conditions and their human consequences in Cappadocia in 368. In section 8 Basil exhorts his flock to outdo the philanthropy of those outside the Church, and of the saints of the old law, by displaying a like charity towards those suffering the effects of hunger and drought. This social concern of Basil finds its counterpart in his monastic legislation. Moralia 3, for example, cites the dual command of Matthew 22:37-39, and Moralia 5 is simply a string of texts from the New Testament which enforce the same lesson. The Shorter Rules deal on several occasions with the way in which the second com­ mand is to be implemented. Rule 162, for example, cites John 15:13 about laying down one’s life for the brethren, and the following rule assembles rather more biblical quotations to the same end. Rule 175 attends rather to the need for spiritual care for and sympathy with the sinner, grieving for him if he goes astray, rejoicing at his recovery. It is in the Longer Rules, however, that Basil offers a more extended account of the nature of the religious life and of the place within it of love of neighbour. In the very first Rule he traces the root of the life of perfection to the dual command of Matthew 22:37-39. Rule 2 deals with the love of God, which is seen as the realization of the desire for God which from our birth God has

planted within each. It is in the third Rule, O n the love of neighbour’, that Basil gives an extended account of the implications of the second command. He expounds the Rule on the basis of humanistic and scriptural principles. A human being is by nature a sociable being who lives with and enjoys the company of his fellow mortals. He is not by nature either savage or solitary - a point to which Basil returns with considerable vigour in Rule 7. This conception of human beings as naturally inclined to live with and be attracted towards their own kind may arise from Basil’s own experience. It is more probable, however, that it owes much to the Stoic principle of oikeiosis or natural attractiveness of beings of the same class to each other.16 He wishes to show that we are by nature endowed with a natural urge to love and care for each other. It is but a short step from there to John 13:34, T give you a new command, that you love one another’. This scriptural command, which is reinforced by Matthew 25:35 in the parable of the sheep and the goats, shows not only Basil’s insistence on the importance of fraternal charity, but also his belief, again characteristic of the man, that the second command, in this respect like the first, does not oppose our natural inclinations. Basil does not see love of neighbour as a challenge to nature but as its fulfilment. It may be significant in this connection that he makes no reference to the sort of love for enemies of which Christ speaks in the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Matt 5:43-48) and St Paul at Romans 5:5. Even in his innovativeness, Basil’s desire to harmonize culture and revelation seems not to allow him to go much beyond love for one’s own kind in his advocacy of charity.

3.3 DOCTRINE AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT So far Basil’s contribution to the theological enterprise has been largely considered from a monastic viewpoint. Something has been said of the way in which he welded together diverse elements of a Hellenic and Christian character and from them constructed a Christian vision. This vision can pretty well be summed up in the following propositions. Every created spirit, human or angelic, was made with a natural spark of desire for God. The release and the realization of this in-built urge is not spontaneously achieved, but depends on the willingness of the created spirit to mould itself in conformity with the wishes of God and so to become like him. Finally, this likeness once achieved, the spirit is free to see the

beauty which it had so long desired. So, Basil writes in chapter 1, section 2 of On the Holy Spirit that hunting for truth is an arduous business, demanding both intellectual training and moral purity. Becoming like God - the phrase is taken from Plato’s Theaetetus 176B - and knowing God are strongly connected. Religion, for Basil, is intimately linked to the truth about the object of worship, and that truth demands labour both in its discovery and in its understanding. ‘Hunting truth’, he writes in the same section, ‘is no easy task; we must look everywhere for its tracks.’ It follows from this that commitment to true religion is a costly business, demand­ ing not, as it did in the first centuries of the Church, the surrender of life, but devotion to the truth. And for the successful fulfilment of that need we depend upon the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. ‘Therefore, I begin this explanation asking the Holy Spirit to enlighten me.’ Here we find united two themes of great import­ ance: the relevance of doctrine to the life of perfection (and vice versa), and the special role of the Holy Spirit as enlightener, a role indeed that he is consistently said to perform, throughout the work and the letters of Basil. Since it is primarily as the theologian of the Holy Spirit that Basil deserves particular attention, it is instructive to trace his thinking on the nature and office of the third person of the Trinity in the writings that antedate On the Holy Spirit of 375. His earliest datable essay on the subject is Book 3 of Against Eunomius (c. 364). In the seven chapters of this work he deals with the central Anomoian objections to the equality of the Spirit with the Father and Son. The Anomoians had argued that the Spirit was unlike the other two members of the divine triad on principles which derive partly from philosophy and partly from a literal understanding of certain scriptural texts. For them the fact that the Spirit was mentioned third after the other two proved that his nature was inferior to theirs. Again, his inferior activity, that of sanctifying, must mean, so they argued, that his nature was inferior. Because he was neither creator nor generated, there could be no place for him in the Godhead. Finally, they argued that Amos 4:13, ‘God creates the wind’ (= spirit), and John 1:3, ‘All things were made by him’, implied the creaturely character of the Holy Spirit. In the central chapter of his reply, chapter 4, Basil outlines the works of the Holy Spirit and associates him above all with the work of life-giving and perfecting. He perfects all things, but above all, rational creatures, angels and human beings, by forming them in virtue. Basil associates the Spirit with the work of creation and uses

Psalm 33:6 to aid him: ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth all the power thereof.’17 The Spirit, as it were, finishes things off, brings them to perfection; and although this work is primarily seen in the sanctification of spiritual beings, Basil does not seem to think that it is essentially inferior to the work of moulding matter in the first place. The similarity between Basil’s understanding of the work of the Spirit, and that of Origen in On First Principles 1.3, is very clear. On the Holy Spirit probably appeared eleven years later in 375. It is a surprisingly tough-minded, logical treatise. But instead of being directed against the Anomoians, the principal adversary here in view is his old friend and monastic mentor Eustathius, Bishop of Sebaste. It is sad to think that those who had been friends and allies at Constantinople in 360, Eustathius himself, Basil of Ancyra and George of Laodicea, whose opinions then Basil probably shared, now found themselves opposed by him. It is not at all clear that there was any connection at all between Eustathian asceticism and Eustathius’ unorthodox views on the Spirit. For him the Spirit was neither creature nor creator, but somewhere in between. It was the aim of Basil to prove that this territory did not exist. There are several surprising, if not arresting, features of On the Holy Spirit. It is made up of 30 chapters and 79 sections. With the exception of chapter 9 (= sections 22 and 23), to which we shall return, much of the treatise is couched in dry, even arid, language. A surprisingly large amount is concerned with precise meaning and usage of prepositions, the abuse of which, at least on Basil’s version, by his rivals had led to the conclusion that the Son and the Spirit were not fully divine. So the title of chapter 2 runs ‘The origin of the way heretics closely observe prepositions’. Basil devotes considerable space to arguing that such attention to verbal usage has little or nothing to do with the Gospel. But in endeavouring to dispel the spectre raised by the Pneumatomachi or Spirit-fighters, Basil is himself not averse to showing his own logical acumen. A further point worth noting is that, in a work ostensibly devoted to the defence of the deity of the Holy Spirit, the first eight chapters are concerned solely with defending the deity of the Son. In fact, as we learn from 1.3, the occasion of the book’s writing was the occurrence of differing versions of the doxology in public worship. ‘Lately while I pray with the people, we sometimes finish the doxology to God the Father with the form “Glory to the Father with the Son, together with the Holy Spirit”, and at other times we use “Glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit” . Some

of those present accused us of using strange and mutually contradictory terms.’ The central thrust of Basil’s positive argument in favour of the Spirit’s deity is the non-separability of the three persons and the inference from this that they are all three worthy of the same honour. ‘If a man calls on God but rejects the Son, his faith is empty. If someone rejects the Spirit, his faith in the Father and the Son is made useless . . . It is impossible to worship the Son except in the Holy Spirit; it is impossible to call upon the Father except in the Spirit of adoption’ (11.27). Referring to this passage at a later part of the book, Basil writes: ‘Let us return to the point we first raised: that in everything the Holy Spirit is indivisibly and insepar­ ably joined to the Father and the Son’ (16.37). The inseparability of the Spirit from the Father and the Son leads to the conclusion that they are to be glorified together. Equality of honour implies equal­ ity of nature. The scriptural passage used by Basil to establish this conclusion is Matthew 28:19: ‘Go therefore baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ He uses the passage often. It occurs for the first time about 364, in Book 3 of Against Eunomius; in Letter 159, of 373, we find it used again for the same purpose; and in On the Holy Spirit it occurs on several occasions. Its use in liturgical contexts is clear from the second century onwards, if not earlier. The Didache employs it, as does Ignatius of Antioch (7o the Philadelphians 9). It is implied, though not directly cited, by Justin Martyr in his first Apology (section 61), and we also find it in Book 3 of Irenaeus’ Against the Heresies. Yet despite the appear­ ance of this text in this form in most early writers - Eusebius of Caesarea is a notable exception18 - it does not seem to have occurred to them to make any connection between avowed litur­ gical practice and dogmatic conviction. This means that the com­ mon argument legem credendi statuit lex orandi (‘liturgical prayer structures belief’) needs to be understood in a restricted sense. Liturgy preserves a tradition that is later fully understood. Basil seems to have been innovative in making the connection between worship and belief. He seems to have been aware that his argument was open to criticism. The title of chapter 24 of On the Holy Spirit runs: ‘Considering that many created things are glori­ fied proves the absurdity of refusing to glorify the Spirit.’ To which one might reasonably object that if the glorification of X does not imply the deity of X, then part of Basil’s case falls to the ground. It

is only if glorification is restricted to the divine nature that the argument works. The crux of Basil’s position is therefore this. Everybody admits that the Father is God and the Son is God. But we always unite the Spirit with the two other members of the Trinity in our prayers and hymns, and above all our doxologies. Persons so conjointly honoured must share a common nature. To deny the Spirit’s deity is to put a question beside that of Father and Son. Despite all this willingness on Basil’s part to unite the Holy Spirit in common worship with the Father and the Son, he is curiously reticent about the actual assertion of deity and consubstantiality of all three persons, a diplomatic reticence which the Creed of Con­ stantinople also shared. That this reticence was no unintentional accident is indicated by the fact that when Gregory of Nazianzus urged him to come out into the open on the subject, he resolutely declined to do so. His reply to Gregory as contained in his Letter 71 is rather dismissive; he urges his friend to take no notice of any stray criticism of his views. More deeply, however, his concern to preserve the fragile peace of the Church made him unwilling to introduce a further possible split in the ranks of the orthodox. It was something of a diplomatic triumph to have restored the Creed of Nicaea to its proper place within the Church. To add something further to it or to propose a new doctrine was dangerous. Basil almost certainly held the doctrine himself. His celebrated ‘eco­ nomy’ forbade him to put the unity to the test. Basil’s belief in and attitude towards the Holy Spirit were closely linked to his own spiritual convictions about the way we are to draw close to God. Much in this is owed to Plato and Origen. For Basil the Holy Spirit is the crown of righteousness given to the worthy. ‘Who is so ignorant of the good things God has prepared for the worthy’, he writes {On the Holy Spirit 16.40), ‘that he does not understand that the crown of the righteous man is precisely the grace of the Spirit?’ The Spirit cannot dwell with those who are unworthy. Purity of life is a necessary prelude to the life of the Spirit and the enlightenment brought by it. So too Origen had written: ‘There is another grace of the Holy Spirit, which is given to the worthy’ {On First Principles 1.3.7). As for Plato and for Origen, so too for Basil the divine nature and life of the Spirit are thought of as bringing light. Basil writes: ‘He [the Holy Spirit] is the source of sanctification, spiritual light, who gives illumination to everyone, using his powers to search for the truth - and the illumination he gives is himself . . . He shines upon

those who are cleansed of every spot and makes them spiritual through fellowship with himself. . . Spirit-bearing souls, illumined by him, finally become spiritual themselves, and their grace is sent forth to others’ (On the Holy Spirit 9.23). The Platonic background to Basil’s way of thinking becomes even more sharply focused in a further passage in the same work. The gradual education of us by God and his gentleness in so doing are expressed as follows. He knows our eyes are accustomed to dim shadows, so he uses these at first. Then he shows us the sun’s reflection in water, so as to spare us ‘from being blinded by the pure light’ (On the Holy Spirit 14.33). The influence on this passage of Plato’s analogy of the Cave in Republic 7 is unmistakable. In both passages there is a move from the darkness created by shadows and images into the bright light of day. In both cases the sun is a symbol, in Plato for the Idea of the good, in Basil for the Holy Spirit. In both cases the ultimate object of vision is also the medium which enables us to see. So Basil writes: ‘if we are illumined by the divine power, and fix our eyes on the beauty of the image of the invisible God, and through the image are led up to the indescribable beauty of the source, it is because we have been inseparably joined to the Spirit of knowledge’ (On the Holy Spirit 18.47). This enlightening character of the action of the Holy Spirit is connected by Basil with Psalm 36(35):9: ‘In thy light do we see light.’ On this verse Basil comments ‘that is, through the illumination of the Holy Spirit’. Finally, in good Platonic fashion, Basil insists that ‘the Holy Spirit works within the purified soul giving it the ability to see’ (26.61). Even without the parallels from the Republic the stress Basil lays on the release of sight in the vision of God is very clear, and must inevitably recall the rather austere intellectualism advocated by Origen in his tussle with the Montanists, to which he clearly alludes at the opening of Book 7 of Against Celsus. It would, however, be unfair to argue either for Origen or for Basil that their reaction against too great a stress on the emotions led them to adopt an aridly intellectual approach to the life of the spirit. Mind/spirit/nows must not be conceived too narrowly in the Platonic tradition. Mind and heart go together and both need the Spirit’s help if they are to be properly activated. It is in this respect above all that it is possible to distinguish Basil’s position from that of Plotinus, for whom the individual soul/ spirit is not properly distinct from its divine source. For Plotinus the human soul is treated as though it were part of the World Soul, the

third member of Plotinus’ Trinity, which is made up of the One, the Spirit (or Mind, Nous) and the World Soul. For Basil the distinc­ tion between the individual human soul and the World Soul is retained. If, as seems very probable,19 Basil was familiar with some of the Enneads of Plotinus, then it is very instructive to see the way in which he distinguishes his position from that of Plotinus. Plotinus held that the soul as it exists in us is a ‘divine and honourable thing, capable by reason of its being of attaining to God and of ascending to him’. The journey upward is not far and consists of remembering what you once were and are still, if you will only recall it. We are to wake up to our true nature and so discover ourselves to be of divine nature and worth (cf. Ennead V.1.1). The distinction between the individual and the World Soul is that between the part and the whole; and the World Soul itself is but an extension downwards of the Spirit, and the Spirit of the One, from which all proceed by way of emanation. For, although Ploti­ nus expresses the structure of the intelligible universe by means of three distinct hypostases, yet these three merge into each other. There are no straight lines across the map of the universe. Basil’s account of the three ultimate beings and of their relation to the human spirit, though possessing obvious points of contact, is also suggestively different. As with Plotinus Mind and Soul come from the One, so too with Basil the Son and Spirit proceed from the Father. Again, both Plotinus and Basil believe that the individual receives light from the World Soul/Holy Spirit. Yet for Basil all three members of the Trinity are personal and in their essential natures co-equal, while in Plotinus the law of the superiority of the cause to the effect operates. Secondly, the light received by the human soul in Plotinus does not differ essentially from its own light; in Basil it does. In Plotinus the sharp line between creature and creator that we find in Basil simply does not exist. This means that the deification both authors set before us as the ultimate ideal (compare On the Holy Spirit 9.23 and Ennead VI.9.9) needs to be understood in very differing ways.

3.4 CONCLUSION In his whole life and policy Basil represents the best type of ecclesiastic. He tried, with a striking degree of success, to do justice to the claims of unity and truth, of richness and order, of faith and

culture, of theology and the life of the Spirit. We can see this integrating temper at work in the following fields. (a) In order to reinstate the Creed of Nicaea as a basis of agreement among all non-Arians, he gave to the crucial word ‘consubstantial’ a sense which it had previously not clearly pos­ sessed. As will become clear in Chapter 6, he gave it a generic sense, such that the Father and Son were conceived of as equal, because sharing in the same nature. The logical model of member­ ship of a class was being used to provide for ‘consubstantial’ a sense which was acceptable to old and new Nicenes alike. (b) Basil’s re-ordering of the monastic life is part of a strategy to incorporate into one ideal and movement some of the more an­ archic elements in the asceticism of the epoch. His friend Eustath­ ius of Sebaste, to whom Basil owed much of his enthusiasm for the monastic life, was probably connected with a strongly charismatic movement that had flourished in Asia Minor and subsequently been condemned at the Synod of Gangra in 340. It is possible to see Basil having a moderating influence upon this raw material. (c) Basil’s understanding of the life of the human spirit in its journey towards God cannot be viewed in isolation from his understanding of the divine Spirit in its nature and relationship to us. The Holy Spirit is not only he in whom the Christian believes, but he through whom the Christian believes. In his light we see light. (d) Basil was a man of culture, though how deep is a matter of some dispute. This is clear from his letters, from his Address to Young Men on reading the Greek poets, from his nine Homilies on the Six Days o f Creation, and from his book On the Holy Spirit. In none of these writings does he adopt a spirit of slavish and uncritical imitation. Above all, his robust conviction of the centrality of the Christian doctrine of creation and of the difference between crea­ ture and creator informs his discussion at all points.

Notes 1 P. Maraval has argued very plausibly for 377 as the year of Basil’s death: ‘La date de la mort de Basile de Cesaree’, Revue des itudes augustiennes 34 (1988). 2

Cf. In Basilium Fratrem: GNO X.1.2.116.13ff. (perhaps the unnamed agent was Demosthenes, the addressee of Basil’s Letter 225) and for Valens himself, compared to Herod, cf. GNO X.1.2.121.6ff.

3 For the situation at Antioch and its divisions cf. F. Cavallera, Le schisme d’Antioche (IV -V siecle) (Paris, 1905); for Basil’s dealings on

this subject with other church leaders, cf. Letters 67 , 69 and 80 (to Athanasius) and Letters 90 and 92 (to the Western bishops); also Letter 246 (to Damasus). 4

Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 58, with Basil's rather unsympathetic reply in his Letter 71; for the political naivety of Gregory of Nyssa cf. Basil, Letter 58.

5

Gregory of Nyssa, Life o f Macrina 6.

6

Gregory of Nyssa, Letter 13.4; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 4.26; though despite this elaborate education he persisted in slighting it as in Letters 223.2 and 258, where he speaks of culture as ‘vanity’.

7

On the shallowness of Basil’s learning cf. Chapter 1, note 10; and E. Amand de Mendieta, ‘The official attitude of Basil of Caesarea as a Christian bishop towards Greek philosophy and science’ in Derek Baker (ed.), The Orthodox Churches and the West (Studies in Church History XIII; Oxford, 1976).

8 M. F. Wiles, ‘Eunomius: hair-splitting dialectician or defender of the accessibility of salvation’ in Rowan Williams (ed.), The Making o f Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour o f Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1989). 9

K. E. Kirk, The Vision o f God: The Christian Doctrine o f the summum bonum (London, 1931), 9.118.

10 On Eustathius cf. Basil, Letter 223 and J. Gribomont in Dictionnaire de Spiritualiti 4, pp. 1708-12. 11 A selection of the canons of the Synod of Gangra is conveniently gathered together in Creeds, Councils and Controversies, ed. J. Ste­ venson, rev. W. H. C. Frend (London, 1989), no. 2. The general tone of the condemned movement was one of a puritanical rejection of marriage (canon 1) and exaltation of celibacy (canon 4). 12 Cf. Anne-Marie Malingrey, ‘Philosophia’, Etudes et commentaires 40 (Paris, 1961). 13 The importance of these texts and of the idea of community in Basilian monachism is well illustrated by Longer Rules 7.4; 32.1; 35.2. 14 For manual labour as a necessary ingredient of the monastic life compare Monastic Constitutions 4; On the Renunciation o f the World 9; Longer Rules 37.1; and Callinicus, Life o f Hypatius 8.11 with the note there by G. Bartelink on p. 101 of the Sources Chretiennes edition. 15 Part 2 of Gregory of Nyssa, De instituto christiano (GNO VIII. 1.68ff.) contains an elaborate account of the required behaviour of those in charge, the proestotes. A portrait, normally supposed to be of Basil as the ideal superior, is given in ch. 23 of On Virginity: GNO VIII. 1.338.27. 16 There is a discussion of the meaning of oikeiosis by S. G. Pembroke in A. A. Long (ed.), Problems in Stoicism (London, 1971), pp. 114ff.

17 Psalm 32:6 (LXX) is used, apparently for the first time, by Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 1.7 and thereafter, perhaps influenced by him, by Irenaeus, Demonstration 5 and Against the Heresies I.XXII. 1. 18 The suggestion that the text of Matthew 28:19 was not always the same is discussed by H. Benedict Green in ‘Matthew 28:19, Eusebius and the lex orandi’ in The Making o f Orthodoxy, op. cit. 19 For two divergent views on the influence of Plotinus on Basil compare P. Henry in Les etats du texte de Plotin (Brussels, 1938), ch. 5 dealing with Basil; and on the other side J. Rist in P. J. Fedwick (ed.), Basil o f Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic (Toronto, 1981), ch. 5.

4 Gregory of Nazianzus' 4.1 FAMILY AND LIFE Gregory of Nazianzus was the most autobiographic of the three Cappadocians, and from his letters and poems it is possible to piece together something of his own life, attitudes and intimate circle. Like the others he sprang from the landed aristocracy of Pontus. His father, another Gregory, died at a great age in 374 as Bishop of Nazianzus, and his son delivered a sermon on the occasion which has come down to us as no. 18 in his collection. From it we learn that the elder Gregory had belonged before his conversion to Christianity to a little-known sect of Hypsistarians. This group seems to have flourished in Asia Minor in the fourth century and derived its name from the Greek word hypsistos or highest, appar­ ently a cult name for God which both Jews and Gentiles felt themselves able to use. The existence of this syncretistic group in this period is also mentioned by Gregory of Nyssa in 383. Gregory the Elder was converted to Christianity in 325 as a result partly of his wife’s influence, partly of the passage through Nazianzus of bishops making their way to Nicaea for the Council. Shortly afterwards he became a bishop. However, it was to his mother Nonna, rather than to his father, that our Gregory owed his faith. Unlike her husband she had been born a Christian. In an oration on his brother Caesarius, Gregory writes that her husband, unlike herself, had been ‘grafted in from a foreign olive’ (cf. Rom 11:17), while she came from an ancient Christian family. His affection for his mother peeps out in some of his letters. In one to Caesarius (7), written in 362, during the reign of Julian the Apostate (361-363), he remonstrates with his

brother for his ambition, which he hopes will not get to the ears of ‘our noble mother, who would be inconsolable if she heard it’. Ten years later in a letter to Basil he speaks of his mother’s physical weakness and of her nearness to death, and we must assume that she died soon after this letter. He does however use the occasion of the panegyric on his father to speak in generous terms of her own devotion to God and her care for the house. Gregory contrasts his mother favourably with Eve. The latter induced Adam to sin and through that to death; Nonna, on the other hand, led her husband to eternal life. She clearly understood that the only true nobility was beauty of soul, and preserving and perfecting the image of God within. With so much evident gratitude to and affection for Nonna, it is perhaps strange that no separate panegyric records her life and virtues. Gregory’s own birth has been variously dated. J. Mossay has recently argued for the year 300. This would mean, if Mossay is correct, that Gregory began his university course at Athens in 351 at the advanced age of over fifty, which would be unusual and therefore unlikely. It seems better, therefore, to retain the tradi­ tional date of 329. His meeting at Athens with Basil, which was fraught with considerable consequences, has already been chron­ icled, as have the principal features of the studies he would have gone through and the teachers who may have influenced him. The bitterness with which at a later date (362) Gregory greeted the Julianic law2 is reflected both in his attack on Julian in his fourth Oration and in his panegyric on his brother Caesarius. Gregory’s own flair for fine writing is evident in his sermons; it is worth remarking that the Suda, a tenth-century literary encyclopedia containing much valuable information about Greek literature, tells us that Gregory’s style owed much to the influence of a secondcentury Greek orator, Polemo, noticed by the third-century histor­ ian of philosophy and rhetoric Philostratus. The philosophy department of the university was only slowly recovering from the torpor of the third century3 and we cannot assume that the carefully constructed syllabus of the early fifth century was yet in operation. It is hard, therefore, for us to know just how much of ancient philosophy Gregory knew. Like many of the Fathers he was coy about express references to the pagan philosophers. He mentions Porphyry only once; Plotinus, never. Yet his interest in a serious, reflective approach to religion can be gauged from the fact that, shortly after he left Athens, together with Basil he compiled a collection of extracts from the writings of

Origen, the Philocalia, to show the harmony of faith and reason. In Letter 115, Gregory describes it as being of use to serious students. Shortly after this, or perhaps at the same period, we find Gregory co-operating in another venture of Basil’s, the monastery founded by Basil on the river Iris, of which Basil gives a flattering if not wholly accurate account in his Letter 2. Gregory’s own letters of the period, especially 4 to 6, give his own, less lyrical version of the actualities of Basil’s project. Not long after, perhaps at the instance of his father, Gregory was induced to take a step in his life which he subsequently regretted and from which even then, perhaps in 364, he attempted to escape. He was ordained priest. The whole of his long second Oration is devoted to defending his action in his unsuccessful flight. The argument explores the usual themes, his own unfitness and even more his unworthiness for such responsibility. It formed a pattern for future similar exercises in the same genre, above all from St John Chrysostom, whose treatise On the Priesthood rehearses many of the themes of Gregory. The Western Church also bene­ fited from the sermon, as it was one of the nine of Gregory’s sermons translated into Latin by Rufinus (c. 345-410) towards the end of the century.4 In 372 Basil had Gregory made Bishop of Sasima, a small town in that part of the Roman province of Cappadocia presided over by Basil. The diocese was insignificant and Gregory seems to have had no taste for the work of a bishop. As far as we can make out, he continued to reside at Nazianzus until the death of his father in 374 and probably later. The great moment of his life came during the Council of Constantinople in 381. Two years before it opened Gregory had been busy in the capital and had delivered in the church of the Resurrection his five Theological Orations, which sum up in a clear and elegant fashion the faith of the Church on the nature of God and of the Trinity. The first oration contains a sharp warning of the danger of trying to do theology without due atten­ tion to the moral character of the enquirer and also to the reverence needed in the presence of mystery. Gregory endeavours to retain a difficult balance between his assertion, in the second oration, of the divine unknowability, and in the fourth and fifth of the divinity of the Son and the Spirit. So eminent a theologian claimed the attention of emperor and assembled bishops and, despite what turned out to be his political naivety, he was called on to ascend the seat of Constantinople, vacated by the Arian Demophilus in 380. A little later, on the death of Meletius of Antioch, the president of the

council, in May 381, Gregory was chosen to be his successor. Unfortunately, Gregory’s defence of the wrong side in the dispute about the rightful successor to the see of Antioch - he thought it should be the strong Nicene Paulinus, others thought it belonged by right to Flavian - together with his gullibility over the consecration of Maximus the Cynic, brought about his downfall. This downfall was the more easily achieved because it was conveniently dis­ covered that, by accepting the see of Constantinople, Gregory had transgressed canon 6 of Nicaea, which forbade the translation of bishops. Gregory could hardly resist the combined pressure of the factions massed against him and he left the capital for Nazianzus, where he seems to have remained for the rest of his life, dying about the year 391. These remaining years were spent in obscurity. Jerome tells us that the evening of his life was spent by Gregory in monastic solitude. His time was profitably occupied in writing letters to friends and composing verses on his own life and on the central doctrines of the faith. It is impossible to believe that he did not in some measure regret the glory and the business which a cruel fate had forced him to relinquish. On the other hand it is equally hard to believe that in his heart of hearts the life of seclusion and letters, otium cum dignitate, did not agree better with his sensitive soul than the world of political activity in the service of the Church. Doubtless it was this tension in him that appealed so strongly to Cardinal Newman.5

4.2 MAN OF LETTERS, THEOLOGIAN It may appear odd to begin an account of the significance of Gregory in such a way. After all, to later generations he was always ‘the Theologian’, and it is largely because of his Theological Orations that he is known. It is also true that the five orations apart, his letters to Cledonius (= Letters 101,102 and 202) in answer to the challenge of Apollinarianism have always been regarded as em­ bodying the most neat and effective reply to Apollinarius. Never­ theless if his performance is compared with that of either of the other two Cappadocians, the limited nature of his own contribution becomes clear. The ‘general’ and traditional character of Gregory’s own theo­ logical positions can be seen by listing his views on the principal areas of discussion. For him, in the first place, evil is non-material, a position which he inherited from Origen (cf. Commentary on

John 2.13.92ff.), and is largely to be explained in terms of ignor­ ance. Salvation comes primarily through enlightenment, and it is, therefore, no surprise to find that ‘light’ is the characteristic term Gregory uses for referring to God. So, Moreschini6 can write that from 363 ‘light’ becomes the most common designation of God in Gregory. A particularly clear example of this tendency occurs in Oration 32.15, which begins with the text from 1 John 1:5, ‘God is light’, and then proceeds to elaborate on the various other texts from the Bible which refer in turn to God’s brightness, to our present darkness, and to our future enlightenment (cf. Ps 18:12; 1 Cor 13:12). Indeed it is this very divine brightness that makes him inaccessible to impure and created intelligences. So Gregory writes in Oration 2.5 Ί am not so unaware of the divine greatness and human littleness, as not to think it a great thing for the whole created realm to come near to God, who is the brightest and most shining purity, far above all material and immaterial nature’. Evil, then, is darkness; God is light; and in the centre of Gregory’s thinking lies a basic soteriological concern, and, as we have seen, that soteriological concern expresses itself in terms of enlightenment. God can only be a true light to those who are pure of heart, and this means that the preliminaries to full salvation are moral purity leading to vision. In this also Gregory shows himself a follower of Origen, and through him of Plato, for both of whom access to the highest mysteries is only gained by those who have been purified through the necessary training of morality and mind. The spirit, therefore, of Republic 7 and On First Principles 2.11.7 is clearly discernible in Orations 9.2 and 27.3. Gregory’s insertion into the tradition is clearly discernible from the last passage, where he writes: ‘For the impure it is not safe, we may safely say, to touch the pure, just as it is unsafe to fix weak eyes on the sun’s rays.’ If this text is compared with Republic 516A, the Platonic parentage is obvious. The purification/light connection is neither isolated nor original in Gregory, nor does his account of the nature of Christ himself differ greatly from that of Origen. Both writers insist on the full humanity and divinity of Christ. Both insist that by full human­ ity they mean that Christ possessed a full and complete body, soul and spirit. The strong resemblance between Origen’s assertion of this position in his Dialogue with Heraclides 7 and Gregory’s Letter 101 again suggests the dependence of Gregory on Origen. This impression is reinforced by comparing the insistence of both writers on the mediatorial role of the human soul of Christ, as the place where the union of divine and human in Christ takes place. Origen

in On First Principles 2.6.3 speaks of the soul as ‘mediant between the deity and the body’, while Gregory in Letter 101 writes: ‘Mind is mingled with mind, as nearer and more closely related, and through it with the flesh, being a mediator between God and carnality.’ Gregory’s elegance in formulating theological statements can be seen in his defence of the full humanity of Christ and of the co-equal Trinity, and it may be due to this fact that he is owed the title ‘Theologian’. It is to him that we owe the formula ‘what has not been assumed, has not been healed’ in Letter 101, although, as we have seen, the theology underlying it is not novel or peculiar to Gregory. It is to him also that we owe the formula of one nature and three hypostases in section 9 of his Oration 31 (= fifth Theological Oration). Again, Letter 101 expresses neatly the vital differences between the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation as follows: ‘The Saviour is made of elements, which are distinct from each other. . . yet he is not two persons . . . for both natures are one by combina­ tion, the deity being made man and the manhood deified . . . And I say different elements, because it is the reverse of what is the case in the Trinity; for there we acknowledge the differences so as not to confound the Persons.’ A crude paraphrase of this elegant expres­ sion might read ‘In Christ there are two “whats” and one “who” ; in God there are three “whos” and one “what” ’. In many ways Gregory was an elegant, orthodox and unexcep­ tional writer, more memorable for his powers of expression than for any strikingly new contributions to the history of theology. But despite the temptation to dismiss him as merely a fine writer of late antique prose and verse and in that respect not inferior to his pagan contemporaries, such a judgement fails to do him complete justice. In two respects at least he advocates positions which had not become current when he did so, and in the second of these he adumbrates a point of view taken up much later by John Henry Newman and the Second Vatican Council. The first of these is his warm and at times indiscreet advocacy of the deity of the Holy Spirit. The first hint we have of this comes in a letter written to Basil in 372/373, in which he censures his friend for his failure to assert in clearer and less ambiguous language the full deity of the Holy Spirit. Basil’s silence had apparently led some to suppose that he denied the doctrine in question, and in the letter (58) Gregory had defended his friend on the grounds of caution and the consequent need to ‘economize’ the truth. Basil’s answer to the charge in Letter 71 need not here detain us. What is important is that Gregory

there and thereafter appears as an uncompromising advocate of the doctrine of the Spirit’s divinity. In this view, which we find unambi­ guously expressed in his fifth Theological Oration, he is clearly going beyond both Origen and the cautious and ambiguous utter­ ances of Basil, who even in On the Holy Spirit had declined to call the Holy Spirit either God or consubstantial. In this respect it is instructive to compare Basil with Gregory’s assertions in section 10 of the same oration. ‘What, then? Is the Spirit God? Most cer­ tainly. Well, then, is he consubstantial? Yes, if he is God.’ The only earlier writer with whom Gregory’s assertions can be compared is Athanasius, in whose Letters to Serapion we find a similar ciarity. The similarity of view between Gregory and Athanasius both on this subject and on the nature of Christ’s Incarnation in Gregory’s fourth Theological Oration makes it not improbable that even in this area Gregory is a derivative rather than innovative writer. Indeed it may be that very traditional character of his writing that made him so well thought of among later writers. Even if it is hard to establish any real novelty of thought in Gregory on the subject of the deity of the Holy Spirit, there remains one area where he seems to mark a development. In the same oration, in section 21 he begins on a long explanation for the silence of the Old Testament on the deity of the Holy Spirit. Gregory then elaborates a general theory of development, which he then applies to the doctrine of God in section 26. ‘For the matter stands thus: The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly and the Son more obscurely. The New manifested the Son, and sug­ gested the deity of the Holy Spirit. Now the Spirit dwells among us, and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of himself.’ The reason advanced by Gregory for the gradual nature of the revela­ tion of the Trinity is the interesting one that, had all been told at the beginning, it might have been too much for the created intelligence to grasp. We need time to be introduced to the sublime mystery of the Trinity. ‘For this reason it was, I think, that he gradually came to dwell in the disciples, measuring himself out to them in accord­ ance with their capacity to receive him.’ Only gradually does the Spirit reveal himself to us in accordance with our ability to receive. There are two correlative principles at work here. The first is the importance of history in revelation. Unlike those who went before him and claimed, as did Origen in On First Principles 1.3, that the Spirit was to be found in the Old Testament in Genesis 1:2 and Psalm 33(32):6, Gregory holds that the Old Testament contains no doctrine of the Holy Spirit. In other words, there is a progressive

unfolding of revelation. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were not crypto-Trinitarians; they were biblical monotheists. The second point is that the reason for this gradualness was the condition of the human race. Gregory sums up his position in section 27 of his fifth Theological Oration as follows: ‘You see lights breaking upon us gradually; and the order of theology, which is better for us to keep, neither proclaiming things too suddenly nor yet keeping them hidden to the end.’ Apart from certain hints of development and of progressive revelation in St Irenaeus, Gregory is a solitary voice in his assertion of a principle which was later to play so large a part in theology. But despite this piece of innovation, Gregory does not seem to have been much influenced by it in his understanding of the life of the Spirit, in which there is little to distinguish his position from that of Origen and Basil. He, like them, stresses the luminous character of God and uses those texts in the Bible that reinforce this point. Behind Gregory, therefore, lie the image of the Cave in Plato’s Republic and the following biblical texts: Hosea 10:12 (in the LXX), ‘Light to yourselves lamps of knowledge’7 - a passage also employed on several occasions by Origen; and four passages from the Johannine writings with the same message - 1 John 1:5; John 1:9 applied to the Spirit not to the Word, as it had been by Basil;8 John 8:12; and John 12:46. Gregory was a very ‘traditional’ writer. Partly for that reason and partly because of the ‘competition’ from Basil and Gregory of Nyssa it is easy to undervalue his contribution to theology and spirituality. He was not greatly enamoured of the way the Anomoians, Aetius and Eunomius, carried on their arguments, and accused them of being logic-choppers rather than men of the Gospel (cf. Oration 27.3). In one of his sermons he expresses his own attitude as follows: ‘Nothing so unites the sincere worshippers of God as agreement about God; nothing so sets them apart as difference of opinion’ (Oration 6.12). He was a literary man and a poet rather than an Athanasius or a Basil. Even so, it is important to remember that despite his disclaimers Gregory could argue, especially when called upon to defend orthodoxy in the church of the Resurrection in Constantinople, the scene of the five Theo­ logical Orations. Again, as will be indicated in chapter 6, and as we have already seen in connection with his teaching on the Holy Spirit, he was capable of espousing positions and using models which were both new and influential.

4.3 SPIRITUALITY Gregory’s approach to the spiritual life owes much to Origen. Above all he makes a very close connection between theology and spirituality. Light imagery abounds in both. In this he is unlike Gregory of Nyssa, who is traditionally and accurately connected with the imagery of darkness. For Gregory, as for Plato and Origen, the conditions for advance in the Spirit are just the same as those for advance in true understanding of God. Likeness to God, moral purity (Matt 5:8, 48) are indispensable for the removal of heresy. In Oration 35.2 it is by means of the light-bearing character of the Spirit that the darkness of error and deceit is put to flight; and in a remarkable passage in Oration 33.11 the purpose of the universal Gospel is that nothing should be left untouched by the triple light. If these were all we had to go on we might be forgiven for thinking that Gregory’s approach to theology was solely intel­ lectual. We need however to remember, before we pass any judgement on Gregory, that the activity of the mind in religious enquiries must not be conceived in a purely mental fashion. In fact the excessive intellectualism of the Anomoians was what he prin­ cipally protested against. It is also important to remember that there exist passages in Gregory where the inaccessibility of God is stressed. In his second Theological Oration he insists that God is exceedingly difficult to know, and that for a variety of reasons. We must learn to value the knowledge of God we have been given; we must be saved from pride and, above all, we need to remember that between us and God ‘there exists the darkness of the body, like the cloud of old between the Egyptians and Hebrews’ (section 12). The ascent up the mountain of the knowledge of the Lord is a constant struggle and never issues in total success. At the end of this oration Gregory suggests that only the angels possess that clear enlighten­ ment that enables them to look upon the divine splendour. This doubt about the ultimate ability of the created intelligence to arrive at any more than an imperfect understanding of the nature of the Trinity finds expression at the close of the fifth Theological Oration. In that passage he dismisses all the analogies and models offered for the understanding of God. ‘Finally, then, it seems best to let the images and shadows go, as being deceitful and very short of the truth; and clinging myself to the more reverent conception, and resting upon few words, using the guidance of the Holy Spirit. . . I shall keep to the end the enlightenment I have received.’ But even though it is possible to see in Gregory of Nazianzus doubts about

the possibilities of the human mind, he hardly goes as far as Gregory of Nyssa in this particular direction.9 In his discussion of the Cappadocians in The Study o f Spirituality Andrew Louth devotes no space at all to Gregory of Nazianzus, except to connect him with Basil’s monastic activities and the composition of the Philocalia.10 This somewhat dismissive attitude is a pity and to some extent characterizes the undervaluing of Gregory’s spirituality in Western circles. Part of the reason for this is that, as we have seen, much of Gregory’s approach owes a good deal to the tradition in which he stands, a tradition in which the upward motion of the human spirit meets the downward motion of the divine Spirit, above all as it comes to us in the person of Christ. There is one area, however, in which on the face of it Gregory differs both from Origen and from the other two Cappadocians. D. Winslow writes in The Dynamics o f Salvation: ‘We would point out that no Christian theologian prior to Gregory employed the term theosis (or the idea contained in the term) with as much consistency and frequency as did he.’11 It has been calculated that the verb theod occurs 21 times and the neologism theosis ten times. Even Plotinus is restrained in comparison with Gregory.12 The word means ‘deification’ and has indeed a parallel in meaning, if not in form, with Athanasius, who regularly sees the term of salvation as ‘deification’, though he does not use the actual expression theosis. But what did Gregory mean by it? Certainly not that the barriers that separate creature from creator are abolished. On the other hand it means a good deal more than moral goodness and religious truth. Winslow writes: ‘theosis describes our progressive growth towards an adopted dignity of fulfilled creatureliness’,13 while Florovsky, more strongly: ‘We are in intimate connexion as human persons with the living God. To be with him is to dwell in him and to share his perfection.’14 One thing that emerges quite clearly from Gregory is that the agent of deification is God and not we ourselves. In his fifth Theological Oration he argues that the Spirit must be divine, because he deifies. The Spirit draws us into a new relation­ ship with the Godhead, and this relationship presumes, though it mysteriously transcends, moral, spiritual and intellectual perfection. Why did Gregory use or rather invent this expression? It is hard to say. The basic idea was the common property of most of the Eastern Fathers, and as there seems no obvious nuance to be, conveyed, it is possible that Gregory used it for ‘controversial’ purposes. The great Plotinus had expressed his ideal in similar

language at Ennead VI.9.9, and Gregory’s aim may well have been to out-trump the most serious rival to the Gospel by claiming for the Gospel precisely the same language as Platonists were accus­ tomed to use in their writings, though giving the language a quite different sense.

4.4 EPILOGUE Gregory’s friendship with Basil, dating as it did from their under­ graduate days at Athens in 351-356, was probably the most signi­ ficant factor of his life. It was at the same time for him both a blessing and a misfortune. Basil was a leader of men, a founder, an organizer, an ecclesiastical politician, someone to whom sub­ sequent generations could look back with gratitude for his varied contributions to the life of the Church. He tamed and organized the wild wandering ascetics and brought them under a stable rule; he brought together a faction-ridden Church and was in large measure responsible for the adoption of the Creed of Nicaea. Gregory was an introvert, a poet, a man of letters. In ‘The rise and fall of Gregory’,15 J. H. Newman characterizes him as follows: ‘Gregory disliked the routine intercourse of society; he disliked ecclesiastical business, he disliked publicity, he disliked strife, he felt his own imperfections, he feared to disgrace his profession, and to lose his hope.’ Yet despite the great difference in temperament of the two men, where would Gregory have been without his more masterful friend? During the only period of his life when he rose to a position of real influence, he was no great success in administration and politics. ‘It is plain’, writes Newman in the essay already referred to, ‘that the gentle and humble minded Gregory was unequal to the government of the church and province of Constantinople, which were as unworthy as they were impatient of him.’ Yet with all his ecclesiastical shortcomings and his theological and spiritual traditionalism, there is something extraordinarily charming about him. This results partly from the tension evident within him between love for the retired life and a certain hankering after the positions of evident importance for which his sensitive nature did not fit him, but which he coveted. Had he been a more thoroughgoing advocate of retirement, he would doubtless have suffered less, but he would also have been a far less interesting human being. Then, too, there is his flair for the memorable

phrase, in which he sums up a whole theological position, some­ times neither particularly profound nor original, but a guide for future generations. Finally there is his sensitivity. In Letter 80, written either to Eudoxius or to Philagrius between 380 and 382, he writes as follows: You ask me how my affairs are. Miserable. I have lost two brothers, the one of the spirit, Basil, and the one of the flesh, Caesarius. I shall cry out with David, ‘My father and mother have left me’ [Psalm 27(26): 10]. My body is in a sorry state; old age is over my head. Cares and business worry me, as do false friends and the shepherdless state of the Church. Good is des­ troyed, evil is naked; we are at sea by night without any light, Christ is asleep. What further must I endure? There is only one release from evil - death; and even that frightens me, to judge from what I here experience. Could anything be more depressing? It is hardly surprising that Newman found him so congenial a character. The sentence with which Newman ends his essay may form a fitting coda to this account: ‘And thus I take leave of St Gregory, a man who is as great theologically as he is personally winning.’ If theological greatness be thought to include the power to express neatly what others have laboured at, then Gregory was a great as well as an influential theologian.

Notes 1 The most useful accounts of the life and works of Gregory of Nazianzus are by B. Wyss in Reallexicon fiir Antike und Christentum, by J. Mossay in Theologische Realenzyklopadie, and by H. G. Beck, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich), Philosophisch-historische Abteilung (1977.4). 2 For Julian’s ‘savage’ edict see Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 22.13.7; 25.4.20. 3 For an account of the school of Athens see the introduction to the Bude edition of Proclus, Theologia Platonica 1 by H. G. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink (Paris, 1968), especially pp. xxxv-xlviii; also p. xxxviii, note 2. 4

Apart from Sermon 2, Rufinus also translated 6 ,1 6 ,1 7 ,2 6 , 27, 38, 39 and 41. It is surprising that, except for 27, Rufinus translated none of the other theological orations of Gregory.

5 J. H. Newman, ‘The rise and fall of Gregory’ in Historical Sketches II (London, 1872), ch. 4.

6

C. Moreschini, ‘Luce e purificazione nella dottrina di Gregorio Nazianzeno’, Augustinianum (1973), pp. 535-49.

7

For the use of Hosea 10:12 cf. Oration 32.12.

8

Compare Basil, On the Holy Spirit 16.47 with Gregory, Theological Oration 5.3.

9

For a discussion of Gregory’s anthropology see Anna-Stina Ellverson, The Dual Nature o f Man (Uppsala, 1981).

10 Andrew Louth in C. Jones, G. Wainwright and E. Yamold (eds), The Study o f Spirituality (London, 1986), pp. 161-8. 11 Donald F. Winslow, The Dynamics o f Salvation: A Study in Gregory o f Nazianzus (Cambridge, MA, 1979), p. 179. 12 Plotinus never uses the words theod or theosis, though he does use ‘to become God’ at Ennead VI.9.9.58, while preferring both there and at Ennead I.2.6.3 the language of ‘being’ rather than that of ‘becoming’ God, doubtless as better reflecting his conviction that we are always divine and do not become so. 13 Winslow, op. cit., p. 189. 14 G. Florovsky, Eastern Fathers o f the Fourth Century (Paris, 1931). 15

See above, note 5.

5 Gregory of Nyssa 5.1 LIFE AND WORKS Gregory of Nazianzus delivered funeral orations on his brother Caesarius, his sister Gorgonia and his father, the elder Gregory. He also preached a long address on Basil. Basil himself seems to have been less aware of the importance of family ties. Gregory of Nyssa, however, is full of his family. Not only does his brother Basil loom large in letters and treatises alike; we are also made aware of the existence of two other of their siblings, about whom we learn nothing from Basil at all: the young brother Naucratius,1killed in a hunting accident, and the great sister Macrina, whose life Gregory wrote and whose deathbed forms the mise en scene for Gregory’s treatise On the Soul and Resurrection. Gregory differs from the more austere attitude of his brother in one other personal respect: it is altogether probable that Gregory was married. It is true that he seems to have regretted this step. A passage in chapter 3 of On Virginity discusses the married state in an unflattering way. It is also true that the name of his wife is a matter of uncertain conjecture from a letter by Gregory of Nazianzus. She may have been called Theosebeia.2 The other facts of a singularly uneventful life are briefly told. Unlike his brother and friend he did not enjoy the benefits of life at the university of Athens. In one of his letters he claims that all he had acquired in the field of higher learning3 he owed to his brother Basil, a claim which, if true, says much for the teaching abilities of the one and for the docility of the other. Even so it is hard to believe that Gregory derived all his knowledge of philosophy and theology from his brother, if only because his grasp of these areas seems

greatly superior to Basil’s. Whatever be the nature of Gregory’s intellectual debt to his brother, his ecclesiastical promotion owed everything to him. Despite Gregory’s unsuitability for and naivety in office - a fact to which Basil’s own letters bear frequent and eloquent testimony4 - he was made Bishop of the insignificant and newly created see of Nyssa in 372, largely to support his brother’s position in that part of Cappadocia which was left to him after the boundary changes of the Emperor Valens in 371/372. Gregory’s career in Nyssa was chequered; exiled in 375 by the Arians, he was allowed to return in 378 in virtue of an imperial decree of that year. After the death of his brother in January 379 (or perhaps 377) Gregory came into his own. He took part in 381 at the Council of Constantinople, some time before the convening of which he had composed his massive refutation of Eunomius in his three books Against Eunomius. So high was his standing during and after the council that he delivered the funeral oration in honour of the deceased president, Meletius, and was appointed by the Emperor Theodosius one of the commissaries (inspectors of orthodoxy) for the civil diocese of Pontus.5 It was also, presumably, at the instance of the same Theodosius that he was appointed to deliver the funeral orations in honour of the Emperor’s wife Aelia Flacilla in 383 and of his young daughter Pulcheria two years later. The year 385 marks the high-water point of Gregory’s external career. He was probably still alive in 393, since Jerome’s work On Famous Men, composed in that year, mentions Gregory as though he were still alive. He may have died a little later. Gregory’s importance for posterity, however, is not to be sought in his ecclesiastico-political addresses and activities. It is as a writer, and above all as one whose views change importantly under certain external influences, that he claims our attention. Much of what he wrote was composed in direct response to the suggestion and memory of Basil.6 Among such writings must be mentioned On Virginity (371/372), which offers a philosophical underpinning to Basil’s own Rules. Again, Against Eunomius represents in part a defence of the good name of Basil.7 Finally, the two treatises On the Six Days o f Creation and On the Making o f Man are critical continuations of Basil’s own works in the same areas. The family element is also discernible in On the Soul and Resurrection, a work which owes much to Plato’s Phaedo and has as its setting the deathbed of Macrina, whose Life he also composed. These writings can all be roughly dated between 380 and 382 and belong to a period of great literary activity. It is much less possible to date the

great Catechetical Oration with any certainty. It is odd in that it omits some of the normal concerns of Gregory. The fact that it was intended for catechists may explain the silence on the divine infinity. The great ascetico-mystical treatise the Life o f Moses, and the Homilies on the Song o f Songs, are usually assigned to the evening of Gregory’s own life, somewhere between 385 and 392, but there is no real certainty on this matter. There is also a host of other homilies and minor dogmatic treatises designed to refute various aberrations on the nature of God and of Christ.

5.2 SPIRITUAL TEACHING - THE INFLUENCE OF ORIGEN (a) Exegesis Although Gregory only mentions Origen twice by name8 in the whole volume of his writing, it is quite clear that his debt to him throughout his career was immense. In practice, however, Gregory was forced to modify, if not to abandon entirely, the principles on which Origen’s theology reposes and on which his spiritual system rests. Gregory’s need to refute the heresy of Eunomius forced him to rebuild his spiritual vision on the un-Origenistic base of the divine infinity, and his dependence on the Great Letter ascribed to Macarius (a fourth-century Egyptian abbot), which is clear in his own De Instituto, made him aware of the importance of emotion in religion. Even so, it was Origen’s perception of the inspired char­ acter of all Scripture (cf. 2 Tim 3:16)9 that lay at the root of Gregory’s search for a hidden meaning to the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, to justify their place in the Old Testament. The methods outlined by Origen in Book 4 of On First Principles, with which to refute the drastic critique of the whole of the Old and a large part of the New Testament by Marcion, were also used by Gregory. In his use of them, indeed, he was a good deal more thoroughgoing than was his brother Basil. Basil writes against allegory in On Faith, in contrast to Gregory’s prologue to his Commentary on the Song o f Songs, defending it. In one particular feature of his exegetical technique Gregory exploits a tool employed indeed by Origen, but to a far smaller degree. Cardinal Danielou entitled this process enchainement or connection, a translation of the Greek term akolouthia. Gregory’s preoccupation with this notion is well illustrated from his enormous and varied use of the word. It appears in logic, cosmology, history and exegesis; and it signals Gregory’s search for an underlying and

coherent pattern, which will give sense to the apparent casual and haphazard order of events, and order of narration, in the Bible. So, when Gregory writes in the Life of Moses (11.42) ‘Let us return to the connection of the text’, he does not simply mean that we shall now deal with what comes next, but rather, or also, with the implied logical consequence of what went before.10 Gregory’s Homilies on the Beatitudes provide a wealth of exam­ ples of this principle in practice. The opening of the second homily runs as follows: ‘It seems to me that the Beatitudes are arranged in order like so many steps, so as to facilitate the ascent from one to the other.’ The consequence of this conviction is that Gregory is always eager to establish close, and, it must be said, at times artificial, links between one Beatitude and the next. Later on in the same homily he writes: ‘If we are able to contemplate the transcen­ dent land above the heavens [cf. Plato, Phaedrus 245], whose capital is the city of the king, of which as a prophet says “glorious things are spoken” [Psalm 87(86):3], we shall no longer be sur­ prised at the order in which the Beatitudes follow each other.’ Again, we find at the opening of the third homily, ‘In orderly sequence [akolouthia] the Word shows through the Beatitudes the third height.’ A similar conviction of the non-haphazard character of the words of the Bible is clear in Gregory’s treatment of the Psalms, from the opening paragraph of which his preoccupation with such ‘connections’ is clear.

(b) E m Underlying and enabling the upward movement of the soul in Plato’s Symposium is the unsatisfied desire to behold ultimate beauty. This pattern is taken over by Origen, above all in his Commentary on the Song o f Songs, though as we have seen he introduces appropriate modifications into the general scheme. Above all Origen personalizes the ultimate object of search. Greg­ ory, likewise, assumes desire, eros or pothos,11 to lie at the root of human craving for God. It is a theme that finds expression in all his ascetic writings. At the opening of his series of eight sermons on the Beatitudes he likens the desire for God to a miser’s avarice. ‘Therefore let us too, who desire the pure gold, use a multitude of hands, that is to say prayers, so that the treasure may be brought to light, that all may divide it equally and each possess it whole.’ Part of the purpose of the treatise On Virginity is to displace physical love by spiritual love. In chapter 11 the ultimate object of desire is

said, in a highly Platonic fashion, to be absolute beauty. Desire for God is the dominant motif of On the Christian Life. In his account of the theology of this treatise, Werner Jaeger writes as follows: ‘The essence of the soul is discerned in the innate desire of the soul for the good . . . The platonic concept of eros or pothos often occurs in Gregory and permeates all his works.’12 But, as with Origen, so also with Gregory, the most striking example of his use and remodelling of the Platonic idea of eros occurs in his fifteen sermons on the Song of Songs. As Nygren observes (p. 433, note 6), ‘This work swarms with expressions for the soul’s ascent to God’.13 Again, on the same page: ‘It is the breviary of Bride-mysticism, it contains, so to speak, the “philo­ sophy of Bride-mysticism” .’ A fuller analysis of this work occurs later in this chapter. Here it is sufficient to note that Gregory’s whole programme is dominated by this upward tendency, for which he uses such striking symbols as ‘the dart of love’ and speaks of Christ as ‘the archer of love’ (cf. Homily V: GNO VI. 138.4; Homily XIII: GNO VI.383.9). Yet, as we shall see in the next section, connatural though this desire may be to the created spirit it is not released nor does it operate in any sense automatically. Free choice must co-operate with desire if the end of human life is to be realized.

(c) The image of God and human freedom For both Origen and Gregory the power and tendency of the created spirit to mount upwards to its creator and source derives from the fact that it was created by God, like God and for God. So Origen writes in his Dialogue with Heraclides the locus of the likeness of God in us is in the mind. Gregory echoes this teaching in On Virginity, probably written in 371. ‘This reasoning and intelli­ gent creature, man, at once the work and the likeness of the divine and imperishable mind (for so in the creation it is written of him that “God made man in his own image”) . . . did not have initially the liability to passion and to death . . . Passion was introduced afterwards.’ However unlike the primal man the present human race may seem, and therefore however unlike God, the image is never finally or completely destroyed. This is partly because Greg­ ory thinks the passions do not deeply touch the essence of the soul, but partly because he came to see that the root of the image of God in us was not so much in the intellectual powers possessed by us as in the freedom of the will.

However, this emphasis on the centrality of freedom seems to have been something Gregory grew into rather than began with. Origen also insists that virtue is impossible without freedom: ‘If you take away freedom, you remove virtue’ {Against Celsus 4.3). But he never seems to identify the image of God in us with free will. Gregory’s changed perspective on this matter can be seen by comparing what he has to say in On the Soul and Resurrection, written in 380 or 381, with his account in the Catechetical Oration or Address on Religious Instruction. In the former work he finds the image in the higher part of the soul, the speculative and critical faculty. He there argues, as Origen had done, that only that part in us can be considered to be truly godlike and divine which most aptly reflects the intellectual and spiritual nature of God. ‘The contem­ plative and critical faculty within us is the peculiar feature of the godlike soul and only there do we grasp the divine’ (PG 46, 89B). The soul becomes what it most truly is by allowing itself to be drawn upwards to the Beauty which is God. In such a picture Plato’s Symposium is never far away. It is not at all clear what forced Gregory to alter his perspective in this regard. Why, in other words, did he abandon, or modify, the intellectualism of his earlier writings and replace it with a voluntar­ ist stress? It may be that his perception of the sovereignty of freedom was prompted by a growing awareness of the divine freedom, in whose image we are created. What is increasingly clear is that the adespoton of man, that is, his ability to act independently of pressures from within and without, occupies the centre of the stage in the anthropology of Gregory’s mature writings. In a contemporary work of Gregory’s, On the Making o f Man, the intellectual stress has largely vanished and the voluntarist replaced it. In chapter 4 Gregory makes the following comparison between the soul and God. As the soul controls the body, so God controls the universe. As God is free from external compulsion, so too is the image of God within us. It is also by use of the idea of untrammelled freedom that Gregory accounts for the disparity between God’s initial designs for the human race and the actual situation we see before us. How can we be said in any meaningful sense to be like God when the facts at our disposal militate against any such assumption? We are evidently frail, short-lived, amoral, if not actually perverse, and sexually differentiated into male and female. God is sexless, almighty, eternal and wise and good. In chapter 16 Gregory endeavours to account for this striking differ­ ence between the image and the archetype, between human nature

and God. Gregory’s solution of the difficulty is that when God said at Genesis 1:26 ‘Let us make man after our own image and likeness’, he did not thereby refer to the actual condition of man, but rather to the ideal and desired condition. Sometimes Gregory expresses himself as though this condition actually existed, but it is probably better to understand him as meaning that that was the perfect, pre-creation idea of us that God had in his mind, but which because of our abuse of freedom never actually existed, and will only come to exist when ‘God shall be all in all’. This means that although the outworkings of the image are not at present to be found, the root of those outworkings, human freedom, is never lost. In his Catechetical Oration of a few years later Gregory faces the same problem, of the distance between the divine archetype and the human departure from this ideal. His explanation of this is in essentials the same. We are now in an unnatural state. Passion, mortality and every type of suffering have set in. We have strayed far from the divine image and likeness which should mark us. But despite this gloomy picture of human nature Gregory does not believe in a total loss of the image of God within us. In chapter 5 he writes that we have not been deprived ‘of the most excellent and precious of blessings - I mean the gift of liberty and free will. For were human life governed by necessity, the “image” would be falsified in that respect, and so differ from the archetype.’ It is not quite clear from this passage whether Gregory thinks that freedom constitutes the whole of God’s image in us, or simply a part of it. It is perhaps best to think of the image as being the root of our godlike qualities. Freedom, according to a passage in On the Dead (GNO IX. 1.58.7), is responsible for the evil passions within us; it is the demiurge of evil. In this insight that the spiritual power of the will, and not the body, is responsible for evil, Gregory’s position is markedly distinct from that of Plotinus, whose account of the origin of evil in Ennead 1.8 connects it very closely with the body. C. W. Macleod14 makes the attractive suggestion that On the Dead marks a more generous attitude to the body than in Gregory’s earlier writings. This more benign attitude is reflected in a remarkable and probably unique passage in the first Homily on the Lord's Prayer (= PG 44 ,1125B), where he implies that God made ‘this mud in the likeness of the divine character’. For stricter Platonists, Christian or pagan, such a claim would be unthinkable. There seems to be a connection, which we can also see in Augustine’s City o f God 14,

between an emphasis on freedom and a more generous attitude to the material world and above all the human body.

(d) Contemplation and virtue We have already indicated some of the respects in which Gregory differs from Origen. Above all, he assigns a greater significance to the will as the source of evil, and has a less pessimistic view of the body. Something of this difference can also be discerned in their understanding of the Christian goal. The Platonist tradition had tended to subordinate virtue to knowledge, ethics to epistemology, while believing that there existed a close connection between the two. On the whole, though, for Plato, Aristotle and Origen, the good, moral life is regarded as a gateway to light, truth and understanding, rather than as an end in itself. Gregory’s earliest essay in the ascetic-mystical genre, On Virginity, probably written in 371, repeats the traditional pattern. His understanding of Mat­ thew 5:8, ‘Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God’, differs hardly at all from that offered by Origen of that text at the end of the second book of On First Principles. With the progress of time, however, this two-tier structure was substantially modified, if not entirely abandoned. This shift of emphasis is well illustrated by his treatise On Perfection. In it he outlines the three central components of the life of excellence, in the following order: ‘thought, idea and action’ (GNO VIII.210.4). In other words virtuous action is seen as the result of thought and knowledge rather than its condition. Something of the re-fashioning of the Platonic tradition in Chris­ tian thought can be seen from the treatment Gregory gives to the sixth Beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’, in his homily on the text. Gregory confesses to experiencing considerable perplexity in coming to grips with the text, a perplex­ ity that arises from the text of the Bible itself, rather than from his own failure to experience any immediate knowledge of God. For, although Our Lord had offered vision of God to the pure of heart, John 1:18 had declared such knowledge to be beyond our reach: ‘God no man has seen.’ And again at Exodus 33:20 it had been clearly stated ‘No one will see God and live’. Gregory’s answer to this dilemma falls into two parts. Although we can have no know­ ledge of the divine nature, which lies beyond the reach of the human mind (PG 44, 1268B), we can acquire some knowledge of his wisdom, as it expresses itself in the works of creation. In arguing

in this way Gregory draws a distinction, already employed by Basil in Letter 234, between the divine nature and the divine energeiae. These energies are those activities of the divine nature which are distinct both from the inner divine nature and from the effects of the divine action. Such a distinction had been worked out in the controversy with Eunomius in order to protect Basil and Gregory from the charge of agnosticism, to which their highly apophatic approach to the nature of God gave rise. The second way Gregory has of trying to defend the possibility and availability of the knowledge of God is a rather unusual stress on the vision of God which those who are pure of heart experience in their souls. He writes as follows: ‘Hence if a man is pure in heart, he sees himself and sees in himself what he desires; thus he becomes blessed and sees the archetype within the image’ (PG 44, 1272B). The desire for the vision of God has been subtly transformed into the vision of the purified image of God within the soul. The argument runs as follows: seeing God is the equivalent of having God; and having God is the same as having within oneself the purified image of God. The upshot of Gregory’s treatment is to connect the vision of God in this life, and probably in that to come, with the perception of the effects of God’s activities in the universe and of the moral life in the human soul. It is by virtue that we imitate God in this life and therefore come to share in his nature more fully. Virtue, knowledge and sharing are linked closely together. Gregory’s most celebrated treatise on the theme of Christian perfection and holiness is his allegorical commentary on Exodus, the Life of Moses. It marks the end as well as the high point of Gregory’s reworking of the Platonic tradition. Its subtitle, O n perfection in virtue’, indicates the general line of the argument. The word arete (‘virtue’) occurs about a hundred times in the work, and the expressed aim is the pursuit of the likeness of God by the virtuous life. Although it is true that a passage in Plato’s Theaetetus specifies likeness to God in moral terms, the majority of the Platonic dialogues stress the importance of some sort of direct perception of the ultimate as the goal of life. Vision accompanied by union is the promise of Plotinus, who writes: ‘If anyone has seen the Good, he knows of what I speak’ (Ennead 1.6.7). By contrast Gregory prefers to use darkness language when speaking of God, and prefers the Platonic language of likeness, when describing the final blessing of the Christian life (Life of Moses 11.318). It is hard to

know what led Gregory to this change of attitude. The preoccupa­ tion with virtue is quite unmistakable, though it would be a grave error to conceive virtue too narrowly. Gregory certainly refuses to cut off the life of moral perfection from that of knowing about God. As we always need the latter, so we can never afford to forget the former. This mature insistence on the essentially virtuous character of the Christian ideal is linked to a further important feature of Gregory’s theology. For him, God is not only good and virtuous, he is virtue.15 This unusual ‘definition’ occurs too frequently to be accidental. At the opening of the Life o f Moses we find God so defined, and it forms the basis of Gregory’s whole argument that we can only become like God in his infinite virtue by our own con­ tinuous striving to be like him. With the important qualification that for Gregory God is infinite, his ‘definition’ of the human ideal is closer to Plato (cf. Theaetetus 176B) than to the more exclusively intellectualist pictures offered either by the ‘young’ Gregory or by Aristotle and Plotinus. Does this mean, therefore, that Gregory’s vision of human perfection is quite distinct from that offered by the Platonist tradition? Or is Jaeger correct in affirming that ‘Gregory of Nyssa was inspired by Origen’s great example . . . Knowledge of being (gnosis ton onton) is the supreme end of religion for Gregory . . . His concept of the ascetic life is inseparable from this concept of religion’?16 Neither position does complete justice to Gregory’s own position. But it is clear that for him the moral, the contemplat­ ive and the ascetic life are deeply related to each other. In his earlier writing he seems to have thought of the relation as only one­ way, that is, of virtue as the gateway to gnosis; but in his more mature writings the movement is two-way. Virtue is not only the condition of the possibility of knowledge, knowledge also serves as a step towards greater moral perfection. In other words there is a dialectical relation between the two. The moral life is the precondi­ tion for knowing God, and when we grow in knowledge, this must mean a change in our own lives. Further, the thought of God as ‘virtue’ is not simply of him as a moral agent, but rather of him as embracing all excellence. In other words it is our old friend the ‘principle of perfection’ expressed in a slightly different form. If we add to this the idea of the divine infinity, then we can see how Gregory’s reworking of the tradition has been influenced by theo­ logical as well as by ascetic considerations. But as this evolution was

partly due to his controversy with Eunomius we must now turn to that.

5.3 REACTION TO EUNOMIUS We have already seen that the earlier writings of Gregory reflect the influence of Origen, in their concern to link together virtue and spiritual understanding. We have also seen how this perception was gradually modified in favour of a much less gnostic vision, one which was much more virtue-oriented. This change was partly, no doubt, occasioned by Gregory’s own spiritual growth, and marks a turn from theoria to praxis. On the other hand the change also signals a deeper understanding of God, which was to some extent thrust upon him by the demands of the controversy with Eunomius, with which he was involved from the death of Basil on 1 January 379, for the next five years. It led him to replace the ‘lightness’ spirituality, which he had learnt from Plato and Origen, with a ‘darkness’ spirituality, with which his name is often and rightly associated. The difference between Origen and Gregory is well brought out by Henri Crouzel: Origen and Gregory of Nyssa have often been contrasted by attributing to the former a mysticism of light and to the latter a mysticism of darkness . . . Now it is not impossible that Origen’s mysticism of light is influenced by his polemic against the Montanist conception of trance as unconsciousness, while the mysti­ cism of darkness favoured at Nyssa, perhaps arises in part from Gregory’s reaction, following his brother Basil, against the neoArianism of Eunomius, who maintained that the divine nature was strictly defined by the fact that the Father was unbegotten.17 Crouzel’s argument is compelling and suggestive. Differing chal­ lenges provoke differing approaches to the same subject. The consequences for spirituality are considerable, above all if the conceptions of the deity thus elicited are hard to reconcile. That such an approach is in danger of historicism goes without saying. For all that can be said is that Montanism made the Church think of God as ‘light’ and Eunomius as ‘darkness’.

5.3.1 Aetius and Eunomius Aetius is rightly regarded as the founder of the neo-Arian or Anomoian party. He came from Antioch and, if the somewhat lubricious account of his life offered by Gregory of Nyssa in Against Eunomius I.37ff. is to be believed, he had a various and not altogether creditable career. He moved from the trade of bronze smith to that of logician, which latter art he learnt at Alexandria. His humble origins may partly explain the evident animus which Gregory shows towards him; but although we cannot exclude the element of snobbishness discernible in the account he gives of Aetius’ youth and education, there was a more powerful reason for the dislike Aetius engendered. It is quite clear that he was a brilliant master of dialectic. This feature of his writing is attributed by Gregory to his education in the logic of Aristotle (cf. Against Eunomius 1.46). It must be admitted that logic was not always Gregory’s strong point, and if he could suggest that his opponent’s mastery of this tool owed everything to Aristotle, then he had scored a palpable advantage, once we remember in what low esteem churchmen of the day held Aristotle. In 351 Aetius produced his Syntagmation,18 a short summary in 37 brief syllogisms, preserved for us by Epiphanius (Haereses 76.11). No doubt the very pithiness of the argument made it easily available to a large number of readers. The central point and the main conclusion of the argument was to insist that the Son was not, and by definition could not be, fully divine and equal to the Father. The central plank in Aetius’ argument was to define the idea of God by means of ‘ingeneracy’ or ‘unbegottenness’. If ingeneracy defines the very being of God, it is a relatively short step to the conclusion that the Son cannot be fully God, generacy and ingeneracy being regarded as logical contradictories. Aetius’ proposal to define God as ingenerate was in one way not entirely novel. It is possible to find a similar connection between the two ideas made also by Justin in his First Apology on several occasions. So, for example, in I Apology 14 he refers to the unbegotten God. Usually, however, the idea is regarded as external to rather than definitive of the divine nature. In Arius, on the other hand, far from defining the divine nature, we find a refusal to define it at all. So, for example, in his Thaleia Arius writes: ‘God is in essence ineffable to all.’ Aetius, on the contrary, holds that God can be defined as ‘ingenerate’. So, although the consequences are in both cases similar - the Son being

ontologically inferior to the Father - the reasons both have for making this assertion are not the same. Eunomius19 was both pupil and successor of Aetius in his championship of the radical inferiority of the Son to the Father. He, too, was a formidable master of dialectic, and it may be the fact that he came from Cappadocia that made the three Cappadocians peculiarly hostile to him. His logical powers are attested not only by his surviving works, the Apology of about 363 and the Apology for the Apology of fifteen years later, but also by two other factors. First of all he was ‘answered’ by Basil, the two Gregorys and at a slightly later date by St John Chrysostom. This fact alone is evidence of the respect in which his arguments were held. Secondly, the ecclesiastical historian Sozomen informs us that the Empress Flacilla, herself a devout supporter of Nicene orthodoxy, was eager to prevent a meeting between her husband Theodosius and the dreaded Eunomius.20 Eunomius has been the subject of considerable attention over recent years, and he has not been wanting in defenders. His creed, indeed, which is appended to his Apology would probably escape notice, if it were not ‘commented on’ by the Apology itself. We find indeed the characteristic Anomoian assertions about the nature of God, who is ‘one, both unbegotten and without beginning, admit­ ting of no being prior to himself (for nothing can exist prior to the Unbegotten) nor with himself (for the Unbegotten is one and only he is God) nor in himself (for he is simple and uncompounded)’. The Son, we later learn, was the one through whom the world was made, being himself begotten and created before the world. Euno­ mius develops the central contention of Aetius, that God is unbe­ gotten, by arguing that the term does not denote an aspect of God, external to him, but is a divine name which at once declares to all the inner nature of God. Once the divinely revealed name has been grasped by the Christian, then he can be said to have grasped God himself. Section 20 sets out the conclusion of Eunomius’ case with enviable and devastating clarity. ‘It seems to us that those who presume to compare the essence which is unmastered, superior to all cause and unbound by any law, to that which is begotten and serves the law of the Father, have neither really examined the nature of the universe, nor made judgements about things with clear minds.’ Why did Eunomius, and indeed Aetius before him, abandon Arius’ view that the divine nature was beyond human understand­ ing, in favour of the view that it could be adequately known and

defined? A common and in many ways pleasing answer to this question is that Arius’ insistence on the divine incomprehensibility left it open for his critics to reply that, if that were the case, could it not be that there was a divine Son as well? M. F. Wiles21 argues that one of the central concerns of Eunomius was ‘to affirm the true and transcendent God in such a way that we may know him and worship him as he really is’ (p. 169). The main thrust of Wiles’ paper, as he himself states, is to reject the suggestion that there exists a wide gulf between the rationalistic approach usually attributed to Eunomius and the mystical/soteriological interests of the Cappadocians. Professor Wiles may well be correct in defending the Anomoians in general and Eunomius in particular from egregious rationalism and an arrogant claim to have adequately defined the divine nature; yet, as we shall see, it was precisely this feature of the Neo-Arian programme that was seized on by their critics and made the first plank in their ‘demolition’. One of the difficulties of the position of Professor Wiles is that he sees the position of the Anomoians as a response to a stress on the divine incomprehensibility, whereas historically it seems to be the case that it works the other way round. The Cappadocian stress on the divine mysteriousness is a response to the claims of Eunomius and not vice versa.

5.3.2 The reply of Gregory of Nyssa - the growth of negative theology Whatever the ultimate aim of Eunomius’ theology may have been, there can be no doubt that the principal effect of his theology was to ensure that the Son was not to be ranked with the Father in deity. It manifested in fact a complete rejection of the views enshrined in the Creed of Nicaea of 325. Its method of procedure we have already glimpsed - a definition of the nature of God in such terms that the Son could not be considered as sharing in the divine nature. Gregory’s reply to Eunomius can be reduced to two distinct but related propositions: (a) the idea of God should not be unreser­ vedly connected with the first person of the Trinity - it belongs to all three; (b) the divine nature itself cannot be defined, and therefore any attempt on the part of Eunomius to do so is ill advised. We shall have to turn to the first point later, when dealing with Gregory’s theological teaching on the Trinity. For the present it is important to see just how Gregory set about refuting the Eunomian conten­ tion that the divine nature could be exhaustively/adequately defined.

Gregory has two lines of attack, the metaphysical and the scriptural. The former can be found in the first book Against Eunomius. It basically takes the form of arguing that the absolute is infinite, because there is nothing that could limit it. At Against Eunomius (= CE) 1.168 he writes: ‘Goodness, as long as it is incapable of its opposite, has no bounds to its goodness: its op­ posite alone can circumscribe it, as we may see by particular examples.’ This argument for the divine infinity is given greater depth and prominence a little later in the same treatise, where it is argued that the whole deity is creative and therefore infinite (CE 1.273-278). It is not altogether clear how Gregory makes the leap from not being in principle receptive of improvement from outside to being infinite. ‘Uncreate, intelligible nature is far removed from such distinctions [of more or less]; it does not possess the good by acquisition, or participate only in the goodness of some good, which lies above it: in its own essence it is good . . . and incompre­ hensibly excellent’ (CE 1.276). It is only a short step from this to a clear affirmation of the divine infinity. This is duly made at CE 1.291: ‘The first good is in its nature infinite and so it follows that the participation in it will be infinite also.’ This view, as we shall see, is echoed at the opening of the Life o f Moses. Both the argument and conclusion of Gregory are daring and difficult. Daring, because the conclusion, if admitted, adds a radic­ ally new dimension to traditional philosophy and theology. Most of the previous writers in the Hellenistic tradition had been at one with Plato in insisting that to be unlimited and therefore without definition was to be strictly unknowable and therefore somehow defective. In one celebrated and probably authentic passage Origen had claimed that God could not be infinite, because if he were he could not know himself.22 Of non-Christian writers Plotinus only can be claimed as supporting the view held by Gregory, and he not too clearly. Difficult, because the movement from perfect goodness to infinite goodness, on which Gregory’s argument rests, assumes that the absence of evil implies the infinity of good. But since Gregory elsewhere argues that evil is essentially negative and unreal, he would have to admit that perfection is infinite because there is no non-being in it. But does such perfection lead to infinity? Neither in Against Eunomius nor anywhere else does Gregory argue to the divine infinity from any personal experience of God as unlimited. Even so he does regard the system of Eunomius as fundamentally irreligious and as ultimately destructive of faith. For Gregory, Eunomius is emphatically a ‘hair-splitting dialectician’.

‘How pitiful’, he writes (CE 11.84), ‘are they for their cleverness; how wretched, how fatal is their overwise philosophy. How far have they separated themselves from the hope of the Christian. How far have they withdrawn themselves from Abraham the Father of faith.’ Gregory regards Abraham’s condition as a para­ digm of faith. ‘He went out, knowing not whither he went.’ Created intellectual beings, among which Gregory includes angels, never escape from the condition of faith. The two pillars, therefore, of Gregory’s position are human faith and God’s infinity. These two features are closely related. Because God, for Gregory, is essentially above the reach of the human mind, created intelligences, whether angelic or human, must walk by faith and not by sight. He writes a little later in the same treatise (section 91): ‘So there arises a law of faith for the life to come, teaching those who would come to God by the history of Abraham that it is impossible to draw near to him, unless faith mediate, and bring the seeking soul into union with the incomprehensible nature of God.’ Faith is not, therefore, a temporary state from which we emerge into the light of knowledge, as is suggested by Plato and by Gregory himself in his On Virginity. For Plato, in the Republic 511E, pistis, faith, is a preliminary condition of the mind, before it comes to noesis and dianoia, intuition and discursive reason. For Gregory faith is not a preliminary state, but that mental and spiritual condition of being perpetually open to and dependent upon the divine self-disclosure. Without faith, for him, knowledge of and about God is impossible.23

5.4 THE L IF E

O F M O SES

Gregory’s insistence on the infinity of God and the inescapability of the life of faith might be thought to lead inevitably to a sort of numbed paralysis before God. It might issue in some sort of spiritual torpor, where action and thinking were regarded as alike irrelevant. That this is not in practice the case is well brought out by the Life o f Moses. The very structure of the Life, which is one of movement of body, mind and virtue, indicates that the discovery of the divine infinity does not come at the beginning of the journey. Despite the fact that Gregory had used the idea of infinity with which to evade and refute the Anomoian claim to total knowledge of God,24 it is not, for him, a truth that comes at once to the created mind. Gregory is no ardent prophet of passivity in prayer or in

thought about God. His stress on the close connection between ethics and epistemology places him firmly within a Platonic scheme. It was his perception of God that forced him to modify this scheme. The figure of Moses exercised a great influence on the Jewish and Christian imagination. Philo composed two treatises about Moses. Christ is portrayed as a second Moses by St Matthew, and in St Paul we are provided with allegorical treatment of the food provided by God through Moses in the desert at 1 Corinthians 10. Further, we have a somewhat embroidered account of the life of Moses in the speech of St Stephen in Acts 7:20ff. Further evidence of the popularity of Moses in the early Church is provided by the convic­ tion voiced by Justin that he was the first of the prophets (I Apology 32.1); and in the same writer we find the extraordinary claim that Plato derived his views on morality and on the structure and making of the universe from Moses (cf. I Apology 44,59). Origen, too, had delivered thirteen Homilies on Exodus, which, besides employing a good deal of material common to the tradition, served further to highlight the figure and career of Moses and to provide a point of contact and comparison with Gregory’s own treatment of the same subject. It is impossible to date the Life o f Moses with any degree of certainty. It is conventionally dated to the evening of Gregory’s life on the basis of slight external and strong internal evidence.25 In section 2 of the preface26 (throughout what follows I follow the numbering of J. Danielou’s text and translation: Sources Chretiennes 1 bis), we find Gregory referring to ‘these grey hairs’, a remark which is taken by both Danielou and Jaeger to point to Gregory’s old age. But this is not a necessary inference. On other occasions he uses the same expression in works written at a younger age. The second argument derives from the conviction that a work like the Life, which assumes the divine infinity, can only belong to the end of his life. Gregory had only learnt the importance of the divine infinity, so the argument goes, as a result of the controversy with Eunomius. It was a dogmatic conviction, which induced Gregory to relearn his spiritual vision. But, even if this argument is accepted - and it depends on a postulate that derives from Langerbeck27 - it need only mean that the Life belongs to some time after 381. A date as late as 390 or a year or so later needs to be argued for more effectively than do the two points so far adduced. If the actual date must remain a matter of uncertainty, the basic subject matter or theme leaves us in no perplexity. The subtitle of

the work is O n perfection in virtue’. As was already clear from the Homilies on the Beatitudes Gregory was becoming increasingly convinced that Christian excellence was ethical rather than mys­ tical. As we have seen, this movement of thought reached its apogee in the Life o f Moses. Yet, as has been persuasively argued by C. W. Macleod,28 the work is also a rhetorical masterpiece. From the very beginning of the Preface Gregory compares the virtuous life to racing in the stadium. Allusion to St Paul’s description of the life of goodness in 1 Corinthians 9:25-27 is never far from the surface. The image dominates his conception. As Macleod points out, ‘outside the preface, the comparison is brought back at the very climax of the work (2.242-246), where it serves to express Gregory’s principal doctrine, that human goodness is a continual progression towards or behind an infinite God, epektasis\ It is precisely in this context that the spiritual idealism of Philippians 3:13-14 is realized: ‘For­ getting what lies behind me and reaching out to what lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win the prize, which is God’s call to the life above in Christ Jesus.’ The life of virtue as it is explored and exposed in this work is full of paradoxes, of which one of the most striking comes from the passage just mentioned. Virtue is a curious amalgam of standing still and running a race. It is a mixture of standing on the rock which is Christ and forever moving forward, a mixture of dromos (run­ ning) and stasis (standing still). Therefore he who has showed Moses the place, urges him on in his course. When he promised that he would stand him on the rock, he showed him the nature of that divine race . . . For truly he who has run the race as the Apostle says, in that wide and roomy stadium, which the divine voice calls the place . . . and has planted his feet on the rock, will win the crown of life. (11.245, 246) The powerful image of static movement well expresses the central paradox of the Christian life, that we are already in Christ and yet are summoned to an ever-increasing truth. The asceticism of Antony of Egypt manifests a similar pattern - the pursuit of God within the context of being already saved. Where Gregory differs from Athanasius, the author of the Life o f Antony, is in his superior rhetorical power in the construction of provocative images.

As we have already seen in 5.2(d), to define the Christian ideal as virtue was not a self-evident step, especially for one who was so familiar with the Origenistic tradition, nor is it at all clear why Gregory took it.29 But perhaps the most remarkable element of his synthesis concerns his attempt to harness the idea of virtue to the idea of infinity, by making the obvious enough connection between likeness to God and likeness to the infinite God. Such a linkage prevents Gregory’s vision from deteriorating into Stoicism. It is saved from such a fate by the figure of Christ, who plays a large part in the Life, and by the idea of infinity. For Gregory’s vision, though ethical in plan, is profoundly theological in its basic conception. Furthermore, although it is true that the upward movement of the created spirit culminates in a conviction, rather than a direct perception, of the infinity of God, it must be stressed that this is the point of ultimate arrival rather than of initial departure. Progress is vital to Gregory’s conception of the life of the Spirit; but this progress partakes of two forms. In its first appearance it consists in the movement from one idea of God to another and deeper one, by means of a series of theophanies, which convince the soul that God is really real, that he cannot be grasped by the human mind and finally that he is infinite. There is, however, a second meaning to be given to the word ‘progress’, that of going forward in a seemingly patternless road, from one step to the next, the progress that Danielou described as epektasis with reference, as we have seen, to Philippians 3:13. Gregory concentrates his account of Moses’ life of virtue round three primal theophanies. In the first of these, Exodus 3:14, God reveals himself to Mds«s at the burning bush with the words T am who I am’; in the second, at Exodus 20:21, ‘Moses drew near to the thick cloud where God was’; in the third, at Exodus 33:23, all that Moses is permitted to see of God is his back: ‘You shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.’ In his exegesis of these primary passages Gregory observes a remarkable similarity of treatment. In each case (a) the passage is related to the person of Christ, (b) it is then developed to illustrate a central truth about the divine nature, and (c) important moral consequences are drawn. In other words, Christology, theology and the moral life are intimately related to each other. But not only does Gregory seek to relate the life of the Spirit to Christian believing, he also seeks to integrate his belief in the central doctrine of progress towards an ever-increasing likeness to God into a scheme of departure and return. In a passage of great interest in the Life (11.82), in a text that discusses the possible

future enlightenment of the Egyptians, Gregory alludes to the doctrine of apocatastasis, which is clearly interpreted to refer to the final salvation of all, even of those who have been condemned to the fires of hell. We are not here so much concerned with the doctrine of universal salvation, the evidence of which in Gregory is too egregious to be denied, as with his belief that salvation is a return to beginnings. Progress, in other words, is conceived of as a return to beginnings; or, in the slightly different language of Plotinus, just as procession or going forth is a passage from better to worse, so reversion is a passage from worse to better. As E. R. Dodds observes in his commentary on the Elements of the fifth century ad Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus, the ancient world was disinclined to be favourable to the idea of progress, and could only allow it as a form of reversion to a lost paradise.30 The central difference between the Neoplatonic and Christian doctrine of return lies in the fact that while for Plotinus the end is vision, even union, for Gregory it is endless going forward to a perpetually recessive goal. As was noted above, Gregory’s account of Moses’ progress articulates itself into three principal stages, marked by three theo­ phanies. The first of these offers an exegesis of Moses’ experience at the burning bush, at Exodus 3:2-14 (= Life II.19-25). In discussing the text he makes the following points. First of all the theophany is regarded as a moment of illumination or revelation. In section 19 we read that the truth which appeared to Moses in this apparition was God. In other words, the accent falls on truth. ‘God is truth and truth is the light.’ Here we are in the atmosphere of ‘light mysticism’. Indeed, Gregory uses the word photagogia, illumination, with which to define the experience, a word often used to describe the brightness of the Easter mysteries. So far it is fair to see Gregory as offering a programme not unlike that proposed by Origen and Evagrius.31 Secondly, when we inspect more closely in what this illumination consists we may be surprised to discover that far from being initially some truth about the God who reveals, it is a combination of the Incarnation of the Word and the virginity of his mother. What is particularly arresting about this passage is its difference from Origen’s treatment and the novelty of the application of the burning bush to the virginity of Our Lady. Origen’s own treatment of the incident occurs in his second homily on Exodus. It is a remarkable fact that although this homily deals with Exodus 2:11 to 4:10, it has nothing to say at all on verses 4 and 14 of chapter 3. In other words Origen in this homily ignores the

burning bush and there is, therefore, no parallel at all to the double exegesis of 3:14 offered by Gregory. Incarnation and virginity receive no mention. Gregory, however, makes both these connec­ tions, and although he is probably not original in referring the burning bush to the Incarnation of the Word, he seems, as Danielou observes in his note on this passage, to have been the first writer to connect the incident with the virginity of Mary. The comparison with Origen is instructive because it illustrates the fact that although in this context Gregory is Origenist in his ‘light theology’, his connection of light theology with the historical Christ marks a departure from his master. At Exodus 3:5, Moses is instructed by God to remove his shoes, as he is standing on holy ground. Origen’s extremely brief treat­ ment of Exodus 3 leaves him no space to comment on this text. Even Philo, whose account of the incident is much closer to Gregory’s than is that of Origen, has nothing to say about Exodus 3:5 in On the Life o f Moses 1.65-70. These facts may point to the conclusion that here too Gregory’s version of events is peculiar to him. He interprets the command to mean the need for moral purification for those who wish to enter into knowledge of and familiarity with Christ and God. The difference from Plato, whose Republic has a good deal to say about the need for moral purifica­ tion as a prelude to mental growth, lies largely in this, that for Gregory some enlightenment, in this case the theophany at the burning bush, precedes the demand for purity. The purity, in its turn, leads to greater understanding. In other words revelation is not simply given to the pure of heart. Religion must go before moral growth as well as come after it. Finally and most importantly, the effect of the theophany is to convince Moses of the distinction between appearance, phantasia, and reality (section 23). To be in possession of the truth is to be free from the untruth of deception. The Platonic equation of truth and reality is everywhere evident. A lie is a statement about something which purports to exist, but which does not in fact exist. The aim of the philosophic life is the emancipation from the world of shadows and lies into the world of truth. Gregory here assumes, as had the anonymous fourth-century author of the Cohortatio ad Graecos (22) before him, that the self-revelation of God to Moses at the bush was the same as Plato’s assertion at Timaeus 27D, that ‘we must begin by distinguishing that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming and never is’. Greg­ ory’s treatment almost certainly owes something to Philo’s

interpretation of the incident in his Life o f Moses 1.75: ‘God replied: “First tell them that I am He who IS, that they may learn the difference between what IS and what is not, and also the further lesson, that no name at all can properly be used of Me, to whom alone existence belongs.” ’ The final result of the theophany and preparation is expressed in the quasi-definition of the divine nature offered at section 25. It is totally self-sufficient and devoid of any dependence on or participa­ tion in being. It is always the same, incapable alike of improvement or of decrease, and therefore of all change either for better or for worse. It is that at which all things aim and in which all participate, though without diminution in the process. ‘It is truly the really real, and knowledge of it is knowledge of the truth.’ The markedly Platonic character of these ‘descriptions’ hardly needs stressing, and parallels may be found in the Symposium 211A-B. Indeed apart from the very un-Platonic ideas of Incarnation and virginity, the whole passage reads like an extract from a Platonic handbook. In true Platonic fashion, also, Gregory has nothing to say at this point about the most un-Platonic of doctrines, the divine infinity. The second theophany (= Life II.162ff.) is an exegesis of Exodus 20:21, ‘And the people stood afar off, while Moses drew near to the thick cloud where God was’. To prepare his readers for what is to come, and at the same time to prevent any possible misconceptions, Gregory observes that there is an explicit and important contrast between the manifestation in the burning bush and that in the cloud. ‘The Divine was first seen in light and now in darkness.’ This leads Gregory to introduce an important distinction between the initial darkness from which we turn away and which we seek to avoid, and the secondary darkness, where God dwells. The pro­ gress, therefore, is one towards greater truth, from darkness, that is from the realm of the senses, into light and truth, and then beyond that into a world of supra-sensible and supra-intellectual reality. The God who is affirmed at Life 11.25 to be absolute being, and to be therefore in some sense the equivalent of the Platonic absolute, is now discovered to be in an important sense beyond such categor­ ies. Gregory’s frequent insistence on the dark, incomprehensible side of the divine nature and its identity with the light side is not entirely without precedent in the tradition, though it is doubtful if Plato himself would have been quite at home with it. For though in a celebrated sentence of Timaeus 28E he had affirmed that ‘To discover the maker and father of this universe is indeed a hard task, and having found him it would be impossible to tell everyone about

him’, he had never gone so far as to assert the absolute incompre­ hensibility of the divine nature. Later writers in the Platonic tradition have sometimes been interpreted in a more apophatic direction, but for a clear and forceful statement of this position we must look elsewhere. It is in Philo above all that we find such an insistence, and because this insistence occurs as part of the exegesis of Exodus 20:21, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Philo was Gregory’s inspiration. It is not, however, in Philo’s Life o f Moses that we find a discussion of the theophany on Sinai. There Philo is unaccountably silent. It is in the treatise On the Posterity and Exile o f Cain V.14 that we find a clear premonition of Gregory’s own treatment. Philo writes as follows: So see him [Moses] enter into the thick darkness where God was, that is into conceptions regarding the Existent Being, that belong to the unapproachable region, where there are no material forms. For the cause of all is not in the thick darkness, nor loclally in any place at all, but high above both place and time . . . When therefore the God-loving soul probes the question of the essence of the Existent Being, he enters on a quest of that which is beyond matter and beyond sight. And out of this quest there accrues to him a vast boon, namely to apprehend that the God of real Being is apprehensible by no one, and to see precisely this, that He is incapable of being seen. The measure of similarity between Gregory and Philo, though striking enough, should not be overstressed. Both employ the same passage of Exodus to suggest the transcendence of the divine nature. But, whereas for Philo the text points to the superiority of God to sense, Gregory uses the same passage to assert the superior­ ity of God to intellect as well. For Philo God is above all sensory shape, for Gregory he is above all form. For Philo incomprehens­ ibility seems to mean ‘incapable of being seen’, for Gregory the same expression means ‘incapable of being understood’. It is true that in his comment on Exodus 33.23, ‘Thou shalt behold what is behind me, but my face thou shalt not see’, at Posterity XLVIII.169, Philo’s doctrine is more apophatic, but this stage corresponds to the third theophany in Gregory’s Life and not to his second. Gregory illustrates his contention that God cannot be comprehended with two scriptural passages, Psalm 18:11(17:12), ‘God made darkness his hiding place’ and John 1:18, ‘No one has seen God’. The first of

these texts had been used by Origen at Against Celsus 6.17 to enforce the lesson of God’s transcendence - but not that of his superiority to the mind, as does Gregory. The strong doctrine of the divine incomprehensibility does not stand alone in Gregory’s treatment of the text. As with the first theophany, so here also, truth about the nature of God is closely connected with an exhortation to further moral progress and with the doctrine of the Incarnation. We are made aware that the vision of God on Sinai is not the end of Moses’ spiritual pilgrimage. It is but the intermediate stage between the burning bush and the vision of the back parts of God from the rock. Moral progress, which in Gregory is both a preparation for and a response to further enlightenment, can never be arrested. Moses is exhorted to con­ tinual upward progress, to a tabernacle not made with hands (Life 11.167 with reference to Heb 9:11). It is this ‘tabernacle not made with hands’ to which Gregory directs his attention in section 170 and following. In section 174 the unmade tabernacle is taken to mean the deity of Christ, which allows itself to have a temporal covering made for it in the shape of his created human nature. The incarnate Word, therefore, on Gregory’s understanding is in two senses a tabernacle. It is so in virtue of being, as the Word, not made with human hands; and it is so as assuming a created tent, the temple of his divinity. The originality of Gregory, therefore, consists not so much in his assertion of the divine incomprehensibility, which plainly has its antecedents in the Platonic tradition and in Philo, as in his connec­ tion of this insight to the demand for moral progress and to the Incarnation of the Word. The third theophany in the Life, the second on the mountain (= Life II.236ff.), consists of Moses’ vision of the back parts of God related in Exodus 33:17-23, where in answer to Moses’ plea for a face-to-face vision of God, he receives the reply T will cover you with my hand until I have passed by and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen’. The central truth communicated by this message is that ‘the divine is without limits’ - a fact which serves to further distinguish God from the rest of reality. A support for this position is adduced from an argument which echoes what Gregory had argued in Against Eunomius 1.168. In both passages the point made is that goodness/beauty can only be limited by their oppos­ ites. Where there is neither evil nor ugliness - and that must be the case for God - there can be no limit, and where there is no limit, there must be an infinity of either being or beauty or goodness.

The novelty, even the heretical character of such a doctrine to the Greek ear has often been stressed. With the possible exception of Plotinus the idea of infinity had not been regarded by either the Platonic or the Aristotelian schools as a positive virtue.32 Neither, indeed, had the Bible so described or defined God. Not only had they not done so; they had on their own principles very good reasons for not doing so. The close connection drawn between reality and knowledge by the Greeks, and the importance of revelation among the Jews and Christians, had made them resist, perhaps unconsciously, the idea that the supreme reality was such that definition of it was in principle impossible. An ordered universe demanded for its explanation a supreme principle of order, the world of Forms, self-thinking thought or the God who revealed himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Although they were prepared to admit ‘that he was hard to grasp’ or that his name was sacred, or ‘that he dwelt in unapproachable light’, that he was in principle beyond the reach of reason and definition was something outside their acquaintance. For the majority of Greeks, indeed, there was only one reality which could be regarded as without shape and limit and that was matter, the lowest reality on the scale of being, not the highest. Much has been written about the originality of Gregory in making these assertions. It seems impossible to deny that, as was stated above in the context of the Eunomian controversy, the major, if not the sole, ground for Gregory’s insistence in this matter was controversial. It is not clearly in the tradition, nor does it seem to spring from any particular mystical experience on Gregory’s part. It simply arises from the desire to find a convenient tool with which to overcome the Eunomian contention that it was possible to define the divine nature. If God is infinite he clearly cannot be defined. The only major writer prior to Gregory who breaks from his Platonic mould and asserts the infinity of the One is Plotinus.33 His argument, however, is quite different from that of Gregory. At Ennead V.5.6 he argues that because the One generates form, it must itself be without it. ‘But if it is without form it is not a substance; for a substance must be some particular thing, some­ thing that is defined and limited. But it is impossible to apprehend the One as a particular thing, for then it would not be the principle, but only the particular thing you said it was.’ Although both Gregory and Plotinus assert the formlessness34 of the absolute, Gregory continues to call God the ‘really real’ and the ‘good’ and

the ‘beautiful’. For Plotinus God is indeed absolute goodness, but quite emphatically neither really real nor beautiful. Starting with the divine infinity as a premise Gregory draws some important conclusions. As Rowan Williams notes in The Wound of Knowledge: ‘He [sc. Gregory] sees negative theology in a positive light as the ground of man’s self transcendence.’35 This selftranscendence takes the form of refusal ever to be content with or to rest at the point of arrival, but to treat every apparent arrival as an invitation to further growth and stretching out.36 It is a state of being for which Cardinal Danielou coined the term epektasis, ‘stretching out’, which he connected with what for him was the key text in Gregory’s vision, Philippians 3:13, T strain forward to what lies ahead’. It is this endless, never-ending search for God and aspiration to likeness with him, that translates into action the ideal of ‘likeness to the infinite God’, which Gregory discusses in the Preface to the Life. Such a stretching-out must from the nature of the case be in principle insatiable. God is infinite, we are finite; therefore, progress must be without end. ‘No limit’, he writes, ‘would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the Good can be found, nor is the increasing desire for the Good brought to an end because it is satisfied’ (11.239). The Greek word here translated by ‘satisfied’ is koros (satiety). In making this assertion Gregory is clearly distinguishing his position from that of Origen. Origen’s view of the divine nature is that it is limited, and, because limited, incapable of giving lasting satisfaction to the created spirit. Gregory revises this position by making the counter­ assertion that God cannot be defined or in any way limited, and that there can be no end to the created spirit’s quest for the vision of God. In Origen koros is the occasion, if not the cause, of the fall of souls. Gregory’s counter-assertion means that he has to look elsewhere in order to explain sin. Gregory had connected the previous two theophanies with the Incarnation. He does the same with the third. The rock, which is Christ (cf. 1 Cor 10:4), is the link between the rock of Exodus 33:21 and the command and invitation to follow God without ceasing in section 244. It is only when we are in Christ, who is perfect virtue, that we can grow in the knowledge and service of God. At each of the three stages here discussed it is possible to discern the presence of three distinct but related themes, which help to remind us of the close intertwining in Gregory of theology, exegesis and life lived. First of all, each theophany is applied to the Incarnation of the Word, as though Gregory wished to say that the

fi

principal entrance to the knowledge of God is through the human person of Jesus. Secondly, there is a progression in the knowledge of God. He is initially perceived as Real, then as beyond our grasp, and then, paradoxically, he is grasped as Infinite. Finally, the seal of this perception is the practice of the moral life, conceived as a never-ending progress. The contemplation of the truth, important though it is, is on each occasion regarded as a prelude to virtue, not, as Plato and Origen would have held, as a consequence of it.

5.5 THE H O M IL IE S O N

TH E S O N G O F SO N G S

These fifteen homilies, dedicated to the lady Olympias and de­ livered at some time between 386 and 391, mark the high point of Gregory’s theological and literary achievement. For some unex­ plained reason the work stops short at Song of Songs 6:9. The work, which is both diffuse and difficult, has been concisely excerpted by J. Danielou in From Glory to Glory, and the following discussion uses his numbering, with a footnote reference to the Greek text.37 The Song has never been regarded as an easy book. It is indeed a matter of some surprise that it found a permanent home in the Hebrew Bible. In the prologue to his own Commentary on the work Origen informs us that the Song, together with the opening of Genesis and the beginning and ending of Ezekiel, formed the deuteroseis or secondary reading not to be put at once into the hands of the young Jew. Nor was it much used in the Church. There is a possible reference to it at John 7:38 and at Apocalypse 3:20. Origen, however, composed two homilies on it, translated by Jerome, and four books of a Commentary, translated by Rufinus. Gregory explicitly refers to this in the Prologue to his own work, though his treatment differs importantly and consciously from that of his master. The footnotes to H. Langerbeck’s edition of the Homilies for GNO enable us to see, almost at a glance, what are the main points of discontinuity between the two treatments, despite the fact that both stand within the Platonic tradition. The main difference is that Origen’s treatment can be labelled as gnostic or intellectualist, Gregory’s much less so. We have already seen in the Life o f Moses that the stress on the divine infinity and the importance of virtue serve to mark Gregory off from much in the Platonic tradition. Langerbeck also wishes to argue that this insistence on divine infinity does not arise from personal experience but from the

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exigences of dogmatic encounter. Darkness, therefore, and endless progress, epektasis, are seen as consequences of a theological position arrived at on other than spiritual grounds. A good example of this exegesis of Gregory in practice occurs in one of Langerbeck’s notes at the beginning of the fifth homily. On p. 137 he invites a comparison between the gnostic/Origenist treatment of Song 2:8 and that of Gregory, which is described as ‘mystic’. He even suggests in his note on the next page, where Gregory states that the end of all the ascents is not ‘contemplation and clear knowledge of the truth’, that Gregory is consciously arguing against Origen, who in a comparable passage in the third book of his Commentary had spoken of ‘the moral or mystical teaching, that makes glad the heart of man’. There is much to be said in favour of the value of this contrast. A quick glance through the contents of Origen’s Commentary is enough to show how much he insists upon the intellectual element in the life of the Spirit. For Origen, the Song marks the triumph of theology over natural knowledge of the universe, and throughout the work the great desire is for illumination of the mind, by grasping the perfect teachings of Christ, the mystical secrets, which compose our rational food. Our principal duty on earth and pleas­ ure in heaven is to recognize the Trinity. The end of our search is the presence of the Word, who is to satisfy and to illuminate the mind, a state which is prefigured in the ever-present invitation to go beyond things seen and temporal in search of the unseen and the timeless (cf. 2 Cor 4:18). Different from Origen though Gregory is in many respects, he owes much both in method and in general approach to him. Gregory insists (26)38 in the first homily that there are in the book ‘two sets of senses, one corporeal and the other spiritual, as the Word tells us in the book of Proverbs: “Thou shalt find the sense of God” [= Prov 2:5, though not in the Hebrew]’. The same passage, with the same translation and used for the same purpose, occurs in the last paragraph of Book 4 of Origen’s On First Principles and at Against Celsus 7.34. Gregory defends the practice of allegory in the prologue to his Commentary on the Song o f Songs, even as Origen does in Book 4 of On First Principles, but he fails to suggest that Scripture has three senses, as distinct from the customary two of Philo and the Greek allegorical tradition. A distinctive feature of Gregory’s exegesis in the Life o f Moses plays an important part in the Homilies on the Song o f Songs: ‘sequence of thought’ or akolouthia. As a device for interpreting

the text we do not find it in Origen. In Homily 5 (41),39 speaking of Song 2:13-14, ‘Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one and come’, Gregory continues: ‘Notice here the order of the words. How does each one link with the next? Do you see how the thought sequence is closely kept in a kind of chain?’ To this feature of his exegesis it is worthwhile adding another: his penchant for recapitulation of the ‘argument so far’. We find such a summary at the opening of the fifth homily and of the sixth, and towards the close of the twelfth (75) :40 ‘Let us recapitulate and resume our thought.’ There is the allied assumption that to an ordered sequence in the narrative of the sacred text there corresponds a similar sequence in the life of the Christian. How precisely this ‘level’ approach to the life of the spirit relates to the breaks implied by the three theophanies of the Life o f Moses and their counterpart in Homily 11 is far from clear, even as the dark nights of sense and spirit of St John of the Cross hardly seem to tally either with the experience of the faithful Christian at prayer, or with the contours outlined by other masters of the spiritual life, who appeal instead to a gradual growth marked only by an occasional hillock. Given that Gregory has set himself to offer an exegesis of the Song of Songs, it is hardly surprising to find him devoting so much space to the language and imagery of love. From the outset he is emphatic that the love of which he writes is spiritual in its source and object. In the first homily (24)41 he insists that it is of a spiritual marriage that he speaks; but the love is, though spiritual, still vital for our salvation. ‘For he “who wishes all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” [1 Tim 2:4] shows us in this book the most perfect and glorious path of salvation, I mean by way of love.’ He then goes on to contrast salvation by love with two lesser forms of salvation: fear of punishment and hope of reward. ‘The truly virtuous man . . . loves with his “whole heart and soul and strength” [Deut 6:5] not the creatures that come from God but Him who is the source of all good.’ The word here used by Gregory (and the Bible) for love is agape. He does not, however, as later writers have done, make any important distinction between agape and eros, for in a celebrated passage in the thirteenth homily (76 = GNO VI.383.9) he clearly thinks of eros as an intense form of agape, for he writes ‘For love (agape) that is strained to intensity is called desire (eros)’. He uses several synonyms to express the variousness of love, pothos and epithumia being two further words. Any attempt to ascend the spiritual mountain presumes and expresses this basis of desire. In Homily 2 (27)42 we read that the

bride is denied the immediate satisfaction of her longing for the groom: ‘For God has greater plans for her: he wants the beginning of her enjoyment to arouse a greater yearning for Him, that her desire might give zest for joy.’ Again, in Homily 5 (44)43 we read that the only guide in the ascent to perfection must be our yearning for it. ‘Not out of sadness, or necessity, but by yourself reinforcing your yearning for the good by your own reason, and not out of any necessity.’ Gregory’s most extravagant and famous treatment of the love motif comes in his comment on the phrase Ί am wounded with love’ (Song 2:5), which he discusses in the fourth homily (38).44 In it the archer is love and the arrow also is love, the Father being the one who sends the Son, to penetrate into the heart of the bride. ‘It is indeed a good wound and a sweet pain by which life penetrates the soul.’ Yet this is not the end; for in the process of being wounded by the arrow of divine love, the bride herself becomes the arrow that is shot. ‘The Bridegroom and our archer are the same. And the bride and the arrow is the purified soul, which he takes and aims at a good target.’ The unusual feature of this piece of exegesis is that the arrow is interpreted in two different ways. It begins by being the Word of God, shot by the Father for the wounding and salvation of the human spirit. It ends by being the very spirit it was sent to save. A curious alchemy has taken place. The upward motion of the human soul is dependent upon being pierced by the arrow of holy love. The archer, the arrow and the mark at which the archer aims all become one. Though Gregory never says so, he seems to be speaking about the transformation of love through the direct action of the Son upon the created spirit. The condition of the possibility of a rightly ordered love is its identity with Him who is love. Union with the Word of God may be necessary for rightly directed love; but that love is itself the necessary precondition for the realization of the upward heavenly call. It is a call which requires both the desire of the human heart and the free response of the created spirit. For freedom lies at the heart of the image and likeness of God with which we were initially created and which was never permanently lost. Although Gregory believes that the effects of the primal sin were serious in terms of loss of bodily integrity and mental clarity, nevertheless he takes a less dark view of the human condition than does St Augustine. The aim of the Christian life is moral perfection, considered above all as likeness to God, who, as in the Life o f Moses, is himself regarded not simply as virtuous but as virtue. The Platonic-biblical collocation of ideas is by now

familiar and is well illustrated by two passages from the ninth homily. In the first of these (57),45 commenting on Song 4:11, ‘The smell of thy garments as the smell of frankincense’, Gregory carries on as follows: ‘The underlying philosophia of this text is an instruc­ tion to men on the goal of perfection. For the aim of the life of virtue is to become like God; and this is the reason why the virtuous take great pains to cultivate purity of soul and freedom from the passions so that the form as it were of transcendent Being might be revealed in them because of their more perfect fife.’ In the second passage (62)46 Gregory offers two differing but not necessarily conflicting views of the symbol of saffron in Song of Songs 4:14. The first is the Aristotelian doctrine of virtue as the mean between two extremes, ‘the more popular interpretation’, the second is the true faith or sound doctrine. He concludes: O f these two interpretations I will leave it to my readers to choose as they will, either one or both. In a certain sense they come to the same thing. For the one suggests the meaning of perfection, the other the possession of divine nature. There is of course no perfection outside of the godhead.’ As in the Life, not only is there an extremely close connection made between ‘knowing the truth’ and ‘living virtuously’; this connection is at times made into an actual equivalence. This near-equation has been noted before in the sixth Homily on the Beatitudes, where the puzzle of the sixth Beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God’, was set beside the other statements of the Bible like John 1:18, which spoke of the divine inaccessibility. There Gregory had argued that to know God is to have God within one, through living the virtuous life. To this notion of progressive deification through virtue, Gregory adds another of singular attractiveness and originality. In Homily 3 (31)47 the birth and growth of Jesus in Palestine is not limited to the once-for-all occurrence of his temporal and local Incarnation, but is applied to us also. Now Jesus, who is born as a child for us, advances ‘in wisdom and age and grace’ [Luke 2:52] in different ways in the hearts of those who receive him. He is not the same in everyone, but only according to the measure of those in whom he dwells, adapting himself to the capacity of each one who receives him: to some he comes as a babe, to others as one advancing, to others in full maturity according to the nature of the cluster [cf. Song 1:13].

The idea that through the life of moral goodness Jesus is born in us seems to mean that we become other Christs. We are not far from the idea of becoming ourselves identical, as far as we may, with the arrow of love shot at us by the divine archer. Although Gregory is less insistent, as far as vocabulary goes, on the divinization of man, this ought not to lead us to think that the reality contained in the idea was absent from or alien to his consciousness. It would be hard to find stronger assertions of the extremely close connection between the human and the divine than are discovered in the third and fourth homilies on the Song of Songs. It is in the eleventh homily, however, that we come across Gregory’s most distinctive expression of the spiritual quest. The contact with the Life will be at once evident, as will the contrast between Gregory and Origen. The point has already been touched on in connection with the opening of the fifth homily, and Langerbeck repeats it in his note (GNO VI, p. 322). ‘Here’, he writes, ‘you have in a nutshell the difference between the gnostic theologians of Alexandria and the mystical theologian.’ The difference is, he says, between the Alexandrian claim that God is essentially, though with great effort and difficulty, knowable, and the Cappadocian view that God of himself essentially exceeds the powers of the human mind. Gregory’s discussion is at this point linked to his exegesis of Song of Songs 5:2: O pen to me my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one: for my head is full of dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.’ He carries on (7):48 Our interpretation will help you to grasp the meaning of this text. Moses’ vision of God began with light [cf. Exod 3:2ff.?]; after­ wards God spoke to him in a cloud [Exod 20:21]. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness [Exod 24:15-18 or perhaps 33:20-23]. Now the doctrine we are here taught is as follows. Our initial withdrawal from wrong and erroneous ideas of God is a transition from darkness to light. Next comes a closer awareness of hidden things, and by this the soul is guided through sense phenomena to the world of the invisible. And this awareness is a kind of cloud . . . which slowly guides the soul and accustoms it to look for what is hidden. Next . . . the soul enters the secret chamber of the divine knowledge and here she is cut off on all sides by the divine darkness. Now she leaves outside all that can be grasped by sense or by reason, and the only thing left for her contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible. And here God is, as the

Scriptures tell us in connection with Moses: ‘But Moses went to the dark cloud wherein God was’ [Exod 20:21]. Although the general structure of spiritual progress in the Homi­ lies and the Life is the same, both proceeding from primary ignorance through light and then into a deeper darkness, there is not a complete identity between the two accounts. Although both agree about the first step, the second step is described in the Homilies ‘through a cloud’, in the Life ‘through darkness’. Most important of all, the third stage in the Homilies takes place in darkness and relies on Exodus 20:21 whereas in the Life the third stage is indeed in darkness, but insists rather on the infinity than on the incomprehensibility of the divine and uses Exodus 33:20-23 to enforce its message. In other words the threefold pattern of both ascents is slightly different. It is also true that whereas the darkness is well integrated into the whole pattern of the Life the same is not true of its use in the Homilies. The perception of the divine infinity plays less important a role in the latter than in the former work. Although the Homilies fail to integrate the darkness symbolism into the general pattern of Incarnation and ascent, it would be unfair to Gregory to suggest that the doctrine played no part in his account of the life of the Spirit. The Incarnation is a source both of healing/return in the fifth homily and of instruction to the whole created order, angels included, in the eighth. In the former passage (42), Gregory outlines in luxuriant terms the primal condition of man’s nature in paradise, ‘growing fat and thriving on the water of the fountain flowing there; and he flourished so long as he had the blossom of immortality . . . But when the winter of disobedience came and withered his roots . . . man was stripped of his immor­ tality; the grass of virtue was dried up, the love of God was chilled by repeated sin.’ All this very depressing condition was remedied ‘by the arrival of one who brought spring to our souls’.49

5.5.1 Restoration and progress; the circle and the line In this and other passages Gregory seems very insistent that the purpose of the Incarnation of Christ is essentially restorative. What had been once in the garden would be again. The bodily integrity and sexlessness, the apatheia, would be restored, and effects of the primal sin would be in the end undone, and the lost image and likeness of God would be regained. This message comes through clearly also in the Catechetical Oration and in On the Making of

Man. It is essentially a cyclical pattern. The grace so received was called in later theological language in the West gratia sanans as distinct from gratia elevans. The former restores the status quo by repairing the wrong done. The latter offers a higher possibility, a going beyond the first condition to a new vocation. Yet before it is lightly concluded that Gregory can firmly be classed with Origen as a strong advocate of the circular pattern, there are certain texts on the subject, in these homilies and else­ where, which tell a very different story. These passages insist that there was a definite newness above all in the fact of and events surrounding the Lord’s Incarnation. In Homily 850 Gregory has much to say about the economy of salvation, which he bases on Ephesians 3:10-12, a text which speaks of the manifold wisdom of God being made known in Christ Jesus. Gregory argues that although the ordinary power and providence of God was evident to the angels, before and independent of the Incarnation, the mighty works of God, ‘the manifold quality of the divine wisdom’ were not known’. Only through the Church did this newness become known. ‘How the Word became flesh, life is mingled with death, in his bruises our wound is healed, the infirmity of the cross brings down the power of the adversary, the invisible is revealed in the flesh.’ It is doubtful if either Origen or Augustine would have thought that the angels would have valued such merely historical information. For Augustine, at any rate, the wisdom of the angels would not include temporal facts. For Gregory it does. For Gregory the Church does not date back to Abel, nor is Christianity as old as creation.51 This stress on the novelty of the Incarnation and therefore on real progress in revelation of the divine nature does not only serve to set Gregory apart from much of what we find in his master Origen and his younger contemporary, Augustine. (For both of them the historical figure of Christ does not strictly reveal any new truths about the divine nature. For both of them the Incarnation is viewed as a means towards the knowledge of what was in principle available since the foundation of the world.) It ought also to be said that this accent on novelty is hard to square with certain elements in Gregory’s own theology. This is above all the case when his ‘cyclic’ view of creation is considered. For him, not only will all be restored, but, what comes to the same thing, what will be at the end will be what was before the fall. The same water, the same food, the same exuberant flowers of virtues will be found in heaven as were

forfeited through sin on earth. This ought to mean that we will receive again the lost knowledge of God we once enjoyed. It must be clear by now that Gregory’s account of the newness of the knowledge of God simply will not allow him to make such a claim. It looks as if he is saying in the fifth homily that the purpose of the Incarnation is to put the clock back, to restore all to the primal state, and in the eighth homily he seems to be saying that whatever may be true about the moral condition of the human race at the moment of apocatastasis, it will certainly know truths about God which before were hidden from it and from the angels (cf. esp. GNO VI, p. 254, line 17). The fifth and eighth homilies of Gregory give somewhat differing accounts of the place of the Incarnation in his spirituality and theology. They point in fact to a central tension in his thought, which can be expressed as follows. The fifth homily sees Christ’s Incarnation as part of God’s plan for the restoration of humankind to the lost paradise. As with Athanasius, Gregory’s teacher in Christology, the Incarnation is the beginning, the essential begin­ ning, of the process of the restoration of the lost graces of the primal creation, immortality and the knowledge of God. It does not appear in the fifth homily to carry the human creature beyond its point of departure. The pattern is emphatically cyclical, departure and return, an Odyssey rather than an Aeneid. The tension which exists between this picture and that of the eighth is in itself interesting and helps to illuminate a tension that dominates all Gregory’s spiritual writing, that between return and progress. In the latter homily the role of the Incarnation is not simply restor­ ative but also offers to the whole of the spiritual creation new insights into the nature of God. By the Incarnation human and angelic natures are invited to go further into the mystery of God. This tension between return and progress can be viewed in Gregory as a key to his teaching. It can also be connected with two sets of texts which conveniently illustrate the two aspects of this thought, 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 and Philippians 3:13, together with his understanding of 1 Corinthians 13:12. The idea of return and thereafter of rest from labour is movingly portrayed in Homily 15 (82).52 Using an image which owes much to Plato’s Phaedrus 246 and to Origen’s On First Principles 1.8.4, Gregory supposes the primal creation to have been winged, and in this feature possessing the divine likeness. Our wings were incorruptibility and power, which were our attributes so long as we were like God. O nce

outside the shelter of God’s wings we were stripped of our wings. Hence the grace of God hath appeared to us, enlightening us, that denying ungodliness and worldly desires, we might once again grow wings through sanctity and righteousness [Titus 2:11-12].’ The passage ends thus: ‘By thine eyes, O Lord, I obtain the grace of being winged again, of recovering through virtue the wings of a dove, by which I may have the power of flight. Now I can fly and rest, and indeed in that rest which the Lord enjoyed when he rested from creation.’ Though the expression apokatastasis does not occur here, the idea of return does, as does the phrase ‘ancient grace’ (GNO VI, p. 449, line 3). There is at this point in the text no suggestion that the state arrived at should be thought of as a stage on the way to a greater perfection, a temporary interval in the passage from glory to glory (cf. 2 Cor 3:18). Yet here, again, the ‘return’ pattern is not allowed to have the only or the last word. In the fifth homily (43)53 any arrival is treated as merely a point or a landmark in the endless progress upward of the redeemed spirit. Here Gregory does cite 2 Corinthians 3:18 and carries on: ‘This means that though what we find and grasp is always glory, no matter how great and sublime it may be, we always believe it to be less than we hope for.’ This element of the unending, upward call, with its moral and intellectual sides, pre­ sents a linear and more historical dimension to the idea of Christian perfection, and, as has been shown in the discussion of the Life o f Moses, it is linked to the idea of God as infinite virtue, to whose assimilation all are invited. Its difference from and challenge to the cyclic view, which is also found in Gregory and to a large extent among his pagan and Christian predecessors, is clear from a few examples. The Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus had in the fifth century bc claimed, in a phrase popularized by T. S. Eliot in Burnt Norton, that ‘the way up and the way down are the same’. For Plato in Phaedrus the whole effort of the fallen, embodied spirit was to fly upwards again to the heavenly dwelling, by regrowing one’s lost wings, on the model of some spiritual Icarus. Plotinus, too, regarded the life of the spirit as a reawakening to the forgotten truth about the self, a return to origins. This resolutely cyclical pattern has echoes in the Bible. Isaiah, for example, looks forward to a golden age when ‘the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid’ (Isaiah 11:6), to a situation, in other words, where the primal happiness and vision of paradise will

be restored. Time and history are for the retracing of one’s steps to a golden age. Origen’s pattern is expressed epigrammatically as ‘the end will be like the beginning’ (On First Principles 1.6.1). Athanasius’ discussion of the nature of redemption in On the Incarnation treats it largely as re-creation, as putting the clock back, as restoration of the lost graces of immortality and the image of God. Gregory’s qualification if not total rejection of this inherited pattern is all the more remarkable when it is recalled that much of his writing seems to endorse such a vision. Side by side with an affirmation of the ‘return’ character of salvation, we find passages like the following from his eighth homily (50).54 He is arguing that Paul, despite the visions described in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4, had no reason for desisting from the progress demanded of him by Philippians 3:13: He clearly meant this to include even the third heaven, which he alone saw . . . Yet even after listening in secret to the mysteries of heaven, Paul does not let the graces he has obtained become the limit of his desire, but he continues to go on and on, never ceasing his ascent. Thus he teaches us, I think, that in our constant participation in the blessed nature of the Good, the graces we receive at every point are indeed great, but the path that lies beyond our immediate grasp is infinite. Gregory’s severe qualification of the traditional account of the return of the spirit to its home is accompanied by another equally surprising departure from Platonism. For Gregory faith is the perpetual condition of the created spirit, a term which for him includes not simply human beings but angels as well. We can indeed know that God exists and that he is infinite, but even in the three theophanies we can never arise beyond these convictions about God to an actual knowledge of God. This knowledge comes to us in any case through revelation and is on the whole mediated to us by means of the Incarnation and through the perception of the activ­ ities of God in this world. This conviction about the primacy and ultimacy of faith - that is, of limited and indirect knowledge of God, mediated largely through the senses - is one which serves to distinguish Gregory from Plato, who in the sixth book of the Republic had regarded

faith, pistis, as a stage to knowledge, episteme. Early Gregory, in On Virginity, seems to have believed something very like this. Augustine regularly elevates understanding above faith. The latter is necessary, indeed, for any progress but must be gone beyond. ‘If you do not believe you will not understand’ (Isaiah 7:9 LXX)55 is a favourite verse of his. The Incarnation is not ultimate for him; for Gregory it is. This primacy of faith over knowledge in the third homily can be paralleled in other writings of Gregory. It is significant partly because it seems to break the hold of Plato upon his spirituality; but more importantly because it makes change and progress of the very essence of the created spirit, not simply a condition of its earthly exile and therefore the result of sin. It refuses to see any radical discontinuity between this life and the life of the world to come or between the human and the angelic conditions. The language of darkness of Homily 11 coupled with the unusual expression of ‘sense of presence’,56 describing the highest to which the human spirit may rise in its quest for God, only serve to reinforce the fundamental point that partial knowledge is of the very nature of the created spirit, into which sin did not project it in the beginning and from which death will not release it at the end. No amount of likeness, whether scriptural (cf. Matt 5:48) or Platonic (cf. Theae­ tetus 176B), can ever release us from the created, time-bound and limited character of existence and put us on a level with God. The typically Gregorian teachings about growth and progress and increasing likeness must always be taken together with and balanced by his more central idea of the divine otherness and darkness. Endless may be the progress to which created spirits are invited, and through which they realize their basic character, but however far they go and may grow, there is no Augustinian rest for them either beyond the grave or, a fortiori, on this side. Gregory’s understanding of the Christian life, therefore, con­ tains the traditional ‘circular’ and the more novel ‘linear’ elements. Return to origins is uncomfortably juxtaposed to a doctrine of endless progress. At first glance it is hard to see either how two such theologies might be harmonized or whether Gregory felt the need to do so. Perhaps it is simply enough to say that the return to beginnings is the condition of the possibility of the release in us of the drive upward which, properly speaking, constitutes the human spirit. Angels, therefore, who know no fall, are for all time busy on the same work as will mark us.

5.6 DOGMATIC THEOLOGY So far in this assessment of Gregory the accent has fallen on his professedly spiritual and exegetical writings, and on the more dogmatic side only in so far as it has altered the spiritual approach. There is much to be said in favour of such an approach, especially as to most people Gregory is thought of as the apostle of apophaticism, both in himself and in the writings of Denys the Areopagite, whose treatment of the divine darkness in his Mystical Theology owes much to Gregory’s Life of Moses. It would, however, be unjust to Gregory and untrue to the evidence to suggest that Gregory was devoid of more strictly dogmatic interests. Apart from Against Eunomius, which was devoted to refuting the arch-ration­ alism of Eunomius and to defending the true and mysterious deity of all three persons of the Trinity, we have several less extensive treatises, edited by F. Muller in GNO III. 1. These deal with the deity of the Holy Spirit (Against the Macedonians) ’, with the charge of teaching tritheism (To Ablabius); and finally, and most impor­ tantly, with a defence of the full humanity of Christ (Against Apollinarius).

5.6.1 The Catechetical Oration This summary of the main articles of Christian doctrine was com­ posed by Gregory, perhaps in 385, for the benefit of catechists. The way in which the doctrines are presented owes much to Origen’s treatise On First Principles and to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. It is not only a convenient summary of doctrines; it endeavours to show how these doctrines make sense and can be understood within a larger, philosophical perspective. One must assume that the converts the treatise has in mind were persons of considerable cultivation, who needed to be convinced that to embrace the Gospel did not mean abandoning the insights of Platonic philo­ sophy. This means in practice that the account of God, evil, freedom and the Incarnation owe much to Plato and Plotinus. An inventory of the dogmatic elements reveals the following: (a) chapters 1-4: the doctrine of the Trinity, its coherence with both reason and the Old Testament. (b) chapters 5-8: the creation of the human race and the origin of evil, which evil is traced to the abuse of that very gift which is intrinsic to the divine image within us, namely our free will.

(c) chapters 9-32 deal with the Incarnation and the Redemption. Much of this lengthy portion is concerned with answering the stock objections to the idea and the fact of the Incarnation: birth is no degradation and the infinite is not confined in the finite; the reason for it (14) and for its delay (15,17); the harmony between the doctrine of the Incarnation and the four basic ideas about God: his power, his justice, his goodness and his wisdom (20-26); 27 resumes the argument of 14, and 29 takes up again the objections of 15 and 17. Section 30 tries to explain the continuance of sin after the saving work of Christ, by use of the serpent imagery; 31 explains the partial success of the Gospel by appealing to the central Gregorian doctrine of freedom; the cross (32) is an active symbol of Christ’s death for all. (d) chapters 33-40 deal with the two sacraments of baptism (33-36) and the Eucharist (37); with an appendix on faith and repentance (38-40). Even so brief an outline of the treatise shows that it contains the central tenets of orthodox Christianity: Trinity, Incarnation, redemption and the sacraments. Christian doctrine forms the outward garment of the work; but the method of dealing with the objections and the guiding principles of the theological substruc­ ture owe a good deal to Gregory’s own Platonist background. This ‘other face’ of the Catechetical Oration (or Address on Religious Instruction) is particularly clear in the ideal of participation in God conceived as the end of human existence, in the stress on the centrality of freedom in the picture of human nature, in the definition of evil as ‘not being’ and in the great stress laid upon the goodness of God which inspires the whole work. Gregory’s anthropology is outlined in chapters 5 to 8 of the Catechetical Oration. Gregory assumes that the creation of Adam and Eve came as the end and climax of all the works of creation. Before them there existed the angelic world and the world of body and sense, neither having any contact with the other. The gulf that separates them is very great, so that the sensible does not bear the marks of the intelligible, nor the intelligible of the sensible. Rather are they characterized by contraries . . . On this account [sc. ‘that no part of creation be rejected’ (1 Tim 4:4)] the divine nature produces in man a blending, migma, of the intelligible and the sensible . . . For God, Scripture says (cf. Gen

2:7), made man by taking dust from the earth, and with his own breath planted life in the creature he had formed. In that way the earthly was raised to union with the divine. Man, therefore, for Gregory is from the beginning and intention­ ally a mixture of body and soul. There is no hint of a fall from a purely spiritual state to one of embodiment, nor is there any suggestion that our present embodied condition is a consequence of tiredness on the part of God or sin on the part of man. This more robust and non-apologetic attitude to the body is not unprecedented among the Fathers. Irenaeus, in the eleventh chapter of his Demonstration, had also employed Genesis 2:7 to the same effect. For both writers man is essentially a microcosm, that man might be at the same time both a link being and also in the image of God. A similar idea had been used by Methodius of Olympus (d. c. 312) in his Banquet 2.7, which is also a comment on the same verse of Genesis. With Plato as traditionally understood, such language is strikingly at variance. Images of God, with the power of assimilation to the divine archetype, we remain; but Gregory and his predecessors, Irenaeus and Methodius, seem to want to hold that truth, together with one which strikes at the root of so intellectual a model, by insisting on the reality of man’s insertion into the divine order of all creation. Interwoven with Gregory’s anthropology in the early chapters of the Catechetical Oration is an account of the origin and nature of evil, which serves as a prelude to his treatment of the rightness of the Incarnation and atoning work of Christ. Within this traditional Christian framework Gregory manages to integrate a good deal of Platonic philosophy. This integration is particularly in evidence in his account of the nature of evil and in his defence of the divine justice. For Gregory, as for the Platonic school in general, evil is not ‘real’. In the seventh chapter he writes: ‘For all wickedness is marked by the privation of good. It does not exist in its own right, nor is it observed to have subsistence.’ Plotinus’ treatment of the origin and nature of evil in Ennead 1.8 makes the same point and for similar reasons. It is part of a strategy to affirm the power and goodness of God. If God, or the One, is omnipotent, as he is claimed to be, then evil can only exist as a by-product, neither independently of God nor by his direct will. If evil is merely

parasitic on the good, as that which is not real is upon the real, then it seems to follow that it will disappear with the ultimate triumph of the real and good. When God, therefore, becomes ‘all in all’ (cf. 1 Cor 15:28), evil will cease altogether from the universe. If the ultimate triumph of the power and goodness of God, who is both ultimate goodness and ultimate reality, issues in the disap­ pearance of evil, it ought to follow that all things will be redeemed, there being nothing left to act as a counterpoise to the divine will. And indeed this is the teaching of Gregory. All things, even the devil, will be redeemed as part of the general plan of universal restoration. At the end even the devil will be unable to resist the purposes of God. In chapter 26 of the same work Gregory writes: ‘He [sc. the Word incarnate] freed man from evil himself. For the healing of an infirmity involves doing away with the disease, even if the process is painful.’ This statement of universalism is by no means isolated; and although Origen probably held the same view, it is by no means so clearly or so often articulated by him as it is by Gregory. A passage in the Life o f Moses expresses the same position. Those condemned to hell are compared to the Egyptians who after three days’ darkness are restored to the bright light (11.82). This passage in Gregory clearly displeased the later Greeks, for as late as the tenth century attempts were made to dismiss it as a copyist’s interpolation. If the ultimate triumph of the power and goodness of God over evil is shown by the ultimate defeat of Satan, it remains to be asked how the final defeat of Satan vindicates the justice of God. For one of the principles on which the whole argument and structure of the Catechetical Oration depends is that of the goodness, power, wis­ dom and justice of God. Gregory’s argument is dominated here and elsewhere through the Catechetical Oration by the thought of the divine fittingness. He expresses the hope at the beginning of chapter 9 that he has said nothing which is ‘unbefitting a right conception of God’. The aim is to find and defend a right idea, a right conception of God; and for the right conception of God to be verified he must be and be seen to be ‘righteous, good, powerful and wise’. The problem is caused for Gregory by his accepting the ancient view that as a result of Adam’s sin the devil acquired certain rights over the human race. The salvation of the human race must not be simply an act of the divine mercy and power, snatching us from the lawful but weak grasp of the devil. It must be a just victory. The very methods which the devil had used to deceive

Adam and Eve in the first place must be employed on him. We were cheated by the devil at the beginning, but ‘the deception would not have succeeded, had not the fish-hook of evil been furnished with the outward appearance of good as with a bait’ (chapter 21). God’s justice is shown in his salvation of the world ‘in His not exercising an arbitrary authority over him who held us in bondage’. Gregory’s argument comes to this: as the devil had tricked Adam and Eve, it was quite in order for Christ to trick the devil. As Adam was deceived into eating the apple, so was the devil tricked by the humanity of Christ. ‘When the devil saw such power he recognized in Christ a bargain which offered him more than he held.’ The humanity of Christ acted as a bait which concealed the deity, which when swallowed by the devil destroyed all the power of evil within him. ‘You observe here how goodness is combined with justice and wisdom, not separated from them. Through the covering of the flesh the divine power is made accessible.’ Although the idea of the rights of the devil was traditional within the Church, its use by Gregory seems quite novel. The strange idea of the tricking of the devil by means of the bait of the divine humanity, and the con­ sequent and necessary salvation of the swallower, hardly had many followers. Its central purpose, however, is rather grand. It aims to show that in the work of redemption of the world, no less than in its creation, God displayed even to the origin of all evil, the devil, just those divine qualities which every tradition within and outside the Church had been at one in assigning to him. Gregory’s treatment of the beneficent defeat of the devil shows both his basic theological preoccupation and his power of enlisting striking imagery in the service of his theology. His treatment in the Catechetical Oration of God’s power in the Incarnation, of the continued existence of sin after the work of redemption was over, of the nature of resurrection, both ours and Christ’s, and finally his account of the Eucharist all show his power of using imagery in the service of a theological vision. To begin with, Gregory has to show how the humility of the Incarnation of the divine Word can be reconciled with his possession of infinite power. In chapter 24 he tries to show that this power is proved and illustrated by becoming one like us. It belongs to the nature of fire to shoot upwards; and no one would think it wonderful for a flame to act naturally . . . But if we

saw a flame with a downward motion, like that of heavy bodies, we would take it for a marvel. So it is with the Incarnation. God’s transcendent power is not so much displayed by the vastness of the heavens or the lustre of the stars or the orderly arrangement of the universe or his perpetual oversight of it, as in his condes­ cension to our weak nature. We marvel at the way the sublime entered a state of lowliness, and, while actually seen in it, did not leave the heights. A further problem is posed for Gregory by the evident fact of the continued existence of sin even after the triumph over the devil by the cross and resurrection. ‘If anyone’, he writes in reply in chapter 30, ‘imagines that he can refute our argument, because human life still continues to go astray through sin, even after the application of the remedy, he may be led to the truth by means of a familiar example. In the case of a snake, should it receive a deadly blow on the head, its coil is not at once killed with its head. While the latter is dead the tail still remains pulsing with its own life, and is not deprived of vital movement.’ The images of the fish-hook, of the flame going downwards instead of rising, and of the serpent illustrate well Gregory’s power of harnessing quite novel pictures to illustrate dogmatic themes. His understanding of the nature and effects of the resurrection and of the Eucharist also illustrates his concern to defend the physical character of the life of the Christian. He argues in the sixteenth chapter that the main purpose of Christ’s rising again was to bring together in unbreakable union the body and soul of Christ, which had been severed by his death on the cross. It is this glueing together of the two elements by means of the resurrection that is of paramount importance. ‘And so [sc. after his resurrection] he united what was separated in an unbreakable union. This is what the resurrection means - the restoration of elements into an indissoluble union after their separation, so that they can grow together. In this way man’s primal grace was restored, and we retrieved once more eternal life.’ Three important points emerge from this brief passage, (a) The resurrection of Christ is conceived as a sort of universally efficacious glue (kolle) - a quite new conception, (b) The body and soul were meant to be together from the beginning and will be so at the end - again an insistence on the integral character of the body for human nature, (c) The fusion of

the two ideas, of restoration and of progress within that restoration, which is clear in the Homilies on the Song of Songs, is also true here. The unbreakable union, which is an act of restoration achieved by the resurrection of Christ, is also conceived as an opportunity for growth. Gregory’s stress on the integrating char­ acter of the resurrection distinguishes him from both Origen and Athanasius and is almost certainly original to him. His treatment of the Eucharist, above all in chapter 37, is also unique and controversial. Some have seen in Gregory’s language of ‘transelementing’, which occurs at the end of the chapter, a precur­ sor of the scholastic doctrine of transubstantiation. Others, how­ ever, Pusey and Harnack among them, see in the language of Gregory something less than the scholastic doctrine, but more than merely a change of use to which the bread and wine are put. For Gregory the central purpose of the Eucharist is to bring the body to salvation. ‘Through the Eucharist the body comes into intimate union with its saviour.’ This salvation of the body is described as a form of transformation effected in it by the presence of the body of God. ‘The immortal body [sc. of God], by entering the one who receives it, transforms his entire being into its own nature.’ We are only able to achieve the immortality for which we were made, by being touched by and coming into contact with the author of immortality. Towards the end of the chapter Gregory repeats his insistence that the purpose of receiving communion is our own immortality and deification. The purpose of the Incarnation is stated to be the deification of humanity. ‘He [sc. Christ] in the Eucharist unites our bodies with himself, so that mankind too, by its union with what is immortal, may share in incorruptibility.’ There are several important and unusual features in this treat­ ment of the Eucharist. The first is the quite novel insistence on the importance and nature of the salvation of the body. We have already noticed how much stress is laid by Gregory on the dual nature of man, body and soul. Here he insists that although the soul is saved by faith, the body must also be saved for heaven. Secondly this salvation is described in terms of deification, though Gregory does not use the word as often as Gregory of Nazianzus, nor in the the same sense. For Gregory of Nyssa it does not imply any absorption into God, but it does mean the immortality of the body. Finally, in his account of what happens to the bread as a result of the prayer of consecration, Gregory makes a comparison with the nature of the Incarnation. Not only does the bread become the

body of the Lord, but the body itself is transmuted by the in­ dwelling of the Word to the dignity of the Godhead. It may be going too far to say that Gregory assimilated the Eucharist to the Incarna­ tion, but he clearly wishes to see some parallel between the two mysteries. In this address Gregory surprises the reader, above all if it is expected that he should uncritically reproduce the central tenets of Origen. It is of course true that much of Origen remains in Gregory. Origen had on several occasions stressed the importance of freedom. ‘If you take away the element of free will from virtue’, he had written, ‘you destroy its very essence.’ Gregory is, if anything, stronger on the centrality of freedom, seeing in it the reflection of the divine nature within us.57 Again, Gregory and Origen are at one in accepting the Platonic doctrine of the positive­ ness and reality of good and the unreality of evil. Finally, it is also true that both are concerned to prove that the Christian idea of God accords with the highest ideas of the pagan philosophers. Plato, Origen and Gregory are at one in holding that the divine must be good, just and powerful, and that failure in any one of these categories somehow disqualifies one from being thought of as God at all. It is perhaps worth remarking here that in the Catechetical Oration we hear nothing of the divine infinity or of divine darkness. Yet the departures from Origen are no less striking. Gregory possesses a power of imagery which is totally lacking in Origen. In fact this rhetorical power is one of the principal features of his work that serves to distinguish him from the Master. The fish-hook, the serpent, the flame and the glue are vivid metaphors. Origen has nothing like them, nor does any writer before Gregory. Secondly and more significantly, there is nothing in Origen to compare with Gregory’s emphasis on the importance of the body. In his teaching on the resurrection, in his anthropology, and in his eucharistic theology, the body plays an essential role. For Origen the doctrine of bodily resurrection is hardly central and in some respects was regarded with such suspicion that views thought to be his were condemned in 543; the Eucharist is either ignored or given a symbolical interpretation; and the very existence of a physical body is associated with a primeval fall. The markedly different emphasis of Gregory cries out for an explanation, but there is no obvious one to be found. It may be that the impulse to produce a more robustly ‘physical’ account of the faith arose simply from the need to expose it for the benefit of catechists, but it may also have had something to do with the Apollinarian controversy.

Notes 1 For Naucratius cf. Life o f Macrina 8 (= GNO VIII. 1.378.9ff.). In the same work of Gregory there is evidence of the impoverished nobility of the family in chs 5 and 20. From these chapters it appears that the grandparents on both sides had been greatly impoverished during the persecution of Diocletian. 2 Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 197, to Gregory of Nyssa, apparently during the last years of his life, refers to one Theosebeia as ‘truly holy and the syzygos of a priest’. The meaning of the word has been the subject of lively discussion, the results of which have been summed up by the editor of the Bude text, Paul Gallay (2, p. 164). 3 Letter 13.5. 4 For Basil’s low esteem of his brother’s practical ability, cf. Basil, Letters 58,100 and 215. 5 Codex Theodosianus XVI.1.3; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History V.10. 6 Although the name ‘Basil’ does not occur, the praise of a life given at the opening of On Virginity 23 is normally thought to refer to him. 7 In Against Eunomius 1.103 Gregory speaks of Basil’s generosity in time of famine, though from 1.72 onwards he offers a not altogether satisfactory account/defence of the chicanery of Basil at the 360 Council of Constantinople. 8 The only two explicit references to Origen in Gregory occur at GNO VI.13.3 and On the Life o f Gregory the Wonderworker (= GNO X.l.13.11). 9 The prologue to the Song Commentary contains an allusion to rather than a quotation of 2 Timothy 3:16 (GNO VI.4.16-17). 10 See J. Danielou, ‘Enchainement’ = ch. 2 of L ’etre et le temps chez Grigoire de Nysse (Leiden, 1970). 11 Cf. G. Horn, ‘L’amour divin. Note sur le mot “Eros” dans saint Gregoire de Nysse’, Revue d ’ascetique et de mystique 8 (1927), pp. 113-31. 12 W. Jaeger, Two Rediscovered Works o f Ancient Christian Literature (Leiden, 1954), p. 76. 13 For a further and somewhat critical account of Gregory of Nyssa on love, see A. Nygren, Agape and Eros (ET; 1932,1938), pp. 430-46. 14 C. W. Macleod, review of Danielou, L ’etre et le temps, Journal o f Theological Studies 22 (1971), pp. 614-18. 15 For the difference between the Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas on the virtue of God compare Theaetetus 176B and Ennead 1.2.1. God is ‘good’ in Mark 10:18, and for Origen God is virtuous in Against Celsus 3.70, though for Origen God is never simply ‘virtue’ as he is for Gregory.

16 Jaeger, op. cit. (note 12 above), p. 73. 17 Henri Crouzel, Origen (ET; Edinburgh, 1989), p. 121. 18 L. R. Wickham (ed.), ‘The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomoean’, Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968), pp. 532-69. 19 Eunomius: The Extant Works, ed. and trans. Richard Paul Vaggione (Oxford Early Christian Texts; Oxford, 1987). 20 Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History VII.6.3. 21 M. F. Wiles, ‘Eunomius: hair-splitting dialectician or defender of the accessibility of salvation’ in Rowan Williams (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1989). 22 Compare Origen, On First Principles (Greek text only) 2.9.1 and the discussion about the appearance or non-appearance of the idea in Plotinus, where the central passages on this theme are Ennead V.5.6 and VI.9.6. 23 Gregory’s preference for ‘faith’ over ‘knowledge’ as the way of defining the relation of all created intelligences to God can be seen at Against Eunomius 1.371 and 11.13. 24 On the subject of the divine infinity see E. Muhlenberg, Die Unendlichkeit Gottes bei Gregor von Nyssa (Gottingen, 1966). In this book, as the subtitle indicates, Muhlenberg comes within an inch of establishing the originality of Gregory in his insistence on the divine infinity. 25 Gregory’s preference for silence, as distinct from the Eunomian search for exact and exhaustive definition of the divine nature, is clear at Against Eunomius 1.541; 11.105; III.9.54. 26 On the subject of Gregory’s age and the meaning of the grey hairs he assigns to himself cf. Life of Moses, prologue, section 2; In suam ordinationem (= GNO IX. 1.332.3); and Letter 11.3— 7 and Maraval’s note there. 27 On this see H. Langerbeck, review of W. Volker, Gregor von Nyssa als Mystiker: ‘Zur Interpretation Gregors von Nyssa’, Theologische Literaturzeitung 82 (1957), pp. 81-90. 28 C. W. Macleod, ‘The preface to Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses’ in Collected Papers (Oxford, 1983), paper 32 (= Journal of Theological Studies 33 (1982), pp. 183-91). 29 On the subject of God and virtue cf. note 15 above; also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X. 1178B 22; Philo, On the Making of the World 8: ‘The active cause is the perfectly pure and unsullied mind of the universe, transcending virtue, transcending knowledge, transcending the good itself and the beautiful itself.’ For a discussion of the relation between human and divine virtue cf. Origen, Against Celsus VI.48. 30 The idea of salvation as restoration is crucial and everywhere in Gregory and is well documented by C. A. Spira in his note to

Gregory’s Funeral Oration on Pulcheria (the daughter of Theodosius the Great): GNOIX.472.9-16; for further references to the theme of return cf. GNO IX.486,7-13. For an illuminating discussion of the problems surrounding the idea of progress, cf. E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress (Oxford, 1974). 31 For the importance of ‘light’ to Origen see Against Celsus 11.71 on 1 John 1:5, ‘God is light’, and for Evagrius’ stress on the importance of knowledge see Praktikos 2 and 3. 32 Cf. Muhlenberg, op. cit. (note 24 above). 33 Plotinus discusses the matter of infinity in Ennead II.4.3. 34 For Gregory the divine nature is without shape at Against Eunomius 1.231,435; and 11.107, 515. 35 Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London, 1979), p. 52. 36 For the succession of new beginnings cf. Homily on the Song of Songs 6 (177.7) and 8 (247.21). 37 J. Danielou, ed. H. Musurillo, From Glory to Glory (New York, 1961). 38 Or. 1 (34.2ff.). These and following references are all taken from GNO VI, ed. H. Langerbeck. 39 Or. 5 (150.5).

Or. 12 (366. lOff.). 41 Or. 1 (15.13ff. and 16.10). 42 Or. 2(63.8).

40

43

Or. 5 (160.10).

44

Or. 4(127.7). Or. 9 (271.10). Or. 9 (284.5; 285.17). Or. 3(98.7). Or. 11 (322.4ff.). Or. 5 (153.8-154.1). Or. 8 (254.12).

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 For the antiquity of the city of God and the Church, cf. On the City of God 15, and for the idea that Christianity is as old as creation cf. also Eusebius, HE 1.2. 52 Or. 15 (447.10). 53 Or. 5 (158.13). 54 Or. 8(245.11).

55 Augustine used Isaiah 7:9 (LXX) in Sermon 43.7; for the distinction between scientia and sapientia see On the Trinity XIII. 1; XIV. 1.3. 56 The expression aisthesis parousias - a very rare one for Gregory, if not unique - Or. 11 (324.10). The earlier Greek Fathers very rarely refer to their own experiences of God, nor do their biographers, in this respect differing from Plotinus, of whom his biographer Porphyry writes (Life o f Plotinus 23) that he experienced some form of rapture on four occasions. A similar distinction between Hellenistic and Christian claims of vision and ecstasy is discernible in the account of the encounter between Abba Olympius and the pagan priest in The Sayings o f the Desert Fathers, Omicron i. 57 For Gregory’s use of adespoton, cf. Catechetical Oration 5; On the Making o f Man 4 (PG 44, 136C; 16, 184B); Homilies on the Song o f Songs 5 (160.17); and On the Soul and Resurrection (PG 46, 101C).

6 The Cappadocian achievement

So far in this study something has been said about the lives and achievements of the three Cappadocian Fathers, and of their treatment of their cultural and theological heritage. Above all, attention has been concentrated upon their reworking of the legacy of Origen and their reaction to the challenge of Eunomius. But apart from this last point little has been said about the specific contribution made by each separately and all together to the doctrine of the Trinity and to Christology. In both these areas, but especially the first, they had a lasting effect on the face of Eastern theology. So, John Meyendorff’s account of the Triune God in his Byzantine Theology begins with a quotation from Gregory of Nazianzus: ‘When I say God, I mean Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’1 The essentially Trinitarian character of Eastern theism owes much to the work of all three Cappadocians, *and to an account of this theology I now turn.

6.1 THE CAPPADOCIANS AND THE TRINITY On 19 June 325, in the presence of the Emperor Constantine, the ‘318’ fathers of Nicaea produced the Nicene Creed, which affirmed in quite unequivocal language the full deity of the Son. In order to reinforce and expand its point the council introduced a word into the creed, the meaning of which was then unclear and caused subsequent generations much trouble. It said that the Son was homoousios, or consubstantial, with the Father. But despite the

apparent authority of the creed we hear no more about it until its reaffirmation at the Western Council of Serdica in 342/343, seven­ teen years later. In the intervening period the strongest supporters of the creed had found themselves expelled from their sees and exiled to foreign parts, while the supporters of Arius flourished. Above all, Eusebius of Nicomedia became a favoured counsellor of the Emperor, whom he baptized on his deathbed in 337. Far from Nicaea being regarded as authoritative and as having said the last word, synod after synod produced creed after creed in order to secure some measure of unity in the Church. An impression of the doctrinal industry and disunity that mark the period between 325 and 381, the date of the second ecumenical council, held at Con­ stantinople, is afforded by the simple fact that it saw the production of at least twelve different and sometimes contradictory creeds. On the whole it can be said that the central aim of all parties was to steer some sort of middle course between the position of Arius on the one hand and that of Marcellus of Ancyra on the other. This means that though all agreed that Arius had been wrong, if he meant that the Son was not co-eternal with the Father, Marcellus was no less wrong in denying any real and eternal distinction between the Father and the Son. Cappadocian theology is an attempt to interpret the central term homoousios in such a way as to insist on the full deity of the Son and of his eternal distinction from the Father. Basil’s own rise to theological consciousness can be dated with some accuracy to a council held at Constantinople in 360, when we find him associated with the party of his friend Eustathius of Sebaste, the so-called Homoiousians. The party had arisen in the middle of the previous decade and tried to form a common front against Aetius and Eunomius, whose insistence on the unlikeness of Son to Father and proposed definition of the divine nature as the Unbegotten or Ingenerate or Primal One has already been men­ tioned. At a synod held in Ancyra in Galatia in 358 Eustathius of Sebaste, George of Laodicea and Basil of Ancyra had endeavoured to rebut the views of Eunomius, by insisting that the Son was ‘like in substance’ to the Father. Such a view of the matter may have satisfied Basil for a short while, but not in the long term. We never find him employing the expression ‘like in substance’ or homoiousios with which to define the position of the Son in relation to the Father. On the other hand we do find him adopting a more pluralist position regarding the nature of God and of the relations within the deity between the three persons. Indeed, much of Basil’s theological

enterprise was to reconcile to the Nicene Creed those whose fears had been roused by the interpretation put upon it by Marcellus. For what did homoousios mean? To the Fathers of Nicaea it had been a convenient tool for disposing of Arius, who would never have dreamed of so defining the relation of Son to Father. It very clearly meant that whatever was affirmed about the Father must also be affirmed about the Son, Fatherhood alone excepted. But apart from this affirmation of equality of nature it is hard to say what more was being stated. Marcellus of Ancyra, as we have seen, thought that the creed asserted identity of nature and of person. In other words there was for him only one nature (ousia) in the deity, but also only one person (hypostasis) there. In other words the interpretation of Nicaea turned on what precise relation was assumed between the two terms ousia and hypostasis. In 362 the Emperor Julian, in an attempt to disturb the peace of the Church, recalled from exile those bishops, among them Atha­ nasius, who had been sent away from their dioceses by Julian’s predecessor Constantius. Athanasius seized the opportunity thus offered him by summoning a synod at Alexandria in 362. The upshot of this was the Tomus ad Antiochenos {Letter to the Antiochenes). It was a clever document, irenic in tone and intention, endeavouring to rally all to the creed of Nicaea, but permitting a certain diversity of interpretation in its meaning. It states: ‘We require nothing beyond the faith of Nicaea.’ As long as that is asserted, together with the condemnation of Arius, it appears to be a matter of theological niceness whether it be affirmed that in the deity there are one ousia and one hypostasis or one ousia and three hypostaseis. This highly ecumenical document was designed to reconcile the opposing factions in the Church of Antioch. Basil of Caesarea’s central contribution to the theological debate was to clarify or to attempt to clarify the relation between these two terms. In his earlier work, the Against Eunomius of about 364, Basil is shy of the word homoousios, using it on only one occasion (1.20), in connection with Hebrews 1:3. After his consecration as bishop in 370, however, he appears as a stalwart supporter both of Nicaea itself and of his own interpretation of the homoousios. In a letter (210) written in 375 he puts forward his own position as an attempt to find a middle path between polytheism and Judaism, Arius and Sabellius. We must confess both community of essence (ousia) and distinction of person (hypostasis), he writes. It is only in Letter 236, of the same year, that he explains more precisely what this distinction entails. Using a distinction which goes back to

Aristotle,2 the relation between ousia and hypostasis is likened to that between general and particular, koinon and idion. The distinction between ousia and hypostasis is the same as that between the general and particular; as, for example, between the animal and the particular man. Wherefore in the case of the Godhead we confess one essence (or substance), so as not to give a variant definition of existence, but we confess a particular hypostasis in order that our conception of Father, Son and Holy Spirit may be without confusion and clear. If we have no distinct perception of the separate characteristics of fatherhood, sonship and sanctification, but form one conception from the general idea of existence, we cannot possibly have a sound account of our faith. Here and elsewhere3 Basil offers us a model drawn from logic, with slightly materialistic overtones,4 in order to shed light upon the mystery of the immaterial Trinity. The three persons of the Trinity all belong to the same general category of Godhead; all are therefore equally spiritual and uncreated, because all share in the same nature. Yet this nature does not have an independent reality apart from the three persons. We are not to think of God as somehow distinct from the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To believe in God is to believe in the Trinity. In the Basilian scheme each person of the Trinity can be thought of as a union of the general divine nature and an individual characteristic, sometimes referred to as a tropos hyparxeos or way of existing. So the Father is as it were a compound of divinity + Fatherhood, and so on for the Son and Spirit. Basil’s treatment of the Spirit calls for special comment, as we have noted above in Chapter 3. For him, what makes the Spirit distinct from Father and Son is his holiness or sanctifying power. This is a constant feature of Basil’s pneumatology.5 However, it fails to show how within such a scheme the role of the Spirit within the eternal divine life is adequately defined. For while Fatherhood and Sonship clearly relate to the immanent nature of God it is hard to see how Sanctification can perform this role. Sanctification defines the role of the Spirit in his economic dealings with us. He cannot be thought of as making the Father and Son holy. A final mark of Basil’s Trinitarian theology goes back to the early days of his controversy with Eunomius. He admits in Book 3 of Against Eunomius that there is an order within the deity, with the

Father as the source of being, the Son and Spirit as deriving their existence from the Father. But though admitting the place of taxis or order within the Trinity, Basil refuses to follow Eunomius in inferring from this order a lessening of essential being and God­ head. Though the Son comes from the Father he is not therefore any less than the Father. In holding this Basil set himself against what can be called a tenet of Platonism, namely that the cause is superior to the effect.6 The pattern of descent from the Father as source persists throughout the rest of Basil’s life, and flowers in his book On the Holy Spirit, where the Father is the first cause of everything, the Son the creator, and the Spirit, the perfecter.7 Gregory of Nazianzus delivered his five Theological Orations in the summer or autumn of 380 in the church of the Resurrection in Constantinople. Although the audience to whom they were addressed was composed of adherents of the Nicene Creed, the wider audience Gregory clearly has in mind are the Eunomians, with whom he spars in the first and second orations, and the Macedonians or Spirit-fighters in the fifth. Apart from a more pronounced insistence on the deity of the Holy Spirit than we find in Basil, he owes much to and shares much with him. He inherits from Basil the two models of sharing a common nature and descent from a single source. With the help of the former he argues for and illustrates the co-equal deity of the three members of the Trinity; by means of the latter he hopes to show how all three are nevertheless only one God. In the fifth Theological Oration (section 10) he admits that all three are consubstantial, yet not three gods, because all come from the same source, that is, the Father. This insistence of Gregory that the source of the divine unity is the monarchy of the Father is often repeated. In the third oration, for example, he writes ‘In a serene, non-temporal, incorporeal way the Father is the parent of the offspring and the originator of the emanation’. Slightly later in the same speech he states ‘So because they [the Son and the Holy Spirit] have a cause [the Father] they are not unoriginate’.8 Even more clearly we find him writing in Oration 42.15 ‘The three have one nature . . . the Godhead. The principle of unity is the Father, from whom the other two are brought forward and to whom they are brought back, not so as to coalesce, but so as to cleave together.’ Although most of Gregory’s analogies support the general model of a unity in trinity achieved by means of a hierarchical descent from the Father, there is at least one passage which seems to derive

the unity from a slightly different picture. In section 14 of the fifth Theological Oration he writes: We have one God because there is a single Godhead. Though there are three objects of belief, they derive from the single whole and have reference to it . . . In a nutshell, the Godhead exists undivided in separate beings . . . It is as though there were a single intermingling of light, which exists in three mutually connected suns. When we look at the Godhead, the primal cause and the sole sovereignty, we have a mental picture of a single whole, certainly. In this passage the unity of the Godhead seems to derive less from the Father than from common sharing in the divine nature. Part of the trouble arises because of Gregory’s flexible use of the key term monarchia, which in the passage just cited refers to membership of the same class; but which in the passage from the third oration referred to just previously clearly means derivation from the Father. On balance, however, despite the odd passage from the fifth Theological Oration, Gregory prefers the idea of a monarchy where the Father is the source of order and being. He advances two further analogies in the same oration, one derived from rivers and the other from sunlight. Both are models of derivation, and so satisfy him on one level, but both connote flux, bodiliness and change and time, and therefore he finally rejects them. A final model is that drawn from mental processes, and that also makes use of a descending model. In this model Father, Son and Holy Spirit are self-related even as mind, word and breath.9 Such an analogy had appealed to a variety of Fathers from Tertullian to Gregory of Nyssa, and slightly later to Augustine.10 It had the great advantage over the stream and sun models of not depending for its effective­ ness upon spatial imagery. To Gregory of Nazianzus we owe one particular idea that seems to be quite new. In his endeavour to evade the Arian charge that the ideas of Fatherhood must be descriptions either of the divine essence - which would exclude the Son - or of the divine attributes - which would import accidents into the simple essence of the Deity - Gregory produces in his third Theological Oration (section 16) the idea of relationship (schesis). Ί should have been frightened by your distinction, if it had been necessary to accept one or other of the alternatives, and not rather put both aside, and state a third and

truer one, namely that “the Father” is not the name either of an essence or of an action, but is the name of the relation, in which the Father stands to the Son and the Son to the Father.’ A relation is neither an action nor a nature nor an attribute. It is, even so, real. It makes the important point that the nature of the Trinity is not simply constituted by the age-old characteristics of deity, like omnipotence, goodness and eternity, but also and perhaps more importantly by the relationship of the three members of the Trinity both to each other (immanent Trinity) and to the world (economic Trinity). This idea has been explored by John Zizioulas in Being as Communion,11 in which he seems to see the nature of the deity as constituted by their mutual interrelationships. So helpful and so powerful was this solution to the problem of the Trinity that it is possible that the celebrated analogies of Augustine in his On the Trinity owe something to it.12 Gregory of Nyssa’s discussion of the Trinity occurs in several contexts. Much of his time was spent, as we have seen, in defending the truth of the co-equality of all three persons against the graded Trinity of Eunomius. In doing this he used language which was susceptible of a tritheist interpretation. So, for example, in his first book Against Eunomius (section 227), he had argued that the three persons of the Trinity share the same divine nature, even as Peter, James and John share in the same human nature. They are the same as each other in point of nature, different in their individuality. His apparent tritheism is even more marked in a letter ascribed to Basil, but now assigned to Gregory, Letter 38. The letter begins by insisting on a real distinction between ousia and hypostasis. After explaining the meaning of the two terms in the human sphere, it continues: ‘Apply this to the doctrine of God and you will not go far wrong . . . The notion of uncreatedness and incomprehensibility apply in the same way exactly to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit . . . The difference of the hypostases does not disintegrate the community of the ousia, nor does the community of the ousia confuse the particularity of the individual characteristics.’ Together they form a ‘united separation and a separated union’. Another of Gregory’s colourful images follows, that of the rain­ bow. As the rainbow unites continuity of light and difference of colour, so too the Trinity unites community of nature and distinc­ tion of person. It is hardly surprising that Gregory, with the best intentions in the world, by using language and images of this kind was exposed to the accusation of tritheism. His dense argument in To Ablabius: On

Not Three Gods is of uncertain date, but may come from the period after the Eunomian crisis. It was in that period that he had argued that the unity of the divine nature was parallel to the unity of human nature; Father and Son and Spirit were like Peter, James and John. The treatise begins with the account of some unknown critic arguing that such an analogy implied tritheism. It is Gregory’s intention to prove that it does not. His first argument is to suggest that the word ‘God’ should not be used in the plural. For him ‘God’ is strictly not a class word at all. The same for Gregory is true of the word ‘man’. He wishes to make the interesting and difficult obser­ vation that ‘God’ is neither a common noun nor a particular one but transcends both. It is, he insists, above physis and therefore not open to the charge of being used in the plural. The aim of the argument is clear, for if accepted it absolves Gregory from the charge of possible tritheism. The difficulty in fully understanding him arises from the fact that the distinction between the terms physis and ousia is both novel and unclear. The second argument in the treatise proceeds on the assumption that we can infer unity of source from unity of action. By this is meant the idea that if it can be shown that one action proceeds from the three members of the Trinity, then the Trinity is the single source of that action. ‘When we inquire whence this good gift came to us, we find, through the guidance of the Scriptures, that it was through the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Thus the Holy Trinity brings to effect every operation in a similar way.’ In other words, where there is only one action, there is only one agent. A third attempt to counter the charge of tritheism takes the form of an attempt to relate the three members of the Trinity together by means of internal relationships. It is not unlike a form of the argument already to be found in Gregory of Nazianzus and may owe something to him. Although we acknowledge the nature as undifferentiated, we do not deny a distinction with respect to causality. That is the only way we distinguish one person from another, by believing, that is, that one is the cause and the other depends on the cause. Again, we recognize another distinction, with regard to that which depends on the cause. There is that [sc. the Son] which depends on the first cause [sc. the Father], and there is that [sc. the Holy Spirit] which derives from the first cause through the second.

Slightly later on this dependence is defined in terms of relationship. There is much here to remind the reader of Augustine’s analogies for the Trinity. Gregory and he are both dealing with the immanent Trinity. Gregory and he both use the notion of relation. Gregory and he both see the Spirit as coming in some way from both the Father and the Son. Where they differ is that Gregory lacks a symmetrical understanding of the way this procession takes place. So Augustine can write in On the Trinity XV.xiii.29 what Gregory never did nor could write: the Spirit proceeds principaliter from the Father, but also from the Son. Behind Augustine’s formulation lies his conviction of the equality of the Son with the Father in all except one feature, his Fatherhood. Apart from that they share all attri­ butes equally, including that of being the source of the Spirit. In On the Trinity XV.xxvi.47 Augustine writes that the Spirit proceeds from the Father principaliter et communiter de utroque. The West­ ern form of the Nicene Creed, ‘the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son’, is the direct child of Augustinian theology. Even so, despite the evident difference in emphasis, the two versions are much closer than is sometimes made out. For in Gregory of Nyssa the Spirit does in a sense come from the Son, at least coming through him; and in the Augustinian version the Spirit does come from the Son, but principally from the Father. Attempts have been made to erect wonderfully different ecclesiologies on the base of this slender difference; it may be doubted with what justification or success.

6.2 THE CAPPADOCIANS AND THE PERSON OF CHRIST Attempts to understand and explore the mystery of Christ’s person had, up to the Council of Nicaea, largely concentrated on asserting what was meant by calling Jesus God. Little serious attempt had been made to examine what it meant to call him man, or how the two assertions about Christ, that he was divine and that he was human, could both be made without breaking him in half and being unable to put the pieces together. Solutions to the problem of the unity of Christ tended in two opposite directions. On one side there were those who treated the deity as primary and reduced the human elements to a very secondary place. Members of this ‘school’ are often termed logos-sarx theologians. The expression derives from the prologue of the fourth gospel: ‘and the Word became flesh.’ The tendency of this school is either to deny that

Christ possessed a human soul, or to admit that he had one, but to deny to it any independent power of action. By and large theo­ logians who came from Alexandria held such opinions, among them Athanasius. On the other side there were members of the logos-anthropos school, who came largely from Antioch and insisted that Christ was fully human and had become united with the Word at his baptism or resurrection or birth as a result of his virtue and obedience, either actual or foreseen. For the members of the former school the virtue of Christ’s life and work derived from his divine nature, for members of the latter the power of Christ resided more in his obedience and example. In 361 a certain Apollinarius became Bishop of Laodicea in Syria. He and his father had done much to create a Christian culture in the East in response to the attempt made by the Emperor Julian in 362 to drive the Christians back into a cultureless ghetto. The two, father and son, had produced classical versions of the books of the Bible. Plato formed the model for the gospels; Homer for the books of Kings and so on. In addition to these fairly harmless activities Apollinarius the younger produced a version of Christology which challenged the rest of the Church, and above all the Cappadocian Fathers, to define their own positions. Basil’s own relationship with Apollinarius has been the subject of some debate.13 A correspondence between the two has been preserved {Letters 361-364) which, if genuine, suggests that Apolli­ narius had a strong influence on Basil’s Trinitarian beliefs. Later, however, in 375, in a letter to Eustathius of Sebaste (= Letter 223), Basil denies having had anything to do with Apollinarius. By 375 Apollinarian views on the nature of the person of Christ had become widespread and were coming to be regarded as dangerous. What then were they? Posterity has not been kind to Apollinarius and we are forced to reconstruct his views largely from the writings of his critics.14 The central thrust of his position was to insist on the unity of Christ. But if Christ were truly one, he could have only one leading principle, or hegemonikon. This leading principle Apollinarius asserted to be the divine nature of the Word. But, if that were so, what place could be found for the humanity of Christ, above all for his rational soul? The answer given was startling in its simplicity: there was none. None was needed, none was possible, none was there. For to assert the existence of a human soul in Christ meant the denial of any true unity in Christ. Again, if Christ was sinless, and he was, and had to be so if he were to save us, then he could not have a

fragile human soul, which everyone knew from experience as liable to sin. The sinlessness of Christ derived from his being a vehicle of the divine nature, which could not sin. Unity and sinlessness were the main props upon which the Apollinarian picture of Christ rested. ‘If God had been conjoined with man, i.e. perfect God with perfect man, there would be two, one Son of God by nature, the other by adoption.’ Finally, ancient biology insisted that in concep­ tion the soul came from the father, the body from the mother. But if Christ had no earthly father - and being virginally conceived he had none - then he had no human soul. The arguments of Apollinarius were very clever; he had a case which needed answering. His old friend Basil has little to offer on the debate. In his Letter 261, written in 377 to the people of Sozopolis, he does indeed discuss the person of Christ, though without mentioning Apollinar­ ius by name. There he insists that Christ possessed a human soul ‘using a body’ which was capable of hope and fear and of growth in virtue. To say otherwise would mean that one would have to predicate the sufferings of Christ, both physical and mental, of the divine nature - a move which would make God less than perfect. It appears from this argument of Basil that his principal objection to the Apollinarian doctrine is theological rather than anthropo­ logical. It ought to be rejected less because it tends to the denial of Christ’s full humanity than because it implies his imperfect divinity. The full humanity of Christ therefore appears as a device to protect his deity. A like argument occurs in the second letter of Nestorius to Cyril, in which he writes with clarity that the division of the natures was necessary in order to protect the divine impassibility.15 Gregory of Nazianzus produced a full and elegant reply to Apollinarius in his Letters to Cledonius. Here Gregory’s understanding of the meaning of redemption, rather than the need to protect a particular idea of the divinity of the Word incarnate, led him to coin a phrase which sums up his (and the Church’s) unhappiness with Apollinarius, and his own positive reply. ‘What has not been assumed has not been healed’ (to aproslepton, atherapeuton). The Word heals our human nature in Christ simply in virtue of touching it. The implications of this elegant formula are far reaching. To begin with there is some sort of identity assumed between Christ’s humanity and ours. Secondly salvation is assimi­ lated to healing, an idea which, for all its attractiveness to the Greek mind,16 is not frequent in the Bible. Finally, the place of healing is assumed to be primarily the created spirit or mind. The mind is the place at which the union between the body of Christ and

the deity occurs. ‘Mind is mingled with mind as nearer and more closely related, and through it with flesh, being a mediator between God and carnality.’ Here we are close to Origen’s belief that the human mind of Christ is the point of juncture between God and the body.17 In several respects, therefore, Gregory of Nazianzus is more Greek than is Apollinarius in his conception of the Incarna­ tion, above all in his insistence on healing as the heart of divine salvation and on the need for the divine in Christ to be related to the bodily by means of something more spiritual. Gregory of Nyssa produced two writings explicitly directed against Apollinarius and his followers. This is in addition to his treatment of the Incarnation in the Catechetical Oration. He wishes to insist, against the criticism of Apollinarius, that, although Christ possessed a complete human nature, he was still one person. Opinions about the nature of his solution have differed.18 Some have seen in him a proto-Nestorian, others a crypto-Monophysite. Others again find his theology ‘crude’ and with little power of synthetic thought. With such a variety of interpretations and judge­ ments it is not easy to form a conclusion that does justice to all the evidence. It seems best to treat him as holding a two-stage Christology, relating to both before and after the resurrection - an element in his teaching, as the Catechetical Oration makes clear, of crucial importance. This will mean that for Gregory Christ during his earthly life was made of two distinct elements, a full divinity and humanity held together in a loose unity, after a Nestorian model. Gradually, however, the shadows in and of the cave of our hu­ manity are dispelled by the presence within it of the divine Word, until the work is completed on the cross. Thereafter, with the resurrection of Christ, the two elements are so firmly joined together that the divinity of Christ swallows up the humanity and transforms it into itself. Gregory uses another of his striking images with which to illustrate this second stage. Our humanity is like a ‘drop of vinegar mixed with the endless ocean’.19 Thereafter it no longer remains in or with its own properties, but takes upon itself the features of the Godhead. No separate, independent nature of the humanity of Christ remains after the transformation. If Gre­ gory began his reply to Apollinarius as a Nestorian, he ends it as a pronounced Monophysite. And what is true for Christ is also true for the whole of humanity. We are made for transformation and it is achieved partly in and partly by us in virtue of our being somehow one with Christ and of our taking seriously the life of the Spirit. For

by our serious co-operation in the life of virtue we realize in ourselves what Christ has begun. The most important contribution made by the Cappadocians to the Christological debate comes undoubtedly from Gregory of Nazianzus. He asserts the basic principle that if we are truly to be saved we need to be saved at our point of greatest need. And that is the human soul. He offers no account of precisely how our humanity relates to Christ, and therefore of how the saving and healing work is to be transmitted. But he does assert the great truth that Christ our saviour must be fully one of us, and therefore must possess a fully human nature.

6.3 THE CAPPADOCIANS AND HELLENISM In origin Christianity was a Hebraic faith, which before very long found itself obliged to express its beliefs in Greek. If the primary motive for this shift had been missionary, it soon became necessary for the Church to defend its particular mission and to expand and explore it in an alien culture. The vast majority of the leading bishops and thinkers of the Church came from Greek-speaking areas of the empire, and the most celebrated writers, especially those who came from Antioch and Alexandria, gave to the prim­ itive Gospel a new complexion, if not a new substance. Whether this development amounted to a change or a continuity has been much disputed. The fact remains that by the fourth century the Church had at least two centuries of Hellenization behind it, and although, towards the beginning of this period, Tertullian in the West had protested against this alien wisdom, the majority of cultivated Christians took it for granted that the marriage between the Gospel and the Greeks was advantageous to the Church. It provided forms with which to express convictions. If the intention of the Lord was a worldwide mission (cf. Matt 28:19), then it is hardly surprising that the forms of the converted world entered into the life of the conqueror. When Rome conquered Greece, it soon found itself using the forms of the vanquished. The same was true with the Gospel. The three Cappadocians grew up in a world where it was assumed that such a marriage of Hellenism and the Gospel was' both a fact and a necessary and desirable fact. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus received a university education at Athens between 351 and 356, and although Gregory of Nyssa received his learning from

his brother Basil, his style and knowledge of philosophy were in no way inferior to his brother’s. Even so, the complacency with which they had all three regarded the alliance between Christianity and classical culture was rudely shaken by the School Law of 362, in which the Emperor Julian forbade Christians to instruct in schools. The marriage which had existed since the days of Justin and Clement of Alexandria was suddenly threatened with divorce. All three Cappadocians reacted, with varying degrees of speed and vigour, to the challenge. Possibly the most outspoken, because the most threatened, of the three was Gregory of Nazianzus, whose brother Caesarius probably belonged to the entourage of the emperor. His funeral oration on his brother reflects a certain ill-founded anxiety about the effects on his brother of this connection;20 but Caesarius remained a Christian despite the anti-Christian fanaticism of Julian - a reminder, perhaps, that Julian’s hostility may not have been quite so intemperate as is often suggested. But, whatever the actual intentions and methods of the emperor, they elicited, after his death in Persia in the spring of 363, two violent harangues from Gregory, Orations 4 and 5, probably delivered at the end of 363 or the beginning of the following year. The former is very long and occupies 130 columns in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca. This must imply that the speech was meant as a pamphlet to be read rather than as a speech to be delivered. The bitterness of the invective reveals the important fact that Gregory regarded Julian’s law and actions as an attack not only upon the Christian community, but also upon all that he, Gregory, held dear - above all the marriage between Hellenism and Christianity, which had informed his own life. Julian’s legislation has been described as an early attempt to create a form of sectarian education, with the Greek poets acting as a sort of sacred text. He chose to regard the Iliad and Odyssey, Plato and Euripides, as supreme works of literature, but also as productions of a view of the world in which the good Christian could not possibly share. Julian is in this sense a pioneer in his refusal to treat these masterpieces of the past as simply literature. The spirit that inspired them and the form they assumed could not be separated. Culture and religion formed an organic whole. Celsus, two centuries earlier, had made a similar reply to Christians who had tried to marry pagan philosophy and Christianity. Julian in 362 tried to effect a divorce between the Gospel and culture. It is therefore not hard to understand why it was that Gregory of Nazianzus, most of all the Cappadocians, felt his whole position

threatened by the School Law. Had he been assured of support from his fellow Christians in the encounter with Julian he might have felt more secure, but the Christian tradition vis-a-vis culture had never been monolithic. There had been many who had doubted the wisdom and the desirability of using the wisdom and culture of the Greeks. Tertullian in the second century, and Jerome in the fourth, had taken a very hostile stand on the subject.21 Gregory, therefore, was defending himself against a twofold attack, from Julian and from the enemies of culture within the Church. His main strategy is to challenge the central contention on which Julian’s position rests. The Greeks, he says,22 had tried to establish a link between to hellenizein, that is, speaking Greek, and worshipping the gods, and saw Christianity as characterized essen­ tially by boorishness and exaggerated respect for authority. To this twofold accusation Gregory replies that appeals to authority are by no means restricted to Christians, and cites a well-known Greek expression, autos epha, ‘He said so’, much in use among the followers of Pythagoras. On the main issue, however, he merely asks how Julian knows that the Greek language is a monopoly of the pagans. Of course he admits that if hellenizein included in its meaning the idea of worshipping the gods, over and above that of speaking Greek, then, in that case, Julian may be correct. But that is precisely what needs proving. But if the word simply means speaking the Greek language then it is quite beyond the com­ petence of the pagans to make such unilateral claims about it. Basil’s attitude to culture can best be gauged from his little work To Young Men on the Value o f Greek Literature.23 It is impossible to be certain about the addressees or the date. A recent editor suggests that the addressees were probably Basil’s nephews (and nieces) and that the work dates from the last years of Basil’s life, about 376 or 377. It lacks the bitterness of Gregory, and is very sententious. His treatment of Greek poetry, above all Homer, is highly moral. Homer is to be read only in so far as he is useful, and by ‘useful’ Basil means ‘profitable for the moral life’. Much of what Basil says owes a good deal to Plato’s treatment of the gods and of the poets in the Republic. He may also have known Plutarch’s On Reading the Poets. Basil’s attitude to Greek poetry is rather narrow and disappointing. The Christian, he thinks, must use only those parts of Homer which have a moral value, and leave the rest on one side. He must be like a bee in his selectiveness, flitting from one flower to another. There is no suggestion here that there is any value in such poetry apart from the moral. Aesthetic considerations

or the theory of ‘art for art’s sake’ seem to have no place in Basil’s attitude. Basil’s cautious approach to classical culture is reflected in Gre­ gory of Nyssa’s attitude to classical philosophy. On two occasions in his Life of Moses he addresses the problem of the attitude a Christian should adopt towards the treasures of Greece. On the first occasion (section 11.37) he writes of the foreign wife of Moses that ‘she will follow him, for there are certain things derived from pagan education, which should not be rejected when we propose to give birth to virtue. Indeed moral and natural philosophy may become at certain times a comrade, friend and companion of life to the higher way, provided that the offspring of this union produce nothing of a foreign defilement.’ Shortly afterwards Gregory shows what he means by ‘foreign defilement’. ‘Pagan philosophy says the soul is immortal. This is a pious offspring. But it also says that souls pass from bodies to bodies and are changed from a rational to an irrational nature. This is a fleshly and alien foreskin.’ Further examples of discrimination follow, which evaluate the contribution of pagan philosophy, choosing some elements, not others. What Basil proposed as a way forward for the Christian when faced with Homer, Gregory does for Plato. The second example derives from the spiritual exegesis of the spoils of the Egyptians (cf. Exod 12:35). The demand to rob the Egyptians of their valuable possessions invites those participating through virtue in the free life to equip themselves with the wealth of pagan learning, by which for­ eigners to the faith beautify themselves . . . We are to receive such things as moral and natural philosophy, geometry, astro­ nomy, dialectic and whatever else is sought by those outside the Church, since these things will be useful [the same word is used by Gregory as by Basil, meaning ‘profitable for the moral life’] when in time the divine sanctuary of mystery must be beautified by the riches of reason . . . For many bring the Church of God their profane learning as a kind of gift. Such a man was the great Basil, who acquired the Egyptian wealth in every respect during his youth and dedicated this wealth to God for the adornment of the Church, the true tabernacle.24 The moderate, somewhat guarded attitude displayed by the three Cappadocians to the Hellenic tradition manifests itself in several ways, which for the sake of clarity I shall divide into form and content. All three of them used forms that they inherited from

their education. Gregory of Nyssa used Plato’s dialogues the Symposium and Phaedo as literary models for his treatises On Virginity and On the Soul and Resurrection. His account of the creation of man in On the Making of Man owes a good deal both to the Symposium and to Protagoras. Gregory of Nazianzus owes a considerable debt in his poetry to the didactic poems of Hesiod and Aratus, and in his style to the speeches of Himerius and, before him, to Polemo. Basil is less obviously dependent on any one author, though he may have kept up a correspondence with Libanius, under whom he studied before his departure for Athens.25 The styles of all three fit well into what we know of the general nonChristian literature of the period. But though there are many formal elements which link them with the contemporary world, it is their use of the world vision of the ancient world that is more complex and more intriguing. All three moved in a ‘platonic universe’.26 The ‘Plato’ whom they knew taught them that there existed an intellectual world of supreme beauty and goodness, apprehensible by the mind, from which and for which the human spirit came and existed. The human spirit or soul was imprisoned in the body, into which it had fallen because of some ‘sin’ committed in a previous existence, and the purpose of life was emancipation from the constriction of the body by a process of purification both moral and mental. To the realm of spirit belonged the world of Forms or Ideas, at the summit of which was to be found the supreme Form, the Idea of the Good, and beneath it the lesser Forms, all conceived as static modes of reality. Much of this general pattern had been already taken over by Origen, and from him the Cappadocians inherited a good deal. But although there is much continuity in their general approach, their innovations within it are perhaps even more striking. The extent of the revision can be seen by looking at four main areas: (a) God, (b) the spiritual world, (c) anthropology and (d) evil. (a) God. For Plato and Plotinus the supreme principle is rarely termed God. The Idea of the Good or of Beauty or Absolute Being is regularly ‘defined’ by Plato as neuter, while in Timaeus the personal god looks at the impersonal Form as something superior to himself. For Plato, value was superior to being, and immobility to motion. Plato would probably have considered a personal abso: lute as a contradiction in terms. Plotinus, likewise, rarely applies the term ‘god’ to the One;27 to make the One personal would have meant a difficulty in applying any idea of absorption in it as the goal of the ascent of the finite spirit. For the Cappadocians, however,

the idea of God is regularly personal, even though the terms of Plato are still applied to God. This fusion of personal and Platonic occurs especially in the more ascetic writings. In the first of his Longer Rules, for example, Basil writes that the supreme beauty is the good: ‘the good is God. All desire the good [a possible reference to the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics], there­ fore all desire God.’ Gregory of Nyssa, likewise, in his treatise On Virginity, identifies the abstract object of Plato’s quest in the Symposium with the God whose vision is promised to the pure of heart at Matthew 5:8. Gregory distinguishes himself from Basil by his greater reluctance to abandon the more impersonal language of the Greeks. This feature of his writing is well illustrated by his frequent use of the neuter to theion, when referring to the deity.28 A further respect in which, while retaining a belief in the absolute nature of God, the Cappadocians substantially modified it, was in their Trinitarian doctrine. They all believed that in some sense the one God was not so simple as to exclude that one God being three persons. In other words absolute unity and simplicity were in their view compatible with threeness. Contrast this with the simplicity of Plato’s first principle, always the same without in­ crease or diminution, or with the One of Plotinus, whose absolute simplicity exceeds our experience of unity. Something has already been said about the embarrassment felt by Gregory of Nyssa in the face of the apparent tritheism of his belief in To Ablabius. Plotinus did indeed believe in the existence of three ultimate principles - a sort of Neoplatonic trinity of One, Mind and Soul. This again might provide a model for a Christian Trinity, until it is remembered that the Plotinian trinity is organized on a descending scale, such that the higher is always superior to what follows. As we have seen, built into Neoplatonism is the principle of the superior­ ity of the cause to the effect. But this principle is consistently rejected by all three Cappadocians.29 For both Gregorys the three persons of the Christian Trinity share equally in eternity and infinity and in being the source of being to all else. The fact that the Son is derived from the Father, and the Spirit from the Father through the Son, makes no difference to the character of their deity. Here again, therefore, we are face to face with a strange phenomenon. Both sides to the debate are at one in admitting that in the divine world there exist three divine hypostases. Both sides admit that it is possible to order these three in point of cause and effect. But, while Plotinus clearly supposes that the One is not only

the uncaused cause of all but also superior to all, the Cappadocians were at one in rejecting any subordinationism of this kind. (b) The spiritual world. For Plato the Idea of the Good was approached by means of a subordinate world of Forms, called mathematica. In other dialogues Plato assumes the existence of a kosmos noetos or intelligible world, which contained the ideal patterns of this world, in accordance with which in Timaeus God had fashioned the temporal order. These forms were thought of as static, perfect and changeless. In comparison with this picture of the upper world, though not with that of Plotinus,30the transforma­ tion wrought by the Cappadocians is remarkable. The divine world of Forms is replaced by the divine world of angels. The Forms in some ill-defined sense owe their existence to the Idea of the Good; the angels are most definitely creatures of God and, more import­ antly, they are full of life. This transformation is too consistent to be either freakish or accidental, and may go back to Origen, who identifies the ‘waters above the firmament’ with the angelic creation. For Basil, indeed, a regular distinction is made between the angels and the Holy Spirit, who is the source of their perfection. ‘Holiness is not part of the essence of the angels; it is accomplished in them through the communion of the Spirit.’31 Gregory of Nazianzus is a little uncertain about the perfection of the angels, whom he describes in the second Theological Oration as ‘pure natures, unalloyed, immovable to evil, or scarcely movable’.32 The reiterated affirmation of the mutable angelic nature makes Gre­ gory’s difference from Plato clear enough. The angels know the divine splendour, but are still with difficulty capable of deserting it in favour of something inferior. Although he does not make use in so many words of Origen’s doctrine of koros or of boredom in the presence of a finite God, he shares with him the conviction that to remain with God is at best precarious. Gregory of Nyssa also believes in the essential mutability of the angels, but for him there is only one sort of movement now, that is movement upwards towards God and nearer to him.33 Freedom from sin, and even absence of a body, never lead to the face-to-face vision of God, whether for human beings or for disembodied spirits. The whole subject of the divine vision has been explored thoroughly by Gregory himself in the sixth Homily on the Beatitudes. Though less optimistic than the other two Cappadocians, he is at one with them in admitting the possibility or even the necessity of change in the world of the angels. This by itself does distinguish all three from the Platonic

conception of a spiritual world of changeless Forms. For them as distinct from Plato the Forms have become living beings rather than static patterns of changeless perfection. (c) Anthropology. Plato’s conception of the human being is hard to define. He is popularly regarded as the archetypal dualist as a result of dialogues like Phaedo and Phaedrus in both of which the soul is regarded as having fallen from a state (and place) of contemplation of the Ideas, without a body, into a state of loss of contemplation, with a body. In other words popular Platonism believes in both a radical distinction of soul and body and the pre­ existence of the soul. This fragile union of soul and body, though characteristic of much of Plato, is not the whole picture. In Timaeus, above all, a much closer union is postulated between body and soul; there is no doctrine of pre-existence, and human nature is treated as a sort of microcosm of the whole.34 This latter view is much more characteristic of the Cappadocians than is the more strictly dualist position. Even Gregory of Nyssa, who devotes the first part of On the Soul and Resurrection to a highly Platonic analysis of the human soul, deals in the second part with the very un-Platonic doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Further, as we have seen, his account of the creation of man in his Catechetical Oration insists on the necessity of a body for human nature, and later on his doctrine of resurrection is closely linked to the idea that body and soul will eternally belong together. Gregory of Nazianzus, likewise, in his second Theological Oration, also speaks of man as a microcosm. There he speaks of the mingling of the mortal with the immortal, of the necessary connection of intellect, the divine part, and of sense.35 Finally, Basil, at least in his treatment of what constitutes the image of God in human nature, does not seem to follow his master, Origen.36 He locates the image of God in man rather in the power to control than in any particularly intellectual faculty. Doubtless the more populist version of Plato remains as an undercurrent throughout the writings of all three Cappadocians; but the very fact that alongside that stress we also find a rather different picture, hard to reconcile with the more common version, even for a philosopher of the calibre of Plotinus,37 indicates a dissatisfaction with ‘school Platonism’. This greater sympathy for the body may have come about through reading the Enneads of Plotinus, with whom the Cappadocians had some slight acquaint­ ance,38 but it is more probable that this revolution took place under the influence of a deeper perception of the meaning for human life

of the doctrines of creation, Incarnation and resurrection of the body. (d) Evil. For Plato there was no Form of evil. It had no eternal significance. He identified being with goodness and non-being with evil. It became an axiom, therefore, for Platonists that evil did not really exist and had therefore no place in the real or spiritual world. Plotinus, too, in his treatise On the Nature and Origin o f Evils (= Ennead 1.8), argues that, though evil has some sort of existence, it does not exist in the upper world of his three hypostases and is both connected with turning away from the One and somehow con­ nected to matter. It is not absolutely unreal but only relatively so. Much of this reduction of evil to unreality had found a ready home among Christian writers, above all Origen. Basil, also, in his sermon That God Is Not the Author o f Evils,39 in his effort to remove the responsibility for the existence of evil from God, adopted a markedly Platonic stance. God is not the author of evil, because evil does not exist. What appears to us to be evil is simply appearance. It results from no action of God, but from our per­ verted wills, that turn away from God, through lack of interest in him. The word Basil uses to describe this mental condition is koros, boredom or satiety. It had been used by Origen40 also to explain the sombre phenomenon of the fall of the soul from its state of primitive blessedness. In Origen’s case this sense of boredom had arisen, so he argued, from the inability of God to satisfy completely the finite spirit. And this ‘inability’ on God’s part was a direct consequence of the finite nature of God himself. It is instructive to see Basil, who in common with Gregory of Nyssa had almost certainly rejected the notion of the divine finitude and replaced it with that of the divine infinity, continuing to use a solution of Origen in order to account for evil in the heavenly places.41 Although neither of the two Gregorys uses this device as a way of accounting for evil’s origin, Basil’s continuing use of Origenistic theodicy is an indication of both the strength of Origen’s system even when severed from its roots and the difficulty of accounting for the rise of evil. Gregory of Nyssa, indeed, rejects the Origen­ istic doctrine of koros,*1 but retains the general Greek idea that sin arises from ignorance. A further ‘inconvenience’ of the conception of evil as non-being, with which all three Cappadocians worked, was: What were they to make of the doctrine of eternal punishment, once it had been agreed that the triumph of God in Christ meant the death of hell and all evil? As we have seen, this conviction of the ultimate

triumph of good led Gregory of Nyssa to a doctrine of universal salvation. For him the Greek teaching of the unreality of evil resolves itself into a doctrine of the non-eternity of hell and of the ultimate salvation of all, even the devil. For Gregory, therefore, basing himself on 1 Corinthians 15:24-28, the only form of punish­ ment is therapeutic. It is surprising that such teaching was not condemned, though attempts were later made to erase it from his writings. The doctrine of universalism was indeed condemned at a much later date by the Synod of Constantinople of 543;43 and the slight suspicion that surrounded the name and works of Gregory of Nyssa doubtless reflects the unease felt at his unashamed main­ tenance of this doctrine. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus were less wholehearted in their universalism.44Basil, particularly, interprets the strictness of God’s demands and judgements so as, in the last analysis, to rule out the possibility of ultimate forgiveness. Both in the Moralia and in the Shorter Rules the sin of disobedience is punished with unending penalties. Eternal punishment can no more come to an end than can eternal life. Compared with the austerities of Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus looks very mild indeed. In his discussion of 1 Corinthians 15:28, which had been used by Gregory of Nyssa to argue to universalism, Gregory of Nazianzus suggests the same conclusion, though neither so clearly, nor so philosophically. In his fourth Theological Oration (section 6) he writes ‘But God will be all in all in the time of restitution; not in the sense that the Father alone will be, and the Son resolved into him . . . but the whole Godhead, when we shall no longer be divided . . . and shall be entirely like God, ready to receive the whole God and him alone. This is the perfection to which we press on.’ His language is nothing like so clear as that of his namesake. He does not say outright that all will be saved; that is only an inference we might draw from his lan­ guage, simply because the subject of the sentence ‘we’ is unclear in its precise meaning. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, though following the general Platonic picture of evil as somehow unreal, are sufficiently loyal to the majority view of the Church as to insist on or not to deny the eternity of evil and therefore of punishment. The four topics chosen enable us to see at a glance what position the Cappadocians took towards their Hellenic heritage. With Plato they shared the view that there exists a spiritual world, beyond the reach of the senses, into which all are invited once the victory over evil has been accomplished. If calling them Platonists is to say that they shared this view, then most certainly that is what they were.

But within this scheme they introduced (though neither uniformly nor universally) certain highly significant modifications. They modified the simplicity of the Absolute by their doctrine of a consubstantial Trinity. They modified its impersonal character by making it profoundly personal. The world of impersonal Forms was replaced by a world of personal and changeable angels. The imprisonment of the soul in the body had by and large been replaced by a more unified version, in which the body was there from the outset and would be there at the end. The major area of disagreement among them is to be found in their treatment of the end of man and the fate of the devil and of other evildoers. Origen (and Plato) held to the view that punishment was essentially therapeutic and would not last for ever. Gregory of Nyssa shared this opinion, and his avowed universalism may explain his absence from among the four great doctors of the Greek Church. Basil, however, almost always holds the sterner view, believing in ever­ lasting punishment. Gregory of Nazianzus is an uncertain candle set between the two brothers.

EPILOGUE The Cappadocians lived through a period during which the shape and attitudes of the Church were being forged, less in the crucible of persecution, though they had to endure a little of that, than beneath the smiles of imperial favour. By the time they were bom the council and creed of Nicaea were already past events. Yet neither the meaning nor the authority of the creed was assured. By the year 381 not only had the creed become acceptable and accepted to the majority of Christians; its meaning had also been clarified, by the distinction between ousia and hypostasis. Further, the deity of the Holy Spirit had also been affirmed. For all these achievements the Cappadocians were largely responsible. The ‘domestication’ of the Church under Constantine and its consequent transformation into a department of state had also raised problems for the Cappadocians, especially when they saw quite clearly that, for some not totally obvious reason, the Arians had the ear of the Emperor. But, except in some of the letters of Basil, the problem of Church-state relationships seems not to have been a cause of great concern to any of the three. It was only in the face of an anti-Christian Emperor, Julian, that the difficulty became acute, above all with his attempt to reclaim classical culture

for paganism. The year 362, therefore, proved vital for them, as it forced them to work out a coherent Christian response to the Julianic challenge. Their reply became in its own way classical, and contrasts suggestively with the total divorce proposed by Julian and endorsed by St John Chrysostom on the one hand, and the exuber­ ant and uncritical enthusiasm for Hellenism displayed by Synesius of Cyrene, the ‘Platonist in a mitre’, on the other. Much of this book has been devoted to an exploration of the spirituality of the Cappadocians, especially its modification of the heritage of Origen. How far Gregory of Nyssa, above all, modified his inheritance has been fruitfully explored by Jean Danielou and Henri Crouzel, who differ in their assessment of the revolutionary character of Gregory’s own contribution. One thing is certain. Gregory’s defence of Nicene orthodoxy made him stress the other­ ness of God in a more marked fashion than we find in Origen. In this newly discovered ‘orthodoxy’, ‘faith’ plays a significantly larger role than it does in Origen. Gregory’s insistence on the divine mystery made him less confident in the power of the human mind adequately to explore the nature of God. Finally, for Gregory, the life of moral perfection is never totally superseded. The demand to fashion our lives on the pattern of knowledge achieved and on that of God himself means that contemplation never replaces virtue but always accompanies it in the endless striving to remodel our own finite existences on the pattern of his infinite goodness.

Notes 1 John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology (New York, 1974). 2

Aristotle, Categories 2B.

3 Basil, Letters 52, 125 and 214. 4 The Greek word used by Basil is to hypokeimenon, ‘that which lies underneath’. 5 For examples of the Spirit as pre-eminently sanctifier (hagiazon) see Against Eunomius III.2; Letter 214.4. 6 For the general axiom in Neoplatonism of the superiority of the cause to the effect cf. Plotinus, Ennead V.5.13.35; and for a discussion of the principle cf. Proclus, Elements of Theology (Oxford, 1933), p. 193 and E. R. Dodds ad loc. 7

Basil, On the Holy Spirit 16.38.

8 Gregory of Nazianzus, third Theological Oration 2, 3. 9

Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 12.1.

10 The ‘mental’ analogy occurs in Tertullian, Against Praxeas 7; Athana­ sius, Against the Arians 2.2; Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration 2; Augustine, On the Trinity IX and X. 11 John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (London, 1985). 12 For Augustine’s possible dependence on Gregory of Nazianzus see On the Trinity 15.20.38 and the note there in the Bibliotheque Augustinienne edition, p. 528. 13 G. L. Prestige, St Basil the Great and Apollinaris of Laodicea, ed. H. Chadwick (London, 1956). 14 See Creeds, Councils and Controversies, ed. J. Stevenson, rev. W. H. C. Frend (London, 1989), no. 70. 15 Ibid., no. 220. 16 The idea that punishment is essentially and solely therapeutic prob­ ably begins with Plato, Gorgias 477A and 480C; and is taken over by Origen, On Jeremiah 1.16; Against Celsus 4.72; On First Principles 2.10.4-6; it is Gregory of Nyssa’s persistent view in Catechetical Oration 8 and 26. 17 Origen, On First Principles 2.6.3. 18 J. F. Bethune Baker, Introduction to the Early History of Christian Doctrine (London, 1903), p. 251, regards Gregory as basically Nestorian in tendency, while J. R. Srawley thinks Gregory’s theology ‘crude and tentative’ and of a ‘monophysite type’: ‘St Gregory of Nyssa on the sinlessness of Christ’, Journal of Theological Studies (1905/06). 19 For humanity as a drop of vinegar in water, cf. Against Apollinarius: GNO III. 1.126. 20 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 7.13. 21 Tertullian, Apologeticus 46; Jerome, Letter 22. 22 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 4.102. 23 St Basil on Greek Literature, ed. N. G. Wilson (London, 1975). 24

On the Life of Moses 11.115, 116; and on his brother Basil in GNO X. 1.126.10.

25 Gregory of Nyssa, Letter 13.4; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History IV.26. 26 Peter Brown, The Body and Society (London, 1989), p. 300. 27 Plotinus applies the word theos to the Absolute One at Ennead· VI.8.21.9; VI.9.9.16. 28 to theion as a designation for God is very frequent in Gregory: cf. On the Making of Man 5, 6; and the examples cited in the index to Srawley’s edition of the Catechetical Oration. 29 Cf. note 6 above; and Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.270.

30 For Plotinus the upper world of Spirit, nous, is full of life and movement as at Ennead V.4.2.43. 31 Basil, On the Holy Spirit 16.38; On the Hexameron 2.5. 32 Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration 2.31 and Mason’s reference. 33 Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses II. 163. 34 Compare Plato, Phaedo 80,81 with Phaedrus 245ff. and Timaeus 81A,

88D. 35 Gregory of Nazianzus, second Theological Oration 22. 36 Compare Origen, Dialogue with Heraclides 12 and 16 and Basil, Homilies on the Hexameron 8.6 and 9.5. 37 Plotinus, Ennead IV.8.1, IV.8.8. 38 For Gregory and the Cappadocian knowledge of Plotinus cf. J. Rist in P. J. Fedwick (ed.), Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic (Toronto, 1981), ch. 5. 39 PG 31, 329. 40 Origen, On First Principles 2.8.3. 41

Brooks Otis, ‘Cappadocian thought as a coherent system’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958).

42

Gregory rejects the Origenistic idea of koros in Life of Moses 11.232.

43 For the canons of the Synod of 543, cf. H. Denzinger, rev. A. Schonmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum (34th edn; Freiburg: Herder, 1967), nos 403-411. 44 For a very useful conspectus of early Church teaching upon eschato­ logy, cf. Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church (Cambridge, 1991).

Index Aetius (fl. 351) 20, 63, 103 akolouthia 54, 55, 79 allegory 54, 79 angels 120, 121, 124 aoicatastasus 71, 86, 89, 93, 123 Apollinarius (c. 310-390) 42,97, 111-13 Aristotle (384-322 bc) 61, 63 Arius (d. 336) 1,22, 103 Athanasius (Bishop of Alexandria 328-373) 1, 19,2 2 ,2 3 ,2 5 ,2 6 , 45, 46, 69, 86, 88, 90, 96, 104-10 Augustine (354-430) 58, 81, 85, 89, 108, 110 Basil (c. 330-379 or 377) 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 19-38,44,60, 104, 112, 116, 119 Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-547) 24, 25,27 Cappadocia 1 ,2 ,4 1 ,4 3 Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 215) 7, 13, 23 Constantine (Emperor 306-337) 1,6, 21, 102, 124 Constantinople (‘founded’ 330) 41, 42, 53, 106 creation 13, 30, 90, 92 darkness 62, 73, 74, 79, 84 deification 35, 48, 92 Donatism 6 Emmelia (mother of Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina the younger) 20 energies 60 epektasis 12, 69, 70, 77, 79

Eunomius (Bishop of Cyzicus c. 361) 20, 53, 60, 62-6, 102 Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339) 7, 13, 32 Eustathius (Bishop of Sebaste c. 356-377) 19-24, 26, 31, 36, 103,

111 faith 67, 88, 89, 125 freedom 56, 57, 58, 97 Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-389) 1, 10, 27, 33, 39-51, 106, 107, 109, 115, 116, 123 Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-394) 1, 3, 7, 8, 24, 27, 39, 47, 52-100, 108, 110, 113, 117, 123 Gregory Thaumaturgos (d. c. 268) 3, 4 ,5 Hellenism 2, 114ff. Himerius (fl. 350) 21, 118 Hypsistarians 3, 39 incarnation 71, 73, 75, 77, 84-6, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96 infinity 65-8, 70, 73, 76, 77, 78, 88 Irenaeus (fl. end 2nd century) 32, 38, 92 Julian (Emperor 361-363) 7, 29, 39, 40, 104, 115, 116, 124 Langerbeck, H. 68, 78, 83, 99 Libanius(314-c. 395) 21,28, 118 light 33-5, 43, 62, 71-3, 83, 100 Macleod, C. W. 58, 69

Macrina the elder 4 ,10, 20 Macrina the younger 20,21, 52, 53 Marcellus (Bishop of Ancyra, deprived 336, d. c. 376) 20,103, 104 Mary, Mother of God 71, 72 Meletius of Antioch (d. 381) 41, 53 Moses 68, 73-5, 83 Neoplatonism 13 Nicaea 1, 6,19, 20, 36, 39, 49, 65, 103,104,124 Origen (185-254) 4, 7, 8,10-17, 24, 33, 34, 42, 43, 47, 55-6, 57-9, 71, 75, 77, 83, 88, 93, 97,113, 118,120,121 see also Philocalia Philo (c. 25 bc- ad 40) 13,14, 68, 72, 74, 96,102 Philocalia (c. 356) 10, 22, 41, 48 Plato (428/427-348/347 bc) 5 , 10ff., 43, 68, 73, 87, 88, 90, 92, 119

see also Republic Plotinus (205-270) 13, 23, 34, 35, 48, 60, 66, 76, 87, 90, 92, 118-20 Rahner, K. 17 Republic (Plato) 11,12,14, 67, 72, 88,116 resurrection 95, 97 reticence ‘economy’ of Basil 33, 44 Sabellianism 20 Satan 93, 94,123,124 social concern/philanthropy 27, 28 Theodosius (Emperor 379-395) 64 Valens (Emperor 364-378) 2 ,1 9 , 23, 53 virtue 59-61, 69, 70, 78, 82, 97,125 Wiles, M. F. 64, 66,99