Justified True Belief

(●) The reluctant preacher whose five sermons in a converted living room fixed how the church would talk about God, and whom the East calls simply the Theologian. + Every Christmas morning, in Greek-speaking churches all over the world, the singing opens with a line a nervous man said out loud in Constantinople in the winter of 380: "Christ is born, glorify Him." He was fifty, he had spent most of his life trying to get out of jobs the church kept giving him, and he had come to the capital to lead a congregation small enough to meet in a room of a relative’s house. Gregory of Nazianzus is one of the three Cappadocians, the group of friends and relations from the high inland plateau of what is now central Turkey who, in the second half of the fourth century, did more than anyone else to settle the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Basil of Caesarea was the organizer and the bishop who could run a province. Basil’s younger brother Gregory of Nyssa was the speculative one. Gregory of Nazianzus was the preacher and the poet, and it was his voice, more than either of theirs, that the church ended up quoting. The signature fact about him is arithmetic. In the whole of Byzantine church literature there is no writer quoted as often as he is except the writers of the Bible, and after his death the East gave him a name it had until then given to one man only, the apostle John: ho Theologos, the Theologian. He would have found that funny. He spent his career insisting that hardly anyone is fit to talk about God, and he included himself in the doubt.

(●) c. 329 AD: He was born on a Cappadocian farm, into a household his mother had already promised to God. + Gregory was born at Arianzus, a family estate near the small town of Nazianzus, out on the cold volcanic uplands of Cappadocia in central Asia Minor. The year is usually given as 329 or 330. He wrote thousands of lines about himself and never once put down the date, so every figure for his early life is an estimate that scholars have worked back from other events, which is why his early dates all carry a "c." His father, also called Gregory, was a landowner who had belonged to the Hypsistarians, a small local sect that worshipped the Most High God, kept some Jewish practices, and would have nothing to do with images. His mother Nonna, who was a Christian from a Christian family, prayed him out of that sect and into the font; not long after his baptism he was made bishop of Nazianzus, and he held the office for about forty-five years. Nonna had also prayed for a son, and when she got one she considered him spoken for. Gregory grew up knowing that he had been handed over to God before he was old enough to be asked, and the knowledge sat on him for the rest of his life like a debt he could not pay and could not refuse. There were two other children, and both of them went ahead of him. Caesarius became a physician good enough to be wanted at the imperial court in Constantinople, and Gorgonia married, raised a family, and outlived Caesarius by only a few years. Gregory would eventually bury all of them, and preach at three of the funerals.

(●) c. 350 AD: A storm at sea frightened him into promising God his life, and Athens gave him the friend who would shape it. + He was given the best education money could buy, which in the fourth century meant travelling for it: schools at Caesarea in Cappadocia, then Caesarea by the sea in Palestine, then Alexandria, and finally Athens, where he stayed the better part of ten years under the famous rhetoricians Himerius and Prohaeresius. The voyage to Athens nearly killed him. His ship was caught in a storm that ran for days, the crew gave up, and Gregory, lying on deck expecting to drown, discovered that what terrified him was not death but dying unbaptized. Baptism was commonly put off in that century until late in life, on the reasoning that it washed away everything behind it and it was prudent to have as much behind you as possible, and Gregory had put it off like everyone else. He promised God in the middle of the storm that if he lived he would belong to him. He lived, and he never treated the promise as cancelled. Athens gave him two things he kept. The first was Basil of Caesarea, a fellow Cappadocian, serious, formidable, and in a hurry. The two of them shared lodgings, books and ambitions, and Gregory later wrote that they seemed "to have one soul, inhabiting two bodies" (Oration 43.20), which is a sentence people quote about their own friends to this day. The second was a fellow student he watched with a suspicion he only understood later: a nephew of the emperor Constantine named Julian, who was quietly abandoning the Christianity he had been raised in and would spend his brief reign as emperor trying to put the old gods back.

(●) 361 AD: His father ordained him priest against his will, and he ran away before the week was out. + Home from Athens, Gregory wanted the quiet life: an estate, books, a stretch of time with Basil at the monastic retreat Basil had set up on the river Iris in Pontus, where the two of them read Origen together and, tradition says, made the anthology of his writings called the Philocalia. What he got was an ambush. At Christmas of 361 his father laid hands on him in front of the congregation at Nazianzus and made him a priest. This was not the outrage to fourth-century sensibilities that it would be now. Congregations regularly seized the man they wanted and had him ordained on the spot, whatever he said about it, and the church half-expected a good candidate to resist. Gregory called it tyranny anyway. Within days he had bolted north to Basil in Pontus, and he stayed away until Easter. What he did when he came back matters more than the running. He preached a short sermon of apology, and then wrote a long one: In Defence of His Flight to Pontus, an extended, painfully honest account of why an intelligent man might be terrified of the pastoral office. Guiding a human being, he wrote there, is "the art of arts and science of sciences," because no material is as variable as a person. That treatise became the first great Christian book on ministry. John Chrysostom quarried it a generation later for On the Priesthood, and Gregory the Great built his Pastoral Rule, the handbook of medieval bishops, on the same foundations.

(●) 372 AD: Basil made him bishop of a dusty road junction, and the friendship never fully healed. + In 371 the emperor Valens, who backed the party Gregory and Basil opposed in the long argument over whether the Son is God in the full sense, split the province of Cappadocia in two, which at a stroke halved the territory Basil governed as archbishop of Caesarea. Basil answered the way an administrator answers: he created new bishoprics along the new border to hold the ground, and he needed men he could trust to fill them. Consecration, the service in which the bishops already in office lay hands on a man and make him one of them, was Basil’s to give, and he gave it where it would do the most good. He consecrated his own brother Gregory to Nyssa, an obscure town in the half of the province he still held. He consecrated his best friend to Sasima, one of the new ones. Sasima was a staging post where three imperial roads met. In the long poem he wrote about his own life, Gregory describes it with a bitterness that has not faded in sixteen centuries: no water worth drinking, no grass, no neighbours worth the name, nothing but dust, noise and travellers changing horses. He accepted consecration because his father and his friend between them left him no room, and then, by his own account, he never took up residence. Instead he went back to Nazianzus and served his aged father, who died in 374 at nearly a hundred, with Nonna following within months. He never quite forgave Basil, and he was not shy about saying so while Basil was alive. Then Basil died in January 379, worn out at about fifty, and Gregory did not attend the funeral. Three years after that he stood up at Caesarea and delivered a memorial oration for him that is one of the finest pieces of prose in the Greek language, and one of the warmest tributes one friend has ever paid another. Both of those things are true of the same man, and between them they are most of what there is to say about the friendship.

(●) 379 AD: He arrived in a capital where the congregation that still called the Son fully God could fit in one room, and preached there anyway. + For roughly forty years the churches of Constantinople had been in the hands of bishops who held that the Son is not God in the full sense: the highest of all creatures, made before time and above every other made thing, but made. Their opponents called them Arians, after Arius of Alexandria; most of them preferred to say only that the Son is "like" the Father, and to leave it there. A small congregation in the city still held to the Council of Nicaea of 325, which had said that the Son is homoousios, of the very same being as the Father, and in 379 they sent for a Cappadocian preacher with a reputation. What Gregory found when he got there was not a church. It was a handful of people meeting in a house belonging to a relative, and he turned a room of it into a chapel and named it the Anastasia, the Resurrection, because, as he liked to say, the faith was going to rise again there. He was fifty years old, unimpressive to look at, and he preached to a room while the great basilicas of the city held services he was not welcome at. It was not a safe posting. During the Easter vigil of 379 a mob broke into the Anastasia and stoned the congregation, and Gregory was dragged before the magistrates afterwards, on the theory that the victim had provoked it. He refused to press charges against anyone. And then, through the following year, he stood up in that same room and preached the five sermons on the doctrine of God that made his name and are still read as a unit: the Theological Orations.

(●) 381 AD: He presided over the council at Constantinople that the church counts as its second, and resigned in the middle of it. + In November 380 the emperor Theodosius entered Constantinople, expelled the reigning bishop, and personally escorted Gregory into the cathedral through a hostile crowd under military guard. The following spring Theodosius summoned about a hundred and fifty Eastern bishops to the city for the gathering the church would later number as its second ecumenical council. An ecumenical council is one that speaks for the whole church rather than for a single province, so what it settles is meant to stay settled everywhere. Meletius of Antioch took the chair to begin with. Then Meletius died while the council was still sitting, and the chair passed to Gregory. He lasted a few weeks, and two quarrels finished him. The first was the disputed succession at Antioch, where the question of who was rightfully bishop of that city had the Eastern churches divided, and Gregory backed the settlement that most of the bishops present did not want. The second was a matter of church law. An old canon, which is what a rule laid down by a council is called, forbade a bishop to transfer from one see to another. A see is the city and district a bishop is given charge of, and Gregory’s, on paper, was still Sasima, the town he had never lived in. Bishops arriving from Egypt made the point loudly. Gregory, who by his own testimony had wanted to leave since the day he arrived, told the council to throw him overboard like Jonah if he was the cause of the storm, and offered his resignation. Theodosius accepted it. His farewell sermon to the council is not the speech of a man at peace. It is proud, wounded, and magnificent by turns, and it ends with him saying goodbye to the church he built out of a living room. His replacement was Nectarius, a well-connected city official who had not yet been baptized. Gregory went home to Cappadocia and ran the church at Nazianzus until 383, when he finally got a bishop appointed there and was free.

(●) 390 AD: He died on the family land, having spent his last years putting his own life into verse. + The last six or seven years were spent at Arianzus, where he had been born, and they were productive in an unexpected way. Gregory turned to poetry, and wrote something like seventeen thousand lines of it: doctrine in verse, moral advice in verse, epitaphs for his family, epigrams, and, above all, a poem of nearly two thousand lines called Concerning His Own Life. Nothing quite like it survives from antiquity. It is the longest autobiographical poem the ancient world has left us, and it was written some fifteen years before Augustine sat down in North Africa to write the Confessions. It is not a saint’s life. Gregory tells the whole story with the grievances left in: the ordination he did not want, Sasima, the bishops at the council, the friend who used him. A reader who wants to know what it felt like to be a fourth-century bishop who never wanted to be one has this book and almost nothing else. He died at Arianzus, most probably on 25 January 390, though some place it a year earlier; his own writings stop and no one recorded the funeral. His will survives, and it leaves the estate to the church at Nazianzus to be spent on the poor.

What He Taught

(T1) Speech about God is not for everyone, at every time, in front of every audience. + Constantinople in 380 had the argument about the Trinity the way a modern city has a political argument: constantly, loudly, and mostly badly. Gregory complains at the start of the first Theological Oration that the marketplace buzzes with it, that every dinner party is worried to death with it, and that the talkers have turned the deepest thing there is into a parlour game they can win. Theology, when he uses the word, is not the general study of religion. It is speech about God himself, which is why he thinks it matters so much who is doing the speaking. So he opens the most famous series of sermons ever preached on the doctrine of God by telling his hearers who is allowed to preach it. Not everyone, he says, and not always, and not in front of every audience, and not about every question. Three conditions do the work, and none of them is a test of cleverness. The speaker must have done the study. The speaker must be undergoing purification, by which Gregory means the slow business of having one’s appetites and vanities put in order, and not a moral examination passed once and filed away. And the occasion must fit, because some things are said in church that are not said in the street. Two things this does not mean, and Gregory says both. It is not a rule that ordinary Christians may not think about God; the five sermons themselves were preached to a mixed congregation in a house, and their whole purpose was to teach them. And it is not a retreat into fog. Gregory argues harder and more technically in these sermons than his opponents did. The point is about posture, and a man who takes up speech about God the way he would take up a debating topic has already got it wrong before he opens his mouth.

(Q) "Not to every one, my friends, does it belong to philosophize about God; not to every one; the Subject is not so cheap and low; and I will add, not before every audience, nor at all times, nor on all points; but on certain occasions, and before certain persons, and within certain limits." + Source: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.3, the First Theological Oration (Browne and Swallow translation). The opening move of the series. A few lines later he names the qualification he cares about most: it belongs to those "who have been previously purified in soul and body, or at the very least are being purified," which is a good deal gentler than it first sounds. He is not asking for perfection before anyone may speak. He is asking that the work be under way (T1).

(T2) God can be truly known and never comprehended, and the difference is not a dodge. + Think of someone you have loved for forty years. You know that person truly. You could pick their step out on a staircase. You will also never get to the end of them, and if a stranger asked you to supply a definition that captured them entirely you would laugh. Knowing truly and knowing exhaustively are two different things, and ordinary life is full of the first without the second. Gregory needed that distinction because of a man named Eunomius, the ablest of the anti-Nicene theologians, who had made an extraordinary claim: that the word "unbegotten" gives the very essence of God, so that a trained mind can know God as God knows himself. Against that, the second Theological Oration climbs Mount Sinai after Moses, goes up into the cloud, and comes down having seen, in Gregory’s phrase, only the back parts of God. What we see, he says, is not the divine nature itself but the majesty and glory of it as it reaches down to creatures. Two words are worth having here, because the whole fourth century turns on the difference between them. God’s essence is what God is in himself, the sheer being of him; his works, what the later Greek fathers would call his energies, are what he does and gives and shows. Gregory’s claim is that the second is genuinely open to us and the first is not, and that this is exactly what Scripture had always said. He is not inventing a loophole. Paul writes of the God "who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16), and the same Bible promises "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8). Both, and on the terms the second one names.

(Q) "It is difficult to conceive God but to define Him in words is an impossibility, as one of the Greek teachers of Divinity taught, not unskilfully, as it appears to me." + Source: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.4, the Second Theological Oration (Browne and Swallow translation). The Greek teacher is Plato, whose Timaeus says that to find the maker of the universe is hard and to declare him to everyone impossible. Gregory quotes the line and then, in the next breath, goes past it: putting God into words is impossible, and conceiving him is more impossible still. A pagan philosopher had reached the edge and Gregory tells him the edge is further out than he thought (T2).

(T3) The One and the Three cannot be held apart in the mind, and neither one is a stage on the way to the other. + Try to picture a face without picturing its expression, or an expression without a face. You cannot get one to sit still on its own long enough to be looked at. Gregory says something very like that about the Trinity, and it is one of the two or three sentences of his that Christians have quoted most: he cannot think of the One without being flooded by the Three, or distinguish the Three without being carried straight back to the One. Behind the poetry is a piece of careful vocabulary that he and Basil worked out together, and that the church has used ever since. Greek had two words that had been used almost interchangeably. Ousia means being, what a thing is: your humanity, which you share with everyone else. Hypostasis means the particular one who is it: you, standing there, and not your neighbour. The Cappadocian formula is one ousia in three hypostaseis, one being in three persons, which is not a contradiction because the two words are not answering the same question. God is one in the sense of what, and three in the sense of who. That formula rules out two errors at once, and Gregory names both. It rules out a ladder, three beings of descending greatness with the Son and the Spirit somewhere below the Father, which is what he thought his opponents were really selling. And it rules out Sabellianism, named after a third-century teacher who held that Father, Son and Spirit are three masks worn in turn by one person, so that God is a solitary actor playing parts. Gregory does keep the Father as the source within the Godhead, the one from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds, but he is emphatic that source does not mean earlier, greater, or more divine. There is no before in God.

(Q) "No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One." + Source: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40.41, On Holy Baptism (Browne and Swallow translation). From a sermon preached to candidates for baptism, explaining the three names they were about to be baptized into. The sentence immediately after it is the honest one: "When I think of any One of the Three I think of Him as the Whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking of escapes me." He is describing prayer, not solving a puzzle (T3).

(T4) The Holy Spirit is God, and Scripture taught it the way a good teacher teaches, one step at a time. + By 380 a great many people who had come round on the Son were digging in over the Spirit. They had a real argument, and it was not a silly one: the New Testament calls the Son God in so many words and never quite does the same for the Spirit. The party that pressed this was nicknamed the Pneumatomachi, the Spirit-fighters, and their position was that the Spirit is a divine gift, a power, an angelic minister, anything but God. Gregory’s first answer is about worship and about what the Spirit actually does. Christians are baptized into the Spirit’s name alongside the Father’s and the Son’s; they pray to him; and Christian teaching says that the Spirit is the one who makes a person holy, which is to say the one who joins a creature to God. A creature cannot do that, any more than a man can lend a fortune he does not have. So he puts the question in the bluntest form available and answers it in four words: is the Spirit God? Most certainly. His second answer is the interesting one, because it takes the objection seriously instead of denying it. Of course the Bible does not say everything at once, he replies. It teaches the way anyone teaches something hard, laying one course of stones and letting it set before adding the next. The Old Testament preached the Father plainly and the Son in shadows; the Gospels made the Son plain and hinted at the Spirit; and now the Spirit himself lives among Christians and, in Gregory’s phrase, "supplies us with a clearer demonstration of Himself" (Oration 31.26). Nothing new is being added to revelation. What was always there is being read in the light that revelation itself finally supplies.

(Q) "What then? Is the Spirit God? Most certainly. Well then, is He Consubstantial? Yes, if He is God." + Source: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.10, the Fifth Theological Oration, On the Holy Spirit (Browne and Swallow translation). Consubstantial translates homoousios, of the same being: the word the Council of Nicaea had used of the Son in 325. Gregory is pointing out that once the first question is settled the second one answers itself, since there is no third category between God and creature for the Spirit to occupy (T4).

(T5) Whatever Christ did not take up into himself, he did not heal. + A surgeon who closes the wound without cleaning the deep part of it has not treated the patient, whatever the dressing looks like in the morning. The patient will seem to be mending, right up until he is not. That is the shape of Gregory’s most quoted sentence, and it was written against a man who was on his own side. Apollinarius of Laodicea had been a friend of Athanasius and a stout defender of Nicaea, and he was trying to solve a genuine problem: how the eternal Word and a human being can be one person rather than two roommates in one body. His solution was to let the divine Word occupy the place a human mind would occupy, so that Jesus had a human body and the animal life of a body, but no human rational mind. It looked tidy. It secured the unity, and it made it impossible for Christ to have sinned. Gregory saw what it cost. The human mind is precisely where the trouble started; the will, the reasoning, the choosing part of a person is the part that has gone wrong and needs saving. A saviour who left that part out saves the half of a man that was never the problem. So he wrote the rule that the church has used ever since: what has not been taken up has not been healed. The healing goes exactly as far as the assuming does, and no further. Read plainly, that is what the New Testament had said. The Word "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), and the letter to the Hebrews says he "had to be made like his brothers in every respect" (Hebrews 2:17). Every respect is the load-bearing phrase. Gregory adds only the inference: if any part of us was left out of the incarnation, that part was left out of the rescue.

(Q) "For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved." + Source: Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101, To Cledonius the Priest against Apollinarius (Browne and Swallow translation). Written around 382 to the priest he had left in charge at Nazianzus, who was dealing with Apollinarian teachers on the ground. To assume, in this sentence, means to take up into oneself: the Son takes a complete human nature into his own person. The Council of Ephesus in 431 took it among its documents of the faith, and Chalcedon did the same in 451, which is a rare career for a piece of pastoral correspondence (T5).

(Q) "Christ is born, glorify Him. Christ from heaven, go out to meet Him. Christ on earth; be exalted." + Source: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 38.1, On the Theophany, or Birthday of Christ (Browne and Swallow translation). Preached at Constantinople, most probably at Christmas of 380, and among the earliest Christmas sermons to survive from the Greek church. Four centuries later Cosmas of Maiuma took these lines as the opening of the canon still sung at the Nativity in the Byzantine rite, which is why a congregation in Athens or Moscow this Christmas will begin with the first sentence of a sermon Gregory preached in a house chapel.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) What he argued about the Spirit went into the creed that congregations still recite, though not in the words he wanted. + The creed most churches say on Sunday is not quite the creed of Nicaea. Nicaea in 325 had settled the Son and then stopped, with a single flat line about the Holy Spirit and nothing else. The version Christians recite now, the one the Council of Chalcedon in 451 attributed to the bishops who met at Constantinople in 381, fills that gap: the Holy Spirit is "the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets." Look at what that clause does. It does not argue; it prescribes worship, and worship of the Spirit alongside the Father and the Son. That is Gregory’s argument from the fifth Theological Oration, carried into the church’s standing text (T4). The honest half of the story is that he did not get what he asked for. He had wanted the council to say plainly that the Spirit is homoousios, of the same being, the Nicene word, and the bishops declined to use it, preferring language that more people could sign. Gregory thought they had trimmed for the sake of peace and said so, in his letters and in the long poem about his own life, with the sourness of a man who had just resigned. He was outvoted on the wording and vindicated on the substance, which is a common enough fate and rarely feels like victory at the time.

(†) A single sentence from a private letter became the church’s standing test of a real incarnation. + Nothing about Epistle 101 was meant to be famous. It is a working letter to a priest in a country town who had Apollinarian teachers in his parish and needed help. Within fifty years the bishops assembled at Ephesus in 431 had taken it among their documents of the faith, and the bishops at Chalcedon in 451 did the same, and its rule was written into the definition Chalcedon produced: one and the same Christ, truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body. That phrase "rational soul" is Gregory’s point put into law. Whatever else the church would allow people to say about how the divine and human meet in Christ, it would not allow anyone to shorten the humanity. The line kept working long after Apollinarius was forgotten. Cyril of Alexandria used Gregory as an authority in his own fight over Christ’s person; Maximus the Confessor, in the seventh century, wrote whole books that are formally commentaries on Gregory’s difficult passages; and John of Damascus, whose Exposition of the Orthodox Faith became the standard summary of Eastern theology, quotes him more than any other father. The test is still the one Christians reach for when a new account of Christ arrives that makes him less than fully human.

(†) The East gave him the title it had kept for the apostle John, and the West met him in translation. + Greek Christians call him ho Theologos, the Theologian, a name they had given before him only to John the Evangelist, and long after him only to the monk Symeon the New Theologian. It is not a compliment about cleverness. It means the man who speaks about God rightly, and it stuck because his sermons became the way the Greek church said what it believed. They also became the Greek church’s reading matter. Byzantine church writers quote him more than any author outside the Bible. The orations were carried early into Latin, Syriac and Armenian, and in time into Georgian, Coptic, Arabic and Old Slavonic, and they were fixed into the calendar as the set readings for the great feasts, which meant that when a Byzantine congregation heard the sermon for Easter or Pentecost, it was usually hearing Gregory. The Latin West got him second hand and later. Jerome, who was in Constantinople during Gregory’s time there, sat under him and afterwards called him his teacher, the man from whom he learned to read Scripture (On Illustrious Men 117). Around the year 400 Rufinus of Aquileia translated nine of the orations into Latin, and that small selection is how the Latin Middle Ages, which read almost no Greek, heard the Cappadocian voice at all. Gregory himself, who never learned much Latin and never went to Rome, would not have expected it.

(†) Where his own record goes against him: he ran from every office he was given, and he could not let a grievance go. + The ledger has another column, and the striking thing is that almost everything in it comes from Gregory. No enemy preserved these failures. He wrote them down himself. - He ran. Ordained priest at Nazianzus, he fled to Pontus within days. Consecrated bishop of Sasima, he never took up the see at all, by his own account. Installed at Constantinople by an emperor, he resigned inside a year. He defends the first flight in a whole treatise, which is itself an admission that it needed defending, and a church that has to conscript its best pastors twice is entitled to notice how much of his energy went into escaping. - He nursed the wound. The letters he sent Basil over Sasima are cold, and the long poem about his own life returns to the injury years after Basil was dead and unable to answer. He was right that his friend had used him. He was also unable to stop saying it. - He kicked a dead man. The two Invectives Against Julian were written after the emperor was killed in Persia, and they are not argument so much as triumph over a corpse, taking open satisfaction in how he died. Gregory had known him as a student and felt personally betrayed, which explains the heat without excusing what he did with it. Admirers of his prose have been apologizing for those two speeches ever since. None of this touches what he taught, and he would have been the first to say that it was not supposed to. His own account of the priesthood argues at length that the office is too high for the man holding it, and he made the argument, as it turns out, from experience.