Justified True Belief

(●) The youngest and least promising of the three Cappadocian Fathers, who turned out to have the deepest mind of them all. + Three men from one small province in central Asia Minor finished the argument that Nicaea had started, and settled how the Christian church would speak about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Basil of Caesarea built the vocabulary. Gregory of Nazianzus preached it into the creed. The third was Basil’s younger brother, a provincial bishop of a town nobody has heard of, who at the time struck almost everyone as the weakest of the three. He was the one nobody sent abroad to study. His brother thought him hopeless at church politics and said so in writing. His own metropolitan, the senior bishop set over a whole province, installed him in a road-junction town called Nyssa mainly because he needed a body in the chair. And then, over about fifteen years, he wrote some of the most original theology the fourth century produced: that God is infinite and therefore can never be exhausted, so that heaven is not arrival but an endless going further in; that the human being is the image of God and therefore cannot be bought at any price, which made him the one preacher of the ancient church known to have said that owning people is wrong in itself; and that Father, Son and Spirit are one God because there is never more than one work being done. Four centuries after his death, at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, a deacon named Epiphanius stood up in front of the assembled bishops and called him the Father of the Fathers. The title stayed on him.

(●) c. 335 AD: He was born into a household that produced saints the way other families produce lawyers. + The family was wealthy, Christian, and Cappadocian, which meant the high inland plateau of what is now central Turkey: cold winters, good horses, and a long way from anywhere that mattered. His father, Basil the Elder, taught rhetoric, the art of public speaking that was the gateway to every profession in the Roman world. His mother, Emmelia, raised somewhere around nine or ten surviving children and buried a husband young. Count the ones the church later canonized and the household starts to look implausible. There is Macrina the Younger, the eldest, who turned the family estate in Pontus into a community of prayer and who is the one person everyone in this family deferred to. There is Basil, who became bishop of Caesarea and built a whole town for the sick outside his own gates. There is Peter, who became bishop of Sebaste. There is Naucratius, who gave up a promising career to live as a hermit by the river Iris and died in a hunting accident in his twenties. Their grandmother, Macrina the Elder, had spent years hiding in the woods of Pontus during a Roman persecution rather than sacrifice to the gods, and had learned her faith from Gregory Thaumaturgus, the missionary bishop who had converted the region a century earlier. Gregory of Nyssa grew up hearing about her. Gregory himself was somewhere in the middle, and he was the one who did not get sent away. Basil went to Constantinople and then to Athens for the best education money could buy, the ancient equivalent of leaving a country town for the two finest universities in the world. Gregory stayed home. What schooling he had came from his father’s books, from the local teachers, and above all from his brother, whom he later called simply his master and teacher. And the man with the second-rate education wrote the harder books.

(●) c. 360s AD: He took a paid job teaching public speaking, and his friends treated it as a defection. + He had already been made a reader, the junior clerical office whose job was to read the Scriptures aloud in the assembly. Then he left it to teach rhetoric for a fee, exactly as his father had done. In a family where the eldest sister had given up marriage and the eldest brother had given up a professorship, this looked like going backwards, and Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil’s closest friend, wrote him a letter about it that has lost none of its sting in sixteen centuries. He tells Gregory that people are blaming him for preferring the title of rhetorician to the title of Christian, and asks him to come back. Somewhere in these years he almost certainly married. The evidence is a remark he makes in his own treatise On Virginity, written around 371, where he says with visible regret that the writer is shut out of the very blessing he is recommending, which is hard to read as anything but a married man commending celibacy to others. A woman named Theosebia is often named as his wife, and that identification is genuinely disputed: when she died, Gregory of Nazianzus sent a letter of condolence calling her Gregory’s sister, and the family did have sisters. What we can say is that he knew the ordinary life from the inside, and that when he writes about grief, marriage and the death of children he does not write like a man guessing. He came back. By the early 370s he was in his brother’s orbit again, and On Virginity is dedicated to Basil’s programme, not to his own.

(●) 372 AD: Basil needed bishops he could trust, and made his reluctant brother bishop of a small town called Nyssa. + In 371 the emperor Valens split the province of Cappadocia in two. The move was administrative on paper and political in fact: it cut in half the territory Basil governed as metropolitan of Caesarea, and Valens had every reason to want Basil weakened. The emperor backed the Arian party, the side that held the Son to be a creature the Father had made rather than God in the full sense, and Basil was the most effective man in Asia Minor on the other side of that question. Basil answered by creating new bishoprics along the new border and filling them with men he could rely on. His friend Gregory of Nazianzus got Sasima, a dusty staging post with a customs house, and never forgave him. His brother Gregory got Nyssa. Basil did not pretend he was appointing a statesman. Writing a few years later to Dorotheus, a presbyter (one of the senior clergy serving under a bishop), about whether to send his brother on a diplomatic mission to the Western church (Letter 215), he said plainly that Gregory was quite inexperienced in ecclesiastical affairs, and that pairing a proud and exalted negotiator with a man to whom anything like mean servility is unknown was a recipe for nothing useful. There is a stranger episode too, and it takes a moment to untangle. Basil had quarrelled with their uncle, who was also a bishop, and Gregory seems to have wanted the two of them back on speaking terms. So letters began arriving from the uncle, brought by Gregory. The first of them, Basil says in a stinging reply (Letter 58), Gregory had forged himself. A second came and was no better. When a third arrived, carried by a man named Adamantius, Basil asked who it is that falls into the same nets three times. The whole thing looks like a clumsy attempt to patch up the family peace. Basil could not work out why, and neither can we. Transparently sincere, politically hopeless, and about to be handed the fight of his life: that is the man who sat down in the chair at Nyssa.

(●) 376 AD: With the Arian party holding the court, a hostile synod deposed him on charges of embezzlement and he spent two years on the road. + Under Valens the Arian party held the machinery of the empire, and the machinery was used. Arianism, remember, was the position that the Son was made by the Father and is not God in the full sense; it had lost the argument at Nicaea in 325 but it had not lost the court. Gregory was accused of mishandling church money and of an irregular ordination, arrested in 375 at the direction of Demosthenes, the imperial vicar of Pontus, and deposed by a synod of hostile bishops meeting in 376. The financial charge seems to have been a pretext. Basil, who knew him best, had already told a correspondent that his brother had no experience of church business whatever, and no one ancient or modern has seriously argued that he stole. So the bishop of Nyssa became a man moving between towns, borrowing a room, staying with friends, unable to return to his own church. The letters from these years are the letters of someone tired. Then, on the ninth of August 378, the emperor Valens rode out to meet a Gothic army near Adrianople and was killed with two thirds of his troops. The empire’s religious policy changed with the man wearing the purple. An edict of toleration followed, the exiled Nicene bishops went home, and Gregory came back to Nyssa in 378 to a welcome he describes with obvious astonishment: crowds in the road, so many people that he could hardly get through his own town.

(●) 379 AD: He lost Basil in January and Macrina before the year was out, and picked up the unfinished argument they left him. + Basil died at the start of 379, worn out at about forty-nine, with the Trinitarian argument unfinished and his commentary on the six days of creation unfinished with it. Later that same year Gregory travelled to Pontus to see his sister and found her dying on a plank bed, having given away everything she owned. He sat with her, and she spent what strength she had left arguing with him about whether the soul survives death and whether the body will rise, because he had come in grieving for Basil and she was not going to let him grieve badly. He wrote both of those days down. The Life of Macrina is the account of the deathbed, including the detail that everything she owned was the worn clothing she had on and an iron cross and ring on a thin chain at her neck; On the Soul and the Resurrection is the argument itself, cast as a conversation with his sister in the manner of a Platonic dialogue, with Macrina in the role Socrates plays in the Phaedo. Readers have long called it the Christian Phaedo. It matters that he wrote it this way. Almost everything we know of Macrina’s teaching survives only because her brother wrote it down, and he says openly that she was his teacher. In the same stretch of months he finished Basil’s unfinished work, writing On the Making of Man as the sequel his brother never got to, and soon took up the three enormous books Against Eunomius, defending Basil against the most formidable Arian dialectician of the age. The younger brother who had been nobody’s idea of a champion picked up the argument where it had been dropped.

(●) 381 AD: At the Council of Constantinople he was one of the men the empire named as the measure of orthodoxy. + The council that met in Constantinople in 381 gave the church the creed most of it still recites, and in particular gave it the clause about the Holy Spirit, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. Gregory was there and was one of its leading voices. When Meletius of Antioch, who was presiding, died during the council, it was Gregory who preached the funeral oration. Afterwards the emperor Theodosius issued an edict listing the bishops whose communion defined catholic orthodoxy in each region, and for the diocese of Pontus it named three: Helladius of Caesarea, Otreius of Melitene, and Gregory of Nyssa. A diocese in the fourth century was not one bishop’s territory but a large civil region of the empire, a whole group of provinces, so this was a short list for the north of Asia Minor. Nine years earlier his brother had installed him in a village. Now the imperial government was using his name as a plumb line. The years that followed made him something like a preacher to the court. He was sent on church business to Arabia and to Jerusalem, and came back with a firm opinion, which he put in writing, that going to the holy places does not bring anyone one step nearer to God, since God is no more present in Jerusalem than in Cappadocia and the traveller takes his own heart with him. In 385 he preached the funeral orations for the emperor’s young daughter Pulcheria and, within months, for the empress Flacilla herself. And he kept writing. The Great Catechism, his handbook of Christian doctrine for teachers, comes from these years, and so does the Life of Moses, and the fifteen homilies on the Song of Songs, and the eight homilies on Ecclesiastes that contain the passage nobody else in the ancient world wrote.

(●) 394 AD: He was last seen at a synod in Constantinople, and then the record simply stops. + He appears in the acts of a synod held at Constantinople in 394, sitting among the bishops on a disputed appointment, and that is the last anyone sees of him. After it there is nothing: no death notice, no funeral oration by a friend, no letter breaking the news. For a bishop of his standing that is unusual, and it leaves everyone estimating. He died soon after, probably in 394 or 395, at about sixty, and the 395 that follows his name in the reference books is a convention rather than a record. There is something fitting in the silence. Gregory of Nazianzus, who wrote his own life at length and in verse, is a man we can hear. Basil left hundreds of letters of business and command. Gregory of Nyssa left arguments, and the arguments outlasted the century in a way none of his contemporaries would have predicted, because they turned out to be about the two things that do not date: what God is like, and what a human being is worth.

What He Taught

(T1) God has no limit, so no mind and no word ever reaches the end of him. + Think about what it means to know something completely. You can know a room completely: walk it, measure it, and there is nothing left. You can, in principle, know a mountain completely. The knowing has an end because the thing has an edge. Gregory’s central claim is that God has no edge. He is infinite, which here does not mean merely very large but means without limit of any kind, and a thing without limit cannot be got round, cannot be measured, cannot be summed up in a definition. This sounds obvious now. It was not obvious then. Gregory is generally credited with being the first Christian thinker to make the infinity of God a load-bearing doctrine rather than a pious adjective, and he did it under pressure. The man across the table was Eunomius, an Arian bishop and a formidable logician, who taught that a single word gives us the very essence of God: "unbegotten," meaning that God comes from no one and was never born or made. Get that word, Eunomius held, and a trained mind can know God as well as God knows himself. Gregory’s answer is that a definition is a fence, and there is no fence that will go round God. Then he draws the consequence that made him famous, and it is not the gloomy one you might expect. If God is inexhaustible, then the soul that comes to him does not arrive and stop. It goes on going in, forever, and each stage is a real satisfaction that opens into a further desire. Later readers gave this a name from a phrase of Paul’s, "straining forward to what lies ahead" (Philippians 3:13): epektasis, the endless stretching forward. In the Life of Moses he reads the whole exodus story as a picture of it. Moses asks to see God’s glory and is put in a cleft of rock and shown God’s back, which Gregory takes to mean that to see God is to follow him; and Moses, who has spoken with God face to face, climbs the mountain into thick darkness (Exodus 20:21), which Gregory takes to mean that the closer you come the less you can see, not because there is less light but because there is more of God than eyes were built for. The practical upshot is a definition of perfection that no other ancient writer offers. For Gregory, being perfect cannot mean having arrived, because there is nowhere to arrive at. It means never stopping.

(Q) "It is not possible that that which is by nature infinite should be comprehended in any conception expressed by words." + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, Book III, §5 in the twelve-book division used by the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 5 (Moore and Wilson translation). Eunomius had claimed that the human mind can grasp God’s essence. Gregory begins his reply by conceding, almost cheerfully, that in this particular kind of wisdom he is unlearned, and then explains why everyone else is too. He goes on: "For by what name can I describe the incomprehensible? by what speech can I declare the unspeakable?"

(T2) A human being carries the image of God, and therefore has no price at which he can be sold. + In the fourth century, slavery was simply the weather. Nobody argued about it because nobody thought there was anything to argue about. Christians owned slaves, bishops owned slaves, and the church’s teachers said what everyone said: treat them kindly, remember they are your brothers in Christ, remember you have a Master in heaven too. What almost nobody said was that the institution itself should not exist. Then Gregory sat down to preach through Ecclesiastes, and reached chapter 2, where Solomon lists the things he acquired in his search for satisfaction: houses, vineyards, pools, herds, and slaves. Gregory’s fourth homily takes that one line and turns it into something the ancient world had not heard. He does not begin with cruelty or with the treatment of slaves. He goes for the ownership itself, and he argues it from Genesis. God gave the human race dominion over the fish, the birds and the cattle, and over nothing else (Genesis 1:26). To own a human being is to step over the boundary of the authority you were actually given and legislate against God, dividing a single free nature into owner and owned. Then he asks the question that gives the homily its force, and it is an economic question. Very well: name the price. What sum in the world is the equivalent of a rational nature made in the likeness of God? Christ himself said that a man who gained the whole world would still have lost on the exchange if he lost his own soul (Matthew 16:26), so the whole world is already too small a figure. And if the man being sold is the one to whom the earth was given, then the auctioneer is selling the earth and the islands and the sea along with him, and there is no buyer alive who can cover the lot. Gregory presses further and says the thing his contemporaries would have found most shocking: God himself does not do this, for God set us free when we were slaves to sin, and his gifts are irrevocable (Romans 11:29). If God will not enslave what is free, who are you? He then does something no other preacher of the age does. He looks at the piece of paper, the contract of sale, and asks what would happen if a worm ate it, or a drop of water blurred the ink. Where would your ownership be then? The whole edifice rests on a document. He is telling a congregation, some of whom owned people sitting in the same building, that their title deeds are a fiction.

(Q) "For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God?" + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes, Homily 4, on Ecclesiastes 2:7 (Hall and Moriarty translation, de Gruyter 1993, page 74). An obol was a small coin, roughly a labourer’s snack money; a stater, which he names in the next line, was worth a few days of work. The smallness is the point. Gregory is not saying the price offered was too low. He is saying that any figure at all, in any currency, is an absurdity, because the thing being priced is the likeness of God. No other preacher of the ancient church is known to have argued that slaveholding is wrong in itself rather than wrong when done badly (T2).

(T3) Father, Son and Spirit are one God because there is never more than one work being done. + A friend named Ablabius came to Gregory with the objection that anyone who has thought about the Trinity for five minutes has felt. Peter, James and John are three men. We call them three men because they share one human nature and are three individuals. Father, Son and Spirit share one divine nature and are three individuals. So why is that not three Gods? Say what you like about mystery; the arithmetic looks the same. Gregory takes it seriously, and he does not answer by softening either half. His treatise To Ablabius, On Not Three Gods is short, and its central move is to shift the question from what the three are to what the three do. When three farmers work a field, we can still point at each one and say that this row is his work and that row is his neighbour’s. Their activity divides. Now look for the same division in God, Gregory says, and you will not find it. There is no work the Father does in which the Son is idle, no operation the Son performs apart from the Spirit. Every single act that reaches us from God, creation, providence, our own life, our own sanctification, comes from the Father, through the Son, and is brought to completion in the Holy Spirit, and it is one act, not three running in parallel. The technical words he and Basil settled on are worth learning, because the whole fourth-century argument turns on them. Ousia is what a thing is: the nature or essence, what you would put after "this is a...". Hypostasis is the particular one who is it: the individual, the who rather than the what. Ask a stranger what he is and he says a human being; ask who he is and he gives you his name. The first answer is his ousia, the second his hypostasis. God, on this account, is one ousia in three hypostaseis, one what in three whos. And the reason this is not three Gods, Gregory argues, is that "God" is not the name of a substance we can count but a name we derive from what God does, and the doing is single. Christians have used a shorter form of his point ever since, in the maxim that the works of the Trinity toward the world are undivided.

(Q) "Every operation which extends from God to the Creation, and is named according to our variable conceptions of it, has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit." + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, On "Not Three Gods," to Ablabius (Moore and Wilson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The sentence directly before this one is the contrast that makes it work: among human beings, each worker has his own separate operation, so the workers can be counted. Gregory’s worked example is the gift of life. Ask where your life came from and Scripture will answer Father, Son and Spirit, but you have not been given three lives (T3).

(T4) The resurrection is not a new body but this one, put back the way God first made it. + The objections his sister answers on her deathbed are the ones people still raise in kitchens after funerals, and Gregory has the honesty to write them down in full. If a body is burned and scattered, or eaten by fish, or has decayed into soil that grew wheat that fed somebody else, how is it ever reassembled? And if it is reassembled, which version of it? The infant? The invalid? The man who died at ninety with almost nothing left? Macrina’s answer, as Gregory reports it, does not begin where you would expect. It begins from a definition. Resurrection is not God building a replacement. It is the putting back of our own nature into the form it had before anything went wrong with it, which means that all the things we would have to bring back with us if resurrection meant simple resuscitation, the illness, the ageing, the infant helplessness, the decay, are precisely the things that do not come back, because none of them belonged to the human being as God made it. That is why the question "at what age?" has no purchase. There was no age in the design. As for the scattering, her argument is that the soul is not a thing occupying a place, so distance does not divide it from what is its own, and it retains what Gregory calls a kind of recognition of the elements it lived in, the way you know your own handwriting across a room. He knows this is a picture rather than a mechanism, and he says so. What he insists on, against the Platonists he otherwise learned so much from, is that the body is coming back, that the human being is soul and body together and not a soul temporarily inconvenienced by one, and that hope directed at anything less is not the Christian hope.

(Q) "The Resurrection is no other thing than the re-constitution of our nature in its original form." + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection (Moore and Wilson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Macrina gives this as a formal definition, and Gregory sets down what she takes it to rule out: in the life God first made there was neither old age nor infancy nor any of the sufferings that come from our present infirmities, so none of those are what rises (T4).

(Q) "In fact, in the Beautiful no limit is to be found so that love should have to cease with any limit of the Beautiful." + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection (Moore and Wilson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Macrina is expounding Paul’s claim that prophecy and knowledge will pass away but "Love never ends" (1 Corinthians 13:8). Her reason is Gregory’s doctrine of infinity turned into a promise: knowledge stops when there is nothing left to learn and hope stops when the thing hoped for arrives, but love has nowhere to stop, because what it loves has no far side (T1). This is the sentence the whole mystical tradition after him would build on.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The creed most Christians recite on Sunday reached its final form in the room where he was standing. + A congregation on its feet on a Sunday morning, reciting the creed from memory, is saying sentences that were fought over for two generations, and one of the rooms where the fighting stopped had Gregory in it. Nicaea in 325 had said that the Son is of one substance with the Father. It had said almost nothing about the Holy Spirit, and for two generations afterwards the church argued about both. The settlement that ended the argument is the Cappadocian one: one ousia in three hypostaseis (T3), with the Spirit fully God alongside the Father and the Son, and the Council of Constantinople in 381 put it into the creed. That is the text recited in most churches today under the name of the Nicene Creed, and Gregory was in the council that produced it. His particular contribution was to answer the objection that would otherwise have sunk the whole formula. If you say three individuals and one nature, a good logician will say you have said three Gods, and Eunomius and his party were very good logicians. To Ablabius is the reply that let the church hold both halves at once, and it did the work: the principle that the outward works of the Trinity are undivided became common property in both halves of Christendom. In the Greek world it was argued from these few pages. In the Latin world Augustine came to the same principle by a road of his own. The empire drew its own conclusion quickly. Theodosius’ edict after the council named the bishops whose communion marked a church as orthodox, and Gregory of Nyssa was one of the three it named for the diocese of Pontus. Four centuries later, in the sixth session of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, Epiphanius the Deacon called him the Father of the Fathers in front of the assembled bishops.

(†) The Christian mystics took his darkness and his endless ascent and built a tradition on them. + Most ancient religion assumed that light is where God is and darkness is where he is not. Gregory reversed it. Because God is infinite, the nearer you get the less you can take in, so the mountain climbs into cloud (T1). That single move is the beginning of what later writers call apophatic theology, from the Greek for denial: the discipline of saying what God is not, because every positive statement is too small. The line runs directly from him. Around the year 500 an anonymous writer, most likely a monk in Syria, published under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian whom Paul converted in Acts 17, and he took Gregory’s divine darkness and made a system of it. Through him it reached the whole Middle Ages, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Maximus the Confessor, the deepest Byzantine theologian of the seventh century, took the endless ascent and made it central to the Eastern understanding of salvation as growing participation in the life of God. John of Damascus quotes him. The Eastern churches never stopped reading him. The West, which read him mostly at second hand and in poor Latin, largely forgot him until the twentieth century, when a German classicist named Werner Jaeger began a critical edition of the Greek text and French and Swiss theologians, Jean Danielou and Hans Urs von Balthasar among them, made the case that this provincial bishop was one of the most original minds the church has produced. That judgement has held. A great deal of the current scholarly conversation about divine infinity, about the image of God, and about what the resurrection body is, still starts with him.

(†) His argument against owning people was copied, preserved, and not acted on for fourteen hundred years. + Honesty about a good argument includes what happened to it, and what happened to the fourth homily on Ecclesiastes is that nothing happened to it. The homilies were copied, read and preserved; the church kept the text safe for sixteen centuries. No council took it up. No bishop legislated from it. Slavery went on in Christian empires, East and West, and the ordinary Christian teaching about it stayed where it had been: masters should be kind, slaves should be patient, and both should remember the judgement. The silence proves less than you might think, and something worse than you might think. It does not show that the argument was unavailable, because it was sitting in the manuscripts the whole time, in libraries, in monasteries, in the hands of men who preached from the same book. It shows how much harder it is to see a wrong you are standing inside than to answer one someone has raised. When abolition finally came, fourteen centuries later, it came from Christians reasoning from exactly the premises Gregory reasoned from: the image of God in every person, and the soul no money can buy. Whether the Quakers and the evangelicals who did that work had this homily in front of them hardly matters, because they did not need it. The material was in Genesis, which is where Gregory found it too. What Gregory did, and what no other preacher of the ancient church is known to have done, is put those premises together and reach the conclusion out loud, from a pulpit, in front of people who owned slaves.

(†) Where his own record is questioned: he taught that hell will one day be empty, and the church did not follow him there. + Two things in his own writing have drawn steady criticism, and both are genuinely his rather than something later readers made of him. - Universal restoration. Gregory taught that punishment after death is medicinal rather than retributive: medicine given to heal a patient rather than a sentence served to settle a debt. What he pictures is a surgery, painful in proportion to how much evil has grown into a soul, and finished when the evil is gone. He argued the point from the nature of evil itself, which he held to be a privation, a lack of good rather than a thing in its own right, and therefore finite, whereas God is not. Given long enough, the finite runs out. His conclusion, stated most plainly in the Great Catechism and in On the Soul and the Resurrection, is that every rational creature, the devil included, will finally be healed and restored, so that God may be "all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28). The Greek word for it is apokatastasis, restoration. The church did not receive it. Christ’s own words set eternal punishment and eternal life in the same sentence and the same balance (Matthew 25:46), and the mainstream of Christians East and West has read that as decisive. The version of the doctrine taught by Origen, the third-century Alexandrian whose work lies behind Gregory’s here, was condemned at Constantinople in 553. Christians have disagreed since about how far Gregory’s own version falls under that judgement, and it is fair to say that he was never himself condemned and that his standing as a Father survived intact. What is not in dispute is that on this he stands with a small Origenist minority against the settled mind of the church. - The ransom paid to the devil. In the Great Catechism Gregory explains the cross with an image that has embarrassed his admirers ever since: the devil, having acquired a just claim over humanity, is offered Christ in exchange, takes the bait because the divine nature is hidden inside the human, and is caught like a fish on a hook. Gregory defends the deception as fair dealing with a deceiver, and adds, characteristically, that the devil will benefit from it in the end. His friend Gregory of Nazianzus rejected the whole framework in a single indignant paragraph of his Easter oration (Oration 45.22): a ransom is paid to whoever holds the captive, and the thought that the robber should be paid off, and paid in God himself, is an outrage. Most Christian teaching since has agreed with Nazianzus. Neither point is small, and neither is a reason to put him down. He was working out loud, in public, on questions where the church had not yet decided, and he was wrong in the direction of hoping too much.