THE

_oPPADOCIANS
After the Emperor Constantine made the Church's faith
legal in 313, there was a tremendous flowering of Christian
c ulture and a creative and turbulent encounter between
the Christian community and the classical heritage of late
antiquity, In the final th ird of the fourth century the three
gre at Cappadocian Fathers were at the centre of this
excit ing encounte r. Their leader was St Basil, an
e cclesiastical statesman, social reformer and monastic
founde r a s well as a theolo gian, His friend St Gregory of
Nazianzus was a brilliant preacher and sensitive poet who
gave classic expression to the theology and spirituality of
the Ho ly Trinity in luminous prose and versa, Basil's brother
St G regory of Nyssa was renowned tor the depth ot his
speculative theol ogy and mystical spirituality, Though they
col labo rated and shared many common perspectives,
eac h had a unique g ift and personality,

Th is book is the first general treatment in English to bring

together the three Ca ppadocians, It intro duces the rea der
to their fascinating lives a nd w ritings a nd shows the ir
connections with the G reco-Roman culture of thei r a ge,

Anthony Meredith studied philosophy and theology at

Heythrop College, and classics at Oxford, where he went on
to do a doctorate under J N D Kelly on St Gregory of Nyssa,
He was a member of the theological faculty at Oxford from
1973 to 1992 and has been teaching early Christian doctrine
at Heythrop College for 15 years ,

Front c over pic ture : St Basil and St Gregory of Nazianzus

Kariye Musuem. Ista nbul
THEOLOGY

ISBN 0-88141-112-4

I [ 11. )

SVS PRESS 9 780881411126

 The
CAPPADOCIANS

by

1 I
I

J,
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VLADIMIR'S SEMINARY PRESS
i
CRESTWOOD, NEW YORK
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 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meredith, Anthony.
The Cappadocians / Anthony Meredith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Cappadocian Fathers. 2. Basil, Saint, Bishop of Caesarea, ca. 329-379.
3. Gregory, of Nazianus, Saint. 4. Gregory of Nyssa, Saint, ca. 335-ca. 394.
5. Christian saints-Turkey-Biography. 6. Theology, Doctrinal-History-Early
church, ca. 30-600. 1. Title.
Contents
BR67.M46 1995
270.2'092'2-dc20 95-15076
CIP

Editorial foreword Vll

Preface ix
THE CAPP ADOCIANS
Bibliography xi
Abbreviations xiii
Copyright © 1995 by Anthony Meredith SJ 1 The background 1
1.1 Geography and early history of Cappadocia 2
ST VLADIMIR'S SEMINARY PRESS 1.2 Christianity in Cappadocia 3
575 Scarsdale Rd., Crestwood, NY 10707 1.3 The conversion of Constantine 6
1-800-204-2665 2 The roots of Cappadocian theology 10
2.1 Plato 10
First printing 1995 2.2 Origen 13
Second printing 2000
3 Basil of Caesarea 19
3.1 Life 20
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
3.2 Monasticism 24
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval 3.3 Doctrine and the life of the Spirit 29
system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. 3.4 Conclusion 35
4 Gregory of N azianzus 39
4.1 Family and life 39
ISBN 0-88141-112-4
4.2 Man of letters, theologian 42
4.3 Spirituality 47
4.4 Epilogue 49
5 Gregory of Nyssa 52

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v

 THE CAPPADOCIANS

5.1 Life and works 52

5.2 Spiritual teaching - the influence of Origen 54
5.3 Reaction to Eunomius 62
5.4 The Life of Moses 67
5.5 The Homilies on the Song of Songs 78
5.6 Dogmatic theology 90
6 The Cappadocian achievement
6.1 The Cappadocians and the Trinity
102
102
Editorial foreword
6.2 The Cappadocians and the person of Christ 110
6.3 The Cappadocians and Hellenism 114
St Anselm of Canterbury once described himself as someone with
Epilogue 124 faith seeking understanding. In words addressed to God he says 'I
Index 128 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

Vi Vll
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
viii
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 1. 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
ix
 THE CAPPADOCIANS

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

Bibliography
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 Primary sources
made use of categories derived from Aristotle and Plato. The
As yet there is only one series which includes all the known writings
Cappadocians, therefore, each in their different ways, mad~ s~b­
of the three Cappadocians, the Patrologia Graeca (PG), edited by
stantial contributions to the spiritual, intellectual and dogmatic hfe
J. P. Migne (1857--66). This itself was based entirely upon the work
of fourth-century Christianity. This influence, above all in the field
of previous scholars, notably, in the case of Basil, on that of the
of Christian doctrine and spirituality, has been lasting; while their
Maurist Benedictines. Basil is in PG 29-32; Gregory of Nazianzus
reworking in the light of the Council of Nicaea of the inherited
in PG 35-38; Gregory of Nyssa in PG 44-46.
teaching of Origen possesses an interest all of its own.
Over and above this complete corpus, the writings of Gregory of
This preface ends with a few words of thanks to several people
Nyssa have been appearing in the Leiden edition (= GNO) begun
who in their different ways have helped in the making of this book.
by Werner Jaeger in 1920 and now numbering 13 volumes, of
First of all I should like to thank Fr Brian Davies, without whose
which, for the purposes of this book, the following are most often
initial invitation and persistent reminders the book might never
cited:
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 Contra Eunomium = GNO 1 and 2.
much indebted to the reader for the book, for whose painstaking
and extremely helpful criticisms I am very grateful. If the result has Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum GNO 6 (in 15
any merit, much of it is his 'fault'. Finally I should like to express sermons).
my gratitude to one now dead, who encouraged and inspired ~y For study purposes the most useful edition of the Life of Moses is
interest in the Cappadocians more than twenty years ago: Cohn in Sources Chn!tiennes (SC), ed. J. Danielou (Paris, 1968), and of
Macleod. Whatever value this work possesses comes largely from the Catechetical Oration (sometimes known as the Address to
the patient and acute unselfishness of these four. For any faults and Catechists), ed. 1. Srawley (Cambridge, 1903).
errors I am alone to blame. For Gregory of Nazianzus: the five Theological Orations (=
Orations 27-31), ed. A. 1. 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).
x
xi
 THE CAPPADOCIANS

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 of Patristic
Thought (Westminster, MD, 1951-86) is useful; as also is J. N. D.
Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (5th edn; London, 1977) with the Abbreviations
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 CE Contra Eunomium
French or German and upon specific aspects of the Cappadocians' ET English translation
works. Two are particularly useful: Paul Jonathan Fedwick (ed.), GNO Gregorii.Nysseni Opera, Leiden edition
Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic (Toronto, 1981); HE Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica)
and Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Meta- LXX Septuagint Greek Old Testament
morphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with PG J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Graeca
Hellenism (New Haven and London: Yale, 1993). SC Sources Chretiennes

XII xiii
 1
To the memory of
my father and mother 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

1
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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'
2 3
THE BACKGROUND
(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 YHWH 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
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
THE BACKGROUND
labours he added certain natural miracles, to which the two
7); after the mind had been trained, it was ready to devote itself to
brothers gave possible independent witness. It is hardly to be
the pursuit of physics, the study of the laws of nature. And then it
wondered at that they were so devoted to him, for Basil is witness to
was ready for the most serious part of the first section of the course,
the fact that it was to Gregory that his own grandmother, Macrina
ethics (chapters 9-12). The aim of this part was not a purely
the Elder, owed her conversion to Christianity. Macrina's own role
intellectual mastery of the principles of moral philosophy, but,
in the formation of Basil is well illustrated by his Letter 223, in
more importantly, 'likeness to God' - an ideal which owes much to
which (section 3) he explains to his friend Eustathius ~f Sebaste .the
Plato's Theaetetus (176B). This moral excellence is not, however,
completely received and traditional character of his own. faith,
viewed by Origen as being the end of the course or indeed of life.
'which I received as a child from my blessed mother (Emmeha) and
Beyond it lies theology, which contains two sections on the study of
from my grandmother Macrina'. .
Greek philosophy and the exegesis of the Bible. Not that Gregory
Our knowledge of the life of Gregory depends almost entlfely on
professes himself an uncritical admirer of Greek philosophy. He
three sources. One of them, Gregory's Address to Origen, is the
admits its lack of self-consistency and its consequent failure to
most contemporary document and probably the most reliable; the
convert others to its tenets (chapter 14). On the other hand it
other two are three brief notices about him in Eusebius' Ecclesiast-
purifies the mind of dreams and encourages us to move upwards
ical History (HE 6.30; 7.14; 7.28) and the Panegyric by Gregory of
and be ready for the study of Scripture (chapter 1S). The Bible is
Nyssa composed a century or so after the death o~ its subje~t.
regarded as the infallible source of knowledge. Several important
However, they differ in details, the most important bemg that whlle
principles underlying Origen's treatment of Scripture are here
Eusebius and Gregory himself locate his student days in Caesarea,
enunciated. Above all he insists that the Christian theologian
whither Origen went in 231, Gregory of Nyssa seems to know
should not commit himself uncritically to anyone system of philo-
nothing of this sojourn and can at least be interpreted as placing ~he
sophy. The theologian must be prepared to be eclectic. Further, the
period in Egypt. This discrepancy apart, on one central a~d vlt~l
words of Scripture may only make an entrance into souls that are
point all three witnesses are united: Gregory's master dunng thiS
properly prepared. It is our - moral- distance from God that makes
period was Origen. Origen, Eusebius informs us (HE ~.30), 'in-
his words opaque to us. The moral demands upon the would-be
stilled into them [Gregory the Wonderworker and his brother
exegete are in the tradition of the Greek philosophers, who also
Athenodore] a passion for philosophy and urged them to exchange
insist on the importance of moral purity if knowledge of the truth is
their former love for the study of divine truth. Five whole years
to be arrived at. In this area, as in many others, Origen foreshad-
they continued with him, and made such progress in divine things
ows the views of the Cappadocians. In another important respect
that, while still young men, they were deemed worthy of the
he also does this, in refusing to separate theology from spirituality
episcopate in the churches of Pontus.' Gregor~ of ~y~sa a~so
and from the moral life.
mentions Origen by name as the master of Gregory s Chnshan faith
Gregory owed much to these Origenistic insights. To what extent
(GNO X.1.13.11 = PG 46, 90SD) - a remarkable fact when it is
did it also influence his own theological positions? His opposition to
recalled that on only one other occasion does Gregory of Nyssa
the views of Paul of Samosata, which we can reasonably infer from
mention by name the one theologian to whose influence upon him
his presence at the Council of Antioch in 264, where Paul was
practically everything he wrote is an eloquent witness. 7
condemned, probably for a mixture of modalism and adoptionism,
But apart from the combined witness of Eusebius and Gregory of
suggests that like Origen Gregory was a strong advocate of the real
Nyssa that Origen's influence was effective in deflecting Gregory
and eternal distinction among the three persons of the Trinity. His
from the love of pagan learning, we learn nothing more exact from
Address hardly provides us with any very clear picture of his
them about the precise character of the education he received fr~m
theological views, and we are thrown back on Gregory's Creed
Origen. For that we have to turn to Gregory's own Address, ~hlch
recorded for us in detail in the Panegyric (GNO X.1.17.24-18.2S;
contains much interesting material about the structure of a umver-
sity course in third-century Caesarea. Apparently it began with a
= PG 46, 912C-913A). The highly orthodox character of this creed
has led some to the conclusion that it hardly represents the views of
thorough study of the techniques and practice of dialectic (chapter
its supposed author - a suspicion which is supported to some extent
4
S
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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? ' distinguish them from their predecessors. Even so they were to
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
6 7
THE BACKGROUND
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' (d. 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
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 Mango lO and G. C. Stead ll 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 of 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
 THE CAPPADOCIANS THE BACKGROUND

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.
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 Marcel-
linus, not on the whole a favourable critic, describes the measure as
cruel: Res Gestae 22.10.7.
10 C. Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (London, 1980), pp.
169ft.

Notes 11 G. C. Stead, Philosophie und Theologie (Stuttgart, 1990).

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 of the Hellenistic World
(Oxford, 1941), esp. pp. 571ff.; also A. H. M. Jones, Cities of the
Eastern Roman Provinces (Oxford, 1971); S. E. Kirsten, 'Cappadocia'
in Reallexiconfur 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 Be 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 Gesam-
melte Aufsiitze zur Kirchengeschichte II (Tiibingen, 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 loco (cf. note 2) says that Gregory is the first to attest
this belief.
7 Gregory of Nyssa, prologue to Commentary on the Song of 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 Marcel-
linus, Res Gestae 21.16.18 (on its abuse by bishops); Gregory of Nyssa,
Letter 2.13.

8 9

2 (dictator) Dio.nysius; to this end he co.mpo.sed the Republic, Politi-
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,l and Basil twice,
once by name in On the Holy Spirit (29.73) and once negatively and
not by name in Homilies on the Six Days of 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
10
THE Ro.o.TS o.F CAPPADo.CIAN THEo.Lo.GY
his conclusio.ns. Mo.re importantly, we hear nothing in any o.f them
o.f Plato's Po.litical concern. Plato's disgust with a system that put
Socrates to. death in 399 BC led him to try to. create a new so.cial
o.rder; to this end he visited Syracuse to enlist the help of the tyrant
cus and Laws; but of this we find hardly a trace in later Platonism
and no.thing whatever in the patristic use of Plato.. Instead we find
both in the Fathers and in their pagan contempo.raries a preference
for a relatively small number o.f passages, a fact which has led to the
interesting suggestion2 that there existed at this period a Platonic
anthology. The fact that such an antho.lo.gy 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 abo.ut
the intellectual methods of the Cappado.cians.
Plato.nism as it had co.me to be understood in the period of which
we speak included three basic ideas, all of which exerted consider-
able influence o.n the Fathers o.f both East and West. (a) There
existed an ideal wo.rld of changeless patterns of reality, known as
Forms. Their existence was postulated in o.rder to acco.unt for the
world o.f 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 so.metimes 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 time-
bound reality of the visible wo.rld was related to the eternal world of
perfect Fo.rms in various ways. Plato had used the expressions
'participatio.n' 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 do.es not believe in any doctrine of creation in
the strict sense o.f 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 o.f the soul in the beginning of time. This
11

THE CAPPADOCIANS
ascetic and spiritual journey is vividly traced for us in Plato's
analogy of the Cave in Book 7 of the Republic and in the upward
motion of eros in the Symposium.
As Andrew Louth has well illustrated in his Christian Mystical
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 Republic. The very idea of 'turning
round the eye of the soul' (cf. Republic 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 Timaeus
the eternity of matter. They denied it. Secondly, they all at least
verbally rejected the Platonic teaching, which we find in Phaedrus,
12
THE ROOTS OF CAPPADOCIAN THEOLOGY
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 Soil 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
follo~ing the example of his father in offering himself for martyr-
dom 10 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:
13
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 of 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
14
THE ROOTS OF CAPPADOCIAN THEOLOGY
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
15
 1
THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 of 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.
16
THE ROOTS OF CAPPADOCIAN THEOLOGY
'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.'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 0/ 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 Eunomiu:
111.10.41, a quotation, though unacknowledg~d, from Plutar~h s
treatise On Isis and Osiris 360D-F, probably denved from Eusebms,
Preparation/or the GospeI5.5.1.
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.. Mansfi~ld
(eds), Knowledge o/God in the Graeco-Roman World (Lelden: Bnll,
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 discus~es
both the originality and the sources in his writings of Origen's teachmg
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
17
 THE CAPPADOCIANS

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 of Songs
(GNO VI.12.14ff.).
7 For further confirmation of this understanding of John 6:33 in Origen,
ct. his exegesis of 'Give us this day our daily bread' in On Prayer 27.2.
8 Origen, Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, ed.
3
Hans Urs von Balthasar, trans. Robert 1. Daly (Washington, 1983),
no. 768, p. 276.

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

18 19
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
20
BASIL OF CAESAREA
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 of 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 N azianzus collaborated in
21
 1
THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
Philo calia 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
22
BASIL OF CAESAREA
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
23
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
illness - Gregory of Nyssa's account strongly suggests that he
suffered from a complaint of the liver (cf. PG 46, 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 of 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 of our holy Father Basil' .
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 of 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 offuga 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 Sebaste 10 of the
24
BASIL OF CAESAREA
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 of
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 sa-
dhus 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 of Antony, and it is therefore not
improbable that at least some literary influence filtered through
25

THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 (d. 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 of 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 of 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 'On the perfection of the monastic life', probably written
26
BASIL OF CAESAREA
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 self-
advertisement 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' (d. 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 'On beneficence', and Gregory of Nazian-
zus wrote 'On 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
27
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 ('I 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 ('In 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
28
BASIL OF CAESAREA
planted within each. It is in the third Rule, 'On 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, 'I 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
29
 1
r
THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
30
BASIL OF CAESAREA
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.'l7 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.1t 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
31
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
(To 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 exception 18 - 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
32
1
BASIL OF CAESAREA
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
33
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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/spiritlnous
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
34
BASIL OF CAESAREA
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 (d. 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
35
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 of 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 etudes
augustiennes 34 (1988).
2 Cf.ln 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, ct. GNO X.1.2.121.6ft.
3 For the situation at Antioch and its divisions ct. F. Cavallera, Le
schisme d'Antioche (IV-V siecle) (Paris, 1905); for Basil's dealings on
36
BASIL OF CAESAREA
this subject with other church leaders, ct. 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 ct.
Basil, Letter 58.
5 Gregory of Nyssa, Life of 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 ct. 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 of
Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1989).
9 K. E. Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the summum
bonum (London, 1931),9.118.
10 On Eustathius ct. Basil, Letter 223 and 1. Gribomont in Dictionnaire
de Spiritualite 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. 1.. 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 of the .World
9; Longer Rules 37.1; and Callinicus, Life of 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
VIIl.l.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. 114ft.
37
 THE CAPPADOCIANS

17 Psalm 32:6 (LXX) is used, apparently for the first time, by Theophilus
o~ Antioch, To Autolycus 1.7 and thereafter, perhaps influenced by
him, by Irenaeus, Demonstration 5 and Against the Heresies LXXII.l.
1
18 The suggestion that the text of Matthew 28:19 was not always the same r
is discussed by H. Benedict Green in 'Matthew 28:19, Eusebius and
the lex orandi' in The Making of Orthodoxy, op. cit. 4
19 For two divergent views on the influence of Plotin us on Basil compare
P., Henr~ in Les etats du texte de Plotin (Brussels, 1938), ch. 5 dealing

Gregory of Nazianzus'
with BasIl; and on the other side J. Rist in P. 1. Fedwick (ed.), Basil of
Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic (Toronto, 1981), ch. 5.

4.1 FAMILY AND LIFE

Gregory of N azianzus 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

38 39
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 teacher,S 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 second-
century 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
40
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS
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, ofthe
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 ofthe
41
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 obscurit~.
Jerome tells us that the evening of his life was spent by Gregory m
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 t~e 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 LEITERS, 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 ow~ t~eo­
logical positions can be seen by listing his view~ ~n the pnncIpal
areas of discussion. For him, in the first place, evIl IS non-matenal,
a position which he inherited from Origen (d. Commentary on
42
GREGORY OF NAZIANZ US
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, Moreschini 6 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 (d. 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 'I 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
r 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
I... 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
r 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
43
t

THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 ... An~ 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 l~tter. written to Ba~il
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
44
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS
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
i he then applies to the doctrine of God in section 26. 'For the matter
L 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
l
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
45

THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 ~n
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 Ano-
moians, Aetius and Eunomius, carried on their arguments, and
accused them of being logic-choppers rather than men of the
Gospel (d. 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.
46
I
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS
r 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
Ii" in a remarkable passage in Oration 33.11 the purpose of the
I
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
f 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
47
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
the possibilities of the human mind, he hardly goes as far as
Gregory of Nyssa in this particular directionY
In his discussion of the Cappadocians in The Study of 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. lO 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 of 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.'ll It has been calculated that the verb
theoo 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
48
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS
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 1. 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
49
 THE CAPPADOCIANS GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS

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.
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 of Man (Uppsala, 1981).
10 Andrew Louth in C. Jones, G. Wainwright and E. Yarn old (eds) , The
Study of Spirituality (London, 1986), pp. 161-8.
11 Donald F. Winslow, The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study in Gregory of
Nazianzus (Cambridge, MA, 1979), p. 179.
12 Plotinus never uses the words theoo or theosis, though he does use 'to
become God' at Ennead VI.9.9.58, while preferring both there and at
Ennead 1.2.6.3 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 of the Fourth Century (Paris, 1931).
15 See above, note 5.

Notes
1 The most useful accounts of the life and works of Gregory of Nazian-
zus are by B. Wyss in Reallexicon fur Antike und Christentum, by J.
Mossay in Theologische Realenzyklopiidie, and by H. G. Beck,
Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich), Philo-
sophisch-historische Abteilung (1977.4).
2 For Julian's 'savage' edict see Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Ge~tae
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. Saffn.~y and
L. G. Westerink (Paris, 1968), especially pp. xxxv-xlviii; also p.
xxxviii, note 2.
4 Apart from Sermon 2, Rufinus also translated 6, 16, 17, 26, 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.

50 51

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, 1 killed 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
52
GREGORY OF NYSSA
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 of Creation and On the Making of 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
53
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 of Moses, and
the Homilies on the Song of 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 of 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 enchafnement or
connection, a translation of the Greek term akolouthia. Gregory's
preoccupation with this notion is well illustrated from his enormou~
and varied use of the word. It appears in logic, cosmology, history
and exegesis; and it signals Gregory's search for an underlying and
54
GREGORY OF NYSSA
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. 1O
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) Eros
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 of 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
55
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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.
56
GREGORY OF NYSSA
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 of 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
57
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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.
Macleod 14 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 human mind (PG 44, 1268B), we can acquire some knowledge of
connection, which we can also see in Augustine's City of God 14,
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
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
his wisdom, as it expresses itself in the works of creation. In arguing
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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, 'On
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 Theaetetlls
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 ofthe Christian life (Life of Moses 11.318). It is hard to
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
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. IS This unusual 'definition' occurs too frequently to be
accidental. At the opening of the Life of 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 (d. 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
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 Mon-
tanist 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 neo-
Arianism 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' .
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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 eqmil to the Father.
The central plank in Aetius' argument was to define the idea of God
by means of ,in gene racy' 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
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
ontologically inferior to the Father - the reasons both have for
making this assertion are not the same.
Eunomius 19 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
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
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 mysticaVsoteriological 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.
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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-
hensiblyexcellent' (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 of 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 Ori-
gen 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'.
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
'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
SUE, 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?3
5.4 THE LIFE OF MOSES
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 of 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
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 (1 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 (d. 1 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 of 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 preface 26 (throughout what follows I follow the
numbering of J. Danielou's text and translation: Sources Chre-
tiennes 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 Langer-
beck27 - 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
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
the work is 'On 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 of Moses.
Yet, as has been persuasively argued by C. W. Macleod,2s 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 oithat 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 of Antony, is in his superior
rhetorical power in the construction of provocative images.
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 oftheophanies, 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 Moses at the burning bush with the words 'I 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
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
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. 3o The central
difference between the N eoplatonic 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 11.19-25). 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 ph6tag6gia,
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
71
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 Dan-
ielou 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 of 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 ofthe 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
72
GREGORY OF NYSSA
interpretation of the incident in his Life of 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: !t 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 mark~dly
Platonic character of these 'descriptions' hardly needs stressmg,
and parallels may be found in the Symposium .211A-B .. In.d~ed
apart from the very un-Platonic ideas of IncarnatIon and vuglmty,
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 cO.ntrast
between the manifestation in the burning bush and that m the
cloud. 'The Divine was first seen in light and now in darkness.' This
leads Gregory to introduce an i!llportant distincti~n between the
initial darkness from which we turn away and whIch we seek to
avoid, and the secondary darkness, where God dwells. The pr~­
gress, therefore, is one towards greater truth ,{rom darkness, that IS
from the realm of the senses, into light i!nd 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 nad 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
73
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
[ superiority to the mind, as does Gregory.
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.
r connected with an exhortation to further moral progress and with
It is not, however, in Philo's Life of 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 of 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 locally
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
l
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,
l
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
74
GREGORY OF NYSSA
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
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
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 1I.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 'I 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.
75

THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 resisf,
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.S.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 formlessness 34 of the absolute,
Gregory continues to call God the 'really real' and the 'good' and
76
'l
GREGORY OF NYSSA
l
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
I light as the ground of man's self transcendence.'35 This self-
transcendence 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
r 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, 'I strain forward to what
r lies ahead'. It is this endless, never-ending search for God and
l
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,
l
'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
77
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 HOMILIES ON THE SONG OF SONGS
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 of 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
78
GREGORY OF NYSSA
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 Langer-
beck's notes at the beginning of the fifth homily. On p. 137 he
invites a comparison between the gnosticlOrigenist 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 of 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 of Moses
plays an important part in the Homilies on the Song of Songs:
'sequence of thought' or akolouthia. As a device for interpreting
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 bur
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 of 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
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
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
I desire might give zest for joy.' Again, in Homily 5 (44)43 we read
T 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
1I 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 'I 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
1I
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
1 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 ofthe 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
i
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 of Moses, is himself regarded not simply as virtuous but
as virtue. The Platonic-biblical collocation of ideas is by now
81
L
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 underlyingphilosophia 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 life.' 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: 'Of 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].
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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 Langer-
beck 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: 'Open 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 33:2G-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
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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-
~ies 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
~rimal sin would be in the end undone, and the lost image and
hkeness of God would be regained. This message comes through
clearly also in the Catechetical Oration and in On the Making of
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
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
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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. 'Once
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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, 0 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 of
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
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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 Philip-
pians 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
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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.
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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 apophati-
cism, 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 111.1. 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.
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
(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
(2(}-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 tl).at 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
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
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' (d. 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 of 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
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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.' Tbe
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
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
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
95
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
96
GREGORY OF NYSSA
body of the Lord, but the body itself is transmuted by the in-
dwelling of the Word to the dignity of the Godhead. It maybe 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 anyone 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.
97
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
Notes
1 For Naucratius ct. Life of 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 sy zygos 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, ct. Basil,
Letters 58, 100 and 215.
5 Codex Theodosianus XVI. 1.3; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History V.lO.
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 of Gregory the Wonderworker (= GNO
X.1. 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 Ie temps chez
Gregoire de Nysse (Leiden, 1970).
11 Cf. G. Horn, 'L'amour divino Note sur Ie mot "Eros" dans saint
Gregoire de Nysse', Revue d'ascetique et de mystique 8 (1927), pp.
113-31.
12 W. Jaeger, Two Rediscovered Works of 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 Ie temps, Journal of
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.
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GREGORY OF NYSSA
16 Jaeger, op. cit. (note 12 above), p. 73.
17 Henri Crouzel, Origen (ET; Edinburgh, 1989), p. 12l.
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. Miihlenberg, Die Un-
endlichkeit Gottes bei Gregor von Nyssa (G6ttingen, 1966). In this
book, as the subtitle indicates, Miihlenberg 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; 111.9.54.
26 On the subject of Gregory's age and the meaning of the grey hairs he
assigns to himself ct. Life of Moses, prologue, section 2; In suam
ordinationem (= GNO IX.l.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 ct. 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 ct. 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
99
 THE CAPPADOCIANS GREGORY OF NYSSA

Gregory's Funeral Oration on Pulcheria (the daughter of Theodosius 55 Augustine used Isaiah 7:9 (LXX) in Sermon 43.7; for the distinction
the Great): GNO IX.472.9-16; for further references to the theme of between scientia and sapientia see On the Trinity XIII.1; XIV. 1.3.
return cf. GNO IX.486,7-13. For an illuminating discussion of the
problems surrounding the idea of progress, cf. E. R. Dodds, The 56 The expression aisthesis parousias - a very rare one for Gregory, if not
Ancient Concept of Progress (Oxford, 1974). unique - Or. 11 (324.10). The earlier Greek Fathers very rarely refer
to their own experiences of God, nor do their biographers, in this
31 For the importance of 'light' to Origen see Against Celsus 11.71 on respect differing from Plotinus, of whom his biographer Porphyry
1 John 1:5, 'God is light', and for Evagrius' stress on the importance writes (Life of Plotinus 23) that he experienced some form of rapture
of knowledge see Praktikos 2 and 3. on four occasions. A similar distinction between Hellenistic and
Christian claims of vision and ecstasy is discernible in the account of
32 Cf. Miihlenberg, op. cit. (note 24 above).
the encounter between Abba Olympius and the pagan priest in The
33 Plotinus discusses the matter of infinity in Ennead 11.4.3. Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Omicron i.
34 For Gregory the divine nature is without shape at Against Eunomius 57 For Gregory's use of adespoton, cf. Catechetical Oration 5; On the
1.231,435; and 11.107,515. Making of Man 4 (PG 44, 136C; 16, 184B); Homilies on the Song of
Songs 5 (160.17); and On the Soul and Resurrection (PG 46, 101C).
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).
40 Or. 12 (366.lOff.).
41 Or. 1 (15.13ff. and 16.10).
42 Or. 2 (63.8).
43 Or. 5 (160.10).
44 Or. 4 (127.7).
45 Or. 9 (271.10).
46 Or. 9 (284.5; 285.17).
47 Or. 3 (98.7).
48 Or. 11 (322.4ff.).
49 Or. 5 (153.8 -154.1).
50 Or. 8 (254.12).
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).

100 101

6 exiled to foreign parts, while the supporters of Arius flourished.
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. ~ut
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 ord~r to
reinforce and expand its point the council introduced a word mto
the creed, the meaning of which was then unclear and caused
subsequent generations much trouble. It said that the S~n was
homoousios, or consubstantial, with the Father. But despIte the
102
THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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
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 cen,tral 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 homoi-
ousios 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
103
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 Antio-
chenes). 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
104
THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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 atropos 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
105
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 N azianzus 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
106
THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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 N azianzus 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). 'I 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
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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,l1 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
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THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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.
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
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THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 devic~ 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, athera-
peuton). 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
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THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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.l7 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 Christo-
logy, 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
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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
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THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 of 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
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THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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 ofthe 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
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 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 N azianzus 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 anyone
author, though he may have kept up a correspondence with Liba- '
nius, under whom he studied before his departure for Athens. 25
The styles of all three fit well into what we know of the general non-
Christian 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 abs0 7
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 theascent of the finite spirit. For the Cappadocians, however,
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THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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 calise and
effect. But, while Plotinus clearly supposes that the One is not only
119
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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, 30 the 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
120
THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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 Nazian-
zus, 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
121
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 of 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 of 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
41
Origen in order to account for evil in the heavenly places.
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, 42 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
122
THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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. 44 Basil, 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.
123
 THE CAPPADOCIANS
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 born
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
124
THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT
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 111.2; Letter 214.4.
6 For the general axiom in Neoplatonism of the superiority of the cause
to the effectcf. Plotinus, Ennead V.5.13.35; and for a discussion of the
principle cf. Procius, Elements o/Theology (Oxford, 1933), p. 193 and
E. R. Dodds ad loco
7 Basil, On the Holy Spirit 16.38.
8 Gregory of Nazianzus, third Theological Oration 2,3.
9 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 12.1.
125
 THE CAPPADOCIANS THE CAPPADOCIAN ACHIEVEMENT

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 August-
inienne edition, p. 528.
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 11.163.

13 G. L. Prestige, St Basil the Great and Apollinaris of Laodicea, ed. H. 34 Compare Plato, Phaedo 80,81 with Phaedrus 245ff. and Timaeus 81A,
Chadwick (London, 1956). 88D.

14 See Creeds, Councils and Controversies, ed. J. Stevenson, rev. W. H. 35 Gregory of Nazianzus, second Theological Oration 22.
C. Frend (London, 1989), no. 70. 36 Compare Origen, Dialogue with Heraclides 12 and 16 and Basil,
15 Ibid., no. 220. Homilies on the Hexameron 8.6 and 9.5.

16 The idea that punishment is essentially and solely therapeutic prob- 37 Plotinus, Ennead IV.8.1, IV.8.8.
ably begins with Plato, Gorgias 477A and 480C; and is taken over by 38 For Gregory and the Cappadocian knowledge of Plotinus cf. J. Rist in
Origen, On Jeremiah 1.16; Against Celsus 4.72; On First Principles P. J. Fedwick (ed.), Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic
2.10.4--6; it is Gregory of Nyssa's persistent view in Catechetical (Toronto, 1981), ch. 5.
Oration 8 and 26.
39 PG 31, 329.
17 Origen, On First Principles 2.6.3.
40 Origen, On First Principles 2.8.3.
18 1. F. Bethune Baker, Introduction to the Early History of Christian
Doctrine (London, 1903), p. 251, regards Gregory as basically Nestor- 41 Brooks Otis, 'Cappadocian thought as a coherent system', Dumbarton
ian in tendency, while J. R. Srawley thinks Gregory's theology 'crude Oaks Papers 12 (1958).
and tentative' and of a 'monophysite type': 'St Gregory of Nyssa on 42 Gregory rejects the Origenistic idea of koros in Life of Moses 11.232.
the sinlessness of Christ', Journal of Theological Studies (1905/06).
43 For the canons of the Synod of 543, cf. H. Denzinger, rev. A.
19 For humanity as a drop of vinegar in water, cf. Against Apollinarius: Schon metzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum (34th edn; Freiburg: Herder,
GNO 111.1.126. 1967), nos 403-411.
20 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 7.13. 44 For a very useful conspectus of early Church teaching upon eschato-
21 Tertullian, Apologeticus 46; Jerome, Letter 22. logy, cf. Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church (Cambridge,
1991).
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.1.126.1O.
25 Gregory of Nyssa, Letter 13.4; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History IY.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 CatecheticalOration.
29 Cf. note 6 above; and Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.270.

126 127

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 Be) 61,63
Arius (d. 336) 1,22,103
Athanasius (Bishop of Alexandria
328-373) 1, 19,22,23,25,26,
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, 41, 43
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
128
INDEX
Macrina the elder 4, to, 20 see also Republic
r Macrina the younger 20,21,52,53 Plotinus (205--270) 13, 23, 34, 35, 48,
Marcellus (Bishop of Ancyra, 60,66,76,87,90,92,118-20
deprived 336, d. c. 376) 20, 103,
104 Rahner, K. 17
lI Mary, Mother of God 71, 72
Meletius of Antioch (d. 381) 41,53
Republic (Plato) 11, 12, 14, 67, 72,
88, 116
Moses 68, 73-5, 83 resurrection 95, 97
reticence 'economy' of Basil 33,44
Neoplatonism 13
Nicaea 1,6, 19,20,36,39,49,65,
Eunomius (Bishop of Cyzicus c. 103, 104, 124 Sabellianism 20
361) 20,53,60,62-6, 102 Satan 93, 94, 123, 124
Origen (185--254) 4,7,8,10-17,24,
Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339)7, 13, social concern/philanthropy 27, 28
33,34,42,43,47,55--6,57-9,
32
71,75,77,83,88,93,97, 113,
Eustathius (Bishop of Sebaste c. Theodosius (Emperor 379-395) 64
118, 120, 121
356-377) 19-24,26,31,36,103,
see also Philocalia
111
Valens (Emperor 364-378) 2, 19,23,
Philo (c. 25 BC-AD 40) 13, 14, 68, 72,
53
faith 67,88,89, 125 74,96,102
freedom 56,57,58,97 l' Philocalia (c. 356) 10, 22, 41, 48
virtue 59-61,69, 70, 78, 82, 97, 125
Plato (4281427-3481347 BC) 5, 10ff.,
J 43,68,73,87,88,90,92,119 Wiles, M. F. 64, 66, 99
Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-389) I,
10,27,33,39-51, 106, 107, 109,
115, 116, 123 1
Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-394) 1,3,
I
7,8,24,27,39,47,52-100,108,
110, 113, 117, 123
Gregory Thaumaturgos (d. c. 268) 3,
l
4,5 (
Hellenism 2, 114ff.
I
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,
~
I
92
Julian (Emperor 361-363) 7, 29, 39,
40, 104, 115, 116, 124
I
Langerbeck, H. 68, 78, 83, 99
Libanius (314-c. 395) 21,28, 118
light 33-5, 43, 62, 71-3, 83, 100
\
l
Macleod, C. w. 58,69
129