January 14 St. Gregory Nazianzen (329-390) After his baptism at 30, Gregory gladly accepted his friend Basil’s invitation to join him in a newly founded monastery. The solitude was broken when Gregory’s father, a bishop, needed help in his diocese and estate. It seems that Gregory was ordained a priest practically by force, and only reluctantly accepted the responsibility. He skillfully avoided a schism that threatened when his own father made compromises with Arianism. At 41, Gregory was chosen suffragan bishop of Caesarea and at once came into conflict with Valens, the emperor, who supported the Arians. An unfortunate by-product of the battle was the cooling of the friendship of two saints. Basil, his archbishop, sent him to a miserable and unhealthy town on the border of unjustly created divisions in his diocese. Basil reproached Gregory for not going to his see. When protection for Arianism ended with the death of Valens, Gregory was called to rebuild the faith in the great see of Constantinople, which had been under Arian teachers for three decades. Retiring and sensitive, he dreaded being drawn into the whirlpool of corruption and violence. He first stayed at a friend’s home, which became the only orthodox church in the city. In such surroundings, he began giving the great sermons on the Trinity for which he is famous. In time, Gregory did rebuild the faith in the city, but at the cost of great suffering, slander, insults and even personal violence. An interloper even tried to take over his bishopric. His last days were spent in solitude and austerity. He wrote religious poetry, some of it autobiographical, of great depth and beauty. He was acclaimed simply as “the Theologian.” Some account must now be given of Gregorys voluminous writings, and of his reputation as an orator and a theologian, on which, more than on anything else, rests his fame as one of the greatest lights of the Eastern Church. His works naturally fall under three heads, namely his poems, his epistles, and his orations. Much, though by no means all, of what he wrote has been preserved, and has been frequently published, the editio princeps of the poems being the Aldine (1504), while the first edition of his collected works appeared in Paris in 1609-11. The Bodleian catalogue contains more than thirty folio pages enumerating various editions of Gregorys works, of which the best and most complete are the Benedictine edition (two folio volumes, begun in 1778, finished in 1840), and the edition of Migne (four volumes XXXV - XXXVIII, in P.G., Paris, 1857 - 1862). Poetical compositions These, as already stated, comprise autobiographical verses, epigrams, epitaphs and epistles. The epigrams have been translated by Thomas Drant (London, 1568), the epitaphs by Boyd (London, 1826), while other poems have been gracefully and charmingly paraphrased by Newman in his Church of the Fathers. Jerome and Suidas say that Gregory wrote more than 30,000 verses; if this is not an exaggeration, fully two-thirds of them have been lost. Very different estimates have been formed of the value of his poetry, the greater part of which was written in advanced years, and perhaps rather as a relaxation from the cares and troubles of life than as a serious pursuit. Delicate, graphic, and flowing as are many of his verses, and giving ample evidence of the cultured and gifted intellect which produced them, they cannot be held to parallel (the comparison would be an unfair one, had not many of them been written expressly to supersede and take the place of the work of heathen writers) the great creations of the classic Greek poets. Yet Villemain, no mean critic, places the poems in the front rank of Gregorys compositions, and thinks so highly of them that he maintains that the writer ought to be called, pre-eminently, not so much the theologian of the East as the poet of Eastern Christendom. Prose epistles These, by common consent, belong to the finest literary productions of Gregorys age. All that are extant are finished compositions; and that the writer excelled in this kind of composition is shown from one of them (Ep. ccix, to Nicobulus) in which he enlarges with admirable good sense on the rules by which all letter-writers should be guided. It was at the request of Nicobulus, who believed, and rightly, that these letters contained much of permanent interest and value, that Gregory prepared and edited the collection containing the greater number of them which has come down to us. Many of them are perfect models of epistolary style — short, clear, couched in admirably chosen language, and in turn witty and profound, playful, affectionate and acute. Orations Both in his own time, and by the general verdict of posterity, Gregory was recognized as one of the very foremost orators who have ever adorned the Christian Church. Trained in the finest rhetorical schools of his age, he did more than justice to his distinguished teachers; and while boasting or vainglory was foreign to his nature, he frankly acknowledged his consciousness of his remarkable oratorical gifts, and his satisfaction at having been enabled to cultivate them fully in his youth. Basil and Gregory, it has been said, were the pioneers of Christian eloquence, modeled on, and inspired by, the noble and sustained oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero, and calculated to move and impress the most cultured and critical audiences of the age. Only comparatively few of the numerous orations delivered by Gregory have been preserved to us, consisting of discourses spoken by him on widely different occasions, but all marked by the same lofty qualities. Faults they have, of course: lengthy digressions, excessive ornament, strained antithesis, laboured metaphors, and occasional over-violence of invective. But their merits are far greater than their defects, and no one can read them without being struck by the noble phraseology, perfect command of the purest Greek, high imaginative powers, lucidity and incisiveness of thought, fiery zeal and transparent sincerity of intention, by which they are distinguished. Hardly any of Gregorys extant sermons are direct expositions of Scripture, and they have for this reason been adversely criticized. Bossuet, however, points out with perfect truth that many of these discourses are really nothing but skillful interweaving of Scriptural texts, a profound knowledge of which is evident from every line of them. Gregorys claims to rank as one of the greatest theologians of the early Church are based, apart from his reputation among his contemporaries, and the verdict of history in his regard, chiefly on the five great Theological Discourses which he delivered at Constantinople in the course of the year 380. In estimating the scope and value of these famous utterances, it is necessary to remember what was the religious condition of Constantinople when Gregory, at the urgent instance of Basil, of many other bishops, and of the sorely-tried Catholics of the Eastern capital, went thither to undertake the spiritual charge of the faithful. It was less as an administrator, or an organizer, than as a man of saintly life and of oratorical gifts famous throughout the Eastern Church, that Gregory was asked, and consented, to undertake his difficult mission; and he had to exercise those gifts in combating not one but numerous heresies which had been dividing and desolating Constantinople for many years. Arianism in every form and degree, incipient, moderate, and extreme, was of course the great enemy, but Gregory had also to wage war against the Apollinarian teaching, which denied the humanity of Christ, as well as against the contrary tendency — later developed into Nestorianism — which distinguished between the Son of Mary and the Son of God as two distinct and separate personalities. A saint first, and a theologian afterwards, Gregory in one of his early sermons at the Anastasia insisted on the principle of reverence in treating of the mysteries of faith (a principle entirely ignored by his Arian opponents), and also on the purity of life and example which all who dealt with these high matters must show forth if their teaching was to be effectual. In the first and second of the five discourses he develops these two principles at some length, urging in language of wonderful beauty and force the necessity for all who would know God aright to lead a supernatural life, and to approach so sublime a study with a mind pure and free from sin. The third discourse (on the Son) is devoted to a defence of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, and a demonstration of its consonance with the primitive doctrine of the Unity of God. The eternal existence of the Son and Spirit are insisted on, together with their dependence on the Father as origin or principle; and the Divinity of the Son is argued from Scripture against the Arians, whose misunderstanding of various Scripture texts is exposed and confuted. In the fourth discourse, on the same subject, the union of the Godhead and Manhood in Christ Incarnate is set forth and luminously proved from Scripture and reason. The fifth and final discourse (on the Holy Spirit) is directed partly against the Macedonian heresy, which denied altogether the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, and also against those who reduced the Third Person of the Trinity to a mere impersonal energy of the Father. Gregory, in reply to the contention that the Divinity of the Spirit is not expressed in Scripture, quotes and comments on several passages which teach the doctrine by implication, adding that the full manifestation of this great truth was intended to be gradual, following on the revelation of the Divinity of the Son. It is to be noted that Gregory nowhere formulates the doctrine of the Double Procession, although in his luminous exposition of the Trinitarian doctrine there are many passages which seem to anticipate the fuller teaching of the Quicumque vult. No summary, not even a faithful verbal translation, can give any adequate idea of the combined subtlety and lucidity of thought, and rare beauty of expression, of these wonderful discourses, in which, as one of his French critics truly observes, Gregory has summed up and closed the controversy of a whole century. The best evidence of their value and power lies in the fact that for fourteen centuries they have been a mine whence the greatest theologians of Christendom have drawn treasures of wisdom to illustrate and support their own teaching on the deepest mysteries of the Catholic Faith.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:44:59 +0000
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