Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory was born about 335 at Caesarea in Cappadocia, into a family that produced more saints than most centuries do: his grandmother Macrina the Elder had survived persecution in the woods; his mother Emmelia raised ten children; his older sister Macrina the Younger ran the family estate as a monastic community; his older brother was Basil the Great; his younger brother Peter became bishop of Sebaste. He was the quiet one, and the late bloomer. He did not go to Athens like Basil. He trained as a rhetorician, taught rhetoric, and married. Basil, needing loyal bishops in his fight with the Arian party, made him bishop of the small and undistinguished town of Nyssa in 372 — a purely political appointment, and Gregory was bad at the politics. Basil complained that his brother was hopeless at administration and too easily deceived. In 376 an Arian synod deposed him on trumped-up charges of mishandling church funds, and he spent two years in exile until the emperor Valens died. Then Basil died in 379, and Gregory grew into the space. Within two years he was one of the leading voices at the Council of Constantinople in 381, preaching the funeral oration for the council's president and helping fix the language on the Holy Spirit. He was named in the imperial edict as a standard of orthodox communion. He was the deepest thinker of the three Cappadocians. Against Eunomius answered the most sophisticated Arian of the age. On the Making of Man and the Great Catechism laid out a full Christian anthropology. On the Soul and the Resurrection is a dialogue with Macrina as she lay dying, and the Life of Macrina is his account of her. His signature idea is epektasis: because God is infinite, the soul's growth into him never ends. There is no ceiling and no arrival. "This is truly to see God," he wrote in the Life of Moses, "never to have this desire satisfied." And in his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes he did something no one else in antiquity did. Preaching on the verse "I got me slaves and slave-girls," he denounced slaveholding as such — not its abuses, the thing itself. You have set your own price on a creature made in God's image, he told his congregation; you have taken what belongs to God and made it merchandise. It is the sharpest attack on slavery in the ancient world. He also held out hope for a final restoration of all things, following Origen, which the church did not receive. He died about 395. Sources: Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes, homily 4; The Life of Moses and Selected Works (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 5); Basil of Caesarea, Letters; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. III.