Gregory of Nazianzus

Gregory was born about 329 at Arianzus, near the town of Nazianzus in Cappadocia. His father, also Gregory, had belonged to an odd Jewish-pagan sect before his wife Nonna brought him to Christ; he then became bishop of Nazianzus and held the see for forty-five years. The son was the child of a vow, Nonna had promised him to God before he was born, and he knew it his whole life.

He was educated at Caesarea in Cappadocia, at Caesarea in Palestine, at Alexandria, and finally at Athens, where he stayed about ten years. There he met Basil, and the friendship became the fixed point of his life. He was, by his own account and everyone else's, the finest Greek stylist of his generation and temperamentally unfit for a fight, a scholar who wanted a quiet room and got dragged out of it again and again.

He was ordained priest by his father in 362, against his will, and ran away to Basil's monastic retreat in Pontus for a few months before shame brought him back. He preached his return sermon on it, and never pretended otherwise: he had fled.

In 372 Basil, needing loyal bishops to hold his province against the Arian emperor, consecrated him bishop of Sasima, a dusty crossroads waystation with, Gregory said, no water and no grass and nothing but dust and the noise of carts. He never took up residence. It strained the friendship badly, and he was still writing about it years later. He assisted his aged father at Nazianzus instead, and after his father and his mother and his brother and his sister had all died within a few years, he withdrew to Seleucia and expected to be finished.

He was about fifty when the summons came, and it was the reason for his life.

Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern empire, had been in Arian hands for four decades. Every major church in the city belonged to them. In 379 the small Nicene remnant asked Gregory to come and be their pastor. He arrived with nothing, and set up a chapel in a relative's house. He called it the Anastasia, the Resurrection, because, he said, the true faith would rise again there.

In that room, to a congregation that could fit inside a house, he preached the five sermons known ever since as the Theological Orations. They are the clearest statement of the doctrine of the Trinity produced in the ancient church.

He argued that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God in three, distinguished not by rank or by degree of divinity but only by their relations to one another; that the Spirit is God, worshiped and glorified with the Father and the Son; and, against those who claimed Christ took a human body without a human mind, that whatever the Son did not assume, he did not heal. Since it is the human mind that goes wrong, the Son took a human mind. The line has governed Christian thinking about the incarnation ever since.

He paid for the sermons. Mobs pelted the chapel with stones. He was physically attacked during a service at Easter 379. A young man was sent to assassinate him and lost his nerve; Gregory forgave him publicly and the man became a friend.

When Theodosius took the Eastern throne in 380 he restored the churches to the Nicene party and installed Gregory in the great church of the Holy Apostles under armed guard, through a hostile crowd. In 381 the emperor convened the Council of Constantinople, the second ecumenical council. Gregory was made its president after the first president died.

And then it went the way councils go. His appointment to the capital was challenged on a technicality: he was already bishop of Sasima, and a canon of Nicaea forbade moving from one see to another. The Egyptian bishops arrived and pressed it. Gregory, sick and sick of it, stood up in front of the council and offered himself as Jonah, throw me overboard if the storm is about me. He resigned the see, preached a farewell to the city, and went home.

The council finished without him, and the creed it produced, the one recited in churches every Sunday, with its clause on the Holy Spirit, carries his theology and Basil's, though Basil had died two years earlier and Gregory had walked out.

He spent his last years at Arianzus writing poetry, including a long autobiographical poem, De Vita Sua, in which he says exactly what he thought of church politics and of himself. He died about 390. The Eastern church gave him a title it has given only two other men: Gregory the Theologian.

Sources: Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 27–31 (the Theological Orations); Gregory of Nazianzus, De Vita Sua and Oration 43 (on Basil); Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 7.