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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Gregory of Nyssa
died c. 395Patristic
The quiet brother in a family of saints, and the boldest mind of the three Cappadocians.
Summary
- Lived died c. 395.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived7 moments · AD 313–600
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
In their own words
“One who reflecting on this holds cheaply all that mankind prizes, whose only love is the divine life, because "all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass," can never care for this grass which "to-day is and to-morrow is not"; studying the divine ways, he knows not only that human life has no fixity, but that the entire universe will not keep on its quiet course for ever; he neglects his existence here as an alien and a passing thing; for the Saviour said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away," the whole of necessity awaits its refashioning.”
ON VIRGINITY 4 · on 1 Peter 1:24
“For, “All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall,”
“(non occ.) Now the assembly of the devils had prepared itself to resist the Divine power. But when He was approaching Who had power over all things, they proclaim aloud His eminent virtue. Wherefore there follows, But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, saying, &c.”
Catena Aurea by Aquinas · on Mark 5:6
“When the man saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees before Him.”
“For faithful is he who has promised that "a thousand shall be chased by one," and that "ten thousand shall be put to flight by two," victory in battle being due not to numbers but to righteousness.”
ANSWER TO EUNOMIUS'S SECOND BOOK · on Joshua 23:10
“One of you can put a thousand to flight, because the LORD your God fights for you, just as He promised.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Gregory of Nyssa at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Argued that knowing God is a climb that never ends, and that no Christian should own another human being.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.