Gregory of Nyssa

History

Life

Gregory was born in Cappadocia, in a family that produced more saints than most dioceses. His mother Emmelia was a martyr’s daughter; his elder sister Macrina became a monastic teacher and is honoured as a saint; his brothers Basil of Caesarea and Peter of Sebaste both became bishops. Gregory called Basil “our father and our master” (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Gregory of Nyssa”, 1910, secondary). His date of birth is unknown; c. 335 is the usual estimate.

He did not want a church career. He studied rhetoric and began teaching it, over Basil’s objections, and he married — a letter of Gregory of Nazianzus consoles him on the death of Theosebeia, who was almost certainly his wife. He came to the church late and reluctantly, and Basil made him bishop of the small town of Nyssa around 372, chiefly to fill a see with a reliable Nicene in the middle of the Arian emperor Valens’ campaign against them.

He was not good at it. Basil complained that his brother was hopeless at administration and too trusting to be useful in church politics. Arian opponents accused him of mishandling church funds and of an irregular ordination; he was arrested, escaped, and was deposed by a hostile synod at Nyssa in 376. He wandered from town to town until Valens died in 378 and he was restored.

Then Basil died, at the start of 379, and Gregory became the public voice of the family’s theology. He attended the Council of Antioch in 379, the Council of Constantinople in 381, where he was among the Nicene bishops whose standing the emperor Theodosius used to define orthodox communion in the East, and he preached at funerals of the imperial family. He was still writing after 385, and died at an unknown date soon after.

Influence

Gregory’s reputation moved in the opposite direction from Basil’s. Where Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus were read constantly in the Byzantine church, Gregory of Nyssa’s more speculative work was handled carefully, partly because of his sympathy with Origen on the restoration of all things.

Modern recovery began with the critical edition of his works started by Werner Jaeger in 1921. Twentieth-century theologians found in him what they wanted from the fathers: Jean Daniélou on mystical theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar on the infinite God, and Orthodox writers on Theosis, for which Gregory is a principal source. Feminist and philosophical theologians have taken up his claim that sexual difference belongs to the fallen order and his account of the soul’s endless progress.

Key ideas and contributors

The ransom and the hook. Gregory’s account of the atonement in The Great Catechism (chs. 22–24) is the fullest patristic version of the ransom argument. Humanity, “deceived, to his ruin, by an illusion of that beauty,” sold itself to the devil. God could not recover it “by measures of arbitrary violence,” because he “was just too.” Therefore “it was necessary that a ransom should be paid, which should exceed in value that which was to be ransomed; and hence it was necessary that the Son of God should surrender Himself to the power of death.” The devil accepted the exchange without seeing the deity hidden in the flesh, like a fish taking a baited hook, and in seizing one he had no claim on he lost his claim on everyone.

One essence, three persons. Gregory completed what Basil began. His On “Not Three Gods” (text) answers the obvious objection to Nicene language: if Father, Son and Spirit are each God, why are there not three gods? His answer is that the divine names describe operations, and the three never act separately — every divine act begins in the Father, proceeds through the Son and is completed in the Spirit, so there is one operation and therefore one nature.

Against Eunomius. His longest work answers the radical Arian Eunomius, who held that the Son’s generation makes him unlike the Father and that the divine essence can be known by reason. Gregory’s reply is the foundation of apophatic theology in the East: God’s essence is infinite, so no concept reaches it, and the names we use describe what God does toward us.

Epektasis: endless growth. Because God is infinite, the soul’s approach to him never terminates in possession. In the Life of Moses Gregory makes perfection consist in never stopping — a perpetual stretching forward, drawn from Paul’s “straining forward to what lies ahead” (Philippians 3:13). This is his most distinctive contribution and the reason he matters to Theosis.

Against slavery. In his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes Gregory attacks slaveholding as such, on the ground that a being made in God’s image cannot be priced. It is the most direct condemnation of the institution in ancient Christian literature.

Key controversies

Universalism. Gregory follows Origen in expecting the final restoration of all rational creatures, including the devil: punishment is purgative, and in the end God will be all in all. The Fifth Ecumenical Council condemned Origenist apokatastasis in 553, but never Gregory, who was already honoured as a saint. Christian Universalism claims him as its strongest patristic witness; defenders of Eternal Conscious Torment argue that his statements are hopeful rhetoric rather than doctrine, or that he was simply wrong on a point the church later settled. The dispute is live in both Orthodox and Catholic scholarship.

The ransom paid to the devil. Gregory of Nazianzus, his namesake and friend, called it outrageous to think a ransom was owed to the devil, and Anselm of Canterbury demolished the theory in Cur Deus Homo (1098): the devil is a rebel with no rights God must honour. Gustaf Aulén later argued in Christus Victor (1931) that Gregory’s transaction language was never meant commercially and that the real content is liberation.

Did God deceive? The hook image troubled readers from the start. Gregory’s own answer is that the deception was just, since the deceiver was paid in his own coin and the outcome was his healing too. Critics from Anselm onward found the argument unworthy of God.

Was he a Platonist? Gregory uses Platonic and Stoic vocabulary heavily, and nineteenth-century scholarship treated him as a Christian Neoplatonist. Jaeger and Daniélou argued the reverse: he takes the vocabulary and breaks it, since an infinite God who is approached without end is not the Platonic One.