The Reluctant Bishop of Nyssa

Around 372 St. Basil the Great consecrated his younger brother Gregory bishop of Nyssa, a small and undistinguished Cappadocian town, as one move in Basil’s larger struggle to hold his ecclesiastical province together against Anthimus of Tyana after the civil division of Cappadocia. Gregory was a theologian rather than an administrator, reluctant and politically naive — Basil’s own letters record his exasperation — and within a few years the Arian party under the emperor Valens used charges of financial maladministration and irregular ordination to depose him and drive him into a wandering exile (376–378), from which he returned in triumph only after Valens’ death.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Division of Cappadocia and Basil’s Strategy

The making of Gregory into a bishop cannot be understood apart from a quarrel over church boundaries. In 371 the emperor Valens, for administrative reasons, split the province of Cappadocia into two, creating Cappadocia Secunda with its civil capital at Tyana. The bishop of Tyana, Anthimus, promptly claimed that his city’s new status as a provincial metropolis carried metropolitan ecclesiastical rights, and so sought to detach from Basil’s see of Caesarea those churches that now lay in the second province — together with their revenues (the matter is reflected throughout Basil’s correspondence of these years; cf. Basil, Epistle 74–76). Basil, archbishop of Caesarea since 370, resisted this loss of jurisdiction.

Basil’s counter-strategy was to multiply suffragan sees, planting bishops loyal to himself and to the Nicene cause in the contested borderlands so as to secure both the churches and his own metropolitan authority. It was in this campaign that he consecrated his friend Gregory of Nazianzus to the wretched posting at Sasima — an appointment the Theologian never forgave — and that he consecrated his brother Gregory to Nyssa, a small, poor town in his own province (cf. Anthimus’s dispute as discussed in modern accounts of the Cappadocian settlement). Gregory the Theologian later remarked, sharply, that Basil ought not to have placed his brother in so mean a town but rather to have made the town worthy of him (Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle alluding to the appointment; cf. Oration 43, his funeral oration for Basil).

A Theologian, Not an Administrator

Gregory was, by temperament and training, the wrong man for ecclesiastical politics. A rhetor turned exegete and dogmatician, he had neither his brother’s organizing genius nor any taste for the intrigue and finance that diocesan administration in a contested province demanded. Basil’s letters preserve a frank and sometimes pained estimate of him.

The most famous episode is the affair of the forged letters. Gregory, distressed by the estrangement between Basil and their uncle, also named Gregory, who was a bishop in sympathy with bishops disaffected from Basil, tried to engineer a reconciliation by producing a letter purporting to come from the uncle — and, when the forgery was exposed, by producing further such letters (Basil, Epistle 58; Epistle 59; Epistle 60). In Epistle 58 Basil administers a crushing rebuke: “You forged one letter, and brought it to me as though it came from our most reverend uncle the bishop, trying to deceive me, I know not why … The forgery was found out, the bishop himself repudiating it” (Basil, Epistle 58; trans. NPNF II/8). The well-meant deception had achieved the opposite of peace. Elsewhere Basil records his brother’s unfitness for affairs and his innocence of the ways of the world (cf. Basil, Epistle 100, on the trials of the time and his reliance on more capable men). The portrait that emerges from Basil’s side of the correspondence is of a brother revered for holiness and learning but distrusted for political judgment — exactly the man who would soon be an easy target.

(A note of method: Basil’s letters are numbered consistently in the standard editions, but the precise attribution of particular complaints to particular letters varies in the literature; the Epistle 58 rebuke for the forged letters is secure and well attested, and is cited here as the certain instance.)

The Homoian Campaign Under Valens

The wider setting was the Arian, more exactly homoian, ascendancy under Valens, an emperor who from 364/365 backed the homoian party (which professed the Son “like” the Father, avoiding the Nicene homoousios) and pressed the Nicene bishops of the East. Basil’s stature largely shielded Caesarea; the lesser Nicene bishops of the province were more exposed. Gregory of Nyssa, brother of the chief Nicene champion of the East and himself an outspoken defender of the Nicene faith, was a natural object of attack once his enemies — the homoian clergy and the imperial officials backing them — found a pretext.

The Charges, the Synod, and Deposition (375/376)

The pretext came in 375/376. Gregory was accused of maladministration of church funds — embezzlement or misuse of money — and of an irregularity in his ordination (the legitimacy of his consecration being impugned). On these charges the governor of Pontus had him arrested and brought under guard; Gregory, ill and unsuited to such treatment, escaped or slipped away from his escort. A synod of homoian bishops, convened under the protection of the imperial authorities, then deposed him from the see of Nyssa (the episode is recounted in the historians of the following generation; cf. the events alluded to in Basil’s Epistles of 376, and the later narrative in church-historical tradition). The financial charge in particular fits the homoian tactic of the period: where doctrine could not be made to stick against a man of unimpeachable orthodoxy, accusations of administrative wrongdoing served to remove Nicene bishops with a show of legality.

Wandering Exile, 376–378

Deposed and unable to hold his see, Gregory spent the next roughly two years as a wanderer, moving from place to place in the East, unable to return to Nyssa while the homoian party held the upper hand. His own later writings and his brother’s letters reflect the hardship and the sense of the Church besieged in these years. Basil, who died on 1 January 379, did not live to see his brother restored. The exile of the bishop of an obscure town was a small event beside the great struggle, but it marks Gregory’s emergence — hitherto in his brother’s shadow — as a confessor in his own right.

The Triumphant Return, 378

The turn came with the empire’s. On 9 August 378 Valens was killed at the catastrophic Battle of Adrianople against the Goths. His death removed the imperial backing of the homoian party in the East; the new western emperor Gratian, and soon Theodosius I (proclaimed in 379), set policy decisively toward Nicene orthodoxy. In the wake of Valens’ death and the consequent relaxation, then reversal, of the homoian regime, the deposed Nicene bishops were recalled, and Gregory returned to Nyssa in 378 amid the rejoicing of his flock — a homecoming he himself describes with feeling, the people pouring out to meet him (Gregory of Nyssa, Epistle 6, describing his return). The reluctant bishop came back vindicated.

After the Return

The years immediately following transformed Gregory’s stature. With Basil dead at the beginning of 379 and Macrina dying later that same year, Gregory inherited the mantle of the family’s theological leadership. He took a leading part in the Council of Antioch (379), undertook a mission to set the churches of Pontus and Arabia in order, and stood in 381 as one of the principal Nicene voices at the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople — where the canon naming the bishops in communion with whom orthodoxy was to be reckoned listed Gregory of Nyssa for Pontus (Council of Constantinople, 381; cf. canon 2 of the council and its later citation). The administrator’s failures of the early 370s gave way to the theologian’s authority. The man Basil had doubted as a manager of affairs proved, in the decade after Basil’s death, the most enduring theological mind the family produced.

See Also

• The Holy Family of Cappadocia — the household and formation from which the reluctant bishop came
• After Basil — Gregory’s inheritance of the Nicene cause on his brother’s death in 379
• Constantinople 381 and After — Gregory’s role at the Second Ecumenical Council and his later standing
• St. Basil the Great — the brother, metropolitan, and consecrator whose strategy made Gregory a bishop
• The Church Fathers — the Cappadocians and the Nicene settlement

References

• Basil of Caesarea. Letters (esp. Epistles 58, 59, 60, 74–76, 100). In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 8 (NPNF II/8). Ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. New York: Christian Literature, 1895.
• Gregory of Nyssa. Letters (Epistulae), esp. Epistles 6 and 13. GNO VIII/2, ed. G. Pasquali, Leiden: Brill, 1959; trans. A. M. Silvas, Gregory of Nyssa: The Letters, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 83, Leiden: Brill, 2007.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43 (Funeral Oration on Basil) and Letters. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 7 (NPNF II/7).
• Council of Constantinople (381), canon 2. In The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF II/14.
• Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
• Maraval, Pierre. “Biography of Gregory of Nyssa.” In The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, ed. L. F. Mateo-Seco and G. Maspero. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 99. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
• Van Dam, Raymond. Families and Friends in Late Roman Cappadocia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.