After Basil

When St. Basil the Great died on 1 January 379, the defense of the Cappadocian and Nicene settlement passed to his younger brother, who had until then stood in Basil’s shadow. The years that followed saw Gregory of Nyssa take up his brother’s unfinished anti-Eunomian battle, travel on imperial and ecclesial business to Arabia and Jerusalem, and grieve the loss within a single year of both Basil and their sister Macrina — a grief that turned him toward the great writings on the soul and the resurrection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Death of Basil and a Reluctant Succession

St. Basil the Great died on 1 January 379, worn out before his fiftieth year by asceticism, illness, and the labor of his episcopate (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, ch. 1). His death removed from the Eastern Church the single most formidable architect of the pro-Nicene cause and the organizing mind of what is now called the Cappadocian settlement — the theological formula of one ousia in three hypostaseis by which the Nicene faith was secured against both Arian subordinationism and the modalist collapse of the persons. It also removed Gregory’s elder brother, protector, and consecrator: it was Basil who, around 372, had pressed the reluctant Gregory into the small and contested see of Nyssa as a strategic appointment in his struggle with the Arianizing metropolitan Anthimus of Tyana (see Reluctant Bishop of Nyssa).

Gregory had not been an easy suffragan. Basil’s letters complain of his brother’s political naïveté, and Gregory had been deposed from Nyssa under the Arian emperor Valens (around 376) on a trumped-up charge of mishandling church funds, returning only after Valens fell at Adrianople in 378 (Mateo-Seco and Maspero, Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, Leiden: Brill, 2010, s.v. “Life”). Yet with Basil gone, it was precisely this brother — the speculative, untried, mystically minded younger sibling — who stepped into the role of public defender of the settlement. The cause that Basil had carried as a churchman and organizer now passed to a mind of greater philosophical daring, and the next four years would be the most productive of Gregory’s life.

Taking Up the Anti-Eunomian Battle

The most urgent piece of unfinished business was the controversy with Eunomius of Cyzicus, the leader of the radical “Heteroousian” or “Anomoean” Arians, who taught that the Son is unlike the Father in essence and that the divine essence is fully comprehended in the name “Unbegotten” (agennētos). Basil had answered Eunomius’s first Apology with his own Against Eunomius (c. 364). Eunomius, after long delay, replied with a massive Apologia Apologiae (an “Apology for the Apology”), a point-by-point rebuttal of Basil — but it appeared only after Basil’s death, so that Basil could not answer it (Mateo-Seco and Maspero, Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, s.v. “Contra Eunomium”; NPNF II/5, prolegomena).

Gregory took up the reply on his brother’s behalf. His own Contra Eunomium (Against Eunomius), composed in books across roughly 380–383, is at once a vindication of Basil’s memory, a refutation of Eunomius, and Gregory’s own dogmatic masterpiece — the longest and most demanding work in his corpus (Against Eunomius I–III [GNO I–II; PG 45:243–1122]). The first book defends Basil and dismantles Eunomius’s account of the divine names; the later books press the positive Cappadocian doctrine that the divine essence is incomprehensible, that no single name exhausts God, and that the unbegottenness of the Father and the begottenness of the Son are not differences of essence but of relation and mode of origin. Against Eunomius’s confident rationalism — the claim that the human mind can know the very essence of God — Gregory set the infinity and unknowability of the divine nature, a theme that runs from the Contra Eunomium into his mystical writings (see Against Eunomius, where the work receives full treatment). Here it is enough to mark its origin: Gregory wrote it because Basil could no longer, and in doing so he became, in the technical sense, his brother’s successor in the controversy that had defined the age.

The Missions and the Travels

Gregory’s new prominence brought ecclesiastical and imperial commissions that took him far from his obscure see. Around 379–380 he was sent on a mission to Arabia (the Roman province of Arabia, in the region of Bostra) — apparently dispatched by a synod to address disorder in the churches there — and from Arabia he went on, whether by commission or by personal devotion, to Jerusalem and the holy places of Palestine (Maraval, Grégoire de Nysse: Lettres, Sources Chrétiennes 363, Paris: Cerf, 1990, introduction; Mateo-Seco and Maspero, Brill Dictionary, s.v. “Life” and “Letters”).

The visit produced two of his most discussed letters. Epistle 2, conventionally titled “On Pilgrimages” (De euntibus Hierosolyma), contains Gregory’s famously skeptical estimate of the spiritual value of pilgrimage. Writing from hard experience of the roads and the company they kept, he argues that a change of place brings one no nearer to God — “when the Lord invites the blessed to their inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, He does not include a pilgrimage to Jerusalem among the good deeds” — for God is not more present in Palestine than in Cappadocia, and the dangers to chastity and decorum on the journey may do the soul more harm than the holy sites do it good (Epistle 2 [GNO VIII/2:13–19]). The letter has been claimed by every later age that wished a patristic warrant against the abuses of pilgrimage, and it must be read with care: Gregory does not condemn veneration of the holy places as such — he himself made the journey — but warns against confusing geography with sanctity.

Epistle 3 reports the other face of the journey: the doctrinal disorders Gregory found in Jerusalem. He describes a city troubled by Christological and Trinitarian confusion — parties quarreling over the union of natures in Christ and over the persons of the Trinity — and defends his own orthodoxy against slanders that had followed him there (Epistle 3 [GNO VIII/2:19–29]; Maraval, SC 363, notes). Together the two letters show Gregory functioning, in the wake of Basil’s death, as a doctrinal authority dispatched to trouble-spots of the Eastern Church — a role that the council of 381 and the edict of Theodosius would shortly make official (see Constantinople 381 and After).

The Double Grief: Basil and Macrina

Beneath the public labors lay a year of personal loss that shaped everything Gregory wrote next. Basil died in January 379. Some nine months later, late in 379, their elder sister Macrina the Younger — the spiritual head of the family, abbess of the ascetic community at Annisa on the Iris, and the formative influence on both her brothers — died as well (Life of Macrina [GNO VIII/1; SC 178]; see The Life of Macrina). Gregory reached her deathbed in time to be present at the end, and the loss of both his guides within a single year is the personal backdrop against which his most intimate works were composed.

Out of that grief came two linked writings. The Life of Macrina is Gregory’s portrait of his sister as a philosopher and saint, the “Teacher” whose ascetic wisdom had governed the family. And On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione), cast as a deathbed dialogue between Gregory and the dying Macrina in the manner of Plato’s Phaedo, turns the raw fact of bereavement into a sustained argument for the immortality of the soul, the goodness of the body’s resurrection, and the final healing of human nature (On the Soul and the Resurrection [PG 46:11–160]; trans. NPNF II/5; see The Dialogue with Macrina). It is characteristic of Gregory that consolation took the form of speculation: confronted with the deaths of the two people who had formed him, he reasoned his way through grief toward the doctrine of the restoration of all in God. The mourning of 379 is thus not incidental to his eschatology but its occasion.

The Shape of the Years After Basil

The period from 379 to the council of 381 is the hinge of Gregory’s life. He entered it as Basil’s lesser-known brother and a bishop only lately restored from exile; he left it as the foremost theological mind of the Nicene party in the East, author of its weightiest anti-Arian treatise, a doctrinal envoy trusted with delicate missions, and the bereaved author of the writings on the soul. What had been Basil’s settlement became, in these years, Gregory’s to defend and to deepen — and he defended it not by repeating his brother but by pressing the Cappadocian insight into the unknowable infinity of God further than any of the three had taken it.

References

Gregory of Nyssa. Against Eunomius (Contra Eunomium) I–III [GNO I–II, ed. W. Jaeger; PG 45:243–1122]. Translated in NPNF II/5.
Gregory of Nyssa. Epistle 2 (“On Pilgrimages,” De euntibus Hierosolyma) and Epistle 3 [GNO VIII/2, ed. G. Pasquali]. Edited and translated by Pierre Maraval, Grégoire de Nysse: Lettres, Sources Chrétiennes 363. Paris: Cerf, 1990.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione) [PG 46:11–160]. Translated in NPNF II/5.
Gregory of Nyssa. Life of Macrina (Vita Macrinae) [GNO VIII/1; ed. and trans. Pierre Maraval, Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Cerf, 1971].
Mateo-Seco, Lucas Francisco, and Giulio Maspero, eds. The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 99. Leiden: Brill, 2010. (Articles “Life,” “Contra Eunomium,” “Letters.”)
Maraval, Pierre. Grégoire de Nysse: Lettres. Sources Chrétiennes 363. Paris: Cerf, 1990.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 20. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.