Constantinople 381 and After

At the Second Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople in 381 under the emperor Theodosius I, Gregory of Nyssa stood among the leading defenders of the Nicene faith and of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit against the Pneumatomachi, as the council expanded the Creed into the form the Church confesses to this day. The imperial edict of 30 July 381 named him a “standard of communion” for the civil diocese of Pontus, and the years after brought imperial commissions and the great Constantinopolitan orations — culminating, four centuries later, in the title “Father of the Fathers.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Council of 381

The Second Ecumenical Council met at Constantinople in 381, convoked by the emperor Theodosius I, who had come to the Eastern throne in 379 determined to settle the Trinitarian disorders that had divided the Church for two generations since the first Council of Nicaea (325). The council’s task was to ratify and secure the Nicene faith — the homoousion, the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father — against the surviving Arian parties, and to address the newer controversy over the Holy Spirit (Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990, “Constantinople I”; see The Ecumenical Councils).

Gregory of Nyssa attended as one of the foremost theologians of the pro-Nicene side. With Basil dead (1 January 379; see After Basil) and Gregory the Theologian presiding over the council in its early sessions before resigning amid the disputes over his own see, Gregory of Nyssa was among the senior surviving architects of the Cappadocian settlement present in the capital. He came to Constantinople already established as Basil’s successor in the anti-Eunomian struggle and as a doctrinal envoy trusted by the Eastern Church, and at the council he was a leading voice for the Nicene and pro-Nicene cause (Mateo-Seco and Maspero, Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, Leiden: Brill, 2010, s.v. “Life”; Maraval, Grégoire de Nysse: Lettres, SC 363, introduction).

The Divinity of the Holy Spirit and the Pneumatomachi

The doctrinal heart of the council was the question of the Holy Spirit. The original Nicene Creed of 325 had said only “and in the Holy Spirit,” without elaboration, because in 325 the Spirit was not yet the point of dispute. By the 370s a party had arisen — the Pneumatomachi (“Spirit-fighters”), also called Macedonians after Macedonius of Constantinople — who confessed the divinity of the Son but denied that the Holy Spirit was of the same divine essence, treating the Spirit as a creature or a ministering power subordinate to the Father and the Son (Tanner, Decrees 1; see Pneumatology).

Against them the Cappadocians had built the decisive case. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit (c. 375) had defended the Spirit’s divinity by argument from the baptismal formula and the Spirit’s worship in the liturgy; Gregory of Nyssa carried the same teaching, most pointedly in his treatise On the Holy Spirit, Against the Macedonians (Adversus Macedonianos) and in the pneumatological arguments of the Contra Eunomium and On “Not Three Gods.” Gregory’s contribution was to ground the Spirit’s full deity in the single, undivided operation of the Trinity: the Father, Son, and Spirit share one nature because they share one activity (energeia) — every divine work proceeds from the Father, through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit, so that the Spirit who completes the one divine action must be of the one divine nature (On “Not Three Gods” [GNO III/1; PG 45:115–36]; Adversus Macedonianos [GNO III/1]; see On “Not Three Gods”).

The council embodied this teaching in its enlargement of the Creed. To the bare clause of 325 it added the confession of the Spirit as “the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified” — the article that completes the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the symbol still recited in the Divine Liturgy (Tanner, Decrees 1, “The Creed of Constantinople”; Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed., London: Longman, 1972, ch. on the Constantinopolitan Creed). The careful language — affirming the Spirit’s coworship and procession without the precise word homoousios, which the Creed reserves — reflects exactly the Cappadocian strategy of securing the Spirit’s deity by His operation and worship. Gregory’s theology is woven into the article the Church has confessed ever since.

The Edict of 30 July 381: A Standard of Communion

The council’s doctrinal work was matched by imperial action that named Gregory personally. On 30 July 381, while the council was still in session or just concluded, Theodosius issued an edict, preserved in the Theodosian Code as CTh 16.1.3, that defined orthodox catholic communion by naming specific bishops with whom a church had to be in communion to count as catholic. The law commanded that the churches be handed to those who held the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be of one majesty and power; and for each civil diocese of the East it named the bishops who were the touchstone of that communion (Pharr, trans., The Theodosian Code, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952, CTh 16.1.3; Errington, “Church and State in the First Years of Theodosius I,” Chiron 27, 1997).

For the diocese of Pontus — Gregory’s own region — the edict named three bishops as the standard of communion: Helladius of Caesarea (Basil’s successor in the Cappadocian metropolis), Otreius of Melitene, and Gregory of Nyssa (CTh 16.1.3; Pharr, Theodosian Code, ad loc.). To be in communion with these men was, by imperial law, to be orthodox; to be out of communion with them was to be a heretic excluded from the churches and their property. The naming is a measure of how far Gregory had risen in the two and a half years since Basil’s death: the obscure bishop of a small see, once deposed under Valens, was now fixed in Roman law as one of the men by whom catholic orthodoxy itself was defined in the East. It is the high-water mark of his public standing.

Imperial Commissions and the Great Orations

The recognition of 381 brought Gregory into the orbit of the imperial court at Constantinople, and the years following saw him entrusted with commissions and honored with the most public preaching opportunities the empire could offer. He remained a figure of the capital, drawn back repeatedly for synods and for ceremonial occasions of state.

The most celebrated of these were two funeral orations delivered around 385–386, a signal mark of imperial favor. When the young princess Pulcheria, daughter of Theodosius and the empress Aelia Flacilla, died as a child, Gregory was chosen to preach the consolatory oration over her, describing her as a blossom whose shining petals had scarcely lifted from the bud (Oratio funebris in Pulcheriam [GNO IX]; Spira and Klock, eds., The Easter Sermons of Gregory of Nyssa, Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1981). When, only a few weeks or months later, the empress Flacilla herself died while traveling in Thrace, Gregory was again summoned to preach her funeral (Oratio funebris in Flacillam imperatricem [GNO IX]). To be called twice within a single year to mourn the imperial family publicly was, as scholars note, a distinction reserved for a churchman the court regarded as having “arrived” — confirmation that the bishop named in the edict of 381 had become a fixture of the Theodosian establishment (Maraval, in Mateo-Seco and Maspero, Brill Dictionary, s.v. “Life”; Daniélou, “La chronologie des œuvres de Grégoire de Nysse,” Studia Patristica 7, 1966).

These orations are not mere ceremony for the historian of doctrine. In them Gregory turns imperial grief toward his own characteristic theology — the consolation of the resurrection, the soul’s progress into God, the hope that bridles mourning — so that the public sermons of the 380s carry the same eschatological vision that animates On the Soul and the Resurrection. The court had honored Gregory; Gregory used the honor to preach his hope.

A Forward Look: “Father of the Fathers”

The trajectory that began at Constantinople in 381 reached its furthest point long after Gregory’s death (c. 395). At the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which restored the veneration of the holy icons, the assembled Fathers honored Gregory of Nyssa with the extraordinary title “Father of the Fathers” (patēr paterōn) — a recognition that the most speculative of the Cappadocians had become, for the conciliar tradition, a touchstone of orthodoxy itself (Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum… Collectio, vol. 13; see Father of the Fathers, where the title and its reception are treated fully). The honor of 787 is the long echo of the recognition of 381: the bishop whom Theodosius’s edict made a standard of communion for Pontus was at last made, by a council four centuries later, a standard of communion for the whole tradition.

References

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1. Edited by Norman P. Tanner. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Constantinople I, 381; the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.)
The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions. Translated by Clyde Pharr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952. (CTh 16.1.3, edict of 30 July 381.)
Gregory of Nyssa. On “Not Three Gods” (Ad Ablabium, Quod non sint tres dei) [GNO III/1; PG 45:115–36]. Translated in NPNF II/5.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Holy Spirit, Against the Macedonians (Adversus Macedonianos, De Spiritu Sancto) [GNO III/1; PG 45:1301–33].
Gregory of Nyssa. Funeral orations for Pulcheria and Flacilla (Oratio funebris in Pulcheriam; Oratio funebris in Flacillam imperatricem) [GNO IX, ed. A. Spira].
Mateo-Seco, Lucas Francisco, and Giulio Maspero, eds. The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 99. Leiden: Brill, 2010. (Article “Life.”)
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Creeds. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1972.
Errington, R. Malcolm. “Church and State in the First Years of Theodosius I.” Chiron 27 (1997): 21–72.