Preaching and the Poor

Alongside his great dogmatic treatises, St. Gregory of Nyssa was a preacher, and his sermons turn doctrine toward the formation of the Christian life: the eight Homilies on the Beatitudes and the five sermons On the Lord’s Prayer chart the soul’s ascent through the virtues, while On the Love of the Poor presses the obligation of almsgiving and sees in the leper and the destitute the very image of Christ. Most remarkable of all is his Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes, which contains what is widely regarded as the most unequivocal condemnation of slaveholding to survive from all of antiquity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Preaching as Catechesis: The Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer

Gregory’s Great Catechism lays out the structure of the faith; his preaching builds the soul that is to live it. Two sermon cycles stand at the center of his catechetical-spiritual homiletics.

The eight Homilies on the Beatitudes (De beatitudinibus; PG 44:1193–1302; trans. Hilda Graef, ACW 18, 1954) read Matthew 5:3–10 not as eight unrelated blessings but as a ladder of ascent. Each beatitude is a step higher than the last, the Lord standing at the summit and reaching down His hand to those who climb; the sequence carries the soul from poverty of spirit up toward the vision of God promised to the pure of heart (On the Beatitudes, Homily 1; Homily 6). The “poverty of spirit” of the first beatitude Gregory reads as voluntary humility, the imitation of the Christ who, “being rich, became poor for our sake” (On the Beatitudes, Homily 1, on 2 Cor 8:9) — a reading that ties the opening of the cycle directly to his preaching on the poor. The sixth homily, on the pure in heart who shall see God, contains his characteristic teaching that God is seen not by comprehension but by the soul’s purification, the divine likeness restored in us becoming the mirror in which God is beheld (On the Beatitudes, Homily 6).

The five sermons On the Lord’s Prayer (De oratione dominica; PG 44:1119–93; trans. Graef, ACW 18) treat the prayer petition by petition as a school of the spiritual life. Here Gregory teaches that to dare to call God “Father” is to take on the obligation of resembling Him (On the Lord’s Prayer, Sermon 2), and the third sermon, on “Thy will be done,” contains his famous excursus on the dangers of the passions and the discipline of desire. The series is also a primary source for Gregory’s pneumatology: a celebrated variant in the third sermon reads the petition “Thy kingdom come” as “May Thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us,” a reading discussed at length in the Trinitarian debates over the Spirit’s divinity (On the Lord’s Prayer, Sermon 3; cf. Graef’s notes, ACW 18). Together the two cycles form a complete itinerary: the Lord’s Prayer teaches the soul how to ask, the Beatitudes show it what it is ascending toward.

On the Love of the Poor: The Poor as the Image of Christ

Gregory preached at least twice on poverty and almsgiving in the pair of homilies known as On the Love of the Poor (De pauperibus amandis, sometimes titled “On Good Works”; GNO IX, ed. van Heck; PG 46:453–90). These sermons, delivered in a time of famine and want, press the duty of mercy with great urgency, but their theological core is the identification of the poor with Christ.

The second homily turns to the lepers — the most despised and physically ruined of the destitute — and refuses to let his hearers avert their eyes. The leper, disfigured and cast out, still bears the image of God and is a brother in the same nature; to despise him is to despise the one whose features he carries, for Christ Himself is encountered in the least of these (On the Love of the Poor II; cf. Matt 25:40). Gregory dwells on the shared humanity of giver and beggar — the same body, the same mortality, the same need before God — so that almsgiving is not condescension from above but recognition of an equal, indeed of Christ in the equal. The poor man, Gregory says, is the treasurer of our hope: what is given to him is lent to God and repaid in the age to come (On the Love of the Poor I). The same conviction animates his preaching elsewhere on usury and on the duty of the rich, and it places Gregory squarely within the Cappadocian social gospel he shared with his brother Basil (see St. Basil the Great).

The Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes: Antiquity’s Verdict on Slavery

The most extraordinary social text in the whole Gregorian corpus is the Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes (In Ecclesiasten, Homily 4; In Ecclesiasten = PG 44:615–754, with the slavery passage at PG 44:664–68; GNO V; trans. Stuart George Hall and Rachel Moriarty, de Gruyter, 1993). The eight homilies on Ecclesiastes are a meditation on detachment from the vanity of worldly goods. When Gregory reaches Ecclesiastes 2:7 — where the Preacher boasts, “I got me slaves and slave-girls, and had servants born in my house” — he does not allegorize the verse away. He attacks the boast head-on, and the attack becomes the most thoroughgoing condemnation of slaveholding known from the ancient world.

The argument is built on the image of God and on human freedom. To say “I acquired slaves,” Gregory thunders, is to claim ownership over a being who shares your own nature: “I got me slaves and slave-girls” — for what price? What did you find in existence worth so much as this human nature? God set humanity over the irrational beasts alone; over the fish, the birds, the cattle, man was given dominion — but the human being was not among the things made subject (In Ecclesiasten, Homily 4; trans. Hall & Moriarty). To enslave one who bears the image of God and was made by nature free is therefore to overturn the order of creation and to set oneself in the place of God: “you have forgotten the limits of your authority… you have subjected to slavery one who is free and a citizen of the world, who has God as the one who shares his nature.”

Gregory presses the point through the question of price. How is a human being to be valued? “What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God?” The human is priceless because the human is God’s image, and an image of God cannot be bought, sold, or owned; the very attempt to set a price on a person is blasphemy, for the whole earth and all its goods could not purchase a soul (In Ecclesiasten, Homily 4). The slaveholder’s pride — the boast of Ecclesiastes 2:7 — is thus exposed as the root sin: a creature, mortal and bound to the same dust as his slave, arrogating to himself a lordship that belongs to God alone (Coleman M. Ford and others note that for Gregory slaveholding is above all a sin of pride).

This is, as the modern editors and historians agree, without parallel. David Bentley Hart’s much-quoted judgment is that “nowhere in the literary remains of antiquity… is there another document quite comparable” — no surviving ancient text, Christian, Jewish, or pagan, contains “so fierce, unequivocal, and indignant a condemnation of the institution of slavery” (Hart, “The Whole Humanity: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54 (2001): 51–69).

The Scope and Limits of Gregory’s Critique

What Gregory does not do must be stated as carefully as what he does. He does not issue a programmatic call for the legal abolition of slavery, nor does he, here or elsewhere, demand that Christians manumit their slaves as a condition of the faith; the homily is a moral and spiritual indictment, not a piece of legislation or social reform. Scholars therefore divide on how to read its force and reach.

[Disputed: the scope of Gregory's anti-slavery teaching. Stuart George Hall, in the introduction to his and Rachel Moriarty's translation (*Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes*, de Gruyter, 1993), and Daniel F. Stramara Jr., "Gregory of Nyssa: An Ardent Abolitionist?" (*St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly* 41 (1997): 37–60), read the homily as a genuine and principled rejection of slavery as such, rooted in Gregory's theology of the image and his eschatology of restored human equality. Peter Garnsey, *Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine* (Cambridge, 1996), cautions that Gregory's rhetoric, however radical, remained within an exegetical and homiletic frame and did not translate into a social-reform program, and that Gregory elsewhere can speak of slaves and masters without protest. María Mercedes Bergadá, "La condamnation de l'esclavage dans l'Homélie IV" (in *Stuart Hall, ed., Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes*, 1993), and Hart (above) emphasize the metaphysical and theological depth of the condemnation. The consensus is that the *moral* condemnation is total and unprecedented, even though Gregory stops short of a juridical abolitionist program — a tension scholars read variously as the limit of his age or as a deliberately spiritual rather than political mode of address.]

The homily belongs, finally, with the rest of Gregory’s social preaching. The same theology that makes the leper an image of Christ to be embraced makes the slave a free citizen of the world who cannot be owned; the same humility that the Beatitudes demand is the virtue whose opposite — pride — Gregory diagnoses as the engine of slaveholding. His social teaching is not a separate department but the ethical face of his anthropology and his eschatology: because every human being bears the image of God and is destined for the restoration of all, no human being may be treated as a thing. In this the Cappadocian tradition supplies one of the deepest patristic foundations for the Church’s later social witness (see Church and World).

References

Gregory of Nyssa. In Ecclesiasten Homiliae (Homilies on Ecclesiastes). PG 44:615–754. Critical text: In Ecclesiasten Homiliae, ed. Paul Alexander. Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO) V. Leiden: Brill, 1962.
Gregory of Nyssa. Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version with Supporting Studies. Translated by Stuart George Hall and Rachel Moriarty. Edited by Stuart George Hall. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993.
Gregory of Nyssa. The Lord’s Prayer; The Beatitudes. Translated and annotated by Hilda C. Graef. Ancient Christian Writers (ACW) 18. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1954.
Gregory of Nyssa. De beatitudinibus (On the Beatitudes). PG 44:1193–1302. GNO VII/2, ed. John F. Callahan.
Gregory of Nyssa. De oratione dominica (On the Lord’s Prayer). PG 44:1119–93. GNO VII/2, ed. John F. Callahan.
Gregory of Nyssa. De pauperibus amandis (On the Love of the Poor). PG 46:453–90. GNO IX, ed. Adrianus van Heck. Leiden: Brill, 1967.
Hart, David Bentley. “The Whole Humanity: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology.” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (2001): 51–69.
Stramara, Daniel F., Jr. “Gregory of Nyssa: An Ardent Abolitionist?” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1997): 37–60.
Garnsey, Peter. Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.