“Father of the Fathers”

At the Second Council of Nicaea (787), the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Gregory of Nyssa was acclaimed patēr paterōn, “Father of the Fathers,” and his works were read into the conciliar record as patristic authority. This file traces that conciliar reception — from the imperial edict of 381 that named him a standard of communion, through citation at the Sixth (681) and Seventh (787) councils — alongside the strong Byzantine reception of his mystical and Trinitarian writings, the lasting ambivalence over his teaching on universal restoration, and his formative influence on Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Title at Nicaea II (787)

The honorific that fixed Gregory’s standing in the conciliar memory of the Church was pronounced at the Second Council of Nicaea, the Seventh Ecumenical Council, in the year 787. In the sixth session of the council — the session that refuted the Horos (Definition) of the iconoclast synod of Hieria (754) — the deacon Epiphanius, reading on behalf of the assembled Fathers, cited Gregory of Nyssa among the authorities for the veneration of images and called him ho patēr tōn paterōn, “the Father of the Fathers” (Second Council of Nicaea, 787, Act VI; the conciliar acts in Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio XIII, 293–296). The phrase was not a casual flourish. To call one bishop the “Father of the Fathers” was to place him at the source of the patristic stream — a Father whose authority the other Fathers themselves drew upon — and the council deployed his testimony precisely where it most needed unassailable witnesses: in the dogmatic defense of the holy icons against an imperial heresy.

That the iconodule Fathers reached for Gregory at this point is itself a register of his authority: the council needed a Father whose orthodoxy was beyond cavil, and it found one in the younger brother of Basil.

The Conciliar Reception: 381, 681, 787

The title at Nicaea II was the crown of a reception already a century and a half deep by 787.

The first and decisive moment was civil as well as ecclesiastical. On 30 July 381 — in the immediate aftermath of the First Council of Constantinople — the Emperor Theodosius I issued an edict (Codex Theodosianus 16.1.3) naming a roster of bishops communion with whom would henceforth define catholic orthodoxy in the dioceses of the East. Gregory of Nyssa was named in that list, paired with Helladius of Caesarea for the civil diocese of Pontus, so that to be “in communion with Gregory” was, by imperial law, to be orthodox (Codex Theodosianus 16.1.3, 30 July 381; cf. Constantinople 381 and After). For a man who had been deposed from his see only a few years earlier on trumped-up charges, this was a remarkable vindication: the empire made him a touchstone of communion.

The councils that followed treated him the same way. At the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 680–681), which condemned Monothelitism, Gregory’s writings were among the patristic authorities marshaled for the two wills and two energies of Christ. At the Seventh (Nicaea II, 787) he was not only cited but honored with the title (the acts of both councils in Mansi XI for 681 and XIII for 787). The trajectory is unbroken: an imperial standard of communion in 381, a cited authority in 681, the “Father of the Fathers” in 787. Whatever later qualifications attached to one corner of his teaching, the Church’s conciliar tradition never wavered in receiving Gregory of Nyssa as a Father of the first rank.

The Byzantine Reception of the Mystical and Trinitarian Works

Within Byzantium the reception was strong and lasting across most of Gregory’s corpus, and especially where he had done his most original work: in the mystical theology of ascent and in the Trinitarian and apophatic doctrine of God.

His Trinitarian writings — Against Eunomius, To Ablabius (On “Not Three Gods”), the letter To Peter on the Difference between Essence and Hypostasis (transmitted in the Basilian corpus as Letter 38) — became part of the standard Cappadocian deposit on which all later Byzantine Trinitarian theology rested. His insistence on the infinity and incomprehensibility of the divine essence, worked out against the rationalist confidence of Eunomius, fed directly into the apophatic temper of Eastern theology (Gregory, Against Eunomius I–III, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera [GNO] I–II, ed. W. Jaeger, Leiden: Brill).

His mystical works — The Life of Moses, the fifteen Homilies on the Song of Songs, the Homilies on the Beatitudes and On the Lord’s Prayer — transmitted to Byzantium two themes of permanent influence: the doctrine of the divine darkness (the soul’s ascent culminating not in vision-as-comprehension but in a luminous darkness where God is met beyond knowing) and the doctrine of epektasis (the soul’s endless straining-forward into a God who, being infinite, is never exhausted, so that perfection is unending progress). These were woven into the hesychast and ascetic literature of the East, the Life of Moses in particular becoming a charter text of Christian mysticism (see The Life of Moses).

The Ambivalence over Apokatastasis

There was, however, one region of Gregory’s thought that the Byzantine tradition received with unease: his teaching on the universal restoration (apokatastasis) — the hope that, when evil has at last exhausted itself, every rational creature will be purified and gathered back to God. Gregory taught this with some boldness, notably in On the Soul and the Resurrection, the Catechetical Oration, and On the Making of Man (Gregory, On the Soul and the Resurrection; Catechetical Oration 26, 35; On the Making of Man 21–22).

The difficulty was sharpened by the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553) and the anti-Origenist anathemas associated with it, the last of which condemned the doctrine that the punishment of demons and the impious is temporary. Origen was anathematized by name; Gregory never was, and his authority continued to be cited by the very councils (681, 787) that stood downstream of 553. The tradition thus faced a tension it had to manage: how to keep a beloved and conciliar Father while setting aside his hardest teaching.

One device by which it did so was the interpolation hypothesis. The eighth-century patriarch St. Germanus of Constantinople is reported to have argued that the restorationist passages in Gregory were not Gregory’s own but the corruptions of heretics inserted into a pure text — so that the orthodox Father could be received whole, with the offending sentences attributed to forgers. This argument is preserved in the report of Photius, who summarizes Germanus’s treatise in his Bibliotheca (Photius, Bibliotheca, cod. 233). Modern textual scholarship does not sustain the interpolation thesis — the restorationist passages are integral to Gregory’s works and method — but it remains historically important as the mechanism by which the Byzantine tradition retained Gregory’s authority while quarantining his eschatology. The fuller treatment of this reception, the 553 council, and the range of present Orthodox positions belongs to a dedicated file (see Reception and the Orthodox Tradition).

The net result is a reception of striking shape: Gregory honored as “Father of the Fathers,” his Trinitarian and mystical works absorbed into the very substance of Eastern theology, and a single strand of his teaching — never condemned in his name, never proclaimed as dogma — held at arm’s length as a hope rather than a doctrine.

Gregory’s Influence: Dionysius, Maximus, Palamas

The depth of Gregory’s standing is measured less by the title than by the line of theologians who built upon him. Three figures in particular carry his influence into the heart of the Eastern tradition.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late 5th / early 6th c.) inherited and systematized Gregory’s doctrine of the divine darkness. The Dionysian Mystical Theology, with its ascent of Moses into the “darkness of unknowing” where the soul is united to the wholly unknowable God, is unintelligible without Gregory’s treatment of the same Sinai theophany in the Life of Moses — Gregory’s apophatic mysticism being the seedbed of the Dionysian corpus that would shape all subsequent Eastern (and much Western) mystical theology (cf. the Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, ed. Mateo-Seco and Maspero, Leiden: Brill, 2010).

St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) is the great mediator of Gregory to Byzantium. Maximus took up Gregory’s anthropology — the human as the bond of the sensible and intelligible worlds, the double creation, the epektasis of the perfected soul — and his eschatology, and disciplined them within a rigorously Chalcedonian and dyothelite framework. Where Gregory’s restoration risked being read as a necessity that overrode created freedom, Maximus distinguished the universal restoration of nature (the resurrection and the knowledge of God given to all) from the restoration of the will, which cannot be coerced — thereby preserving Gregory’s vision of a cosmos returned to God while guarding the freedom on which final beatitude depends (Maximus, Questions and Doubts 19; cf. St. Maximus the Confessor). It is largely through Maximus’s chastened transmission that Gregory’s deepest themes entered the bloodstream of Orthodox theology.

St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), in the hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century, drew on the Nyssen’s apophaticism — the infinity and incomprehensibility of the divine essence — as part of the patristic foundation for his distinction between the unknowable essence of God and the uncreated energies in which God is truly known and partaken. Gregory of Nyssa’s insistence that God is infinite and therefore never comprehended, and yet genuinely encountered in the ascent, stands behind the Palamite settlement that the essence is unparticipable while the energies are participable (cf. St. Gregory Palamas). The line from the divine darkness of the Life of Moses to the uncreated light of Tabor runs through the whole apophatic tradition that Gregory helped to found.

The Sum of the Reception

To call Gregory the “Father of the Fathers” is to name what the councils, the mystics, and the dogmaticians of the East all acknowledged: that here was a Father at the headwaters of the tradition, drawn upon by those who came after. The empire made him a standard of communion in 381; three ecumenical councils cited or crowned him; Dionysius, Maximus, and Palamas built upon him. The single shadow on this reception — the unease over the apokatastasis — did not diminish his authority but disciplined the use of one part of his work, and the discipline itself testifies to how unwilling the Church was ever to let him go (see The Ecumenical Councils).

See Also

References

  • Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO). Edited by Werner Jaeger et al. Leiden: Brill, 1921– . (Critical edition of Against Eunomius I–III in GNO I–II; the ascetic and exegetical works across the series.)
  • Mansi, J. D. Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio. Vols. XI (Constantinople III, 681) and XIII (Nicaea II, 787; the title “Father of the Fathers” at cols. 293–296).
  • Codex Theodosianus 16.1.3 (edict of Theodosius I, 30 July 381).
  • Photius. Bibliotheca, cod. 233 (summary of St. Germanus of Constantinople on the alleged interpolations in Gregory).
  • Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Constantinople II, 553; Constantinople III, 681; Nicaea II, 787.)
  • Mateo-Seco, Lucas Francisco, and Giulio Maspero, eds. The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa. Vigiliae Christianae Supplements 99. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
  • Daley, Brian E. The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
  • Maximus the Confessor. Questions and Doubts (Quaestiones et dubia). Edited by José H. Declerck. Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca 10. Turnhout: Brepols, 1982.