The Dispute with Eutychius

While Gregory was papal envoy at Constantinople, he became embroiled in a public theological controversy with the patriarch of the city, Eutychius, over the nature of the resurrection body. Eutychius had written a work teaching that the risen body of the saints would be subtle and impalpable, no longer tangible flesh; Gregory countered that the resurrection body, like the risen body of Christ, is real and palpable flesh, however glorified. The dispute was carried before the Emperor Tiberius II, who judged in Gregory’s favour and ordered Eutychius’s book burned. Gregory tells the story himself in the Moralia, and the episode shows the Latin monk holding his own as a theologian at the centre of the Eastern Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)

The Controversy

The patriarch Eutychius of Constantinople (in office 552–565 and again 577–582) — the same Eutychius who had presided over the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553) — had in his later years composed a treatise on the resurrection in which he argued that the bodies of the saints in the resurrection would be made “more subtle than air” (subtilior aere), no longer tangible or palpable flesh but a refined, impalpable substance. The question turned on the right interpretation of St. Paul’s words that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50) and on the meaning of the “spiritual body” (sōma pneumatikon) of 1 Corinthians 15:44 (Gregory, Moralia in Job 14.56.72–74; trans. Library of the Fathers; Markus 1997, 13–14; Moorhead 2005, 14–16).

Gregory, the papal envoy, took the opposing view, and the two men disputed the matter at length. Against Eutychius’s impalpable, etherealized body, Gregory insisted on the reality and tangibility of the risen flesh. His decisive argument was Christological: the risen Lord Himself had shown that the resurrection body, though glorified and freed from corruption, remains true and palpable flesh. Gregory appealed to the Gospel scene in which the risen Christ invites the doubting Thomas to handle Him — “Handle me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39) — and to His eating of the broiled fish before the disciples (Luke 24:42–43). If the Lord’s own resurrection body was palpable, Gregory argued, then the bodies of the saints, conformed to His glorious body (Philippians 3:21), must be palpable too. The “spiritual body” of 1 Corinthians 15 means a body wholly subject to the Spirit and incorruptible — not a body that has ceased to be true flesh (Gregory, Moralia 14.56.72–74; the Christological argument from Luke 24:39).

The Resolution Before the Emperor

The matter was brought before the Emperor Tiberius II Constantine (r. 578–582), to whom both Gregory and Eutychius made their case. According to Gregory’s own account, the emperor judged the dispute in his favour and condemned Eutychius’s teaching, ordering the patriarch’s book on the subject to be burned (Gregory, Moralia 14.56.74; Markus 1997, 13–14; Moorhead 2005, 15–16). Gregory adds a poignant detail that became famous in its retelling: that Eutychius, taken ill not long afterward and on his deathbed, took hold of the skin of his own hand before those gathered around him and confessed, “I confess that we shall all rise again in this flesh,” renouncing his earlier error (Gregory, Moralia 14.56.74; trans. Library of the Fathers) [Disputed: this deathbed-recantation is reported by Gregory alone, decades after the event and as part of his own moral teaching on the resurrection in the *Moralia*; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 it is recorded as Gregory's testimony, not independently confirmed — the underlying dispute and the imperial judgment, however, are accepted as historical (Markus 1997, 13–14)].

Gregory himself fell seriously ill during the controversy, and he remarks that both disputants were sick at the same time, framing the whole affair within his characteristic sense of human frailty and the nearness of death (Gregory, Moralia 14.56.74).

It is worth pausing on the exegetical method the dispute reveals, because it is characteristic of Gregory throughout his works. Eutychius had pressed the Pauline texts — “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50) and the contrast of the “natural body” with the “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44) — toward a spiritualizing conclusion, reading “flesh and blood” as the material substance of the body itself. Gregory answered that the Apostle’s phrase “flesh and blood” denotes not the substance of the body but its corruption and its carnal works — the mortality and sinfulness of the present fallen condition — which indeed cannot enter the kingdom, while the substance of the flesh, healed of corruption, most certainly will, since otherwise the resurrection of the body would be no resurrection at all. The “spiritual body” is the body wholly subjected to the Spirit, not a body that has ceased to be a body (Gregory, Moralia 14.56.72–74; on the same Pauline texts read by the East, see Purgation, Penance, and the East). This reading — taking “flesh and blood” as a moral rather than a physical category, and anchoring the whole question in the palpable risen body of Christ — is exactly the kind of scripturally grounded, pastorally minded exegesis that fills the Moralia and the Homilies. The young envoy who out-argued a patriarch at Constantinople was already the exegete and teacher he would be as pope.

The Theological Stakes

The dispute was not a minor quarrel but touched a point on which the Church’s faith is firm. The resurrection of the body — of this body, transfigured and incorruptible but truly the same flesh — is confessed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (“I look for the resurrection of the dead”) and is grounded in the bodily resurrection of Christ Himself. Any teaching that dissolved the risen body into an impalpable, quasi-spiritual substance edged toward the old error, condemned in various forms from the second century onward, that denied the goodness and permanence of the material creation and the literal raising of the flesh. Gregory’s stand was, in substance, a defence of the catholic faith of the resurrection against a spiritualizing reinterpretation — and it is significant that it was a Western monk who pressed this point at Constantinople, and that the East, in the person of the emperor and the dying patriarch, conceded it (Markus 1997, 13–14; on the consensus of the fathers East and West, see The Church Fathers).

For an Orthodox reading the episode is doubly instructive. It shows Gregory as a competent and resolute theologian, not merely an administrator; and it shows the deep agreement of the pre-Schism East and West on the foundations of the faith. The Latin envoy and the Greek patriarch disputed within one Church and one creedal tradition, and the matter was settled by appeal to Scripture and to the resurrection of Christ — the common patrimony of both. Gregory drew the dispute into his Moralia precisely as an example of contending for the truth of the faith while remaining within the communion of the Church (Gregory, Moralia 14.56.72–74).

See Also

References

  • Gregory the Great. Morals on the Book of Job (Moralia in Job) 14.56.72–74. Trans. Library of the Fathers, Oxford, 1844–1850. (Gregory’s own account of the dispute, the emperor’s judgment, and Eutychius’s deathbed words.)
  • Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 13–14. (The Eutychius dispute and its historical assessment.)
  • Moorhead, John. Gregory the Great. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2005, 14–16. (The controversy and Tiberius II’s role.)
  • Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:44, 15:50; Luke 24:39, 24:42–43; Philippians 3:21.