Family and Formation

St. Gregory of Nazianzus was born around 329–330 into a family that the Church would come to honor almost in its entirety: his father Gregory the Elder and mother Nonna, his brother Caesarius and sister Gorgonia all numbered among the saints. This file traces that family of saints, the disputed date of his birth, his education at Caesarea, Alexandria, and finally Athens, the storm at sea that drew from him a baptismal vow, and the celebrated friendship with Basil the Great forged in the Athenian schools.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Family of Saints

Few of the Fathers came from a household so wholly given to the Church. Gregory was born at the family estate near Arianzum, a village close to Nazianzus in southwest Cappadocia, the son of Gregory the Elder and Nonna (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1). His father had been an adherent of the Hypsistarians, a syncretistic sect that worshipped a single “Most High” God while keeping certain Jewish observances and refusing the full confession of the Church. It was Nonna, his wife, whose persistence and prayer brought him to baptism around 325; not long after, in 328 or 329, Gregory the Elder was consecrated bishop of Nazianzus, an office he would hold for some forty-five years (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1; Britannica, “Saint Gregory of Nazianzus”).

Nonna is remembered as the spiritual engine of the family — the convert-maker whose faith shaped husband and children alike, and whom Gregory honored in verse and oration as the pattern of Christian womanhood. The two younger siblings completed the household of saints. Caesarius, Gregory’s brother, became a distinguished physician who served at the imperial court in Constantinople, and Gorgonia, his sister, married and raised a family in lay piety; at the funerals of both Gregory delivered orations (Orations 7 and 8) that remain among the most moving examples of Christian eulogy and are themselves the principal sources for their lives (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1). The Orthodox Church commemorates Gregory the Elder, Nonna, Caesarius, and Gorgonia each as saints — a rare instance of an entire immediate family entering the calendar.

The date of Gregory’s own birth is not certain. [Disputed: most modern scholarship places it c. 329–330 (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1, favoring c. 329); an older tradition associated with Baronius proposed c. 325, but that rested on the mistaken assumption that episcopal celibacy was already universal and that Gregory the Elder could not have fathered him after his consecration — a premise modern critics reject.] What is secure is that Gregory was the eldest son, born to a bishop’s house, and dedicated by his mother to God before his birth in imitation of Hannah’s vow over Samuel (Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina, autobiographical poems; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1).

Education: Caesarea, Alexandria, and the Storm at Sea

Gregory received the fullest education available to a wealthy provincial of the fourth century, and he pursued it with a hunger that never left him. After early instruction at home and at Nazianzus, he studied rhetoric at Caesarea Mazaca in Cappadocia — where, around 350, he first encountered Basil, the friend of his life — and then at Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, with its great library and the lingering school of Origen (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2). From there he went on to Alexandria, the intellectual capital of the Greek-speaking world, to deepen his rhetorical and philosophical training.

The voyage from Alexandria toward Greece produced the most dramatic episode of his student years. A storm overtook the ship and raged for many days; Gregory, still only a catechumen and not yet baptized, was seized less by the fear of drowning than by the dread of perishing unenlightened, dying outside the saving waters. In his terror he vowed himself wholly to God should he be delivered — a vow he understood ever after as binding his whole life to the Church’s service. He recounts the episode in his autobiographical poetry as a decisive turning, the moment the sea itself preached to him the precariousness of a life not yet consecrated (Gregory of Nazianzus, De Vita Sua and Carmina; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2). The vow would be discharged only years later, when he received baptism from his father at Nazianzus.

Athens, c. 350–358: The Two Roads

The crown of Gregory’s education was Athens, the ancient university city, where he studied roughly from 350 to 358 under the leading rhetoricians of the age and where his friendship with Basil ripened into one of the most celebrated bonds in Christian history. Our principal source for these years is Gregory’s own Funeral Oration on Basil (Oration 43), delivered around 381–382, which idealizes their student days as a shared pursuit of virtue and remains the richest portrait we possess of the two men in their youth.

Gregory describes the discipline the two friends imposed on themselves amid the temptations of student life, knowing only the road to church and the road to their teachers:

“Two ways were known to us, the first of greater value, the second of smaller consequence: the one leading to our sacred buildings and the teachers there, the other to secular instructors” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.21; trans. NPNF II/7).

He summarizes the bond in a phrase that became proverbial — that the two were “one soul in two bodies,” and that “our single object and ambition was virtue, and a life of union with God” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.20–21; trans. NPNF II/7). Among their fellow students at Athens, Gregory notes, was the future emperor Julian — later called “the Apostate” — whose unstable character Gregory claims already to have discerned. The Athenian years gave Gregory complete mastery of classical rhetoric and philosophy, the instruments he would later turn entirely to the service of Christian theology; few of the Fathers wove the Hellenic inheritance so seamlessly into the Church’s confession.

When Basil left Athens first, around 355, Gregory felt the parting bitterly and lingered a while longer, even teaching rhetoric for a time, before returning home to Cappadocia around 358 (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2). There, at last, he received baptism from his father and entered upon the consecrated life his storm-vow had promised — though the precise shape that life would take was not yet his own to choose. Around 358 Basil wrote urging him to share the ascetic retreat he had established at Annisa in Pontus, and Gregory came for a season of shared monastic life; together the two friends compiled the *Philocalia* of Origen, an anthology of selected passages that stands as testimony both to their debt to Origen and to their discriminating reception of him (Basil, Epistle 14; Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistles 4–6; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2).

The Pull Between Solitude and Service

Already in these formative years the central tension of Gregory’s life is visible. By temperament he was a contemplative who loved retreat, study, and the prayerful quiet of Pontus; by vocation — and by the will of others — he would be drawn again and again into the active labors of the priesthood and episcopate. The friendship with Basil, the education that fitted him for public office, and the baptismal vow that bound him to God’s service all pointed toward a life he would never fully embrace without struggle. The reluctance was not weakness but reverence: for Gregory, the height of the theological calling made the grasping after it a kind of impiety. That conviction would shape the crisis of his ordination and find its classic expression in his great Apologia (see The Reluctant Priest).

See Also

• The Reluctant Priest — the 361 ordination, the flight to Pontus, and the founding of pastoral theology
• Orations 27–28 — the theological maturity to which this formation led
• The Friendship with Basil — the relationship begun at Athens
• St. Basil: Athens and Conversion — the same Athenian years from Basil’s side
• The Church Fathers — Gregory among the Cappadocians

References

• Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil. Translated by C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF II/7.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations 7 (On Caesarius) and 8 (On Gorgonia). Translated in NPNF II/7.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. De Vita Sua and Carmina (autobiographical poems).
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Letters (Epistolae) 4–6.
• McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
• Beeley, Christopher A. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
• “Saint Gregory of Nazianzus.” Encyclopædia Britannica (used to locate dates; chronology cross-checked against McGuckin).