The Reluctant Priest

At Christmas 361 St. Gregory of Nazianzus was ordained priest by his own father, against his will, in a coerced consecration he experienced as an act of “tyranny”; he fled at once to Pontus. His return produced Oration 2, the Apologia for his flight, which became the founding text of Christian pastoral theology — naming the cure of souls “the art of arts and science of sciences.” This file traces that crisis, the lifelong pattern of flight and return it inaugurated, and the painful consecration to Sasima in 372 that wounded his friendship with Basil.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Ordination of 361

Gregory had returned from Athens and Pontus to a life of study and retirement, the contemplative quiet he preferred above every office. His father had other intentions. At Christmas 361, in the church at Nazianzus and before the assembled congregation, Gregory the Elder ordained his son to the priesthood — without Gregory’s prior consent, presenting him to the people as already a presbyter (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 3). The aging bishop needed help governing his see and wanted his gifted son beside him; but Gregory experienced the forced ordination as a violation, a seizure of his freedom, and famously called it an act of “tyranny” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.6; trans. NPNF II/7).

His response was flight. Overwhelmed and unwilling, Gregory left Nazianzus almost immediately and withdrew to Pontus, to the ascetic refuge near Basil, to recover himself in solitude and to weigh what had been thrust upon him (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 3). The flight was not mere petulance; it expressed a genuine theological conviction that the priesthood was too high and too perilous a charge to be entered without the deepest preparation, and that to grasp at it — or to be hurled into it unready — endangered both pastor and flock. After some months of reflection he returned to Nazianzus, in time for Easter 362, and was reconciled to his ministry. His return was marked by his very first oration (Oration 1, the brief Easter address), and then, in justification of both his flight and his return, by the great work that would secure his place in the history of pastoral theology.

Oration 2: The Founding Text of Pastoral Theology

The *Apologia* — Oration 2, “In Defence of His Flight to Pontus” — is Gregory’s extended account of why he fled and why a sane man might dread ordination. It is far more than a personal apology: it is a sustained meditation on the nature of the pastoral office, and it became the seedbed of the whole later tradition of Christian writing on the priesthood, directly shaping John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood and, through it, Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 3; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, introduction).

Its central claim is the definition that has echoed through sixteen centuries of pastoral literature. The shepherding of human souls, Gregory writes, exceeds in difficulty every other art and science, because its material — the human person — is the most complex and unstable of all God’s creatures:

“the guiding of man, the most variable and manifold of creatures, seems to me in very deed to be the art of arts and science of sciences” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.16; trans. NPNF II/7).

From this Gregory develops a searching analysis of the pastor as a physician of souls, whose work surpasses that of the physician of bodies precisely because the soul is divine and immortal while the body is perishable matter, and because the sick of soul actively conceal their illness, resist their cure, and resent their healer (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.16–22; trans. NPNF II/7). The pastor must therefore master a discernment subtle enough to fit the remedy to each temperament, age, and circumstance — for the same medicine that heals one soul destroys another. Underlying the whole treatise is Gregory’s conviction that the one who would purify others must first be purified himself: “a man must himself be cleansed before cleansing others; himself become wise, that he may make others wise” (cf. Oration 2.71; trans. NPNF II/7). The dread that drove him to Pontus was, on his own account, the only fitting response of a serious soul to so awful a charge — and his flight, rightly read, was a confession of the office’s height, not a flight from duty.

The Pattern of Flight and Return

The crisis of 361 set the rhythm of Gregory’s entire life. Again and again he would be drawn into office, recoil from it, withdraw — and then return to labor faithfully where he had been placed. The pattern recurs at his consecration to Sasima, which he never took up; in his repeated longing to abandon the embattled capital during his Constantinople years; and at the end, in his final resignation of the see of Constantinople in 381, when he asked to be released “like Jonah” so that the storm troubling the Church might be stilled (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, chs. 3, 9). This oscillation between solitude and service is not a biographical accident but the existential form of his theology: the contemplative drawn to the vision of God resists the noise of office, yet obedience and love drag him back to serve the Church. For Gregory the reluctance was itself a kind of fitness; the men most dangerous in the priesthood were those who desired it.

Sasima, 372: The Wound to the Friendship

The most painful instance of the pattern came at the hands of his closest friend. Around 372 the emperor Valens divided the civil province of Cappadocia in two, and Anthimus, bishop of Tyana — metropolis of the new Cappadocia Secunda — asserted metropolitan rights over the divided territory, including its revenues. To shore up his own jurisdiction against Anthimus, Basil, now Bishop of Caesarea, multiplied bishoprics in the contested zone and consecrated Gregory to a new and wretched little see at Sasima, a bleak posting-station on the imperial road (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 9; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 5). Gregory described it with lasting bitterness as a desolate, dust-choked halt with no water, no greenery, and nothing but the rattle of passing wagons and the quarrels of travelers — “an utterly dreadful, pokey little hole,” in his own contemptuous phrase.

Gregory bitterly resented being made a pawn of his friend’s strategy. He never took possession of the desolate see, and the episode opened a wound in the most celebrated friendship in Christian history that the old intimacy never fully healed (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 9; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 5). He felt that Basil had treated him as a piece on a board, sacrificing their friendship to ecclesiastical politics; Basil, for his part, seems to have judged Gregory wanting in resolve. That Gregory could both resent the Sasima affair for the rest of his life and, after Basil’s death, deliver the funeral oration (Oration 43) that remains our richest and most loving portrait of his friend is one of the more honest complexities the sources preserve — the human cost of Basil’s statecraft, recorded with lasting bitterness by the very friend who would nonetheless eulogize him as a saint.

Gregory withdrew instead to assist his father at Nazianzus, administering that see in his father’s last years (Gregory the Elder died around 374), and after his parents’ deaths retreated again to the solitude of Seleucia. From that retreat he would be called, around 379, to the work that would crown his life and earn him his title: the defense of the Nicene faith in Constantinople (see Orations 27–28).

See Also

• Family and Formation — the upbringing and education behind the contemplative temperament
• Orations 27–28 — the Constantinople ministry to which his return led
• The Friendship with Basil — the bond wounded at Sasima
• St. Basil: The Meletian Schism and Rome — the Sasima affair from Basil’s side, in the context of his church politics
• The Church Fathers — Gregory among the Cappadocians

References

• Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 2: In Defence of His Flight to Pontus (Apologia), esp. §§6, 16, 71. Translated by C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF II/7.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 1: On Easter and His Reluctance. Translated in NPNF II/7.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil. Translated in NPNF II/7.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. De Vita Sua (autobiographical poem).
• McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
• Daley, Brian E. Gregory of Nazianzus. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2006.
• Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.