Christology and Soteriology

St. Gregory the Theologian’s Christology, drawn out of his Trinitarian theology and sharpened against Apollinarius: the principle that “what is not assumed is not healed,” the insistence on the full humanity of Christ including a rational human mind, and the soteriological vision in which the Incarnation aims at the deification of the human person — “let us become gods for His sake, since He for ours became Man.” This file follows the argument of the anti-Apollinarian Letters to Cledonius and traces their authority into the later christological councils.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Soteriological Logic

Gregory’s Christology is governed throughout by a single soteriological rule: Christ saves what he unites to himself, and unites to himself what he assumes. Salvation is therefore as wide as the assumption, and no narrower. This is the famous axiom of the First Letter to Cledonius (Epistle 101), written against Apollinarius around 382:

“For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101 [To Cledonius] 32; trans. NPNF II/7)

Stated positively, the whole of fallen humanity must be taken up if the whole is to be redeemed. Gregory presses the point against any partial Incarnation:

“If anyone has put his trust in Him as a Man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which He has not assumed He has not healed.” (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7)

The argument is not abstract. If Adam fell as a whole — body, soul, and mind together — then a Saviour who took only part of human nature would heal only part, and the most ruined part, the mind, would be left untouched:

“If only half Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also; but if the whole of his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole.” (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7)

Against Apollinarius: The Human Mind of Christ

The occasion was the teaching of Apollinarius of Laodicea (c. 310–390), an early and vigorous defender of Nicaea who, in his zeal to safeguard the unity of Christ and the impeccability of his will, denied that Christ possessed a rational human soul or mind (nous). In Apollinarius’s scheme the divine Word took the place of the human mind, so that Christ had a human body and an animating soul but no human rational center — the Word governed the flesh directly. To Gregory this was not a safeguard but a mutilation: a Christ without a human mind is not a whole man, and a humanity not whole is a humanity not wholly healed.

“If His Manhood is without soul, even the Arians admit this… But if He has a soul, and yet is without a mind, how is He man, for man is not a mindless animal?” (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7)

Gregory’s insistence on the human nous of Christ has a deeper soteriological edge: the mind is precisely the seat of the fall, the faculty that first turned from God in Adam, and therefore the faculty above all that needs healing. “The mind,” he writes, was “the part which had specially sinned and needed redemption” — and so it is the mind that the Word above all assumes (cf. Epistle 101; on this reading see Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Unity of Christ, ch. 2). To leave the mind unassumed would be to leave the wound at its source.

Gregory extends the principle into a catalogue of what the Word took up, refusing every attempt to exempt any part of human nature from the assumption. He insists that the very faculties most marked by the fall — the mind, the will, the affections — are exactly what the Saviour must have made his own:

“Had it been a body without soul, that would be the case also with the soulless idols of the Greeks… If His humanity has no soul, where is the mind? And if no mind, where is the man?” (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7)

The logic is exact and unsparing. Whatever the Word did not unite to himself remains outside the reach of salvation; whatever he united to himself is divinized. The Apollinarian Christ, lacking a human mind, would therefore leave the human mind unredeemed — and with it the whole inner person. For Gregory this is not a fine point of speculation but the difference between a real salvation and an apparent one. The Word “emptied Himself” (Philippians 2:7) not partially but wholly, taking the entire human condition save sin, that he might heal the whole.

One Person in Two Natures

While Gregory insists on the completeness of Christ’s humanity, he is equally insistent on the unity of his person. In the same letter he frames the union in language that anticipates the later conciliar settlements:

“God and Man are two natures, as also soul and body are; but there are not two Sons or two Gods… The Saviour is made of elements which are distinct from one another… yet He is not two Persons. God forbid!” (Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7)

The analogy of soul and body — two real natures in one human person — supplies Gregory with a model for the union of Godhead and manhood in the one Christ: distinct natures, no division of persons. He sets out a series of anathemas against those who would either confuse the natures or divide the Son, and he defends the title Theotokos (Mother of God) as the necessary safeguard of that single subject: “If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary is the Mother of God, he is severed from the Godhead” (Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7). The unity of Christ’s person is, for Gregory, the hinge on which both the Trinity and salvation turn — for it is the one Son, eternally begotten of the Father, who is born of the Virgin and who heals what he assumes.

Theosis: The End of the Incarnation

The purpose of this complete assumption is the deification (theosis) of the human person. Gregory states the great exchange — God becomes man so that man might become god — in his First Oration, preached as a newly ordained priest at Pascha:

“Let us become like Christ, since Christ became like us; let us become gods for His sake, since He for ours became Man.” (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 1 [On Easter] 5; trans. NPNF II/7)

The same vision recurs across his work. In the Oration on the Theophany he describes the Word’s coming as undertaken so “that I too might be made God so far as He is made Man” (Oration 39 13). Deification, for Gregory, is not the creature becoming divine by nature — the gulf between Creator and creature is absolute — but the human person being filled, by grace, with the life of God, sharing in what God is by participation rather than by essence (the distinction the later tradition would frame in terms of essence and energies; see The Holy Trinity). This is why the completeness of the assumption matters so urgently: only a humanity taken up whole can be raised up whole into the divine life. Christology and soteriology are, for Gregory, a single doctrine seen from two sides — the descent of God and the ascent of man meeting in the one person of Christ.

Gregory roots this exchange in the Pauline pattern of kenosis and exaltation. The Word “was made man that we might be made God” — the formula he shares with Athanasius and Irenaeus, but which he sharpens by tying it to the completeness of the assumption. Because the descent reached down to the whole of fallen humanity, the ascent can lift the whole into God. His festal orations on Pascha and the Theophany return to this again and again: the Incarnation is not merely the rescue of humanity from condemnation but its elevation into the life of the Trinity. “What greater destiny,” he asks, “can befall man’s lowliness than that he should be intermingled with God, and by this intermingling should be made God?” (cf. Oration 38 [On the Theophany] 11; trans. NPNF II/7). The healing of the wounded nature and the deification of the redeemed person are, for Gregory, the single movement of one saving act.

It is worth marking the limit Gregory always keeps. Deification never abolishes the distinction between Creator and creature. The human person becomes “god” by grace and participation, not by nature; the saints are filled with the divine life, not absorbed into the divine essence. Gregory’s apophatic insistence that the divine nature is incomprehensible and incommunicable (see The Trinity Perfected) is the guardrail of his soteriology: we are united to God truly, but to the God who remains, in his essence, beyond us — known and shared through his self-giving in Christ and the Spirit. Theosis is therefore not a blurring of the gulf between God and the world but the gracious bridging of it, achieved by the one who stood on both sides of it as God and man.

The Authority of Ep. 101 at Ephesus and Chalcedon

Gregory’s Letters to Cledonius did not remain occasional pieces. Within two generations the principle “what is not assumed is not healed” had become a touchstone of christological orthodoxy. When the christological controversies erupted in the fifth century, both the unity of Christ’s person and the fullness of his humanity that Gregory had defended were enshrined in conciliar definition. Gregory’s authority — he is cited as one of the highest patristic witnesses — stood behind the affirmation at Ephesus (431) of the single subject and the title Theotokos, and behind the Chalcedonian Definition (451), which confessed Christ “in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation… the property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence” (Council of Chalcedon, 451; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The Letters to Cledonius were received by the tradition as a canonical statement of the faith, and the Council of Constantinople (381) had already condemned the Apollinarianism Gregory wrote against (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 7; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, introduction). Two natures preserved without confusion in one person, and a humanity whole enough to be saved whole — the twin convictions of Chalcedon — are precisely the convictions Gregory had pressed against Apollinarius a lifetime before.

References

Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus). Epistles 101 and 102 (To Cledonius, against Apollinarius). c. 382. Trans. NPNF II/7; modern trans. in Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: On God and Christ — The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, Popular Patristics Series 23 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 1: On Easter. Trans. NPNF II/7.
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 39: On the Holy Lights (Theophany). Trans. NPNF II/7.
Council of Ephesus (431). Definition and the Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius.
Council of Chalcedon (451). Definition of Faith (Horos).
Beeley, Christopher A. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Daley, Brian E. Gregory of Nazianzus. The Early Church Fathers. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.