The Anastasia and the Council

The rise of St. Gregory the Theologian at Constantinople: the call in 379 to lead the small Nicene remnant in a city held by the Arians, the converted house-chapel of the Anastasia where he preached the Five Theological Orations, the humiliating affair of Maximus the Cynic and the stealthy night consecration, the entry of the emperor Theodosius in 380 and Gregory’s installation in the Great Church, and his presidency of the Second Ecumenical Council in 381 after the death of Meletius.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Call to Constantinople (379)

When Gregory came to Constantinople early in 379, the imperial capital had been under Arian or Homoian episcopal control for some forty years, since the reign of Constantius II. The small community that held to the Nicene faith — the homoousion of the Son with the Father — had no church of its own in the city and no recognized bishop. A group of these Nicene faithful, together with bishops sympathetic to their cause, invited Gregory, by then a seasoned theologian in his fiftieth year, to come and shepherd them (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 5; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, introduction). The death of the Arian-leaning emperor Valens at the battle of Adrianople in August 378, and the accession of the Nicene Theodosius, had opened a window; the Nicene remnant needed a voice equal to the moment. Gregory, drawn always to the contemplative quiet he never managed to keep, came reluctantly — but he came.

Gregory’s reluctance was not a literary pose. By 379 he had already lived through one painful ordination — his father had compelled him to the priesthood at Nazianzus, and he had fled to Pontus before returning — and a second, when Basil consecrated him bishop of the obscure waystation of Sasima, a see Gregory never effectively occupied and bitterly resented as a pawn in Basil’s ecclesiastical maneuvering against a rival metropolitan. He was a man whose deepest desire was for hesychia, the stillness of the philosophical and contemplative life, and who was repeatedly dragged into public office against his inclination. That this most reluctant of churchmen became the voice of the Nicene cause in the imperial capital is one of the ironies the tradition has savored; Gregory himself read it as the providence of God overruling his own longing for retreat (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, chs. 3–5; De vita sua, lines 1ff.).

The Anastasia Chapel

Gregory began his ministry not in a grand basilica but in a private house, lent to him (according to his own account) by relatives, which he converted into a chapel. He named it the Anastasia — “Resurrection” — and read into the name a double meaning: the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the true faith in a city where it had seemed dead.

“An Anastasia, the scene of the resurrection of the faith.” (Gregory’s own description, reported in McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 5; cf. De vita sua, lines 1079ff.)

It was in this modest room, before a congregation that began small and grew steadily, that Gregory delivered in the latter part of 380 the Five Theological Orations (Orations 27–31) — the works that won him, alone among the Fathers, the title “the Theologian” (see The Trinity Perfected). The contrast became part of his own legend: the most exalted Trinitarian theology of the patristic age was first spoken in a converted house to a beleaguered minority, while the great churches of the city remained in the hands of his opponents. His preaching drew crowds, admiration, and — inevitably — enemies; tradition records that the Anastasia was once stormed by a hostile mob during a vigil, and that Gregory was assailed both by rival Christian factions and by the resentment of a city long accustomed to the Homoian establishment (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 5).

The Anastasia also became the stage for Gregory’s confrontation with the full spectrum of fourth-century error. The Theological Orations answer not only the Arians and the Eunomians — the radical heirs of Arius who claimed that the divine essence could be known and named — but also the Pneumatomachi who denied the Spirit, and the Sabellian tendency that would collapse the persons into one. The setting was polemical and the stakes were public: these were not lecture-hall exercises but sermons preached into a contested city, where every clause was weighed by hostile ears. That Gregory could forge, under such pressure, a theology of such poise is itself part of his achievement. The Anastasia thus stands in the tradition’s memory as a kind of birthplace — the room where the Nicene faith, driven underground in the capital, rose again in the mouth of its greatest fourth-century interpreter.

The Maximus the Cynic Affair

The most painful episode of Gregory’s Constantinopolitan ministry — and one he never disguised in his own telling — was his betrayal by Maximus the Cynic (also called Hero). Maximus arrived from Alexandria in the guise of a Christian philosopher, affecting the dress and manner of a Cynic. Gregory received him warmly, gave him his full confidence, lodged him, and even delivered a public panegyric in his honour (Oration 25, traditionally identified as the speech in praise of “Hero the Philosopher”; see McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 6).

Maximus repaid the trust with a coup. With the backing of Peter, the patriarch of Alexandria — who had turned against Gregory — and a party of Egyptian bishops sent for the purpose, Maximus had himself consecrated bishop of Constantinople secretly, by night, while Gregory lay ill. The consecration was begun in a church and, when interrupted, completed in a private house. The plot collapsed: the people of the city repudiated Maximus, and his claim was rejected, but the humiliation cut Gregory deeply, and he records it with raw honesty in his autobiographical poem rather than passing over it in silence (De vita sua, lines 750ff.; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 6; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, introduction). It was a foretaste of the ecclesiastical politics that would eventually drive him from the city altogether.

Theodosius and the Installation (380)

The decisive turn came with the emperor. Theodosius I, who had issued the edict Cunctos populos (380) establishing Nicene Christianity as the faith of the empire, entered Constantinople in November 380. He moved at once to restore the churches to the Nicene party, expelling the Arian bishop Demophilus. According to Gregory’s own account and the Catholic Encyclopedia’s summary, the emperor accompanied Gregory to the Great Church of Hagia Sophia and saw him enthroned before an immense crowd (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Gregory of Nazianzus”; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 6). After a year and a half in the borrowed room of the Anastasia, the theologian of the Nicene remnant was now, with imperial backing, bishop of the capital and master of its cathedral. Gregory describes the moment with a characteristic mixture of vindication and unease — he had never sought the throne, and the manner of his elevation, owed to imperial troops as much as to ecclesiastical consent, troubled him even as it honoured him.

Whether the cathedral was Hagia Sophia or, as some sources locate the scene, the Church of the Holy Apostles, the substance is the same: backed by imperial authority, Gregory was now the recognized Nicene bishop of the capital. The detail that he was escorted to the throne by soldiers, through streets lined by a hostile populace, troubled Gregory’s own conscience; he had wished to win the city by the word, not to be installed over it by force of arms, and he records the ambivalence rather than the triumph (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 6; De vita sua, lines 1300ff.).

The Council of 381 and the Presidency

In May 381 Theodosius convened at Constantinople the council the Church would receive as the Second Ecumenical Council (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). Some 150 bishops gathered, drawn overwhelmingly from the East. The council opened under the presidency of Meletius of Antioch, the venerable bishop whose disputed see was itself one of the great problems the assembly had to face.

Meletius died suddenly while the council was in session. Gregory, as bishop of the host city, succeeded to the presidency (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Gregory of Nazianzus”; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 7). For a brief season the man who had preached the Trinity from a house-chapel now presided over the council that would enshrine that theology in the creed of the whole Church. The council confirmed the Nicene faith, defined the full divinity of the Holy Spirit against the Pneumatomachi, condemned the Apollinarianism Gregory had written against, and promulgated the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed still sung at every Orthodox Liturgy (Council of Constantinople I, 381; see The Holy Trinity). It also issued the canons that ordered the Church’s life — including the famous Canon 3, granting the bishop of Constantinople “the prerogative of honour after the bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome,” a ruling whose consequences would shape ecclesiastical politics for centuries (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils).

For a few weeks, then, the symmetry was complete: the theologian of the Anastasia presided, as bishop of the host city, over the very council that would canonize his theology. Gregory had every reason to believe that the long reluctance and the recent humiliations had issued, by God’s providence, in a vindication beyond anything he had sought. The vindication was real but the office was not to last.

But the presidency immediately confronted Gregory with the explosive question of who should succeed Meletius at Antioch — and the deeper question of his own right to occupy the see of Constantinople at all. The Antiochene schism had divided the Nicene party for decades, with rival claimants (Meletius and Paulinus) each recognized by different blocs of the Church; Gregory urged that, with Meletius dead, the see be left to Paulinus for the sake of peace, a proposal his fellow Easterners angrily rejected. The council fractured along these lines, and Gregory — caught between the Eastern bishops who had elected Meletius and the Western and Egyptian parties who backed Paulinus and resented Gregory’s own elevation — found himself isolated at the very moment of his greatest authority. Within weeks the politics that had haunted him since the Maximus affair would close around him, and the high point of his ecclesiastical life would dissolve into the resignation he turned into one of the masterpieces of Christian self-defence (see The Resignation).

References

Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus). De vita sua (On His Own Life; Poem II.1.11). Trans. in Denis Molaise Meehan, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: Three Poems, Fathers of the Church 75 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987); also Carolinne White, Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems, Cambridge Medieval Classics 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Gregory the Theologian. The Five Theological Orations (Orations 27–31). 380. Trans. NPNF II/7.
Council of Constantinople I (381). Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
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 and New York: Routledge, 2006.
“St. Gregory of Nazianzus.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7. New York: Robert Appleton, 1910 (used to locate dates and the sequence of events; chronology cross-checked against McGuckin and Daley).