The Letters

St. Gregory the Theologian’s correspondence — a collection of some two hundred and forty-nine letters that is the earliest author-designed letter collection in Greek, gathered and arranged by Gregory himself. It includes the famous epistle to Nicobulus on the art of letter-writing, the three theological letters that a later council endowed with dogmatic authority, and the documented friendship with Basil. This file surveys the collection as literature and as a historical source.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The First Author-Designed Greek Letter Collection

Gregory’s letters survive not as a random sheaf rescued by later editors but as a corpus the author himself assembled. In his old age, his great-nephew Nicobulus asked him for a model collection of his correspondence, and Gregory gathered, selected, and arranged his letters in response — making him, so far as the record shows, the first Greek author to curate his own letters for publication (Storin, Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter Collection: The Complete Translation, introduction; cf. Bradley K. Storin, “The Letter Collection of Gregory of Nazianzus,” in Late Antique Letter Collections, ed. Sogno, Storin, and Watts, 2017). The collection as transmitted numbers on the order of 249 letters, though the exact count and contents are debated: the manuscript families vary, and some letters long printed among Gregory’s are now reassigned — Epistle 249 to Flavian, for instance, is now ascribed by consensus to Gregory of Nyssa rather than to Gregory of Nazianzus (Storin, Letter Collection; cf. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2020.08.14). Gregory’s own arrangement appears to have been organized by addressee and theme rather than chronologically, with the letters to Nicobulus placed first as a kind of preface to the whole.

The Letter on Letter-Writing (Epistle 51)

The most celebrated piece in the collection is Epistle 51, addressed to Nicobulus, in which Gregory sets out his theory of the epistolary art — in effect the first treatise on letter-writing to come down from a Greek Christian author. He lays down three governing virtues. The first is brevity: a letter should be no longer than its subject requires, neither cramped nor padded (Ep. 51.1–3). The second is clarity: the letter should be plain enough for the ordinary reader yet not so plain as to be flat, avoiding both obscurity and banality. The third is grace or charm — the measured use of maxims, proverbs, wit, and rhetorical figures, employed sparingly, “as we use salt with our food,” so that the letter is seasoned but not overwhelmed (Ep. 51.4–6; cf. Epp. 52, 54; Storin, Letter Collection). The epistle is at once a practical manual and a small masterpiece of the very art it describes, and it stands behind the whole later Byzantine tradition of epistolary theory.

The Theological Letters (Epistles 101, 102, 202)

Three of Gregory’s letters are not occasional pieces at all but compact dogmatic treatises, and they carry an authority unique among his correspondence. Epistles 101 and 102 are addressed to Cledonius, a priest in charge of the church at Nazianzum, and Epistle 202 to Nectarius, Gregory’s successor as bishop of Constantinople; all three are directed against the Christology of Apollinarius of Laodicea, who taught that in Christ the divine Word took the place of a human rational soul or mind, so that the incarnate Lord lacked a complete human nature.

Against this, Epistle 101 articulates the principle that became one of the load-bearing axioms of all subsequent Orthodox soteriology:

“That which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101.32, To Cledonius; trans. NPNF II/7)

The logic is exact: salvation is the healing of the whole human being, so the Word must have assumed the whole human being — body, soul, and rational mind — for what was left unassumed would be left unhealed. Apollinarianism was condemned at the First Council of Constantinople (381), and Gregory’s letters became the classic refutation. Their authority was then formally ratified by the great Christological councils: Epistle 101 was read into the record and endorsed at the Council of Ephesus (431) and again at the Council of Chalcedon (451), so that this “theological letter” acquired a quasi-conciliar standing and the “not assumed / not healed” maxim is sometimes called the Chalcedonian principle (cf. the reception history in the patristic-Christology literature). For this reason the three theological letters were transmitted not with the rest of the correspondence but alongside Gregory’s orations, as part of his dogmatic corpus — which is why the modern complete translation of the letter collection deliberately omits them, treating them as belonging to the doctrinal rather than the epistolary body of work (Storin, Letter Collection, introduction).

The Basil Correspondence

A substantial group of the letters documents the most famous friendship in Christian history, that of Gregory and Basil the Great, from their student days at Athens through Basil’s episcopate to the painful rupture over the see of Sasima. The letters preserve the friendship in its warmth and in its strain — the early invitations to the shared ascetic life at Basil’s retreat on the Iris, the collaboration on the Philocalia of Origen, and then the cooling and the recrimination after Basil consecrated Gregory to the wretched little frontier see of Sasima as a move in his ecclesiastical-political contest with Anthimus of Tyana. In Gregory’s curated arrangement the Basil letters are placed prominently, just after those to Nicobulus, in a way that scholars read as deliberately publicizing and even romanticizing the friendship for posterity (Storin, Letter Collection; cf. the BMCR review, 2020.08.14). Read alongside Basil’s own letters and Gregory’s later funeral oration (Oration 43), they make the relationship one of the best-documented personal bonds in all of antiquity — and one of the most honestly fraught.

The Letters as a Historical Source

Beyond their literary and theological value, Gregory’s letters are a primary source for the life of the late-fourth-century Church and for the texture of late-antique Christian society. They show a bishop and a man of letters managing estates and lawsuits, recommending friends and clients, consoling the bereaved, negotiating church appointments, exchanging gifts and compliments, and complaining of illness and the indignities of age. They document the networks of episcopal and aristocratic correspondence through which the Greek Church was actually run, and they let us see the public man of the orations in his private register. Because Gregory edited the collection himself, it is also evidence of how a fourth-century Christian wished to be remembered — a self-portrait in correspondence to set beside the self-portrait in verse of De vita sua. As historical testimony the letters must be read with that self-curation in mind, but precisely as a consciously shaped document they are among the richest sources we have for the inner life of the Nicene Church and its leading men.

References

Storin, Bradley K., trans. Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter Collection: The Complete Translation. Christianity in Late Antiquity 7. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.
Storin, Bradley K. “The Letter Collection of Gregory of Nazianzus.” In Late Antique Letter Collections: A Critical Introduction and Reference Guide, edited by Cristiana Sogno, Bradley K. Storin, and Edward J. Watts. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Letters (incl. Epp. 51, 101, 102, 202). Selections translated in NPNF II/7.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Epistle 101, To Cledonius the Priest, Against Apollinarius. Translated in NPNF II/7.
First Council of Constantinople (381); Council of Ephesus (431); Council of Chalcedon (451). (For the conciliar reception of Epistle 101.)
McGuckin, John Anthony. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.