The Pattern of Withdrawal

Across nearly three decades, St. Gregory the Theologian repeatedly accepted ecclesiastical office and repeatedly fled it: the flight to Pontus in 362, the Sasima refusal of 372, the Nazianzus administrations held “as a temporary measure,” the dramatic resignation from Constantinople in 381, and the final retirement to Arianzus (c. 383–390). This file traces that lifelong oscillation between praxis and theoria, action and contemplation, and how the Orthodox tradition has read it — not as cowardice but as the hesychast instinct of a man who believed the soul must be purified in stillness before it can serve.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Oscillation Charted

Gregory’s career is a series of reluctant entrances into office followed by withdrawals into solitude. The rhythm is consistent enough that scholars treat it as the structural fact of his biography (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1).

  • The flight to Pontus (362). Ordained priest against his will at Christmas 361, Gregory fled to Basil in Pontus about Epiphany 362, returning before Easter under the pressure of duty. Oration 2 is his defense of both the flight and the return (see Oration 2).
  • The Sasima refusal (372). Consecrated bishop of the wretched posting-station of Sasima by Basil, as a pawn in Basil’s jurisdictional struggle with Anthimus of Tyana, Gregory never took possession of the see and bitterly resented the appointment (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 5; and the Basil side of the affair in The Meletian Schism and Rome). He describes it in De Vita Sua as a place “where is neither water nor grass, nor any mark of civilization … a frightful and detestable little village” (Gregory of Nazianzus, De Vita Sua; see the fuller treatment in The Friendship with Basil).
  • The Nazianzus administrations. Gregory assisted and then administered the church of Nazianzus after his father’s death (374), but consistently insisted he held the charge only provisionally — “as a temporary measure” — refusing to be installed as its bishop and pressing instead for the appointment of another (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 6; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1).
  • The silence at Seleucia (c. 375–379). Worn down, Gregory withdrew around the end of 375 to a monastery at the shrine of St. Thecla at Seleucia in Isauria, where he remained for roughly three years in retirement until after the death of the emperor Valens (378) (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 6; New World Encyclopedia, citing McGuckin’s chronology).
  • The Constantinople resignation (381). Summoned to lead the tiny Nicene community of the capital from 379, Gregory presided over the Council of Constantinople in 381 and was briefly recognized as bishop of the imperial city — only to resign dramatically amid the disputes over his canonical standing, delivering a farewell oration and returning home (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 8).
  • The final retirement (c. 383–390). After a last stint administering Nazianzus (c. 382–383), Gregory handed the charge to his cousin Eulalius and withdrew permanently to the family estate at Arianzus, where he spent his final years in ascetic seclusion, writing poetry and letters until his death around 390 (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 9; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1).

The chronology repays a second look, because the withdrawals grow longer and more decisive as the life proceeds. The flight of 362 lasted weeks; the Seleucia retreat lasted three years; the final Arianzus retirement was for life. The pattern is not a nervous tic repeated unchanged but a deepening — as though each return to office taught Gregory more thoroughly why he had fled it, until the last withdrawal was not a flight at all but a settled choice. The Constantinople years (379–381) are the pivot: there Gregory gave the Church its greatest single gift, the Theological Orations, and there he also met the full force of ecclesiastical politics — the disputes over his canonical eligibility to hold the see, the rivalry of competing factions, the bruising business of a council — and concluded that the cost to his soul was not worth the office. His resignation speech and his autobiographical poetry from these years are bitter about the politics and clear about the choice (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 8; Gregory of Nazianzus, De Vita Sua).

Theoria and Praxis in Gregory’s Own Theology

The withdrawals were not merely temperamental; Gregory theorized them. His writings return repeatedly to the tension between the active life of ministry (praxis) and the contemplative life of stillness and the vision of God (theoria), and he consistently ranks the latter higher as the soul’s proper end. He describes his own longing for “philosophy” — his word for the contemplative, ascetic life — as the deepest pull of his nature, against which the demands of office were a kind of violence (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.6–7; De Vita Sua; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2).

Yet Gregory does not simply oppose the two. In Oration 2 the contemplative purification is precisely what qualifies a man for the active office: one must be illumined before illumining, purified before purifying (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.71; trans. NPNF II/7). The flights, on this reading, are not flights from ministry but flights toward the condition that alone makes ministry safe. Beeley argues that for Gregory the whole structure of the Christian life is the ascent toward God in contemplation, and that pastoral office is legitimate only as an overflow of that ascent — which makes Gregory’s withdrawals theologically coherent rather than evasive (Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God, ch. 2). Daley similarly reads the oscillation as expressing Gregory’s conviction that the contemplative vocation has priority, the active office being assumed under obedience and laid down whenever conscience permitted (Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1).

The tension is sharpened by the fact that Gregory’s own gifts were rhetorical and theological — gifts that fitted him supremely for public ministry and that the Church repeatedly conscripted. His genius as an orator was the very thing that made his solitude impossible to keep: the more he withdrew, the more he was summoned back, because no one could state the Nicene faith as he could. The drama of his career is the collision between a contemplative temperament and a churchwide emergency that needed exactly his voice. The Theological Orations of 380 — the high point of his public service — were delivered by a man who had just emerged from years of retreat and who would resign within the year; the most consequential preaching of the fourth century came from someone who would rather have been silent. Gregory himself names this collision repeatedly, casting his public labors as a debt extracted from him against his will and his retreats as the recovery of his true self (Gregory of Nazianzus, De Vita Sua; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, chs. 7–8).

How the Tradition Reads the Pattern

The Orthodox tradition has not read Gregory’s repeated withdrawals as cowardice or instability but as the expression of the hesychast instinct — the same pull toward stillness (hesychia) and the vision of God that animates the later monastic tradition. On this reading, Gregory is the type of the contemplative reluctantly conscripted into active service, who returns to solitude as soon as duty releases him, and whose very reluctance is the sign of his fitness: the man who grasps at office is suspect, the man who flees it from awe is the one the Church should want (these assessments are attributed to the scholarly readers of Gregory’s career — McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, esp. chs. 2 and 9; Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1, who frame the pattern in just these terms).

There is a deeper point in the way the tradition frames this. The contemplative who flees office is not fleeing the Church but fleeing the corruption that office breeds in the unprepared — vainglory, the love of crowds, the subordination of the vision of God to the management of an institution. Gregory’s withdrawals are read as a standing rebuke to ambition: he is the bishop who did not want to be bishop, and that reluctance is precisely what the canons and the Fathers held to be the mark of a true vocation, against the careerist scramble for sees that disfigured the fourth-century Church (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, chs. 5, 8). The resignation at Constantinople in 381 is the climactic instance: at the very summit of his career, presiding over an ecumenical council in the imperial capital, Gregory laid the whole thing down rather than become the occasion of further faction — an act the tradition reads not as defeat but as the freest thing he ever did.

This is also why the tradition honors him as “the Theologian,” a title shared in the East only with St. John the Evangelist and St. Symeon the New Theologian: it was precisely his refusal to subordinate the vision of God to ecclesiastical careerism that gave his theology its authority. The Sasima episode is instructive here. Gregory’s bitterness at being made a pawn was real and lasting, but the tradition does not read his refusal of that see as a failure of obedience; it reads it as the proper recoil of a contemplative from an office handed to him for political convenience rather than for the cure of souls (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 5; and, for Basil’s side, The Meletian Schism and Rome). The pattern of withdrawal, in the end, is inseparable from the pattern of his sanctity: a man who fled office four times is the Church’s chief teacher of what office is.

A final consideration guards against sentimentalizing the pattern. Gregory’s withdrawals were not serene; they were costly, contested, and often resented by those he left in the lurch — his father, who needed him at Nazianzus; Basil, who needed a bishop at Sasima; the Nicene community of Constantinople, who lost their ablest advocate when he resigned. The sources do not present a saint gliding above the fray but a man torn between genuine duties, who sometimes wounded others by choosing his solitude and sometimes wounded himself by surrendering it. The tradition’s verdict — that the contemplative instinct was right and the office rightly secondary — is a theological judgment, not a denial of the human cost, and it coexists in the sources with the real grievances of those Gregory disappointed. That tension is itself part of what makes him a credible witness: he did not resolve the conflict between contemplation and action cleanly, because in a fallen Church it does not resolve cleanly, and his greatness lies partly in having lived the unresolved tension honestly rather than pretending it away (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, chs. 8–9; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1).

See Also

References

  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 2: In Defence of His Flight to Pontus (esp. §§6–7, 71). Trans. C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF II/7.
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. De Vita Sua (Carmen II.1.11, “On His Own Life”). In Autobiographical Poems, trans. Carolinne White, Cambridge Medieval Classics 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  • McGuckin, John Anthony. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, chs. 2, 5, 6, 8, 9.
  • 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, ch. 2.
  • Daley, Brian E. Gregory of Nazianzus. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2006, ch. 1.