Reception East and West

How Gregory of Nazianzus was read across fifteen centuries: the most-cited Father in Byzantine ecclesiastical literature after Scripture, “the Christian Demosthenes,” whose learned and allusive orations called forth a whole commentary tradition (Pseudo-Nonnus, Basil Minimus, Elias of Crete); whose “difficulties” gave St. Maximus the Confessor the occasion for his Ambigua; who entered the Latin West through Rufinus’ translations and Jerome’s claim to have been his pupil; and whom modern scholarship — McGuckin, Beeley, Daley, the Re-Reading Gregory volume — has recovered as both supreme theologian and supreme poet.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Most-Cited Father of Byzantium

No Greek Father was more deeply woven into the textual life of Byzantium than Gregory of Nazianzus. By the common scholarly estimate his orations survive in some 1,500 manuscripts — an extraordinary number, exceeded among Christian Greek texts only by the Bible — and his writings were quoted in Byzantine ecclesiastical literature more than any other source except Scripture (the manuscript figure and the citation rank are standard; see McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography, and the manuscript surveys behind the critical editions). His orations were not merely read; they were a curriculum. The Byzantine school of rhetoric held him up as a model to imitate, so that the lists of authors a student of panegyric or of deliberative oratory was to emulate placed Gregory alongside Demosthenes and Isocrates. In Byzantine usage he was called “the Christian Demosthenes,” and his Oration 43, the panegyric on Basil the Great, was reckoned the finest piece of Greek rhetoric since the age of Demosthenes himself (the epithet and the judgment on Or. 43 are reported in the standard reference literature, e.g. Encyclopedia.com, “Gregory of Nazianzus, St.”; cf. McGuckin).

A select corpus of sixteen orations — the festal and occasional sermons read in the liturgical year — formed the backbone of this reception. These “liturgical homilies” were copied, illuminated (the great illustrated manuscript of the Homilies, Paris gr. 510, made for Basil I, is one of the masterpieces of Byzantine book-painting), preached, and commented upon for a thousand years. Gregory’s presence in the Philokalia of Origen (the anthology Basil and Gregory together compiled), in the dogmatic florilegia of the councils, in the catenae, and in the hymnography of the feasts (see The Theologian Title) made him a Father whom the educated Byzantine encountered everywhere.

The Commentary Tradition

Gregory’s very excellence created a problem of reception. His orations are works of the highest rhetorical art, dense with classical allusion and theologized in a “literary” mode — “charismatic, near-oracular utterances whose laconic obscurity and polysemic allusiveness were not easy to grasp” without trained interpretation (the characterization is the editors’ of the modern Ambigua; see below). A learned reader needed help, and the Byzantine schools supplied it in a sequence of commentaries that is itself a monument to Gregory’s authority.

Pseudo-Nonnus (Nonnus Abbas, “Nonnus the Abbot”), a sixth-century commentator, composed scholia explaining Gregory’s many allusions to Greek mythology in four of the orations (Or. 4 and 5, the Invectives against Julian; Or. 39, On the Holy Lights; Or. 43, On Basil). The commentaries were a “Christian’s guide to Greek culture,” and they traveled far beyond Greek: they were rendered into Syriac (the translation of Paul of Edessa, 623/624), Armenian, and Georgian (Jennifer Nimmo Smith, A Christian’s Guide to Greek Culture: The Pseudo-Nonnus ‘Commentaries’ on ‘Sermons’ 4, 5, 39 and 43, Translated Texts for Historians 37, Liverpool, 2001; “Pseudo-Nonnus,” Wikipedia).
Basil Minimus (“Basil the Least,” Basilius minimus), a tenth-century scholar and metropolitan, compiled commentaries and scholia on a body of Gregory’s orations, glossing their theological as well as their rhetorical difficulties. His work circulated in the manuscripts of the orations and reflects the systematic learned reception of Gregory in the Macedonian renaissance (Basil Minimus is attested in the manuscript tradition of the orations and in the modern critical apparatus; see the catalogues of the Corpus Nazianzenum).
Elias of Crete, in the tenth–twelfth centuries (his commentary is preserved in a manuscript dated to the late twelfth century), produced an extensive commentary that distinctively addressed not only the liturgical homilies but the nineteen “unread” orations that earlier commentators had neglected — filling a real gap in the scholarly coverage of the corpus. His work later passed into Western scholarship through the Latin translations of Johann Löwenklau and Jacques de Billy (E. Pappa and others on Elias of Crete’s commentary; the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca editions of the Corpus Nazianzenum).

This three-stage tradition — mythological scholia, theological commentary, comprehensive exposition — shows the Church doing for Gregory what it did for few other Fathers: treating his orations as a classic text requiring a continuous apparatus, the way pagan antiquity had treated Homer.

Maximus the Confessor and the Ambigua

The supreme monument of the Greek reception of Gregory is not a scholion but a constructive masterpiece born directly out of his “difficulties.” St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) composed the Ambigua — “On Difficulties in the Church Fathers” — precisely as a resolution of aporiai, hard or apparently contradictory passages, in Gregory of Nazianzus (and, in a smaller section, in Pseudo-Dionysius). The work falls into two parts: the earlier and shorter Ambigua to Thomas (treating four passages in Gregory and one in Dionysius), and the great Ambigua to John, sixty-six chapters expounding difficult passages in Gregory’s orations (Nicholas Constas, ed. and trans., On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28–29, Harvard University Press, 2014). What is decisive is that Maximus does not merely gloss Gregory; he uses each puzzling sentence as the seed of a far-reaching theology of creation, incarnation, and deification.

The most famous instance is the origin of Maximus’ whole cosmology. Ambiguum 7 — the heart of his doctrine of the logoi of creation — was occasioned by a single phrase in Gregory, the description of human beings as “a portion of God” (moira theou) that had been borne downward, which Origenist readers took to support their myth of pre-existent souls. Maximus’ answer is not a brief correction but a sustained constructive cosmology that refuses the Origenist reading by building a better account of how creatures are “of God” without ever having pre-existed God’s creative act (see St. Maximus the Confessor: The Logoi of Creation). That the central text of Maximian cosmology grew out of a difficulty in Gregory the Theologian is the clearest possible measure of Gregory’s standing: he was the Father whose hard sayings were worth a Confessor’s lifetime of meditation, and whose authority was such that one corrected the heretics not by setting Gregory aside but by reading him rightly.

The Latin West: Rufinus and Jerome

Gregory’s reach into the Latin West was narrower than in the Greek East — Latin Christendom never possessed the whole corpus — but it was early and real, and it ran through two of the great names of the Latin patristic age.

Tyrannius Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 345–411), the indefatigable translator of Greek theology for the Latin world, rendered a selection of Gregory’s orations into Latin (nine orations, including the Apologeticus, Or. 2, and several festal sermons; Interpretatio orationum Gregorii Nazianzeni, ed. Engelbrecht, CSEL 46). For the medieval West, which read little Greek, Rufinus’ versions were for centuries the principal access to Gregory; the manuscripts of “Gregorius Nazianzenus” in Western libraries are largely the Rufinian corpus. Rufinus thus did for Gregory in the West something of what he did for Origen and the Greek church history — made a body of Eastern theology available to readers who could not reach the original.

St. Jerome (c. 347–420) supplies the more personal link. During his stay in Constantinople in 380–381 — exactly the years of Gregory’s archiepiscopate and of the Second Ecumenical Council — Jerome attached himself to Gregory and afterwards described him as his teacher. In De viris illustribus (c. 392–393) Jerome gave Gregory a laudatory notice and elsewhere refers to him as his praeceptor, “by whom I was instructed in the Scriptures” (Jerome, De viris illustribus 117; cf. his letters and prefaces; “Jerome,” Wikipedia; “Gregory of Nazianzus and Jerome,” scholarly discussion). The claim is Jerome’s own self-presentation, and modern scholars read it for what it is — the recollection of an admiring younger man who sat under Gregory in Constantinople, valuable evidence for Gregory’s teaching activity in the capital and for the high regard in which the Latin West’s greatest scholar held him. Through Jerome’s testimony and Rufinus’ translations, Gregory entered the Western tradition as an authority — later honored, with the other Cappadocians, among the teachers of the universal Church.

Modern Scholarship and the Recovery of the Poetry

The modern study of Gregory has two strands: the recovery of his theology and the recovery of his art.

On the theological side, the decisive turn in English-language scholarship came with John A. McGuckin’s St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), the first full critical study of Gregory’s life and inner world in English, which set the theologian-poet squarely in the world of late antiquity. It was followed by Christopher A. Beeley’s Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light (Oxford University Press, 2008), the first comprehensive modern study of Gregory’s Trinitarian doctrine within the whole of his theological and spiritual vision — tracing the soteriological core of his theology through the dialectic of purification and illumination, divinization (theosis), the singular identity of Christ, and the divinity of the Spirit. Brian E. Daley, S.J., gave the English reader a critical introduction with fresh translations of eight orations, selected poems, letters, and Gregory’s will in his Gregory of Nazianzus (Routledge, The Early Church Fathers, 2006). The state of the field was gathered in the volume Beeley, ed., Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus: Essays on History, Theology, and Culture (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), which assembled the leading scholars — Beeley, McGuckin, Daley, Blowers, Elm, Louth, McLynn, Moreschini, and others — and honored Frederick W. Norris, who had done much to revive English-language study of Gregory. (Andrew Hofer’s Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus, Oxford, 2013, belongs to the same wave of recovery.)

On the literary side, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have rediscovered Gregory the poet. Gregory left some hundred or more poems — dogmatic, moral, and autobiographical — including the great verse autobiography De vita sua, a corpus that for generations could be read only in a nineteenth-century Greek text and had never been Englished. Carolinne White’s Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems (Cambridge Medieval Classics 6, Cambridge University Press, 1996) gave the autobiographical poems a Greek text with facing English translation, opening Gregory’s poetic self-portrait to readers without Greek; the broader project of critical editions (in the Sources Chrétiennes and the Gregor-von-Nazianz-Forschungsstelle series) and of monographs on his metrics and his poetics has restored to view the Father who fused the highest classical learning with the confession of the Trinity. The modern Gregory is thus a single figure recovered in both his offices: the theologian whose orations the academy reads with renewed seriousness, and the poet who set his theology — uniquely among the Greek Fathers — into the meters of Homer and the dialects of classical Greece.

References

McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001 (the manuscript range; the Byzantine reception; “the Christian Demosthenes”).
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: Routledge, 2006.
Beeley, Christopher A., ed. Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus: Essays on History, Theology, and Culture. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012.
Constas, Nicholas, ed. and trans. Maximus the Confessor: On Difficulties in the Church Fathers — The Ambigua. 2 vols. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28–29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014 (the Ambigua to Thomas and to John as commentary on Gregory; Ambiguum 7 and the moira theou passage).
Nimmo Smith, Jennifer. A Christian’s Guide to Greek Culture: The Pseudo-Nonnus ‘Commentaries’ on ‘Sermons’ 4, 5, 39 and 43 by Gregory of Nazianzus. Translated Texts for Historians 37. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001; “Pseudo-Nonnus,” Wikipedia (the sixth-century mythological scholia and their Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian versions).
Rufinus of Aquileia, Interpretatio orationum Gregorii Nazianzeni, ed. A. Engelbrecht, CSEL 46 (the Latin translation of nine orations); Monica Wagner, Rufinus, the Translator.
Jerome, De viris illustribus 117 (the laudatory notice of Gregory; Jerome as his pupil at Constantinople, 380–381); “Jerome,” Wikipedia (used to locate the studentship claim; read against the scholarly discussion “Gregory of Nazianzus and Jerome”).
White, Carolinne, ed. and trans. Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems. Cambridge Medieval Classics 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 (the modern recovery of the poetry; De vita sua).
“Gregory of Nazianzus, St.,” Encyclopedia.com; “Gregory of Nazianzus,” Wikipedia (used to locate the “Christian Demosthenes” epithet, the judgment on Or. 43, and the manuscript and citation data; cross-checked against McGuckin and the critical editions).