The Student of Origen

The single richest source for Gregory’s life is his own Address of Thanksgiving to Origen, the oration he delivered on leaving Origen’s school at Caesarea Maritima after some five years of study. In it he recounts how, raised a pagan and trained for the law, he was brought providentially to Origen, who drew him by friendship and reasoning through the whole curriculum of philosophy to the Scriptures and to Christ. This file follows that genuine, first-person account of his conversion and education — the bedrock of everything securely known about him — and weighs the lasting question of his relation to the great and controversial Origen.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Ante-Nicene Father; Wonderworker)

The Address of Thanksgiving: An Unrivalled Source

Among the writings of the ante-Nicene Church, the Address of Thanksgiving to Origen (Greek Oratio panegyrica, sometimes the Panegyric or Oration and Panegyric Addressed to Origen) occupies a peculiar and precious place. It is a valedictory oration — a formal speech of thanks delivered by a departing student, probably around 238–243, as Gregory left the school Origen had established at Caesarea Maritima in Palestine. As a piece of late-antique rhetoric it follows the conventions of the genre; but because its subject is the speaker’s own conversion and education, it is at the same time an autobiographical document of the first order — the most detailed first-person account we possess of how a third-century pagan became a Christian, and of what a Christian philosophical education under Origen actually consisted of (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Address of Thanksgiving to Origen; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998; Crouzel 1969, introduction). For the historian of Gregory it is therefore the bedrock: where the Address speaks, we have Gregory’s own voice; where it is silent, we are in the hands of much later tradition.

The authenticity of the Address and its attribution to Gregory are not seriously in doubt, though the question of whether the “Theodore” of Eusebius and the “Gregory” of the oration are the same person has been raised and is treated below. The work survives in Greek and was edited with a French translation by Henri Crouzel in the Sources chrétiennes series (Crouzel 1969), the standard modern critical edition, alongside Origen’s own surviving letter to Gregory.

From Law to Philosophy

Gregory opens by describing his upbringing. He was born to wealth and to paganism, and lost his father at fourteen — a turning point he later read as the moment his conversion toward the true God obscurely began (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Address 5; trans. ANF 6). He was educated in the Greek manner, in rhetoric and then in Roman law, with Latin and the law as the intended foundation of a public career; he speaks of the Roman law as something he studied with admiration (Address 5; Slusser 1998).

It was the law, providentially, that set him on the road to Origen. Gregory relates that he and his brother Athenodore intended to travel to Berytus (Beirut), the great law school of the eastern empire, and that a chain of circumstances — the need to escort their sister to her husband, who held a post in the governor’s service in Palestine, and the provision of an official conveyance — brought them instead to Caesarea, where Origen then was (Address 5; trans. ANF 6; Crouzel 1969). Gregory presents this whole sequence not as accident but as the gentle leading of divine providence and of his guardian angel, who, he says, “has reared me from childhood” and brought him at last to the man who would be his teacher (Address 4–5; trans. ANF 6). The brothers’ arrival at Caesarea, and their meeting with Origen, Gregory describes as the decisive moment of his life.

The Method of Origen

The heart of the Address is its account of Origen’s pedagogy, and it is one of the most valuable descriptions of teaching to survive from antiquity. Gregory describes how Origen first bound his pupils to himself by friendship and by an almost Socratic art of conversation, drawing out their assent and rousing in them a love of philosophy and of truth before he led them into any system (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Address 6–7; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998). He likens the experience to being caught by a spark that kindled into a flame of love for the Word (the divine Logos) and for Origen as the Word’s friend and interpreter (Address 6; trans. ANF 6).

Origen then led him, Gregory says, through the entire encyclopedia of Greek learning as a propaedeutic to the truth: logic and dialectic, to train the mind to distinguish truth from falsehood; physics, the study of nature and the heavens, to instil wonder at the order of the cosmos; geometry and astronomy, the mathematical disciplines; and ethics, the cultivation of the virtues, which Origen taught not by precept only but by his own example (Address 7–12; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998). Gregory’s account here is one of the chief sources for the curriculum of late-antique Christian education and for the idea, central to Origen and to the Alexandrian tradition, that the liberal arts and Greek philosophy are the handmaids and preparation for theology rather than its enemies.

From philosophy Origen led him at last to theology proper and to the Scriptures. Gregory describes how Origen ranged freely over the writings of the philosophers and poets, withholding only the atheists, so that his pupils might know all and be enslaved to none, and how he crowned the whole education with the interpretation of the divine Scriptures, which Origen expounded as the one who, Gregory believed, possessed a special grace for understanding the oracles of God (Address 13–15; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998). The Address closes with Gregory’s sorrow at leaving — comparing his departure from Caesarea to an expulsion from paradise — and with thanksgiving to God, to his guardian angel, and to Origen for the gift of those years (Address 16–19; trans. ANF 6).

Eusebius and the Identification

The external control on this autobiography is Eusebius. In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius reports that among Origen’s pupils at Caesarea were two brothers, Theodore and Athenodore, of whom Theodore “was the same as that Gregory who became so distinguished a bishop in our own day,” noting that he and his brother had been carried away by zeal for Greek and Roman studies before Origen instilled in them a passion for philosophy and the divine truth, and that they remained with him for five years and made great progress (Eusebius, HE 6.30; trans. NPNF II/1). Eusebius thus confirms the central facts of the Address from outside it: the two brothers, the prior secular studies, the five years with Origen, the later eminence of Theodore-Gregory as a bishop.

The identification of the Address‘s author with Eusebius’s “Theodore” and with the later Wonderworker has occasionally been questioned by scholars, since the oration itself does not name its speaker as “Gregory” and the change of name is otherwise unexplained. [Disputed: the traditional identification — that the "Theodore" of Eusebius (*HE* 6.30), the anonymous author of the *Address of Thanksgiving*, and Gregory the Wonderworker are one and the same person — is accepted by the great majority of scholars, including Crouzel (1969) and Slusser (1998), on the convergence of the five-years-with-Origen detail, the brother Athenodore, and the Pontic episcopate; a minority of scholars has at various points questioned whether the author of the *Address* is identical with the Wonderworker of Gregory of Nyssa's *Life*, given the silence of the *Address* on the name "Gregory" and the wide gap between its sober self-portrait and Nyssa's wonder-tale, but no alternative identification has won acceptance]. For the purposes of this guide the traditional identification is followed, with the gap between the sober self-portrait of the Address and the marvels of Nyssa’s Life itself treated as a topic (see The Life and the Legend).

Gregory and Origen: The Lasting Question

That Gregory was a devoted pupil of Origen is beyond doubt; the Address is a sustained act of filial gratitude, and Origen’s own affectionate Letter to Gregory — urging him to bring the treasures of Greek learning into the service of Christianity, as Israel took the gold of Egypt — survives alongside it (Origen, Letter to Gregory; in Crouzel 1969). This relationship became, in later centuries, a delicate matter, because Origen’s name was eventually clouded by the condemnation of certain teachings associated with him (the controversies that ran from the fourth century to the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553). Gregory, however, is venerated as a saint and an Ante-Nicene Father without reservation, and the Church has never held his discipleship under Origen against him. The Cappadocian Fathers — Basil and the two Gregories — were themselves deep students of Origen, compiling the Philocalia of his works, and they revered the Wonderworker as a founding father of their own Pontic-Cappadocian church (see The Cult in Pontus and Cappadocia).

The theological substance of what Gregory carried out of Origen’s school is best seen in his Creed, which gives a fully Trinitarian confession of remarkable precision, and in the To Theopompus, a philosophical-theological dialogue on the impassibility of God that bears the marks of his Origenist formation (see The Trinitarian Creed; The Genuine Works). What the Address establishes, and establishes securely, is the human and intellectual origin of all of it: a wealthy pagan law student of Pontus, brought by a chain of providences to a great teacher in Palestine, who there fell in love with the Word and went home a Christian and a philosopher, ready — by the later tradition — to become the apostle of his native province.

References

Gregory Thaumaturgus. Address of Thanksgiving to Origen. Trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The upbringing and law studies at §5; the providential journey to Caesarea at §5; Origen’s method of friendship and dialectic at §6–7; the curriculum — logic, physics, geometry, astronomy, ethics — at §7–12; philosophy, theology, and the Scriptures at §13–15; the departure and thanksgiving at §16–19.)
Crouzel, Henri. Grégoire le Thaumaturge: Remerciement à Origène, suivi de la Lettre d’Origène à Grégoire. Sources chrétiennes 148. Paris: Cerf, 1969. (The critical Greek text of the Address with French translation and introduction; Origen’s Letter to Gregory.)
Slusser, Michael, trans. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (English translation and introduction.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 6.30. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (Theodore and Athenodore, the five years with Origen, the later episcopate.)
Origen. Letter to Gregory. In Crouzel 1969. (The exhortation to take the “spoils of Egypt” — Greek learning — into the service of Christianity.)