The Pastor in Persecution

In the winter of 249–250 the emperor Decius issued the first empire-wide demand that all inhabitants sacrifice to the gods, and the persecution that followed fell on the Church of Gregory’s Pontus as on every province. Soon after came a great plague. The Decian persecution is among the most securely documented events of the third century; what Gregory did within it reaches us, once again, chiefly through Gregory of Nyssa’s Life, written about a century later — the tradition that he counseled his flock to flee rather than court a reckless martyrdom, that he withdrew with them into the wilderness, and that he was a guide and consolation through the ensuing plague. This file sets the securely historical frame of the persecution and the plague beside the pinned anecdotes of Nyssa, and weighs the question of flight against the volunteer-martyrdom debate of the age.

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

The Decian Persecution: The Secure Frame

Unlike most of the events of Gregory’s episcopate, the persecution under Decius rests on a broad and firm documentary base, and it is essential to begin there — with what is known independently of Nyssa’s Life — before turning to the anecdotes the Life attaches to it. The emperor Trajan Decius, who came to power in 249, issued in late 249 or early 250 an edict requiring all the inhabitants of the empire to sacrifice to the gods and to obtain a certificate (libellus) attesting that they had done so — pouring a libation, tasting sacrificial meat, and swearing they had always sacrificed (on the edict and its administration, see the contemporary and near-contemporary record gathered in Eusebius, HE 6.39–42; trans. NPNF II/1). This was something new in the history of Roman persecution: not a local pogrom or a targeted prosecution of named Christians, but a universal, bureaucratically administered demand for an act of pagan worship from every subject of the empire. Surviving libelli from Egypt on papyrus confirm the machinery in concrete detail — ordinary people certifying before local commissioners that they had sacrificed.

For the Church the consequences were severe. Because the demand was universal and enforced by certificate, it caught the ordinary, un-heroic mass of believers in a way that earlier, sporadic persecutions had not, and it produced a great crisis of the lapsed (lapsi) — those who sacrificed, or who bought or forged certificates to escape sacrifice — alongside a roll of confessors and martyrs. Eusebius records the martyrdoms of the period across the major sees; the bishops of Rome, Antioch, and Jerusalem perished, Origen himself was imprisoned and tortured at Caesarea and died not long after of the effects (Eusebius, HE 6.39; trans. NPNF II/1), and Dionysius of Alexandria and Cyprian of Carthage left contemporary accounts of the persecution and the agonizing pastoral problem of the lapsed that followed it (Eusebius, HE 6.40–42; trans. NPNF II/1; Cyprian, De lapsis). The persecution was relatively brief — Decius fell in battle against the Goths in 251, and the systematic enforcement lapsed with him — but its effects on the Church’s discipline and self-understanding were lasting. This is the secure historical frame: a real, datable, empire-wide persecution of 250–251 that unquestionably reached the Christians of Pontus, of whom Gregory was bishop.

It is worth noting that Gregory’s own genuine Canonical Epistle, written a few years later in the aftermath of the Gothic raids of the 250s, shows him as exactly the kind of bishop the Decian crisis demanded — one who weighed degrees of culpability under duress with care and mercy, distinguishing those who fell under genuine compulsion from those whose conduct betrayed real apostasy of the heart (see The Canonical Epistle). The Epistle concerns the raids, not the Decian persecution; but its pastoral temper — graduated, humane, attentive to the difference between weakness and treachery — is precisely the disposition the tradition ascribes to Gregory in the persecution itself, and the genuine document and the later tradition cohere on the character of the man even where they treat different events.

Gregory and the Persecution in Nyssa’s Life

What Gregory did during the Decian persecution is reported, like most of his episcopate, by Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Gregory the Wonderworker, composed about a century after the events (Gregory of Nyssa, Life [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98; on the distance of the Life from its subject see The Witness of Gregory of Nyssa). The anecdotes that follow are therefore pinned to that source per the repository methodology (§3.5) and reported as Nyssa’s testimony, not certified as historical fact — even as the persecution that frames them remains secure history.

Nyssa relates that when the persecution came upon his church, Gregory did not urge his people to rush forward to martyrdom, but on the contrary counseled them to withdraw and to save themselves — to flee the persecution rather than provoke it and throw away their lives. He is said to have reasoned that it was no part of faith to court death needlessly, that those not yet tested might fall if forced to a confrontation beyond their strength, and that it was better to preserve the flock for a more spiritual contest than to expose the weak to apostasy; and Nyssa reports that Gregory himself, with his deacon and companions, withdrew into the wilderness and the mountains for the duration of the danger, sustaining his people from there (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Gregory the Wonderworker [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98). Within this withdrawal the Life sets some of its most vivid wonder-scenes — most famously the episode in which Gregory and his deacon, hidden on a mountain, are passed over by their pursuers because they appear, by a marvel, as two trees or rocks, and the subsequent conversion of the informer who had betrayed their hiding-place (Gregory of Nyssa, Life [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98). The miraculous concealment belongs to the wonder-register treated in The Miracles of Gregory; what concerns us here is the pastoral policy the episode dramatizes — flight, not provocation.

The historical plausibility of this picture is high, even though its specific details are Nyssa’s. Flight in persecution was a recognized and defensible course in the third-century Church: it had explicit dominical warrant — “when they persecute you in one city, flee to another” (Matthew 10:23) — and the most eminent contemporary bishops practiced it. Cyprian of Carthage withdrew from his city during the Decian persecution and governed his church by letter from hiding, defending his flight as obedience to that very command and as the preservation of the shepherd for the sake of the flock; Dionysius of Alexandria likewise withdrew (Eusebius, HE 6.40; trans. NPNF II/1; Cyprian, Letters). That Gregory should have done the same — and counseled his people to do likewise — is therefore entirely in keeping with the soundest pastoral practice of his own generation, whatever the status of Nyssa’s particular anecdotes.

Flight versus Volunteer Martyrdom

The picture of Gregory counseling flight gains its full meaning against the background of a genuine and sharp debate in the early Church over volunteer martyrdom — the question of whether a Christian ought to seek out, provoke, or hand himself over to martyrdom, or whether such rashness was rather a temptation to be resisted. The mainstream of the Church’s wisdom, even in an age that exalted the martyrs above all other Christians, was cautious about self-offered martyrdom. To die when one was sought out and could not in conscience deny Christ was the crown of the faith; but to provoke the authorities, to volunteer oneself unbidden, to court a death one might not have the strength to endure — this many of the soberest voices regarded as presumption, a tempting of God that risked apostasy and dishonored rather than glorified the witness. The Church distinguished, in effect, between the martyr who was seized and the zealot who threw himself forward, and it honored the first while discouraging the second.

Origen — Gregory’s own teacher — was himself an ardent theologian of martyrdom and, in his youth, was restrained from rushing to share his father’s martyrdom only, the tradition says, by his mother’s hiding his clothes; yet even Origen’s Exhortation to Martyrdom concerns the Christian seized and tested, not the Christian who provokes his own arrest. The general mind of the third-century Church, and emphatically of its responsible bishops, was that one did not throw away the lives of the weak, and that a shepherd’s first duty in persecution was to preserve his flock for the contest God actually sent, not to manufacture a contest of his own. Read against this background, the Gregory of Nyssa’s Life — counseling withdrawal, refusing to expose the untested to a trial beyond their strength, fleeing to preserve himself and his people — is the very type of the prudent bishop of the great persecution, the pastoral mirror-image of the reckless volunteer. The tradition presents his flight not as cowardice but as the higher courage of responsibility, of the same temper as the genuine Canonical Epistle’s refusal to count the captive who ate idol-food under compulsion among the apostates (see The Canonical Epistle).

It must be kept clear, all the same, that this interpretation of Gregory’s conduct — the explicit framing of his flight as principled prudence over against volunteer martyrdom — is the shape Nyssa’s Life and the later tradition give it, set within the genuinely attested third-century debate. The persecution is history; the debate over flight and volunteer martyrdom is history; that Gregory chose flight is the tradition of the Life, pinned to it, and credible precisely because it accords so well with the secure context.

The Plague

To the persecution Nyssa’s Life joins a second great trial of Gregory’s later episcopate: a plague that struck Pontus and Neocaesarea. The mid-third century was in fact ravaged by a major and well-attested pandemic — the so-called Plague of Cyprian, which spread across the empire from around 249 into the 260s and is described in vivid contemporary detail by Cyprian of Carthage and by Dionysius of Alexandria, who recount its horrors and the contrasting conduct of Christians and pagans in the face of mass death (Cyprian, De mortalitate; Dionysius of Alexandria, in Eusebius, HE 7.22; trans. NPNF II/1). That a plague of this era reached Pontus is wholly consistent with the documented history of the pandemic; the empire-wide scourge that Cyprian and Dionysius describe did not spare the Pontic cities.

Nyssa’s account of Gregory’s role in the plague belongs, once more, to the register of the Life and is pinned to it. Nyssa relates that the plague fell heavily on Neocaesarea, entering houses and striking down the inhabitants, and that Gregory was the consolation and guide of his people through the terror — that the sign of his presence, his prayers, and (in the wonder-register of the Life) marks set upon the houses distinguished those who would be spared, so that the very catastrophe became an occasion for conversions, the pagans turning to the God whose bishop could stand unafraid amid the dying (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Gregory the Wonderworker [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98). The miraculous particulars — the marked houses, the discrimination of the spared — are wonder-accounts of the Life and are treated as such (see The Miracles of Gregory). But the underlying pattern that Nyssa records — that the Christian clergy did not flee the plague as the pagans were said to flee it, but stayed to tend and bury the dying, and that this fearlessness in the face of contagion won admiration and converts — is one of the best-attested mechanisms of Christian growth in the third century, described independently and at length by Dionysius of Alexandria for the same pandemic (Dionysius, in Eusebius, HE 7.22; trans. NPNF II/1), and emphasized by modern social historians of early Christianity. Here again the Life preserves, beneath its wonders, a historically credible picture of how a bishop’s conduct in catastrophe drew a pagan population toward the Church (Van Dam, Becoming Christian, 2003).

There is an apparent tension worth naming between the two trials as Nyssa presents them: in the persecution Gregory flees, in the plague he stays. But the tension is only apparent, and resolves on the same pastoral logic. Flight in persecution preserved the flock from an avoidable spiritual danger — the temptation to apostasy under a demand that could simply be evaded; staying in plague met an unavoidable bodily danger that the duty of charity forbade the shepherd to flee. The one was a trial that could and should be escaped without sin; the other a trial that love required one to share. The same prudence that withdrew from Decius’s commissioners stood fast against the contagion — and in both, on the tradition’s reckoning, the bishop’s first care was the flock and not himself (Gregory of Nyssa, Life [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98).

What the Tradition Shows

Read with the discipline this section requires, Gregory’s leadership in persecution and plague resolves into two layers. The secure historical frame is firm and important: the empire-wide Decian persecution of 250–251, with its universal sacrifice-edict and its crisis of the lapsed, certainly reached the Pontic church Gregory governed; the great mid-century pandemic certainly ravaged the region; and the genuine Canonical Epistle independently shows Gregory governing a flock through crisis with exactly the graduated mercy the age demanded. The pinned tradition, drawn from Gregory of Nyssa’s Life a century after the events, supplies the specifics: the counsel of flight over reckless martyrdom, the withdrawal into the wilderness, the consolation of a plague-stricken city, the wonders woven through both. The anecdotes cannot be certified as fact; but they are historically credible, because each accords closely with what the contemporary record — Cyprian, Dionysius, Eusebius — independently shows of how the soundest bishops of that very generation actually behaved in persecution and in plague. The Gregory of the tradition is, in this, a recognizable third-century bishop and not a free invention: the prudent shepherd who fled to save his people and stayed to bury them, and who came through both trials with his church not broken but grown (Gregory of Nyssa, Life [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98; Eusebius, HE 6.39–42; 7.22; trans. NPNF II/1; Van Dam, Becoming Christian, 2003).

References

Gregory of Nyssa. De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi (On the Life of Gregory the Wonderworker). PG 46:893–958. Trans. in Michael Slusser, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (The counsel of flight rather than reckless martyrdom; the withdrawal into the wilderness with the deacon; the concealment from pursuers and conversion of the informer; the plague at Neocaesarea and Gregory’s role in it.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 6.39–42; 7.22. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (The Decian persecution and the universal sacrifice-edict; the imprisonment and death of Origen; the crisis of the lapsed; the account of Dionysius of Alexandria on the plague and the conduct of Christians and pagans within it.)
Gregory Thaumaturgus. Canonical Epistle. Trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The graduated, merciful discipline of those who fell under duress — the pastoral temper the tradition ascribes to Gregory in the persecution.)
Cyprian of Carthage. De lapsis; De mortalitate; Letters. (The contemporary North African witness to the Decian crisis of the lapsed, to the defense of episcopal flight in persecution, and to the mid-century plague — adduced here as the independent contemporary parallel to the conduct ascribed to Gregory.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. (The conversion of Pontus and the role of the clergy’s conduct in catastrophe in drawing a pagan population toward the Church.)
Slusser, Michael, trans. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (Translation and introduction to Nyssa’s Life.)