The Canonical Epistle

Among Gregory’s genuine works the Canonical Epistle is the most securely datable and the most concretely historical: a pastoral letter written in the aftermath of the Gothic raids on Pontus in the 250s, ordering the discipline of penance for Christians whose conduct under the invasion had betrayed the gospel — those who had eaten food sacrificed to idols under duress, informed on or robbed their neighbours, profited from the chaos, or even joined the raiders. This file gives the letter’s occasion, its careful and humane grades of penance, and its lasting place in the canonical tradition of the Orthodox Church, where it survives as a genuine witness to how a third-century bishop actually governed his flock.

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

The Occasion: The Gothic Raids

The mid-third century was the age of the great crisis of the Roman frontier, and Pontus lay directly in its path. In the 250s the Goths and the allied Borani crossed the Black Sea and fell upon the provinces of Pontus and Bithynia, sacking cities, carrying off captives, and throwing the settled life of the region into violent disorder (on the Gothic threat to Pontus, see Pontus in the Third Century). The raids were not only a military and economic catastrophe; they were a moral crisis for the Christian community, because in the breakdown of order some Christians behaved no better than the invaders — and some far worse.

It is precisely this moral aftermath that occasions the Canonical Epistle. The letter is addressed, in its surviving form, to a fellow bishop who had written to Gregory for guidance on how to deal with the offenders, and it sets out the grades of penance appropriate to the various kinds of misconduct that the invasion had thrown up (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Canonical Epistle; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998). It can therefore be dated with unusual precision to the years immediately following the Gothic raids, around 254–258 — placing it firmly within the documented political history of the mid-third century and making it the single most secure window onto Gregory’s actual exercise of his episcopal office.

The Discipline of Penance

The body of the letter is a sober, humane piece of pastoral casuistry. Gregory distinguishes carefully between degrees of culpability, refusing to treat unlike cases alike. Some matters he excuses or treats leniently: those who ate food that the barbarians had offered to idols, when there was no idolatrous intent and no alternative under captivity, are not to be reckoned among the apostates, since — as Gregory reasons from Scripture — it is not what enters a man that defiles him (cf. Matthew 15:11), and captives constrained by hunger are not to be condemned for what they were forced to eat (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Canonical Epistle 1; trans. ANF 6). Likewise women violated under the invasion are to be judged by the standard of innocence already laid down for such cases, not condemned as if they had sinned (Canonical Epistle 1–2; Slusser 1998).

Far graver, in Gregory’s reckoning, are the sins of Christians who exploited the catastrophe. He turns his severity upon those who, amid the disorder, enriched themselves at their neighbours’ expense — who seized the goods of others under cover of the invasion, claimed as their own what the barbarians had dropped or abandoned, or refused to return what they had found; upon informers and guides who led the barbarians to houses or betrayed their fellow Christians; and, most terribly, upon those who actually joined the raiders, attacking and plundering their own people as if they had become Goths themselves (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Canonical Epistle 2–7; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998). For Gregory these are the true apostasies of the invasion — not the food eaten under compulsion, but the greed and treachery that the disorder revealed in men’s hearts.

The Grades of Penitents

The most historically influential feature of the letter is the system of penitential grades it sets out in its final canon, which became a classic statement of the Church’s penitential order. Gregory describes the stages through which a serious penitent must pass before being restored to full communion:

the weepers (prosklausis), who stand outside the door of the church and beg the prayers of those entering;
the hearers (akroasis), who stand within the porch and are permitted to hear the Scriptures and the sermon but must depart before the prayers;
the kneelers or prostrators (hypoptosis), who are admitted inside and pray kneeling, departing with the catechumens;
and the co-standers (systasis), who stand with the faithful through the whole service but do not yet receive the Eucharist, until at last they are restored to participation in the holy mysteries (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Canonical Epistle 11; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998).

[Disputed: the eleventh canon, which sets out the four grades of penitents in this developed form, is regarded by a number of scholars as a later addition to or expansion of Gregory's letter rather than part of his original text — the schema of four standing-grades is most fully paralleled in later fourth-century canonical sources — though the substance of a graded penitential discipline is at home in the third-century Church and the canon was transmitted as Gregory's within the Byzantine canonical collections; Slusser (1998) and the older editors discuss the question of the eleventh canon's authenticity without final resolution.]

This carefully graduated path — visible discipline matched to the gravity of the fall, with a real road back to communion — is one of the clearest early witnesses to the Orthodox theology of repentance as a process of healing rather than mere punishment, and it left a permanent mark on the canonical tradition. The four standing-grades would be taken up and developed in the great canonical letters of the later fourth century, above all in the penitential canons of Basil the Great, who governed the neighbouring Cappadocian church a century after Gregory and who knew the Wonderworker as a father of his own region’s tradition (Basil, Letters 188, 199, 217, the “canonical epistles”; see The Cult in Pontus and Cappadocia). That Gregory’s grades and Basil’s run along the same lines is one more thread binding the third-century missionary bishop of Pontus to the Cappadocian Fathers who venerated him.

Reading Scripture in the Service of Mercy

A feature of the letter easily lost beneath its rulings is the way Gregory reasons. He does not legislate by bare authority but argues from Scripture, and almost always in the direction of mercy for the genuinely constrained and severity for the genuinely wicked. On the food eaten in captivity he appeals to the Lord’s own teaching that defilement comes not from what enters a man but from what proceeds out of the heart (cf. Matthew 15:11, 17–20), and to the apostolic principle that food does not commend us to God (cf. 1 Corinthians 8:8), so that the captive who ate what the barbarians set before him, with no idolatrous intent and no choice, is not to be reckoned an apostate (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Canonical Epistle 1; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998). On the women violated under the invasion he reasons from the law of Deuteronomy, which holds the woman taken by force in the open country guiltless because there was none to save her (cf. Deuteronomy 22:25–27), refusing to add the Church’s condemnation to the violence already suffered (Canonical Epistle 1–2; Slusser 1998).

His severity, by contrast, falls on the calculating sins of the heart. To those who kept what they had found, or claimed the goods of the dispossessed as a finder’s reward, Gregory replies that covetousness is idolatry and that the gospel pronounces a woe on those who, like the rich, take what is not their own (Canonical Epistle 3–4; trans. ANF 6). The letter thus enacts in miniature the whole patristic conviction that sin is measured not by external ritual mishap but by the disposition of the will — a conviction that makes Gregory’s casuistry feel, across seventeen centuries, strikingly humane.

The Epistle in the Canonical Tradition

The Canonical Epistle was received into the canonical corpus of the Orthodox Church, where its provisions were counted among the canons of the holy Fathers and carried genuine authority in the discipline of penance. It is included in the standard Byzantine canonical collections and is commented on in the great canonical works of the tradition — figuring, for instance, among the patristic canons gathered in The Rudder (Pedalion), the classic canonical handbook compiled by St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite, where Gregory’s letter stands among the canons of the Fathers received by the Church (cf. The Rudder, the canons of Gregory the Wonderworker; noting per METHODOLOGY §2.2 that the commentary in The Rudder is St. Nikodemos’ and not the canon text itself).

Its survival and reception are themselves significant for the question of Gregory’s authenticity. Unlike the Creed, which reaches us embedded in a later Life, the Canonical Epistle comes down through the sober channel of the Church’s legal tradition, copied and used because bishops needed its rulings — a transmission very unlike that of a wonder-tale, and a strong witness to the existence of a real, governing Gregory behind the legend (see The Genuine Works).

What the Epistle Shows

The Canonical Epistle gives us the historical Gregory at his most concrete: not the wonder-worker of Nyssa’s Life but a working bishop of the crisis years, applying the gospel to the wreckage of an invasion with discrimination, mercy, and firmness. It shows him able to distinguish the captive forced to eat idol-food from the traitor who guided the Goths to his neighbour’s door; able to weigh greed and treachery as worse than ritual defilement; and able to set before the fallen a real, ordered path of repentance back to the Church’s communion. Read alongside the Address of Thanksgiving — the young convert — and the Creed — the theologian — the Canonical Epistle completes the portrait of the genuine Gregory: convert, theologian, and pastor of Pontus through invasion and persecution (see The Pastor in Persecution).

References

Gregory Thaumaturgus. Canonical Epistle. Trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The food sacrificed to idols at canon 1; the violated women at 1–2; the plunderers, informers, and those who joined the raiders at 2–7; the grades of penitents at canon 11.)
Slusser, Michael, trans. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (Translation, dating to the aftermath of the Gothic raids, and discussion of the eleventh canon.)
The Rudder (Pedalion). Comp. Nikodemos the Hagiorite. Trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957. (The canons of Gregory the Wonderworker among the canons of the holy Fathers; the commentary is St. Nikodemos’, not the canon text.)
Basil of Caesarea. Letters 188, 199, 217 (the “canonical epistles” to Amphilochius). Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 8. 1895. (The later Cappadocian development of the penitential grades along the lines Gregory had set out.)