The Feast and the Cult

St. Gregory the Wonderworker is commemorated across the Orthodox Churches on 17 November, the principal feast of the apostolic bishop of Neocaesarea, the wonderworker, and the confessor of the Trinity. The same day is kept in the West, in the Roman Martyrology. This file follows the shape of that commemoration and the themes of its hymnography, explains the Julian/Gregorian calendar reckoning by which the one feast falls on two civil dates, surveys the breadth of his cult, and reports the tradition — first set down by Gregory of Nyssa a century later — of his peaceful death c. 270, when he asked how many pagans remained in his city and was answered with the seventeen who matched the seventeen Christians he had found.

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

The Feast of 17 November

The principal commemoration of Gregory the Wonderworker falls on 17 November, on which day he is honored throughout the Orthodox world as a hierarch and an Ante-Nicene Father — “our father among the saints Gregory, bishop of Neocaesarea, the Wonderworker.” The date is fixed and ancient in the calendar of the Christian East: the Byzantine synaxaria and menologia, which gathered the commemorations of the saints into the liturgical year, assign Gregory to 17 November, and the Menaion — the twelve-volume service book that supplies the proper hymns for each day’s saints — carries his office under that date (Menaion for 17 November; on the entry of his cult into the synaxaria see Gregory in the Later Tradition). The feast is not a high feast of the calendar with its own fasting or vigil rank everywhere, but it is a fixed and universally kept commemoration of a major saint, a hierarch of apostolic standing whose memory the whole Church holds.

That Gregory should have a secure and early place in the liturgical calendar follows directly from the history of his cult traced in The Cult in Pontus and Cappadocia: his memory was carried by the church of Neocaesarea, amplified by the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century — Basil appealing to his authority (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29; Letter 204; trans. NPNF II/8), Gregory of Nyssa composing the encomiastic Life (c. 380) that became the charter of his developed cult (Gregory of Nyssa, De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi, PG 46:893–958; trans. Slusser 1998) — and from there passed into the standard liturgical books of Byzantium. A saint so venerated by the architects of the Nicene settlement was never going to be lost from the calendar, and he was not.

The Calendar: One Feast, Two Civil Dates

A point of practical confusion deserves a plain explanation, because it touches every fixed feast of the Orthodox year, Gregory’s among them. The Orthodox Churches do not all reckon the calendar in the same way, and this affects on what civil date the feast of 17 November is observed — without affecting the feast itself.

The matter is one of calendars, not of dispute. The older reckoning is the Julian calendar (the calendar of Julius Caesar, used by the whole Church through the Middle Ages); the civil world and many Orthodox Churches now use the Gregorian calendar (the corrected calendar promulgated in 1582, which dropped the accumulated error of the Julian reckoning). Because the Julian calendar runs slow against the sun, the two calendars have drifted apart; in the present era (and through the year 2100) the gap is thirteen days.

In practical terms:

Churches that follow the Revised Julian calendar for the fixed feasts — among them the Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Antioch, Alexandria, Romania, Bulgaria, and others — keep Gregory’s feast on 17 November as it falls on the civil (Gregorian) calendar.
Churches that follow the old (Julian) calendar for the fixed feasts — among them the Church of Russia, the Church of Serbia, the Church of Jerusalem, the monasteries of Mount Athos, and others — likewise keep the feast on 17 November of their own (Julian) calendar, which in the present era corresponds to 30 November on the civil Gregorian calendar.

It is essential to see what is and is not happening here. Both groups keep the feast of Gregory the Wonderworker on 17 November — the same calendar date, the same saint, the same office from the Menaion. The difference is only that the Julian “17 November” presently lands on the civil “30 November,” because the two calendars are thirteen days apart. There is no disagreement about when, in the year, Gregory is honored; there is only a difference in which calendar a given Church uses to count the days, and therefore on which secular date the unchanged feast appears. A reader who finds Gregory commemorated on “17 November” in one source and “30 November” in another has found the same feast described from the two reckonings, not two different observances and not a controversy.

The Shape of the Commemoration

On his feast Gregory is served as a hierarch (a bishop-saint), with the proper hymns of his office drawn from the Menaion for 17 November and set within the ordinary structure of the day’s services — Vespers the evening before, with the singing of “Lord, I have cried” and the stichera proper to the saint, and Matins on the morning of the feast, with its canon and exapostilarion. The hymnography is appointed for the saint and woven among the day’s fixed prayers, so that the assembly’s commemoration of Gregory is carried chiefly in song.

The themes of that hymnography — as they may be characterized from the office in the Menaion for 17 November, paraphrased here rather than quoted, and without claiming a fixed translated text — gather the whole of the tradition the earlier sections of this guide have followed:

The wonderworker. The very title Thaumatourgos is the keynote: the hymns hail Gregory as one who worked wonders by the power of God and by faith, and the marvels of Nyssa’s Life — the moving of the mountain, the drying of the marsh, the commanding of the river — supply the imagery by which the office praises him (cf. The Miracles of Gregory). The hymnography presents these as the deeds of a Spirit-bearing apostle, in the idiom of praise rather than of chronicle.
The apostle of Pontus. The office celebrates Gregory as a second apostle to his own land, the shepherd who converted Neocaesarea and Pontus from idolatry to Christ — the missionary bishop of The Apostolic Missionary, in whose hands a city of seventeen Christians became a city of the faithful.
The confessor of the Trinity. Gregory is praised as a teacher of right belief who confessed the Holy Trinity and handed down the rule of faith — the doctrinal note that binds his feast to the Creed and to the vision in which, by tradition, it was given him (see The Trinitarian Creed; on the doctrine, The Holy Trinity).
The vision of the Theotokos. Where the office touches the giving of the Creed, it recalls the apparition of the Mother of God and St. John the Theologian by which, in Nyssa’s Life, the mystery of the faith was declared to Gregory — one of the earliest Marian-apparition traditions, and a theme that joins his feast to the Church’s devotion to the Theotokos (see The Theotokos).

Per the discipline of this guide, these themes are reported as the content of the liturgical office, attributed to the Menaion for 17 November and paraphrased; the office is a vehicle of praise and of the received tradition, not an independent historical witness, and the miracle-imagery it employs rests, as everywhere in this collection, on the testimony of Gregory of Nyssa’s Life (per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5; see The Life and the Legend).

The Commemoration in the West

Gregory’s veneration was never confined to the East. The Latin West kept his memory as well, and the Roman Martyrology — the official catalogue of saints commemorated in the Roman Rite — commemorates St. Gregory, bishop of Neocaesarea, surnamed Thaumaturgus (“the Wonderworker”), on 17 November, naming him a man renowned for his learning, his holiness, and the signs and wonders by which (in the received tradition) he won Pontus to the faith (Roman Martyrology, 17 November). That the two halves of the pre-schism Christian world independently fixed the same date for Gregory underscores how early and how widely his memory was held: he is a saint of the undivided Church of the third century, honored on the one day across East and West (on that shared world, see The Pre-Schism Church). His standing as an Ante-Nicene Father, venerated without reservation in both traditions, places him among the common fathers of the Church before the divisions (see The Church Fathers).

The Breadth and Kinds of Devotion

The devotion to Gregory takes the forms proper to the veneration of a great hierarch and wonderworker. He is honored in the iconography of the Church as a bishop — vested in the omophorion, holding or blessing, often shown with the scroll of his Creed or amid the wonders of his Life (the iconographic tradition is treated in its own file: Iconography and Feast). Churches and chapels bear his name; he is invoked as a patron and a worker of wonders; and as the first saint after the apostles to bear the title “Wonderworker,” he stands at the head of a whole category of later Orthodox saints — the thaumaturgoi — who would inherit the title and the type (on the proverbial career of the title, see Gregory in the Later Tradition).

His particular patronages and intercessory associations follow naturally from his Life: as the bishop who, in Nyssa’s account, halted the flooding river Lycus and dried the contested marsh, he is invoked in connection with floods and waters and with the settling of disputes; as the apostle who converted a province, he is a patron of missionary labor and of the conversion of the unbelieving; and as the Thaumatourgos simply, he is invoked for help in difficulties beyond ordinary remedy. These associations are part of the living piety of his cult rather than claims about the historical bishop, and they are reported here as such. It bears repeating — as the section on the cult is candid about (see The Cult in Pontus and Cappadocia) — that for Gregory the literary memory is far richer and better attested than any relic or burial tradition; the breadth of his devotion rests on his works, his Creed, and his Life, not on a famous shrine.

The Death of Gregory: The Seventeen and the Seventeen

The feast of a saint is the commemoration of his passage to the Lord, and the tradition of Gregory’s death gives the day its closing image. By the received chronology Gregory died about the year 270, in the reign of the emperor Aurelian (270–275), an old man who had been bishop of Neocaesarea for some three decades; he died in peace, not by martyrdom, having outlived the persecutions through which he had shepherded his flock (see The Pastor in Persecution).

The most celebrated detail of his death comes from Gregory of Nyssa’s Life, and must be received as Nyssa’s testimony, not as certified fact. Nyssa relates that as Gregory neared his end he asked how many in the city of Neocaesarea still remained outside the faith, and was told that there were seventeen unbelievers left — exactly the number of Christians, seventeen, whom he had found in the city when he first came to it as bishop. The symmetry is the whole point of the tradition: where he had begun with seventeen believers among a city of pagans, he ended with seventeen pagans among a city of believers, the harvest of his apostolate measured in the inversion of a single number. Gregory, the account continues, gave thanks for the great increase, directed that no special tomb be raised for him — as in life he had owned nothing of his own, so in death he would lie in no ground that was his — and so departed (Gregory of Nyssa, De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi, PG 46:893–958; trans. Slusser 1998).

This is the same 17/17 tradition that frames the whole Life and that the earlier sections have pinned throughout to Gregory of Nyssa as its source: per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 it is reported as the testimony of the Life (c. 380), about a century after Gregory’s death, and is not certified as historical fact (see The Apostolic Missionary for the conversion-side of the same tradition, and The Witness of Gregory of Nyssa for the Life as a source). It is, all the same, the image the Church keeps on his feast: the apostolic bishop who turned his city inside out for Christ, and who asked, at the last, only how much of the harvest was still to be gathered.

[Disputed: the seventeen-and-seventeen tradition of Gregory's converts and of his death is attested only in Gregory of Nyssa's *De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi* (c. 380; PG 46:893–958), about a century after the events, and is not corroborated by Gregory's own writings or by Eusebius (*HE* 6.30). Defenders note that Nyssa drew on a living Pontic memory transmitted through his family — Basil's grandmother Macrina the Elder had been catechized in that tradition (Basil, *Letter* 204; *On the Holy Spirit* 29; trans. NPNF II/8); source-critical scholars (Slusser 1998; Van Dam 2003) read the precise, symmetrical figure as a rhetorical and hagiographic device of the encomium rather than a verifiable census, while not doubting that Gregory was a genuinely successful missionary bishop. The collection follows the methodology in pinning the number to Nyssa and certifying neither the figure nor its symmetry.]

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 (FOTC 98). Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (The death of Gregory; the seventeen unbelievers matching the seventeen believers; his refusal of a private tomb.)
Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit 29 and Letter 204. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 8. 1895. (The Pontic tradition of Gregory and Macrina the Elder.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 6.30. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (The near-contemporary notice that does not carry the seventeen-and-seventeen tradition.)
The Menaion for 17 November (the commemoration of St. Gregory the Wonderworker, bishop of Neocaesarea). (The proper office of the feast; the hymnographic themes paraphrased above — the wonderworker, the apostle of Pontus, the confessor of the Trinity, the vision of the Theotokos.)
Roman Martyrology, 17 November. (The Western commemoration of St. Gregory of Neocaesarea, surnamed Thaumaturgus.)
Slusser, Michael, trans. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (Translation of Nyssa’s Life; introduction on the chronology and the death-tradition.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. (The source-critical reading of the conversion- and death-traditions as Cappadocian construction.)