The Cappadocian Settlement

Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and Gregory of Nyssa completed what Nicaea began: the settlement of Trinitarian grammar — one ousia, three hypostaseis — the defense of the Holy Spirit’s divinity, and the apophatic discipline that guards the mystery the grammar serves. This file surveys the three Cappadocians (with Macrina beside her brothers) as one theological event, culminating in the Second Ecumenical Council, and defers each figure to a full collection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

One Event in Three Persons

The “Cappadocian Fathers” are a family and a friendship before they are a school: Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379) and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 394) were brothers, two of the ten children of an ascetic Christian household whose eldest, Macrina the Younger (c. 327–379), was by her brothers’ testimony the family’s first theologian; Gregory of Nazianzus (329/330–390) was Basil’s fellow student at Athens and lifelong, sorely tried friend (the family portrait in Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina, trans. Corrigan, Toronto: Peregrina, 1987; the Athens friendship in Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43, the funeral oration for Basil; trans. NPNF II/7; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, Utrecht/Westminster: Spectrum/Newman, 1960, on all three). Their joint achievement — Florovsky’s Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century treats it as the classical moment of all patristics — was to take the Nicene homoousios, suspect to many because it seemed to melt the Three into one, and give it a grammar that secured both the unity and the distinction: one essence (ousia), three concrete persons (hypostaseis), distinguished solely by their mutual relations of origin — unbegotten, begotten, proceeding (Florovsky, The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century, Collected Works vol. 7, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987; Behr, The Nicene Faith, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004, part 2; Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, ch. 4).

Before them, ousia and hypostasis had been used interchangeably — Nicaea’s own anathema treats them as synonyms (Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed., London: Longman, 1972, ch. 8). The Cappadocian distinction was therefore not a deduction but a decision of ecclesial language: the terms were conscripted and fixed so that the Church could say what she had always confessed without saying what she must deny. The classic exposition of the difference — general essence and particular person, as “man” to “Peter, Andrew, John” — stands in the letter transmitted as Basil’s Epistle 38, “to his brother Gregory” [Disputed: the authorship of Ep. 38 is contested between Basil and Gregory of Nyssa (as To Peter, on the difference of ousia and hypostasis); much modern scholarship favors Nyssa — see the discussion in Behr, The Nicene Faith, 2004 — and the doctrine is in any case common Cappadocian property] (Basil, Ep. 38; trans. NPNF II/8).

Basil: The Architect

Basil’s contribution was architectural: terminology, church order, monasticism, liturgy. Against Eunomius answered the neo-Arian claim that God’s essence is “unbegottenness” and therefore knowable and demonstrably unshared by the Son, with the counter that we know God from his operations (energeiai) while his essence remains beyond us — the seed of the essence–energies distinction that Palamas would defend a millennium later (Basil, Against Eunomius I–III; trans. DelCogliano and Radde-Gallwitz, FC 122, Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2011; on the Palamite continuity, Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London: Faith Press, 1964; see St. Gregory Palamas). On the Holy Spirit (375) defended the Spirit’s divinity by the Church’s doxology and unwritten liturgical tradition — “worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son,” as the creed of 381 would say — deliberately without applying homoousios to the Spirit, an economy of speech his friend Gregory chafed at (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66 [PG 32:188]; trans. NPNF II/8; on Basil’s reserve, Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.68–69). His Longer and Shorter Rules made cenobitic monasticism normative in the East; his Hexaemeron homilies taught creation; the anaphora bearing his name is served in Orthodox churches ten times a year (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3; see Orthodox Monasticism). He died on 1 January 379, not living to see the council that canonized his work. Full treatment: St. Basil the Great.

Gregory the Theologian: The Voice

What Basil built, Gregory of Nazianzus spoke. Called to Constantinople in 379 to shepherd the tiny Nicene remnant in an Arian capital, he delivered in the chapel of the Anastasia the Five Theological Orations (Orations 27–31, 380) — the texts that earned him the title “the Theologian,” shared in Orthodox tradition only with John the Evangelist and Symeon the New Theologian (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3; Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Their achievement is double. Doctrinally they complete the settlement: the Three are distinguished by unbegottenness, begottenness, and procession alone (Oration 29.2; 31.8–9), and Gregory says plainly what Basil would not — “What then? Is the Spirit God? Certainly. Is he consubstantial? Yes, if he is God” (Oration 31.10; trans. Williams and Wickham, PPS 23, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002). Methodologically they fix the apophatic discipline: theology is not for everyone at all times but for the purified (Oration 27); to define God’s essence is impossible, “to tell of God is not possible… but to know him is even less possible” (Oration 28.4). His Epistle 101 against Apollinarius gave Christology its axiom — “what is not assumed is not healed” (to gar aproslepton, atherapeuton) (Ep. 101 to Cledonius; trans. NPNF II/7) — the principle on which the whole next section of this guide turns (see The Christological Centuries). He presided briefly over the council of 381, resigned amid the intrigues, and retired to write poetry; the Church reads his orations at the great feasts, where whole canons of the liturgical hymnography are versified Gregory (on the hymnographic afterlife, see The Consensus Patrum Rightly Understood). Full treatment: St. Gregory the Theologian.

Gregory of Nyssa: The Depth

The younger Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, was the speculative mind of the three — “father of fathers,” the Seventh Ecumenical Council called him (Nicaea II 787, in the acts; Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). He finished the polemical work (Against Eunomius, continuing Basil’s), wrote the first great systematic catechesis after Origen (the Catechetical Oration), and founded Christian mystical theology in the strict sense: because God is infinite (apeiros), the soul’s ascent is endless — epektasis, the perpetual “straining forward” of Philippians 3:13, “from glory to glory,” so that perfection is precisely never-completed progress into the divine darkness where Moses met God (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses II.219–255; trans. Malherbe and Ferguson, CWS, New York: Paulist, 1978; Daniélou’s classic study Platonisme et théologie mystique, Paris: Aubier, 1944; Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, ch. on Nyssa). His On the Soul and the Resurrection is a dialogue with the dying Macrina, cast deliberately as a Christian Phaedo with his sister in Socrates’ chair — the Church’s memorial of a woman teaching her bishop-brother theology (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection; trans. Roth, PPS 12, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993; see St. Macrina the Younger).

His universalism is the honest asterisk. Multiple passages teach or imply an apokatastasis — the eventual purification of all — and the Church, which condemned Origenist apokatastasis (see The Problem Cases), has never condemned Gregory [Disputed: Ramelli reads Gregory as a consistent universalist continuous with Origen (The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, Leiden: Brill, 2013); other scholars and traditional Orthodox readers argue his hope differs essentially from the condemned system (no pre-existence of souls, no cyclic falls) or that the passages are less systematic than they appear; the question remains genuinely open in the scholarship]. The tradition’s own resolution is instructive for the whole doctrine of the Fathers: it received the witness and declined the speculation — proof that a Father’s authority is corporate and sifted, not personal and total (Florovsky, “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972). Full treatment: St. Gregory of Nyssa.

The Settlement Sealed

The Council of Constantinople (381) — convened after Basil’s death, presided over in part by Gregory the Theologian, attended by Gregory of Nyssa — confirmed the Nicene faith and confessed the Spirit “the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified”: Basil’s doxological argument become creed (the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed; Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 1972, ch. 10; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The Cappadocian settlement is thus the pattern case of how the Fathers work: a received faith, a new denial, a conscripted vocabulary, a conciliar seal — and behind all of it, prayer and ascesis, for the three were monks and the settlement was born as much in Pontic solitude and the Anastasia’s vigils as in any study. Its grammar remains the Church’s: every Orthodox theological dispute since — Chalcedon, the Filioque, Palamism — has been fought on Cappadocian ground (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 2, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974; Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957, chs. 3–4; on the Filioque, the topical article).

See Also

References

  • Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. Vol. 3: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature. Utrecht/Westminster, MD: Spectrum/Newman Press, 1960. (The three Cappadocians: lives and works.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century. Collected Works vol. 7. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987; Bible, Church, Tradition. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
  • Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004. (The settlement; the Ep. 38 question.)
  • Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 27.66 [PG 32:188]; Epistle 38; trans. NPNF II/8. Against Eunomius, trans. Mark DelCogliano and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, FC 122. Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2011.
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations 27–31 (On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations, trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham, PPS 23. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002); Oration 43; Epistle 101. Trans. NPNF II/7.
  • Beeley, Christopher A. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. Life of Moses, trans. Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine Roth, PPS 12. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993. Life of Macrina, trans. Kevin Corrigan. Toronto: Peregrina, 1987.
  • Daniélou, Jean. Platonisme et théologie mystique: Doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse. Paris: Aubier, 1944. (Epektasis.)
  • Louth, Andrew. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. (Nyssa and the divine darkness.)
  • Ramelli, Ilaria. The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis. Leiden: Brill, 2013. (The disputed universalism.)
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Creeds. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1972. (Chs. 8, 10: Nicaea’s anathema; the creed of 381.)
  • Price, Richard, trans. The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. (“Father of fathers.”)
  • Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. London: Faith Press, 1964. (The Basil–Palamas continuity.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957. (Chs. 3–4.)
  • Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, vols. 1–2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, 1974.
  • Scripture: Philippians 3:13; 2 Corinthians 3:18.