To Whom Was the Ransom Paid?

Scripture calls Christ’s death a ransom (lytron), and the question of who received it has only two obvious answers, both of which the Fathers found intolerable. St. Gregory the Theologian, in Oration 45.22, poses the question and refuses both answers in turn; St. Gregory of Nyssa gives the answer “the devil” in the boldest form it ever received in the Greek tradition; and St. John of Damascus, four centuries later, keeps Nyssa’s image while rejecting his answer. This file sets the three texts side by side and states what the refusal of both answers establishes.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why the Question Cannot Be Avoided

“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45; cf. Matthew 20:28). “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:6). “You were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20, 7:23). “You were ransomed… not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19).

The vocabulary is not marginal and it is not a metaphor the Church may quietly retire; it is in the Lord’s own mouth and in the apostolic writings, and it is repeated in the Church’s prayers. But a ransom is by its grammar a payment made to someone, and the moment the metaphor is pressed the question becomes unavoidable. Once asked, it admits of only two answers within the terms of the image: the ransom was paid to the one who held the captives — the devil — or it was paid to God.

The interest of the patristic record is that the two greatest Greek theologians of the fourth century took opposite paths at exactly this fork, and that the tradition finally followed neither of them wholly.

St. Gregory the Theologian: Both Answers Refused

The text is Oration 45, the Second Oration on Pascha, delivered as a paschal homily and one of the two Easter orations read in the Church. Section 22 begins by announcing that what follows is a matter “neglected by most people,” and it is quoted here at length because paraphrase weakens it:

“Now we are to examine another fact and dogma, neglected by most people, but in my judgment well worth enquiring into. To Whom was that Blood offered that was shed for us, and why was It shed? I mean the precious and famous Blood of our God and High priest and Sacrifice. We were detained in bondage by the Evil One, sold under sin, and receiving pleasure in exchange for wickedness. Now, since a ransom belongs only to him who holds in bondage, I ask to whom was this offered, and for what cause? If to the Evil One, fie upon the outrage! If the robber receives ransom, not only from God, but a ransom which consists of God Himself, and has such an illustrious payment for his tyranny, a payment for whose sake it would have been right for him to have left us alone altogether. But if to the Father, I ask first, how? For it was not by Him that we were being oppressed; and next, On what principle did the Blood of His Only begotten Son delight the Father, Who would not receive even Isaac, when he was being offered by his Father, but changed the sacrifice, putting a ram in the place of the human victim? Is it not evident that the Father accepts Him, but neither asked for Him nor demanded Him; but on account of the Incarnation, and because Humanity must be sanctified by the Humanity of God, that He might deliver us Himself, and overcome the tyrant, and draw us to Himself by the mediation of His Son, Who also arranged this to the honour of the Father, Whom it is manifest that He obeys in all things? So much we have said of Christ; the greater part of what we might say shall be reverenced with silence.”
(Gregory the Theologian, Oration 45.22; trans. NPNF II/7)

Four things in this passage deserve to be held apart, because they are usually run together.

The first answer is refused as an outrage. Gregory does not argue that the devil holds no captives — he has just said that “we were detained in bondage by the Evil One, sold under sin.” He refuses the payment. To make God the price handed over to a robber is to dignify the robber’s tyranny with the highest conceivable fee, and Gregory’s exclamation — φεῦ τῆς ὕβρεως, “fie upon the outrage” — is directed at the indignity, not at the premise of captivity. His further point is a reductio: a captor who receives God as payment has been given something so much greater than what he held that he ought in decency to have released the captives for nothing.

The second answer is refused on two distinct grounds. First, on the grammar of the metaphor: a ransom is paid to the captor, “for it was not by Him that we were being oppressed.” The Father is not the jailer. Second, on the character of God: Gregory appeals to Genesis 22, where the Father who is supposed to be delighted by the blood of an only-begotten son is the same God who stopped Abraham’s hand and substituted a ram. The argument is that the God of Scripture is demonstrably not a God who wants the blood of a son.

What Gregory puts in place of both. The Father “accepts Him, but neither asked for Him nor demanded Him.” Acceptance without demand is the whole distinction. The reason given for the Passion is not a payment at all but a purpose: “on account of the Incarnation, and because Humanity must be sanctified by the Humanity of God, that He might deliver us Himself, and overcome the tyrant, and draw us to Himself by the mediation of His Son.”

The reserve at the end. “The greater part of what we might say shall be reverenced with silence.” Gregory does not offer a third theory. He has cleared two false accounts and stopped. This is the deliberate apophatic reticence characteristic of his theology, and it should be read as such rather than as an unfinished argument (see St. Gregory the Theologian: Christology and Soteriology).

A note on the same oration: a few lines later, treating the bronze serpent of Numbers 21:9, Gregory says it “was hung up as a remedy for the biting serpents, not as a type of Him that suffered for us, but as a contrast” (Oration 45.22; trans. NPNF II/7). The Gospel of John, by contrast, treats it precisely as a type: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). The divergence is real and is not resolved here; Gregory’s concern is that the serpent saved by being killed, and it is worth recording that a Father can differ from a natural reading of a Johannine verse without either being disowned.

St. Gregory of Nyssa: The Answer “The Devil,” Given in Full

The other Gregory took the other road, and did so with more system than anyone before or after him in the Greek tradition. The Catechetical Oration (also called the Great Catechism), written around 385 as a handbook for catechists, devotes chapters 22–26 to the question.

Nyssa’s premise is that God’s rescue of humanity must be just as well as powerful. Having freely sold ourselves, we are lawfully held; to snatch us back by force would leave “some colour for a just complaint” to the captor (Catechetical Oration 22; trans. NPNF II/5). Justice therefore requires a ransom, and the ransom must be something the captor would prefer to what he holds (ch. 23). The devil, observing the miracles of Christ, “saw also in Him an opportunity for an advance, in the exchange, upon the value of what he held. For this reason he chooses Him as a ransom for those who were shut up in the prison of death” (ch. 23).

But the devil could not have looked on God unveiled. Hence the image for which the work is famous:

“For since, as has been said before, it was not in the nature of the opposing power to come in contact with the undiluted presence of God, and to undergo His unclouded manifestation, therefore, in order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by him who required it, the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death, and light shining in darkness, that which is diametrically opposed to light and life might vanish.”
(Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration 24; trans. NPNF II/5)

Nyssa knows what the obvious objection is, and he answers it in chapter 26 rather than avoiding it. Was this not a fraud? He grants the description and defends the act as just reciprocity: “he who practised deception receives in return that very treatment, the seeds of which he had himself sown of his own free will. He who first deceived man by the bait of sensual pleasure is himself deceived by the presentment of the human form” (ch. 26). And he adds the argument that distinguishes the divine “deception” from the diabolical one: two men may mix a drug into food, one to kill and one to cure, and “in no way does the manner of the cure adopted spoil the aim and purpose of the benefit intended” (ch. 26). He then draws the conclusion that has troubled readers as much as the hook: the enemy himself will at length find the transaction “just and salutary,” and will experience the benefit of the Incarnation.

The Honest Concession

This is not a passage to be smoothed over, and the discipline of this repository requires it to be reported as it is.

The imagery drew criticism in antiquity, and the criticism came from within. St. Gregory the Theologian’s refusal in Oration 45.22 is, in substance, a refusal of exactly the position Nyssa had set out — the two men were contemporaries and allies, and the “fie upon the outrage” falls on the answer his namesake had given. The notion that the devil possesses a right over humanity, which the ransom account requires if the justice argument is to work, sits badly with a doctrine of creation in which nothing whatever stands outside God’s ownership, and later theology said so bluntly: Anselm of Canterbury devoted a chapter of Cur Deus Homo to demolishing it, holding that “as there is never any injustice in a good angel, so in an evil angel there can be no justice at all,” and that God therefore owed the devil nothing but punishment (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo I.7; trans. Deane). On this particular point Anselm and the Orthodox tradition are on the same side, a fact worth registering before Section 06 sets out where they part (see Anselm and Cur Deus Homo).

The further difficulty is the deception. A God who wins by a stratagem is a God about whom something has been conceded, and Nyssa’s defence — that the deceiver is justly deceived — answers the charge of injustice without answering the discomfort. Later Orthodox sensibility has not been at ease with it, and Orthodox writers who quote the Catechetical Oration generally quote everything except chapter 24. [Disputed: how the fishhook passage should be read. Some hold it a genuine transactional theory of the atonement in which the devil’s rights are taken seriously; others read it as rhetorical and pedagogical, a vivid figure for the hiddenness of God in the flesh rather than a doctrine of diabolical entitlement, noting that Nyssa’s dominant register elsewhere is the participatory one of the mingling of natures and the leaven in the lump (Catechetical Oration 25, 32, 37). The sibling treatment in this repository sets out the modern reappraisals — Aulén’s rehabilitation of the “classic” motif, the reservations of J. N. D. Kelly and A. S. Dunstone, and the metaphorical readings — and does not adjudicate; this file agrees with that staging. See St. Gregory of Nyssa: The Great Catechism.]

What the concession does not establish is that Nyssa was condemned or that the Catechetical Oration is outside the tradition. It is not. He is a Father of the Church and the work is a classic. What the record shows is that on this question the Church had, within a single generation, two of her greatest teachers pulling in opposite directions, and that she did not resolve the tension by decree.

St. John of Damascus: The Image Kept, the Answer Changed

The eighth-century synthesis shows how the tension was in fact absorbed. In the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith III.27, St. John of Damascus writes:

“He dies, therefore, because He took on Himself death on our behalf, and He makes Himself an offering to the Father for our sakes. For we had sinned against Him, and it was meet that He should receive the ransom for us, and that we should thus be delivered from the condemnation. God forbid that the blood of the Lord should have been offered to the tyrant! Wherefore death approaches, and swallowing up the body as a bait is transfixed on the hook of divinity, and after tasting of a sinless and life-giving body, perishes, and brings up again all whom of old he swallowed up.”
(John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith III.27; trans. NPNF II/9)

Three moves are made in that short passage, and together they are the shape of the settled tradition.

The answer “the devil” is refused outright — “God forbid that the blood of the Lord should have been offered to the tyrant.”

The hook and the bait are retained, but the fish is changed. In Nyssa the deceived party is the devil; in the Damascene it is death that swallows the bait and is transfixed. The image survives precisely by ceasing to be a transaction with a person who has rights and becoming a description of what happens when immortal life enters mortality. Nothing is owed to death; death simply cannot hold what it has taken.

The offering is directed to the Father — but note what the Damascene does not say. He does not say the Father demanded it, that his anger required appeasing, or that a quantum of honour was restored. He says that we had sinned against God and that it was fitting that God should receive the ransom “for us.” Whether even this much is a concession to the juridical grammar is a fair question; what is clear is that it stops well short of a theory of satisfaction, and that the Damascene elsewhere states the reason for the whole economy in terms of assumption and healing: God became man “in order that that which was overcome might overcome,” and “that which is not assumed is not remedied” (Exact Exposition III.18; trans. NPNF II/9; see The Unassumed Is the Unhealed).

What the Refusal Establishes

The most useful text in this collection is a refusal, and it is worth stating exactly what it does and does not accomplish.

It does not supply a theory. Gregory offers none, and warns that most of what might be said should be “reverenced with silence.”

It does establish, from within the fourth-century Church and in a homily preached at Pascha, that neither of the two transactional answers is the faith of the Church — not the payment to the devil, and not the payment to a Father who required it. When a later theology arrives at the second of these, it does not encounter a tradition that has never considered the option; it encounters a tradition that considered it, named it, and declined it.

And it fixes the register in which the Cross is to be spoken of. Gregory’s positive statement is entirely in the language of purpose and sanctification: the Incarnation, the sanctifying of humanity by the humanity of God, the overcoming of the tyrant, the drawing of us to God. That is the vocabulary Section 07 takes up when it states what the Church confesses (see The Orthodox Assessment).

References

Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus). Oration 45, The Second Oration on Easter, §22. Translated in NPNF II/7 (Schaff and Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7).
Gregory of Nyssa. Oratio Catechetica Magna (The Great Catechism / Catechetical Oration), chs. 22–26. Translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson in NPNF II/5; critical text ed. J. H. Srawley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903.
John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith III.18, III.27. Translated by S. D. F. Salmond in NPNF II/9.
Anselm of Canterbury. Cur Deus Homo I.7. Translated by Sidney Norton Deane, Chicago: Open Court, 1903.
Dunstone, A. S. The Atonement in Gregory of Nyssa. London: Tyndale Press, 1964.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A. & C. Black, 1977. (Chs. on the patristic doctrine of redemption.)
Aulén, Gustaf. Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement. Trans. A. G. Hebert. London: SPCK, 1931. (Cited here as the source of the modern rehabilitation of the “classic” motif; its taxonomy is assessed at The Scholarly Question and a Sober Assessment.)