The Three and What Each Contributed

The three Cappadocian Fathers are commemorated together and are usually described as though they worked in concert. They did not: they quarrelled, they differed in temperament and in nerve, and one of them was dead before the council that vindicated them. This file sets out what each actually contributed, names the fourth figure whom two of them credited as their teacher, and resists the tidy picture of a single “Cappadocian synthesis” handed down whole.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Who They Were

St. Basil the Great (c. 330–379), Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, from a wealthy Christian family of Pontus that produced several saints. Educated at Caesarea, Constantinople, and Athens, converted from an academic career to asceticism by his sister Macrina, bishop from 370, dead at about fifty after nine years of episcopate spent under the hostile Arian emperor Valens.

St. Gregory the Theologian (329–390), of Nazianzus, Basil’s fellow-student at Athens and his closest friend for a lifetime that included a serious estrangement. A rhetorician of the first rank, temperamentally unsuited to church politics, ordained and consecrated against his will on two occasions, briefly Archbishop of Constantinople in 380–381, and one of only three figures in the Orthodox calendar to bear the title “the Theologian.”

St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395), Basil’s younger brother, made bishop of the insignificant town of Nyssa by Basil for tactical reasons and by his own account unsuited to it. Deposed and exiled under Valens, restored in 378, and after Basil’s death the most philosophically powerful mind of the three.

Basil: The Vocabulary and the Labour

Basil’s contribution is threefold and mostly unglamorous.

He fixed the terminology. The distinction of ousia as the common and hypostasis as the particular is his, and it is what made the confession sayable (see Ousia and Hypostasis).

He answered Eunomius. Against Eunomius (c. 364) is the reply to the most rigorous form of the anti-Nicene case: that unbegottenness is the divine essence and the begotten Son is therefore of another essence. Basil’s counter — that names are drawn from operations and modes of existence, and that no name reaches the essence — is the foundation of the whole later Orthodox theology of divine unknowability (see St. Basil: Contra Eunomium).

He did the ecclesiastical work. The letters — over three hundred of them — are the record of a man assembling a Nicene consensus out of a fractured episcopate under an emperor who wanted him gone, negotiating with Rome and being disappointed by it, and holding his own province together. St. Gregory the Theologian’s funeral oration for him (Oration 43) is the primary source for the friendship and for Basil’s stature, and it should be read with the knowledge that it was written by a man who had been badly used by its subject.

His treatise On the Holy Spirit (375) is treated in the next section, together with the question of his reserve (see Basil’s Reserve and Gregory’s Boldness).

Gregory the Theologian: The Definitive Statement

The Five Theological Orations (Orations 27–31), delivered at the small chapel of the Anastasia in Constantinople in 380 to a congregation in a city where the churches were held by the Arians, are the single most important patristic text on the Trinity. Their contribution is not new vocabulary but the definitive statement of the doctrine in the vocabulary Basil had supplied, and four things in them are decisive.

The rule of theological speech. Orations 27 and 28 set out who may do theology, when, and with what preparation — not everyone, not at all times, not on every subject — and establish that the essence is unknowable and that the theologian’s proper posture is Moses’ on the mountain (see St. Gregory the Theologian: Orations 27–28).

The full divinity of the Spirit, stated without qualification. Gregory says what Basil would not: “What then? Is the Spirit God? Most certainly. Well then, is he consubstantial? Yes, if he is God” (Oration 31.10; trans. NPNF II/7).

The monarchy of the Father, defined as causal and not as superiority. This is Gregory’s most important single contribution and it is the subject of Section 07.

The refusal to explain. Asked what procession is, Gregory answers with a question: “Do you tell me what is the unbegottenness of the Father, and I will explain to you the physiology of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit” (Oration 31.8). The Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds, and the difference between the two modes is confessed and not analysed. Every later Orthodox treatment stands on this refusal.

Gregory of Nyssa: The Philosophical Defence

The younger Gregory does what neither of the others attempted: he takes the philosophical objections seriously enough to answer them on their own ground.

Divine infinity. Gregory is, so far as the record shows, the first Christian writer to make infinity (apeiria) a positive perfection of God rather than a defect of indeterminacy. Because God is unlimited, he cannot be comprehended, since to comprehend is to bound; and because he is unlimited, the soul’s approach to him has no term. The insight is the philosophical foundation of Orthodox apophaticism and, centuries later, of the Palamite distinction (Against Eunomius I; Life of Moses II.163–169; see Apophatic and Cataphatic).

The answer to tritheism. Ad Ablabium supplies the argument that the divine operation is single and undivided — from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit — and that the unity of operation manifests the unity of nature. This is the argument on which the charge of tritheism actually breaks (see On “Not Three Gods”).

The completion of the case against Eunomius. Against Eunomius, in three books, is far longer and more technical than Basil’s and takes up the argument after Eunomius’ reply to Basil, after Basil’s death.

Gregory also held the doctrine of universal restoration (apokatastasis), which the tradition has not received and which this repository treats at length elsewhere; that his Trinitarian theology is dogma and his eschatology is not is a distinction the Church has made and this collection observes (see Apokatastasis in Gregory).

St. Macrina, and the Question of Attribution

St. Macrina the Younger (c. 327–379/380), the eldest of the family’s ten children, is presented by her brother Gregory as the one who turned Basil from vanity to the ascetic life and as his own teacher — “the Teacher,” as he calls her throughout On the Soul and the Resurrection, where she conducts the philosophical argument from her deathbed and Gregory plays the pupil.

Honesty requires the qualification. Everything known of Macrina comes from Gregory: the Life of Macrina and On the Soul and the Resurrection are his compositions, and the dialogue is a literary form in which the interlocutor’s words are the author’s. Whether the arguments Gregory places in her mouth are hers, his, or a genuine collaboration is not recoverable from the sources, and scholars differ. What is not in doubt is that Gregory attributed them to her, in works written for publication, and that the household ascetic community she led was the setting in which both her brothers’ theology took shape (see The Dialogue with Macrina; The Holy Family).

St. Amphilochius of Iconium (c. 340–after 394), Gregory the Theologian’s cousin and Basil’s protégé and correspondent, is sometimes called the fourth Cappadocian. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit is written at his request and addressed to him, and he presided at a synod of Iconium in 376 that condemned the Pneumatomachoi. He is a minor figure in the literature and a real one in the events.

Against the Tidy Picture

Three corrections belong here, and each of them matters for how the settlement is understood.

They were not a school. The three did not hold a common position which they divided the labour of expounding. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa differ substantially on the knowledge of God and on eschatology. Gregory the Theologian goes past Basil on the Spirit and says so. The category “Cappadocian theology” is a modern convenience, and Ayres and Behr both warn against treating it as a single system delivered whole (Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, Oxford, 2004, chs. 8–9; Behr, The Nicene Faith, Crestwood, NY, 2004, pt. 2).

They quarrelled, and it was not trivial. In 372, in the course of a jurisdictional fight with the neighbouring metropolitan of Tyana, Basil consecrated his oldest friend bishop of Sasima — a miserable posting on a road junction which Gregory describes with unforgettable bitterness as “a thoroughly detestable little place… no water, no grass, nothing but dust and noise and wagons” (Gregory the Theologian, De vita sua, and Oration 43; trans. NPNF II/7). Gregory never took up residence and never entirely forgave it. In the same campaign Basil made his own brother bishop of Nyssa, and that appointment was not a success either. The friendship survived, but the funeral oration Gregory eventually preached is the more remarkable for what it does not conceal.

One of them did not live to see it. Basil died on 1 January 379, before Theodosius’ accession changed the imperial policy and two and a half years before the Council of Constantinople confirmed the faith he had spent his life defending. Gregory the Theologian presided at that council and resigned from it in disgust. Gregory of Nyssa alone was present at the end and afterwards, and it fell to him to state the settlement in its mature form (see After Basil).

The Church commemorates Basil, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom together as the Three Hierarchs on 30 January — a feast instituted in the eleventh century to end a quarrel among their partisans, which is itself a fair comment on how such reputations are made (see The Three Hierarchs).

What Was Actually Settled

By 381 the Church had: a stable distinction between what is one in God and what is three; the confession of the Holy Spirit as fully God and worshipped with the Father and the Son; the rule that the three are distinguished by relations of origin and by nothing else; the argument from the single divine operation against tritheism; and the doctrine of the monarchy of the Father, holding the unity of God in a person rather than in a nature.

Those five things are the Trinitarian faith of the Orthodox Church. Everything after them — Damascene’s codification, the Photian controversy, Palamas — is exposition, defence, or application.

References

Basil the Great. Against Eunomius; On the Holy Spirit; Epistles. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Gregory the Theologian. Orations 27–31, 43; De vita sua. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7; Five Theological Orations also trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham, Popular Patristics 23. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2002.
Gregory of Nyssa. Against Eunomius; Ad Ablabium; On the Soul and the Resurrection; Life of Macrina; Life of Moses. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 5; Life of Moses trans. Malherbe and Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1978.
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001.
Hildebrand, Stephen M. The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007.