Paradox and Relationality: An Introduction to the Life and Theology of Gregory of Nazianzus

Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390AD), also known as ‘Gregory the Theologian,’ was one of the most important figures in the history of early Christianity. Born in Cappadocia, now part of modern Turkey, he was a bishop, theologian and poet who made major contributions to the classic theology of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Together with the brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory is ranked as one of the influential ‘Cappadocian Fathers’ of the fourth century, whose influence upon Christian theology and spirituality remains significant even today. At the height of his career he presided over the Council of Constantinople, where the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was expanded to the form it has today. The enduring shape of orthodox theology, therefore, was finalised under Gregory’s influence and oversight.

Gregory was, furthermore, perhaps the greatest orator of the early Church, and his effort to compose a body of epic Christian literature sets him alongside the great Greek poets of antiquity. His poetry is indeed epic, and makes powerful use of paradox as a rhetorical device while elaborating sophisticated metaphysical arguments.

Gregory is worth studying by students of theology, classics and church history alike. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Gregory is one of only three saints to be titled ‘the Theologian,’ indicating the regard in which he is held by the Eastern Church. Despite his importance, however, Gregory’s work and biography are little known among modern audiences.

In writing this article, my goal is to offer a detailed introduction to Gregory’s life, theology and historical significance, with reference to key illustrative passages from Gregory’s theological poems and orations. His biography and the historical context of the Arian controversy are outlined, followed by an exposition of his theology of the Incarnation, the Trinity and deification. In each case, Gregory is addressed as a theologian in his own right while being situated within his intellectual milleu as a Greek rhetorician and Cappadocian Father.

Gregory’s life and historical context

Gregory was born into an aristocratic Christian family in Nazianzus, Cappadocia in 329 AD, then part of the Roman Empire. As a young man he received a classical education, studying Greek philosophy and literature in Athens, Alexandria, Caesarea and Nazianzus. While studying at the University of Athens, he became close friends with a young man who would later become bishop of Caesarea, Basil ‘the Great.’

Gregory’s father, also named Gregory, was bishop of Nazianzus, and in the year 361 Gregory returned home to be ordained a priest and assist his father in running the diocese. Gregory had originally wanted to live as a monk and ascetic philosopher, having made a vow with Basil that the two of them would live a ‘philosophical life’ together, and resented the administrative duties imposed on him. Much of his life was shaped by this tension between his desire to live a solitary, contemplative life and the duty he was called to as a talented theologian and rhetorician during a time of intellectual crisis.

Gregory’s intellectual efforts were inspired by two main events during his lifetime. The first was the Arian controversy, which deeply divided the Christian Church during the fourth century. The second was the exclusion of Christian teachers from universities under the Emperor Julian. In 361, the year that Gregory was ordained, Julian ‘the Apostate’ came to power and publicly renounced his Christian faith and reverted to paganism. Julian subsequently banned Christians from teaching at universities, intending to turn the Empire’s academies into centres of pagan propaganda. Gregory immediately realised the danger of this: the Church risked losing access to education, philosophy and literature, which would leave its priests and theologians lacking the necessary intellectual formation for spreading the Gospel.

Julian’s reign (and his academic exclusion of Christian teachers) was only brief, but this experience inspired Gregory, years later, to compose a new corpus of Christian poetry and literature, mimicking the epic and panegyric styles of the Greek classics. He thereby aimed to ensure that Christians could continue to train as philosophers and rhetoricians even if they were excluded from classical education. His epic poems, the Poemata Arcana, were Gregory’s Christian counter-product to the literature of the classical world and a key medium of his work as a theologian.

The Arian Controversy

Throughout the fourth century, the Roman Empire was divided by the so-called Arian controversy, named after the Alexandrian priest Arius (256–336). Arius, pushing the logic of pure monotheism, taught that God is a single monad whose oneness permits no inner ontological distinction. Jesus, according to Arius, could not possibly God, but must logically be a created being, distinct from and subordinate to God.

In response to Arius’ teaching, the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea was convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325 AD, and attended by over 300 bishops from throughout the Christian world. The Council of Nicaea proclaimed that Jesus was “begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, consubstantial with the Father,” but this failed to stop the spread of Arianism.

By the time of Gregory’s ordination, Arianism was ascendant throughout the empire. Soon after, a talented preacher, Eunomius, arrived in Cappadocia and began to spread a radical version of Arian theology. At the same time, the Pneumatomachian movement publicly denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, sparking another controversy into which Gregory was drawn. In response, Gregory and the other Cappadocian Fathers (who remained committed to Nicene Orthodoxy from the start) elaborated a theology of the Trinity that both affirmed the divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit while responding to the assertions of hierarchical subordination of the divine persons espoused by Arius and Eunomius.

Politics, Preaching and the Council

Throughout the 360s and 70s, Gregory and Basil, plus Basil’s younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, worked together to prevent the spread of Arianism and Pneumatomachianism throughout Cappadocia. In a ‘leaflet war’ with their opponents, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa composed theological tracts including Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, and his brother’s Against Eunomius and On Not Three Gods. Gregory of Nazianzus, however, primarily used his stirring public orations to develop and promote his trinitarian theology. The Cappadocians cemented their province as a stronghold of trinitarian Christianity at a time when most of the Eastern Roman Empire — including the imperial court under Emperor Valens — was dominated by Arianism.

When the Emperor Valens died in 378, he was succeeded by Theodosius I, a convinced trinitarian who held to the faith as defined at the Council of Nicaea. By that time, most of the population of Constantinople — the Imperial capital — were Arians, and the most important churches were staffed by Arian clergy. Theodosius invited Gregory, who by then was Bishop of Sasima, to come to Constantinople and made him Archbishop, an appointment that initially went unrecognised by most of the locals. As most of the churches were Arian parishes, Gregory was given a small side chapel, the ‘Anastasia,’ in the villa of a noblewoman.

It was there that Gregory delivered many of his great ‘theological orations,’ powerful sermons combining acute theological argument with epic rhetorical style. Very soon, his congregation began to grow, and more and more of the people began to desert the Arian clergy. Gregory made enemies quickly this way, and on one occasion a mob of Arians burst into his chapel, attacking him in the middle of a service. On another occasion, an Arian priest called Maximus managed to be ordained as Archbishop of Constantinople in a clandestine ceremony, undermining Gregory’s authority.

Despite these challenges, by 381 Gregory’s powerful oratory skills had succeeded in swaying a huge share of the population, and he was recognised by most the city as Archbishop. Together with the Emperor Theodosius, he convened the Council of Constantinople in May of that year to settle the Arian controversy once and for all.

The first order of business of the Council was to condemn all forms of Arianism and to re-affirm the Trinitarian belief in the divinity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit as the sole orthodox faith of the universal Church. Under Gregory’s presidency, the Council confirmed the Nicene Creed and expanded it, adding the line that Jesus is “begotten of the Father before all ages [aeons]” to emphasise that Christ was begotten in eternity, not created in time. Another line was added to affirm the divinity of the Spirit: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,” but, in an attempt to compromise with the Pneumatomachians, it was not as strongly formulated as Gregory had originally wanted. The expanded Creed of the Council of Constantinople also added the final lines about baptism, the Church, the resurrection of the dead, and the world to come.

The Council of Constantinople represented the definitive triumph of trinitarian Christianity over Arianism. Although Gregory resigned as a result of a dispute about his leadership at the Council, there is little doubt about his influence over the doctrine that it affirmed. Gregory subsequently retired to Nazianzus, exhausted by politics, where he continued to compose poetry and live an ascetic life until his death in 390. He is remembered as one of the most important theologians of the patristic age, and the greatest rhetorician and orator of the early Church. History also remembers him as a man who, unlike many other bishops embroiled in the controversies of their time, did not sway his opponents through mob violence or political suppression, but through the power of his oratory and theological argumentation.

Gregory’s Theology and The Paradox of the Incarnation

One of the arguments made by Gregory and the other Cappadocians against the Arians was that Arius had adhered too rigidly to philosophical logic. Christianity is not a rationalist system, but one that respects mystery and paradox at its core. To make this point, Gregory employed the use of paradox throughout his Poemata Arcana and Orations to show the compelling and mysterious para-logic of Christian orthodoxy.

In his Christmas Homily of 380 AD in Constantinople, Gregory addresses the topic of the Incarnation directly, preaching the fullness of the Nicene faith in a city that had long been dominated by Arianism. He begins by articulating a definition of God, not as a solitary monad but as the self-existent Sea of Being:

“For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only contemplated by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily, not by His Essence, but by what is about Him (His energies).”[1]

This passage is significant on several levels. For Gregory, God is not ‘a being’ or ‘an entity,’ but something far greater: the sum of all Being, Being itself. Gregory emphasises his commitment to monotheism here, but also his respect for the unknowability of God, whose essence cannot be penetrated by the human intellect (as Arius and Eunomius claimed to do with logic and rational argument). For Gregory, the divine Essence can only be known by “what is about Him, His energies” referring to God’s acts and works (energeia), his self-revelation in Christ and the Holy Spirit in the course of human history. Gregory therefore does not aim to unpack the mystery of God with logic, but takes revelation as his starting point.

Having established his view of God, Gregory proceeds to outlines the metaphysics of the Incarnation as follows:

“The Word of God Himself — Who is before all worlds, the Invisible, the Incomprehensible, the Bodiless, Beginning of Beginning, the Light of Light, […] the Father’s Definition and Word — came to His own Image, and took on Him flesh for the sake of our flesh, and mingled Himself with an intelligent soul for my soul’s sake, purifying like by like; and in all points except sin was made man. […] He came forth then as God with that which He had assumed, One Person in two Natures, Flesh and Spirit, of which the latter deified the former.”[2]

Typical of Gregory’s style is his tendency to combine doxology, or praise, with intricate theological metaphysics. We see here the emphasis on Christ’s existence “before all words,” (an important distinction, as we will see below) who in the Incarnation became “One Person in two Natures, Flesh and Spirit, of which the latter deified the former.”

In a motif that characterises his theology, Gregory then uses contrasts of opposites to show the Incarnation of Jesus to be a wondrous mystery:

“O new commingling; O strange conjunction; the Self-Existent comes into being, the Uncreated is created, That which cannot be contained is contained, by the intervention of an intelligent soul, mediating between the Deity and the corporality of the flesh. And He Who gives riches, becomes poor, for He assumes the poverty of my flesh, that I may assume the richness of His Godhead. He that is full empties Himself, for He empties Himself of His glory for a short while, that I may have a share in His Fullness.”[3]

Again, Gregory uses paradox to highlight the contrasting opposites that are at the heart of his theology. His aim is not to show that the Incarnation is illogical, as Arius claimed, but that God’s revelation in the story and person of Jesus reveals a grand mystery, with the union of opposites at its centre and in which opposites are reconciled. The most powerful and illustrative example of this is found in his poem On the Son:

“He was mortal, yet God!
Of the seed of David,
but still the moulder of Adam’s form!
He bore flesh, but existed outside a body!
He is Son of a mother, yet she is a virgin!
He was subject to limitation, yet beyond measure!
A manger received Him,
while Magi were led by a star as they came bearing gifts
and bending to their knees in worship!
As a mortal man he came to the struggle,
yet unconquered he prevailed over the Tempter in the threefold conflict!
Food was laid before Him,
yet it was He who fed thousands and turned water into wine!
He was baptised,
but Himself cleansed sins and was proclaimed Son of the Eternal
by the thundering voice of the Spirit!
As a human being He took sleep,
while as God he lulled the sea to sleep!
He bent His knees in weariness,
but to the knees of the palsied he restored strength!
He prayed,
yet who was it who heard the supplications of the weak?
He was both sacrifice and High Priest,
an offeror of sacrifice — yet God!
He dedicated His blood to God,
and cleansed the whole world!
Even when a cross raised Him up,
it was sin which was fixed by its nails!”[4]

In these lines, we see that the whole of Jesus’ earthly existence and ministry was a story of paradox, a uniting of opposites, a reconciling of difference. Arius’ attempt to create a coherent, logical system is therefore shown to be misguided. At the heart of the story of Jesus is a unitive overcoming of opposites; a paradox that reconciles and redeems.

Metaphysics of the Trinity: Equality and Relationality

The Cappadocians not only staunchly defended the divinity of the Son and the Spirit, but also articulated a coherent theology of the Triune God. They introduced a distinction in God between essence, ousia, and person, hypostasis, making it possible for them to describe God as three divine persons united in one essence, whose inner life is relationality and harmony.

Gregory, in his poetry and orations, stresses that the Trinity is not three Gods, nor is it just three temporary manifestations, but three equal, co-eternal divine persons whose essence is one. This is seen in his poem On the Spirit, where he writes,

“There exists a single nature, beyond measuring, uncreated, timeless, excellent, free and to be worshipped equally, One God in His three gleaming facets, keeping the universe on its whirling course.”[5]

For Gregory, both the equality of the divine persons and the relations between them were of paramount importance. In his poem On the Son, Gregory describes the Second Person of the Trinity as follows: “The Word of God, the timeless Son, the Image of the Original, a nature equal to His who begot Him.”[6] For Gregory, the Father’s begetting of the Son in timeless eternity is critical, as he aims to distinguish the Father’s begetting of the Son from an act of ‘creation,’ which occurs in time. He writes,

“If time precedes my human existence, time is not prior to the Word whose Begetter is timeless. When there existed the Father who is without beginning, then there also existed the Son of the Father, having that Father as His timeless beginning, as light originates from that beautiful great circle of the sun.”[7]

Gregory is at pains to show that, although the Son is begotten of the Father, this does not imply a lower status compared to the Father:

“But if it is a great thing for the Father to have no point of origin for his noble Godhead, it is no lesser glory for the revered Offspring of the great Father to come from such a root.”[8]

What distinguishes the divine persons of the Trinity are therefore not orders of hierarchy, but their relations to each other. In a development that broke with the earlier priority of substance, Gregory and the Cappadocians made relationality and personhood, rather than substance, the primary ontological categories. God exists first and foremost as relational personhood (someone toward another) in timeless eternity, rather than as a solitary monadic substance (something in and of itself). Personhood, being-in-relation-to-another, thus became the ‘ultimate originating principle of reality.’[9] This relational, self-giving orientation towards the Other was thus presumed to be God’s motivation for God’s act of creating the world, as Gregory elsewhere writes, “self-contemplation alone could not satisfy Goodness [i.e., God], but Good must be poured out and go forth beyond Itself to multiply the objects of Its beneficence.”[10]

Equality and relationality of persons thus became central to the trinitarian position, in contrast to the theology of Arius and Eunomius, who argued that the essential characteristic of God is separation and unrelatedness. According to Gregory and the other Cappadocians, the Trinity is not a hierarchy of subordination, but an equal communion of interrelated persons. The Father ‘generates’ the Son in eternity, the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds’ from the Father, while all Three encircle and interweave one another. God’s inner identity is thus a perfect society, a communion of personal relationality.

Deification, or ‘Becoming God’

In addition to their trinitarian theology, the Cappadocians also contributed to an understanding of salvation as a process of deification, or ‘theosis’, literally, ‘becoming God.’ Gregory of Nazianzus was the first Christian theologian to use the word theosis, literally ‘becoming God,’ a stronger expression that the more cautious theopoeisis (‘being made into a god’) used earlier by Clement and Athanasius of Alexandria.[11]

Throughout Gregory’s writing he refers explicitly to ‘becoming God,’ as in the line of the poem On the Son, “Let us bow in awe before the mighty Spirit, who is God in Heaven […] and who in this world makes me God.”[12] By the process of deification, the human soul is drawn into participation into the inner life of the Trinity by grace, through the power of the Holy Spirit, “becoming (one with) God.”

In his Christmas sermon, he proclaims, “it is this which we are celebrating today, the Coming of God to Man, that we might go forth, or rather (for this is the more proper expression) that we might go back to God.”[13] And later, as we have already seen, he says “He [Christ] assumes the poverty of my flesh, that I may assume the richness of His Godhead,”[14] and in his poem On the Son he asks rhetorically how we ought to “hereafter become God through the suffering of Christ”[15] if we deny Christ’s divinity. For Gregory, salvation is not simply a matter of ‘getting into heaven,’ but an ontological sharing in the divine life itself — insofar as this is possible for us creatures.

At the same time, Gregory’s concept of deification is deeply connected to the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. God does not simply ‘reabsorb’ creation back into Godself, as in the divine ‘exit-and-return’ of Neoplatonism. For Gregory, we are able to return to God precisely because Jesus has put on human nature in its entirety, “purifying like by like” and “the latter being deified by the former.”[16] In his Fourth Theological Oration, Gregory says,

“He [Jesus] was actually subject as a slave to flesh, to birth, and to our human experiences; for our liberation, held captive as we are by sin, he was subject to all that he saved. What does the lowliness of Man possess higher than involvement with God, than being made God as a result of this intermingling?”[17]

For Gregory, therefore, the human condition is transformed by its intermingling with the divine nature through the Incarnation of the Son. Only because Jesus was “subject to all that he saved,” have the horizons of the human condition been opened up to the possibility of our deification.

Conclusion

Gregory stands out in the history of early Christianity for his brilliance as a thinker and influence as a Church leader who oversaw the finalisation of orthodox Christian theology. As a theologian, Gregory employed his unparalleled rhetorical talents to show how the Christian mystery is, at its heart, a story of reconciliation and (re-)union between contrasting opposites. His theology is firmly founded in the Incarnation of Christ, whose intermingling with human nature constitutes the very foundation of our salvation and deification.

Furthermore, Gregory and the Cappadocians revolutionised Christian metaphysics by putting personhood and relationality at the heart of the divine essence. The implications of this trinitarian theology are again coming to be appreciated in contemporary theology. If God’s essence is interpersonal, self-giving love, this has significant consequences for humanity made in the image and likeness of God. Relationality, not individual autonomy (or distant self-sufficiency), is primary in God, and as persons made in the image of God and called to share God’s life, we fulfil our deepest calling through loving, equal and self-giving relations with each other, in communion, in community. This insight forms the basis of ‘social trinitarianism’ of Leonardo Boff and John Zizoulas, and the feminist egalitarianism of Catherine LaCugna. Other modern theologians such as Christos Yannaras and Sarah Coakley have argued for the importance of recovering the theology of the Cappadocians for a renewed understanding of personhood, desire and gender.[18]

When I first encountered Gregory as an 18 year-old, I was deeply impressed by his brilliant use of paradox in presenting the mystery of the incarnate Son of God. In more recent years, the Cappadocian vision of relationality and personhood at the centre of God’s inner life has shaped how I view ethics, human nature and society. I hope that through this article I have managed to pass on some of the same excitement that has made me a fan of the Theologian to this day.

Sources / Further Reading

Frances E. Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and its Background, Baker Academic, 2010.

John Behr, The Formation of Christian Theology Vol. 2: The Nicene Faith, Part Two: The Holy Trinity, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.

Catherine Mowry LaCugna, “God in Communion With Us: The Trinity” in Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective (Lacugna, ed.), HarperCollins, 1993.

Gregory of Nazianzus. On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius (Popular Patristics Series), Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Festal Orations (Popular Patristics Series), Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press: 2008.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Poemata Arcana, translated by D.A. Sykes, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1997.

Athanasius Iskander, “Theosis and Theopoesis,” https://www.academia.edu/9909177/Theopoiesis_and_Theosis

The following are either essays about Gregory, or direct reproductions of his texts, from Fr Aiden Kimel on his blog Eclectic Orthodoxy:
St Gregory of Nazianzus: Oration 38
St Gregory the Theologian and the One God: Part 1
St Gregory the Theologian and the One God: Part 2
St Gregory the Theologian and the One God: Part 3
A Christmas Sermon of St Gregory

[1] Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 38 ‘On the Nativity of Christ,’ in Festal Orations (Popular Patristics Series), Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press: 2008.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Gregory of Nazianzus, “On the Son,” from Poemata Arcana, translated by D.A. Sykes, Clarendon Press: 1997.

[5] Nazianzus, “On the Spirit,” Poemata Arcana.

[6] Nazianzus, “On the Son,” Poemata Arcana.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Catherine Morwy LaCugna, “God in Communion with Us: The Trinity” in Freeing Theology, LaCugna (ed.), Harper Collins: 1994, pp. 86–87

[10] Nazianzus, Oration 38 ‘On the Nativity of Christ’

[11] Athanasius Iskander, “Theosis and Theopoesis,” https://www.academia.edu/9909177/Theopoiesis_and_Theosis

[12] Nazianzus, “On the Spirit,” Poemata Arcana.

[13] Nazianzus, Oration 38 ‘On the Nativity of Christ’

[14] Ibid.

[15] Nazianzus, “On the Son,” Poemata Arcana.

[16] Nazianzus, Oration 38 ‘On the Nativity of Christ.’

[17] Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration ‘On the Son,’ in On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press Popular Patristic Series, 2002.

[18] See, for example: Yannaras (2008), Person and Eros, LaCugna (1991), God With Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, or Coakley (2015) The New Asceticism.