Episcopi, Confessoris, et Ecclesiæ Doctoris
“Theologi” cognomento
Festum: die IX Maii (in Calendario Romano antiquo)
I. Nativitas et Origo
Saint Gregory was born around the year 329 in Arianzus, a small estate near the town of Nazianzus in Cappadocia—that fertile soil of Asia Minor which, in the fourth century, brought forth so glorious a harvest of holy bishops and theologians that the Church still speaks of the “Cappadocian Fathers.” His father, also called Gregory, had been a member of the Hypsistarian sect but, through the prayers and gentle persuasion of his wife Saint Nonna, was converted to the true Faith and afterwards consecrated Bishop of Nazianzus. His mother Nonna, a woman of singular piety and a saint in her own right, had consecrated her son to God before his birth, in imitation of holy Anna who offered Samuel to the Lord. He had a brother, Saint Cæsarius, a renowned physician at the imperial court, and a sister, Saint Gorgonia, both numbered among the saints—a family wholly given to Christ.
II. Studia et Amicitia cum Sancto Basilio
The young Gregory’s intellectual gifts were extraordinary, and he pursued the highest learning of his age. He studied at Cæsarea in Cappadocia, then at Cæsarea in Palestine, then at Alexandria, and finally at Athens, where he remained for many years and attained mastery of rhetoric, philosophy, and the liberal arts.
It was at Athens that he formed his celebrated friendship with Saint Basil the Great—a friendship which the Church has ever held up as a model of holy love between souls united in the pursuit of God. Gregory himself wrote of those years with great tenderness:
“We were not only fellow-students, but we knew one another’s hearts. We had all things in common, and a single soul, as it were, bound together two distinct bodies. We were impelled by an equal hope in an object the most desirable—learning. Two ways were known to us: the first leading to our sacred temples, the other to secular teachers.”
Together they renounced the vanities of the world and resolved to consecrate themselves wholly to Christ.
III. Vita Monastica et Sacerdotium
Returning to Cappadocia, Gregory was baptized (for in those days the baptism of catechumens was often deferred until adulthood) and withdrew with Saint Basil to a hermitage in Pontus, by the river Iris. There the two friends devoted themselves to prayer, fasting, manual labour, and the study of Sacred Scripture, particularly through the works of Origen, from which they compiled the celebrated Philocalia.
Gregory’s contemplative soul desired nothing more than this hidden life. But his aged father, the Bishop of Nazianzus, compelled him to receive priestly ordination around the year 361—an act which Gregory at first received as a kind of violence done to his soul. He fled briefly back to Pontus, but returned in obedience and penned his celebrated Apologetic Oration on His Flight (Oration II), one of the great treatises on the priesthood, which Saint John Chrysostom would later imitate in his own De Sacerdotio.
IV. Episcopatus et Certamen pro Fide
Around the year 372, Saint Basil, then Archbishop of Cæsarea and engaged in fierce combat against the Arian Emperor Valens, consecrated Gregory bishop of the small town of Sasima—a poor and contentious place which Gregory never truly governed, and which became a small wound in the friendship of the two saints. Gregory afterwards assisted his aged father in the see of Nazianzus.
But it was at Constantinople, in the year 379, that Gregory entered upon the great work for which God had prepared him. The imperial city had for forty years been almost entirely in the hands of the Arians, who denied the consubstantial divinity of the Son. The tiny Catholic remnant, scarcely a flock, summoned Gregory to be their pastor. He came humbly, lodging in a private house which he converted into a chapel and named Anastasia, “the Resurrection”—for there, as he said, the Faith of Nicæa rose again from the dead.
In that little oratory he preached his Five Theological Orations, which won him from antiquity itself the title of “the Theologian”—a name the Greek Church has bestowed upon only three: Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Gregory Nazianzen, and Saint Symeon the New. In these orations he expounded with unsurpassed clarity and majesty the doctrine of the Holy Trinity—one Substance in three Persons—and especially the divinity of the Holy Ghost, which the Macedonians denied. From him the Church learned to confess with sharp precision:
“There are Three, but the Godhead is One. The Three are One in Godhead, and the One Three in personalities.”
He suffered persecution from heretics, even violence (a mob once stoned him at the altar), and slander from rivals, but he continued to preach with serene fortitude.
V. Concilium Constantinopolitanum
In 381, the Emperor Theodosius the Great, having restored the Catholic Faith, convoked the Second Œcumenical Council at Constantinople. Gregory presided over a portion of its sessions and was confirmed as Archbishop of the imperial city. But when factional disputes arose concerning the canonical regularity of his transfer from Sasima, Gregory—desiring peace above all and weary of contention—rose before the assembled Fathers and offered his resignation in words of magnificent humility:
“If I am the cause of the storm, cast me into the sea, that you may be delivered from this tempest. I was not happy when I ascended the throne, and I descend it willingly. My infirm health counsels me also this course. I have only one debt to pay: death; that I owe to God.”
The Council had already, in great measure under his guidance, confirmed and expanded the Nicene Creed into the form we still recite at Mass—the Credo which proclaims the Holy Ghost to be “Lord and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father, Who together with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.”
VI. Ultimi Anni et Obitus
Gregory withdrew once more to the solitude he had always loved, retiring to his estate at Arianzus. There he gave himself to prayer, ascetic labour, and the composition of his Carmina—poems in classical Greek metre on theological, autobiographical, and moral subjects, which remain a treasure of Christian literature. He died about the year 390, full of years and merits, and was buried at Nazianzus. His relics were later translated to Constantinople, and afterwards a portion to Rome, where they rested in the Vatican Basilica until, in our own age, Pope John Paul II returned a portion to the Œcumenical Patriarchate.
VII. Doctrina et Doctoratus
Saint Gregory was numbered by the Church among the great Doctors of the East, alongside Saints Athanasius, Basil, and John Chrysostom. His writings comprise:
The Five Theological Orations, the most luminous patristic exposition of Trinitarian doctrine; Forty-five Orations on dogmatic, moral, and panegyrical subjects, including his famous funeral orations on Saint Basil and on his brother Cæsarius; numerous Letters, valuable for ecclesiastical history and spiritual direction; and his Poems, including the long autobiographical De Vita Sua.
Saint Jerome, who heard him preach at Constantinople, called him “vir eloquentissimus, præceptor meus, quo Scripturas explanante didici.”—”a most eloquent man, my teacher, by whose explanation of the Scriptures I learned.”
VIII. Sententiæ Selectæ
A few sayings of the Theologian, that the soul may take fire from his words:
“To know God is great; to be united with Him is greater; but to be deified by Him is greatest of all.”
“What was not assumed was not healed; but what was united to His Godhead is also saved.” (Against the Apollinarians—a dictum which became a watchword of orthodox Christology.)
“Give something, however small, to the one in need. For it is not small to one who has nothing. Neither is it small to God, if we have given what we could.”
IX. Lectio pro Imitatione
From the life of this great saint, the faithful soul may draw three principal lessons:
Primum, the love of solitude and contemplative prayer as the soil from which all true theology must spring. Gregory’s profound knowledge of God was not merely the fruit of erudition, but of long silence before the Divine Majesty.
Secundum, the duty of defending the Faith with courage, clarity, and charity, even amid persecution and slander. He stood almost alone in Constantinople against an overwhelming heresy and won the city back for orthodoxy by the power of the Word.
Tertium, the readiness to relinquish honours and dignities for the sake of peace in the Church. His humble resignation at Constantinople is a perpetual rebuke to clerical ambition and a model of true ecclesiastical detachment.
Oratio
Deus, qui pópulo tuo ætérnæ salútis beátum Gregórium minístrum tribuísti: præsta, quǽsumus; ut, quem Doctórem vitæ habúimus in terris, intercessórem habére mereámur in cælis. Per Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti, Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.
O God, who hast bestowed upon Thy people blessed Gregory to be a minister of eternal salvation: grant, we beseech Thee, that we who have had him as a Doctor of life upon earth, may deserve to have him as an intercessor in heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Should you wish to deepen your acquaintance with this Doctor of the Church, I would gently recommend reading first his Second Theological Oration, “On God,” which treats of the limits of human knowledge of the Divine Essence with sublime humility—a wholesome corrective to the rationalism of our age. Following this, the Fifth Theological Oration, “On the Holy Spirit,” remains the classical patristic defence of the Third Person’s divinity.
If this hagiography has stirred your soul, the Lives of the Saints learning path would carry you next to Saint Basil the Great, his beloved companion, and afterwards to Saint Gregory of Nyssa, that the threefold glory of the Cappadocians may be contemplated together. Alternatively, the Theology and Doctrine path would take up the Trinitarian doctrine which Gregory so magnificently expounded.
Sancte Gregóri Theologe, ora pro nobis.