Gregory of Nazianzen (Part One)
This essay will attempt to outline Gregory’s Christology in
his other writings by examining several key themes: illumination and
purification, theosis, impassibility, and Christ’s place and relation to the
Trinity. In outlining these themes we
will by no means avoid references to the Theological
Orations, yet it is hoped that by supplementing these themes with several
of his other works including Epistles
101-102 and the Epiphany Orations,
along with commentary from secondary literature we will arrive at a much more
robust picture of Gregory’s Christology and, given its central significance for
all of his works, his corpus as a
whole. The themes treated here are by no
means discrete, but should be seen as aspectual or different approaches to a
single theme. Moreover, going though
this short reflection essay, while not using modern appropriations of Gregory as
a primary lens or jumping off point, as themes in Gregory are elaborated brief
examples of modern misunderstandings of Gregory will be referenced in order
both to get a clearer picture of what Gregory is not saying, but also in hopes that future appropriation of
Gregory’s work for constructive projects in systematics can be opened past
cliché and superficial interaction.
I.
The Unity of
Christ, the Believer.
As is well known, one of the main
features of Gregory’s theology is the representation of Christ via the
framework of soteriology: he became man, assumed our essence, in order to heal
it. Hence it is often assumed as a
corollary that Gregory represents a fully formed anti-Apollinarian Christology,
which affirms the full extent of Christ’s humanity. Famously Gregory himself wrote “that which is
not assumed has not been healed; but that which is united to God is also being
saved,” (Ep. 101.32) and also “so
that by the same one, who is a completely human being and also God, a complete
humanity, which had fallen under sin, might be created anew,” (Ep. 101.13, 15). It thus seems a fairly natural conclusion to
see in these statements an at least tacit rejection of Apollinarianism. However as Beeley notes, while there are moments
of anti-Apollinarian polemic contained within his theology “there are very few
passages before the end of his career in which Gregory explicitly argues that
Christ is fully human” and that ‘Gregory typically assumes Christ’s humanity
and gives it little positive explanation.”[1] That is to say, the anti-Apollinarian framework
is a true but not very profound insight into Gregory’s Christology, which for
the most part became
anti-Apollinarian due to themes developed over the course of his theological
writings and ministry in Constantinople.
“He, frankly, finds the whole question [of the displacement of the human
mind in Christ by the Logos] ridiculous.”[2] As Gregory himself writes “Whoever hopes in a
mindless person is mindless himself!” (Ep.
101.32)
By redirecting the discussion away from a primary lens of
anti-Apollinarianism, Beeley wants to redraw our attention. Rather than viewing Gregory’s Christology by discussion of the standard textbook
questions of the technical interactions of the two natures in Christ, “[we
should examine how] Gregory understands [Christ’s identity] to be governed by
the economy of salvation viewed as a whole.”[3] Thus Beeley wants to resituate several
accounts of Gregory’s Christology[4] by
outlining how “he views the identity of Jesus Christ and the salvation that
stems from him chiefly through what we could call a narrative, economic
framework.”[5] This is because Beeley sees (rightfully, in
my opinion and limited interaction with Gregory’s texts) that Gregory’s
Christology is focused very clearly on the divinity of Christ, not on how two
natures are equally combined in one person per se.
This narrative-framework approach
is important because, without displacing completely the two natures discussion,
it allows one to focus more on the total thematic image of Gregory’s corpus,
and more importantly how theosis
soteriology provided impetus for his Christological development. This also accounts better for the historical
context, as Beeley notes “the main question in the late-fourth-century debates
concerned the exact nature of the divine being who was made flesh in Jesus, and
consequently what that nature means for the identity of Christ and the life of
his followers.” To focus mainly on the
two-natures dilemma is to ignore “that even the most extreme anti-Nicene theologians…believed
that the Son of God…became flesh for the salvation of the human race…in other
words, [they all] envision some kind of incarnation.” Hence at this point the polemical context
points less to a resolution of the duo
physis Christology so much as it revolves around clarification of Deity and
its relation to soteriology itself.[6]
Hence given that Gregory’s
Soteriology and Christology are so intertwined, and given our limited space, we
will deal with both here, outlining their material content and
interconnections. The first and most
important thing to note on their relation is that the doctrine of God, and the
doctrine of how we know God, are
inseparable—so that, in effect “a cardinal principle of his theological system
is his repeated insistence that the knowledge of God is inseparably related to
the condition of the human knower.”[7] Lewis Ayres thus indicates that of supreme
importance for Gregory is that the doctrine of God is not mere knowledge “but
involves refocusing the gaze of the mind away from its obsession with the
material world.”[8] Thus theologia
is not merely or primarily a discursive enterprise, as the modern projects of
theology tend to be, but is tied in to our salvation and spiritual formation itself.[9] It is a process of purification leading to
illumination. One knows God by being purified; and by being purified one
increases knowledge of God. “Pro-Nicenes
wish Christians to see themselves embedded within a cosmos that is also a
semiotic system that reveals the omnipresent creating consubstantial Word. In our state of ignorance one of the tasks of
the Christian life is the relearning of the language of creation in the Word.”[10] The question thus must be: how does this take
place?
A good place to begin would be in a
passage in Orations 20.12, Gregory
writes “Approach God by the way you live, for what is pure can only be acquired
through purification. Do you want to
become a theologian someday, to be worthy of the Divinity? Keep the commandments. Make your way forward through observing the
precepts, for Christian practice is the stepping stone to contemplation.” Immediately we must recognize that, if
practice is the stepping stone to contemplation, what practices are warranted?
While Gregory lists many things like meditation, prayer, witness, and
praise (Or. 27.4) or “a contrite
heart and the sacrifice of praise,” (16.2) or the casting off of pagan ritual
and the embracing of Christian life (38.4-5; 39.1-7; 40.3-4) the ultimate
source of all these things is the economy of Christ. Hence in the Epiphany Orations Gregory writes “This is our feast, which we
celebrate today: the coming of God to the human race, so that we might make our
way to him…putting off the old humanity and putting on the new…for I must
experience beautiful conversion.” (38.4)
And earlier: “Christ is called Sanctification because he is purity, so
that what is pure may be filled with pureness,” (30.20) and “God causes the
entire process of purification, through which we are divinized” (38.7). The list of citations from Gregory could go
on indefinitely,[11] but for
our purposes the point is well taken that our salvation is wrought by our
knowledge of God and increasing purification, the infinitely concentrated point
of which is the figure of Jesus Christ: in short, theosis.[12]
Hence one can see why Beeley places
an emphasis on the entire economy of salvation, rather than focusing on
Gregory’s concept of the two natures per se (though he has an extended
discussion on this as well):[13]
if “Christian practice is the stepping stone to contemplation [of God]” (Or. 20.12) then certainly that practice
must be an imitation of Christ, an imitation of Christ “bearing and enduring
all things” for our salvation (Or
37.1, 4) and the historically iterable patterns of a human life. Moreover there is another side to this logic
in the idea of theosis than pure
imitation, namely theoria or
contemplation (for as he said elsewhere “unreasoning practice and impractical
reason are equally deficient” Or.
43.43): contemplation of that which is inherently infinite and invisible is
made possible because Christ is the eternal word of God, homoousios with the Father: “O new Mixture! O Unexpected blending!
The One Who Is has come to be, the Uncreated One is created, the Uncontained
One is contained!” (Or 38.13).
In fact, utilizing Moses ascent of
Sinai as an image of contemplation, when Gregory, like Moses “sees the hind
parts of God sheltered by the rock,” that rock is, in fact, Christ (Or. 28.3), namely He who makes
contemplation of the divine possible.
Thus in a paradoxical way, the limited man Jesus is the infinite Creator
God, the tangible man from Nazareth the Logos who was with God in the
beginning. Hence Gregory elaborates on
the kenosis of Christ in an extended
way since it is of extreme importance to his idea of theosis that the invisible be present visibly in Christ, that our
activities and contemplation could somehow be filtered and focused through the
visage of Christ, who is, importantly, fully
God.[14] Kenosis
as such is not a diminution as it became
in 19th century German kenoticism, but a condescension (37.3) assuming the poverty of the flesh
(38.13) in order to become comprehensible and give care and healing to the
creatures (37.1). This is kenosis by
addition, so to speak: “taking the form of a servant” is here the assumption of
an additional state besides divinity.
Nor is this merely a metaphysical technicality. It is important to emphasize in this, says
Gregory, that the Son of Man for our sake neither changed nor stripped himself
of his divinity (Carmen lugubre
1.1.2.60-61)[15] so that
it is indeed God in the flesh with
whom we have accord. Thus as Gavrilyuk has recently argued in The Suffering of the Impassible God[16]
it seems odd that the development of two-natures Christology from concepts like
Gregory’s account of kenosis should
be attributed to Hellenistic philosophy when it appears to be bringing out the
inner logic of the prologue of John, that it was indeed the Logos qua Logos who tabernacled among us.[17] Not to mention the two-natures Christology is
an absolutely vital outworking of theosis
soteriology.[18] Having seen the integral link between
Christology and Soteriology in Gregoy, two other things remain to discuss: the
actual unity of Christ, and Christ’s relation to the Trinity. We will end this section with the former, and
the next section shall briefly speak of the latter, in order to gain a more
fully orbed view of Gregory’s entire Christology.
In discussing the unity of Christ
we run into an immediate oddity in Gregory’s discussion, in that he seems to
somewhat uncritically utilize terms like “blending” (sunkrasis) which to post-Chalcedon ears sounds like the path
towards creating a tertium quid. In Or.
29.19 for example he writes “because he took upon himself your thickness associating
with flesh…since human existence was blended
with God and he was born as a single entity…” and later “he designed to be made
one thing out of two. For both are God,
that which assumed and that which was assumed, the two natures meeting in one
thing. But not two sons: let us not give
a false account of the blending” (37.2) and in Epistle 101.28 “the two are one thing through the blending.” In this manner Pannenberg notes somewhat
critically that despite “the Cappadocians explicitly striving to express the
distinction of the two natures as well as their unity,” nonetheless “they still
conceived this unity rather carelessly as a mixture.”[19] Despite the fact that Beeley agrees with
Pannenberg that the term “blended” is unfortunate and was later to be rejected
by Chalcedon,[20]
nonetheless the term as it stands is nuanced by Gregory’s theology in a more or
less unobjectionable manner, and he notes we must proceed with caution as
“Gregory has often been misunderstood on…whether there is a fundamental unity
or duality in Christ.”[21] Repeatedly Gregory mentions that Christ is
“one and the same” Son of God before and after the incarnation (Ep 101.3) implying the non-compromising
of deity. On the other hand Gregory
writes “Apply the loftier passages to the Divinity, to the nature that is
superior to passivities and the body; apply the lowlier passages to the
composite One, to him who for your sake empties himself and became flesh and
(to say just as well) was made human, and afterwards was also exalted” (29.18). This doesn’t pull too far in the other
direction, however, by attributed two subjects in Christ. As Beeley notes[22]
proper exegesis of this passage in comparison with other instances “the
composite One” is actually a reference to the whole Christ, so that what is
occurring in this passage is a unity and distinction simultaneously. “In other words, Gregory’s rule of
interpretation [communicatio idiomatum] is as much a definition of unity and
unchanging identity of the Son of God…as it is a distinction between those
states, in keeping with his narrative statements of the divine economy.”[23] In this way Gregory wants to secure both in
order to continue the mechanisms of deification which are underwriting his
Christology, and secure our salvation.
Before we turn to the final section we should note in
conclusion how this plays out on the cross.
It has become something of a cottage industry to turn away from
Patristic accounts in order to talk about God abandoning God on the cross, or
of the suffering of God.[24] This of course would be nauseating to
Gregory. Yet simultaneous it is humorous
to note that his account almost stands as a rhetorical attack accounting for
Patristic detractors seventeen hundred years later. When Jesus on the cross cries out “My God, my
God, look upon me, why have you forsaken me,” he argues that this does not
indicate that God has abandoned him, as if God was afraid of suffering, rather
in a point of complete union he has “made our thoughtlessness and waywardness
his own” (30.5). As Beeley puts it
“Jesus’ cry of abandonment in other words does not reflect the absence of God
in suffering, but God’s inclusion of our abandonment within his saving embrace
and healing presence amidst death.”[25] Thus shockingly Gregory notes the necessity
and awesome nature of the Christian faith “to see God crucified,”[26]
(43.64) and indeed “we needed an incarnate God, a God put to death, so that we
might live, and we were put to death with him” (45.28-29). In fact it seems in a very real way Gregory
is arguing that God is so great as to be able to humble himself to the point of
human death for our salvation, and it is precisely God’s character and ability
to do this. Which leads us to the final
section: understanding Christ in relation to the infinite Trinity.
[1] Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the
Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008) p.127
[4] For example J.N.D Kelly Early Christian Doctrines revised ed.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1978) pp.297ff; Aloys Grillmeier Christ in Christian Tradition: From the
Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451) 2nd ed. (Atlanta: John Knox
Press, 1975) pp.369ff. Beeley doesn’t
consider these accounts wrong, but by placing an emphasis in the wrong place
they truncate the discussion of Gregory’s overall theology.
[5] Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus p.122.
[6] Ibid
p.124-125. While I do not want to get
too far afield in the secondary sources (any more than I already have) I think
that while Beeley’s ultimate position is correct, he dismisses Grillmeier’s
analysis too quickly. This is because,
as Grillmeier argues, the relationship between the Logos and the sarx was
actually a key axis for the Arian revision and understanding of the Logos as a
creature (Christ in Christian Tradition
pp.246-248) hence one could surmise that the relationship of the two natures is
seen by Grillmeier as also key to analysis in all further discussions. Grillmeier (p.380) even acknowledges, as does
Beeley, that divinization and soteriology are the ultimate driving engines of
Gregory’s Christology.
[7] Beeley Gregory of Nazianzus p.61.
[8] Lewis Ayres Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth
Century Trinitarian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)
p.330f.
[9] As a personal aside it is
interesting to me how different this is from modern theology. Even when we have aisles of books on
Christian spiritual devotion dedicated to improving “our heart” so we can have
both head and heart knowledge, I cant help but feel that they are part of the
dichotomy they attempt to overcome themselves.
Theology itself is clearly, for Gregory, encompassing of the entire
spiritual discipline and life of a Christian.
Hence Gregory’s focus on theology and/as practice makes me wonder if our
devotional sections, committed to filling the niches of “womens” or “mens” or
“sports” or what-have-you in order to improve spiritual discipline, if these
niches are not themselves made possible by a psychologizing of spirituality
that would have been completely alien to Gregory, and are thus perpetuating,
despite their best intentions, aspects that should never have been
dichotomized.
[11] c.f. Beeley pp.63-115; Ayres
Nicaea and Its Legacy pp.330-333.
[12] Normal Russel The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek
Patristic Tradition (New York: Oxford Press, 2006) pp.213-225,
341-344. Both Russel and Beeley point
out that the term “theosis” was coined by Gregory, which of course was highly
influential on the Byzantine tradition especially through ps. Dionysius the Aeriopagite and Maximus the Confessor.
[13] Beeley Gregory of Nazianzus p.128ff.
[14] At this point Beeley and
Ayres have a different interpretation than Russel. Both Beeley (Gregory of Nazianzus p.118f) and Ayres (Nicaea and its Legacy p.330f) argue that theosis indicates an actual participation in the divine being,
though of course with appended nuances.
Russel (The Doctrine of
Deification pp.213-214, 222-225) however speaks of Gregory’s doctrine as
“purely metaphorical” and as distinct in this way from Athanasius’ account in
that Gregory apparently doesn’t have any realistic participation in the divine
being in mind. Beeley criticizes Russel
in this sense for ignoring how theosis
and illumination are tied together to participation in the Trinity (Gregory of Nazianzus p.119 n.21). While I hesitate to throw my hat in among the
heavy hitters, I nonetheless have to agree with Beeley and Ayres and note I was
a little confused as to how Russel came to this conclusion, which apparently
stems from several of Gregory’s statements that we do not “become God in the
proper sense of the word” (genesthai
kuriws theos).
[15] I was unable to get a hold
of Carmen Lugubre, so all references
shall cite also the secondary source they are appropriated from In this case I owe the reference to Beeley Gregory of Nazianzus p.126.
[16] Paul Gavrilyuk The Suffering of the Impassible God: The
Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[17] Part of the difference is
the rise of univocal language coupled with extreme rise of dialectical logic in
Schelling and Hegel. Whereas in “ousia”
language something must be itself to (tautologically) be itself (and so two natures remain unblended, unmixed, undivided,
etc…) in dialectical logic, per Hegel especially, something can be itself by
negating itself and then overcoming the difference in another negation. In other words “identity” can supposedly on
this account maintain itself across opposing states of being, so the Logos literally becomes man but as an identity
which constitutes God’s identity, he is still God despite the difference in
being. This of course, to its opponents,
seems untenable. On the other hand
dialectical theologians (like Jenson, Jüngel, Moltmann, and to a limited
extent, Pannenberg) argue that this allows for better sense of the very
historical Jesus without what they consider to be the “mystification” of his
human person by positing a Logos substance behind the man. In Pannenberg’s helpful summary: “The formula
o the true divinity and true humanity of Jesus begins with the fact that one
describes one and the same person, the man Jesus of Nazareth from different
points of view. The unity of the
concrete person Jesus of Nazareth is given, and both things are to be said
about this one person: he is God and he is man.
The formula about the two natures, on the contrary, does not take the
concrete unity of the historical man Jesus as its given point of departure, but
rather the difference between the divine and human, creaturely being in
general. Certainly the Fathers at
Chalcedon also were concerned ultimately about true divinity and true humanity
with regard to the historical Jesus Christ…This intention, however, did not
make itself adequately felt in the Chalcedonian formulation as was the case in
the controversies preceding it.
Throughout, the contradiction between God and creature is the logical
starting point for thought, from this perspective the attempt was made to
understand the unity of the two in Jesus…the pattern of thought thus moves in
the opposite direction from the formula vere
dues, vere homo. Jesus now appears
as a being bearing and uniting two opposed substances in himself. From this conception all the insoluble
problems of the doctrine of the two natures result.” Wolfhart Pannenberg Jesus: God and Man 2nd Ed.
trans. Lewis L. Wilkens and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1977) p.284. Precisely as this man, as a reciprocating identity
essential to God the Father, he remains part of the Divine identity (to use
Jenson’s phrase) according to the revised approach. Whether or not this is tenable is the divide
between more classical and the revisionist theologians. This is, to my mind the major difference (dialectical-univocal vs. substantialist or
analogical) between some revisionist Trinitarians and the Patristics.
[18] This can be seen in its
fullest form in Maximus the Confessor’s absolutely unswerving commitment to dyothelitism, for if the divine does not
assume it in the incarnation, it is not healed.
[19] Pannenberg Jesus: God and Man p.297
[20] Beeley Gregory Nazianzus p.131
[24] Jurgen Moltmann The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as
the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology trans. R. A. Wilson and
John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993 ed.) e.g. p.244; The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of
God trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993) e.g.
p.23
[25] Beeley Gregory of Nazianzus p.138.
[26] Ironic, of course, because
Moltmann’s major book goes by precisely this title yet it is a supposed
overturning of the tradition.
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