Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop & Doctor of the Church
July 19 · d. 395
also known as Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Younger, The Father of Fathers
Gregory of Nyssa was the most philosophical and mystical of the three Cappadocian Fathers, the younger brother of Basil the Great and Macrina the Younger. Bishop of the small town of Nyssa, a defender of the full divinity of the Son and the Spirit at the Council of Constantinople in 381, he wrote some of the profoundest theology of the early church on the human person and the soul's endless ascent into God. The Seventh Ecumenical Council called him a Father of Fathers.
Gregory was born around the year 335 into the great Christian family of Cappadocia, in the Roman East, today central Turkey, the younger brother of Basil the Great and of their remarkable elder sister Macrina the Younger, who shaped them both. Unlike Basil, who studied at Athens, Gregory was schooled at home and set out first on a worldly path, as a teacher of rhetoric. The church drew him in slowly, and around the year 372 his brother Basil, locked in a struggle to defend the faith of Nicaea, made him bishop of Nyssa, an obscure little town, partly to gain an ally in the fight. Gregory was no politician, and under the Arian emperor Valens he was accused, deposed by a hostile synod, and driven into exile; only when Valens died was he restored to his see.
What he lacked in worldly skill he more than made for in depth of mind. After Basil's death in 379 Gregory stepped into the front rank of the church's teachers, and at the Council of Constantinople in 381, the council that completed the Nicene Creed, he was among those who secured the confession of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. The quarrel of that age can look like hairsplitting from a distance, but everything hung on it: if the Son and the Spirit were less than God, then it was not God who had come to save us, and the whole gospel failed. Gregory gave the church some of its surest language for holding that God is truly three and truly one.
But his genius ran deeper than controversy. He saw, more clearly than almost anyone before him, that the infinite God can never be possessed or mastered by the mind, that every concept we form of God, if we mistake it for God himself, becomes an idol; the modern theologian Jürgen Moltmann famously compressed Gregory's teaching into the saying that concepts create idols and only wonder comprehends anything. And because God is infinite, Gregory taught, the soul's journey into him never ends: there is no point at which we arrive and stop, only an endless growing from glory to glory, a doctrine he called perpetual progress and unfolded in his mystical reading of the Life of Moses. The soul that has come furthest is the one still most hungry for God. Even the resurrection he understood as a homecoming and a healing, "the re-constitution of our nature in its original form," in the words of his treatise On the Making of Man, translated by Henry Austin Wilson.
He died around the year 395, at the height of his powers, having outlived the brother and sister who taught him and carried their faith further than either. Where Basil built and governed and Macrina prayed, Gregory thought, and gave the church a vision of the Christian life as an unending ascent into a love that is always larger than we have yet found, a God we shall be discovering, joyfully, forever.
How we know Gregory is from his own large and well-preserved body of writing and from the records of his age, which makes him unusually solid ground for a figure of the fourth century. His works include the anti-Arian Against Eunomius, the Great Catechism, On the Making of Man, the Life of Moses, the homilies on the Song of Songs, the Life of Macrina, and the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, along with many letters and sermons; the acts of the Council of Constantinople in 381 and the writings of his brother Basil and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus fill in the rest. One caution belongs to an honest account: Gregory taught a form of universal restoration, the hope that in the end all rational creatures will be purified and brought home to God, a teaching the later church did not receive as doctrine, though it has never ceased to be debated. He was born about 335, made bishop of Nyssa by his brother around 372, and died about 395.
Gregory's feast is kept on July 19 in the Western calendar, together with his sister Macrina; the Eastern church commemorates him on January 10. He is honored as one of the three Cappadocian Fathers, with his brother Basil and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Seventh Ecumenical Council paid him the rare tribute of calling him a Father of Fathers. He is remembered above all for two great themes: the apophatic vision that God is met not in mastery but in a luminous darkness beyond all concepts, and the doctrine of perpetual progress, that the soul's growth into the infinite God has no end. With his brother and sister he belongs to the family that, in one generation, gave the church some of its deepest theology and holiest lives.
Further reading. Gregory's mystical masterwork is the Life of Moses; the standard English is the Paulist Classics of Western Spirituality translation by Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. His major dogmatic and ascetical works, including Against Eunomius, On the Making of Man, the Great Catechism, and On the Soul and the Resurrection, are gathered in the public-domain Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Anthony Meredith's Gregory of Nyssa is the most accessible modern introduction.
Online resources. The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers volume of Gregory's works is freely available at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and New Advent.
British (Received Pronunciation): Jürgen /ˈjɜːrɡən/
Almighty God, you gave your servant Gregory of Nyssa special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52