The ascents of Gregory
BIOGRAPHY
The ascents of Gregory The great St Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394), the most outstanding speculative thinker among the Greek Fathers between Origen and Maximus the Confessor, presents a more complex and perhaps sympathetic personality than do his great siblings Macrina and Basil.
Yet any attempt to discover the ground out of which his life arose runs up against the patchiness of the documentary record. We do not have the hundreds of personal letters that help us understand
Basil's course. No contemporary or friend wrote a synopsis of his life in an encomium or biography the way that Gregory Nazianzen did for Basil, or Gregory of Nyssa himself did for his sister Macrina, or Athanasius did for Antony of Egypt. Gregory's surviving works are not as rich in autobiographical passages as are Basil's letters and the long poems in which Nazianzen meditates on his own life. And often in the personal testimonies that do survive Gregory manages to reveal himself and yet remain somehow elusive.
This introductory biography will attempt to provide a reasonable chronology and historical context within which to situate Gregory's letters. Something more is also ventured, and that is, to suggest the personal ground out which the letters arose and to offer possible solutions to some opacities in the record. The scope of this book does not allow us to incorporate an exhaustive analysis of the progress of his thought, highly desirable though that would be. But we do hope to sketch a few aspects of his personal and spiritual development. A key that can help us to do that is his own idea of progressive spiritual 'ascents':
Those who are progressing from strength to strength, according to the prophetic blessing (Ps 84.7), are disposed in their hearts for noble ascents.
Whenever they lay hold of some good thought, they are led by it to a still loftier thought, which brings about for the soul an ascent on high. Thus he who ever stretches forward (Phil 3.13), shall never cease on the good road upward (cf. Ps 84.5), being guided through lofty thoughts to the apprehension of transcendent realities.1
1 tØn t«n Íperkeim°nvn katanÒhsin. The passage opens the Homily on the Sixth Psalm, GNO 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 187–193 at 187.
biography By carefully probing of the sources, it is possible to see Gregory's life falling naturally into several distinct periods, and to gain some sense of his spiritual progress—and dare we say on occasion regress— from one stage to the next. The outstanding thing is that though
Gregory's course does not immediately present us with the same straightforward and austere focus on spiritual realities as do his great siblings, yet advance in the spirit he did and very much so. Slowly at first, but steadily, all his setbacks, stubbornesses, ineptitudes and distresses became for him so many occasions of eventual spiritual breakthrough, through the grace which he mentions so often, the prayers of his parents (so he reports Macrina's view of it), the witness of his remarkable siblings, and most importantly his own choices for a generous response. Gifted with a keen intellect honed in rhetorical studies, Gregory emerged from a somewhat conflicted and selfish youth and young adulthood with a generous spirit which carried him far beyond his own natural bent to stay out of the religious and political fray and live a more cultured, contemplative, and dare one say, dilettante life. He exercised his freedom, which in the end was true freedom, not in protecting his own inclinations, but in bravely answering to what was asked of him, above all in service of the Faith and the Church. A man both culturally sophisticated and almost childlike in his responses at times, he was far from an unqualified success on the stage of the world. Nevertheless his resolute obedience to the call became for him personally a transforming path of virtue and of religious and intellectual development. In this way
Gregory made his gradual 'ascents' to transcendent realities. By his life's end, he attained a breathtaking spiritual momentum that surely carried him into that eternity of unceasing advance in God of which he spoke so passionately and eloquently in his later writings.
The time is perhaps not far offwhen a comprehensive biography of Gregory, man, thinker and saint, might be attempted, employing all the different strands of sympathetic analysis and appreciation and a wide sweep of the sources. It is to be hoped that the present introductory biography and edition of his letters in English may make a contribution to that end.