The personality revealed in the letters
the letters: a general introduction • 6.2 the wonderful picture of threatening rain; again the whole letter is a lively description of his return home to Nyssa after a long absence.
• The whole of letter 20 is a sustained ecphrasis of a visit to a country estate, full of classical allusions and topoi, invaluable for its description of the forecourt to a country villa.
• 21.1 charming description of the taming of a dove in order to catch other doves.
• 25 is a detailed description of the design of a martyrion, of great interest to the history of architecture.
Ecphrasis often appears as the introductory element of a kind of 'template' that Gregory used when writing a letter. Accordingly, a letter will open immediately with a vivid 'word-picture', usually a description of a scene from nature. Then a transitional sentence follows, usually in the form of a question concerning the meaning of the imagery just evoked. Next follows the 'explanation' of the image and its application to his real purpose in writing. Nowhere is this done more exquisitely than with the imagery of the dove in letter 21. The pattern may be traced in letters 1 (see note at 1.3), 4, 9, 11, 12,
14, 19, 20, 21, 28, 35 and, without the transitional sentence couched as question, in 8, 10, 16, 32. It is altogether a special feature of Gregory's epistolary style, though not exclusively his.7
Having said that, Gregory does have an alternative way of opening his letters. Using the same general template the introductory ecphrasis may be exchanged for a short pithy aphorism, perhaps a scriptural saying or a moral drawn from the case he is about to discuss. It is meant to be pungent and arresting. This can be traced in letters 7, 8, 11 (see 11.3), 15, 23, 24, 26 (by Gregory's correspondent), 32, 33, 34. Combining both opening ambits, a pithy sententia and a graphic image are letters 1 and 37.
The personality revealed in the letters The letters of Gregory yield a picture of a many-sided and rich personality. Gregory, a man of formidable intellectual stature in the 7 I have detected it, far less often of course, in Gregory Nazianzen's letters 178,
195, 230.
the letters: a general introduction
church of his day and indeed of any age, was also possessed of a sensitive and emotional nature. He was given at times to tears and despondency, and was very appreciative of friends as can be seen in his elation at receiving their letters. His heightened sensibility was wonderfully aware of the beauties and the terrors of nature. He was susceptible to dreams full of forewarning significance. To some extent one might even call him a 'romantic'. He had not only formidable powers of forensic reasoning, but so richly symbolic a sensibility that to him the whole world was a tissue of metaphors leading upward to transcendent realities. One senses that Gregory, in comparison with his brother Basil, was of a less stern temperament—which is not to say weak, even as his intellect, in its speculative and contemplative capacities was more wide ranging. He was absolutely a man of great culture and erudition and never hid it, yet such a culture co-existed with and was subsumed into the most intense
Christian faith and the loftiest possible spiritual focus. His Christian humanism was of the most authentic kind since it did not retard but led to mystical transcendence. As compared with Macrina, Basil and Peter, Gregory was slower to grow in his faith, but grow he did, slowly and ineluctably to a resplendent intellectual and spiritual maturity.
For all of his prominence in the 380s as a consulting theologian for Neo-nicene orthodoxy, we gain the impression that, fulfilling
Basil's reading of his character, he not infrequently fell short in political savvy (a perhaps not unwinning trait). In other words, practical prudence was not his strong suit. We see evidence of the failure of his efforts to put things right in church affairs in letters 1, 3, 5,
17, 19 etc. We also see his despondency at the experience in letter 3.4, 10.2–4, 18.4–10. He is constantly dismayed and pained at the sheer faithlessness and viciousness of human beings: letters 12.3,
16.2–3, 19.17–18, 33.1c. His capacity for indignation can be seen in letters 1.27–35, 3.25, 29.4–6. Revealing his sense of self-worth are letters 3.25, 29.4. Yet a gentle self-deprecation and realism about himself run through much that he writes, e.g. 19.3 and in the gentle irony told against himself, as in 25.16.
But he was never one to be disillusioned or bitter or bear a grudge for long. A gentle hope and kindliness, and a most attractive capacity for wonder persist through his letters. This man of most sophisticated intellect never lost a certain naivety in dealing with human affairs. Letters 8.1, 10, 18 and 36 are wonderful testimonies to