Early family life
biography
Early family life Gregory of Nyssa was a scion of unarguably the most remarkable single family in the records of Christian piety. His mother, Emmelia, was a native of Cappadocia, and his father, Basil Senior, was a native of Neocaesarea, the capital of Pontus Polemoniacus. Socially both families were of the landed aristocracy. Religiously, they were known for their early and tenacious adherence to Christianity, which was proven in the days when it was not socially advantageous.
Emmelia's grandfather died a martyr. Basil Senior's parents were St Macrina the Elder and her husband, both confessors of the faith during the last savage persecution in the eastern Roman empire under Maximin Daia (c. 306–313).2 Through the 320s, 330s and early 340s, the family successfully rebuilt its fortunes. Basil Senior won high repute as a rhetorician and advocate in the city of Neocaesarea. Though of Pontus, he and other Christian aristocrats of this generation were exactly the kind Eusebius had in mind when in his Life of Constantine 4.43 he mentioned the Cappadocians who were a match for anyone in their Christian education and learning.
While the men maintained the continuum with the professional and cultural standards of the time, women in many respects set the religious agenda of the family, as was so often the case in other aristocratic Christian families. Macrina the Elder was a zealous custodian of the traditions of the church of Neocaesarea, and that meant the memory of St Gregory Thaumaturgus, the disciple of Origen and apostle of Pontus. And so especially through her, the family tapped a stream of moderate Origenism, i.e. an intellectually engaged and potentially contemplative Christianity that St Gregory had brought with him from Palestine to Pontus. The works of Origen and Philo, along with the pagan classics studied in the higher curriculum taught by Basil, especially the philosophers, stocked the family library.
The children were born during the family's residence in Neocaesarea.
In nearly twenty years, Emmelia bore ten children, nine of whom survived infancy. One cannot forbear quoting here Gregory Nazianzen's eloquent praise of Emmelia's fruitfulness, both bodily and spiritual:
I marvelled when I looked on Emmelia's family so great and so good— all the wealth of her mighty womb; but when I considered how she
2 Gregory Nazianzen Oration 43.5–6.
biography was Christ's cherished possession of pious blood, this is what I said:
'No wonder! The root itself is so great!' This is the holy reward of your piety, you most excellent of women: the honour of your children, for whom you had but one desire.3
The eldest of Basil and Emmelia's children was St Macrina the Younger, born in c. 327, the second was St Basil the Great, born in c. 329, the third was Naucratius, born in c. 330, and then, roughly in order, Theosebia who became a virgin with her elder sister at Annisa, St Gregory of Nyssa, born in c. 335 at the earliest,4 three other daughters, some or all of whom were married,5 and finally St Peter of Sebasteia, born about the time of his father's death in c. 345.
While resident in Neocaesarea, the family made the acquaintance of a rather controversial figure, Eustathius of Sebasteia, the inspirer of a Christian ascetic movement whose influence was already being felt during the late 330s across northern Anatolia, from Constantinople to Armenia. What appears to have happened is that in travelling to the capital Eustathius used to come up to Neocaesarea to join the Via Pontica, the great north road threading northern Anatolia from Constantinople to the eastern frontier at Satala. Around the year
340 he became the subject of a spate of church indictments, including one in Neocaesarea.6 It came to a head in a council held in Gangra, metropolis of Paphlagonia, in about 340/341,7 in which a range of hyper-ascetic and anti-social excesses of the movement were censured. Eustathius sooner or later accommodated his style to some
3 Epigram 162, from The Greek Anthology: Book Eight, tr. W. R. Paton (London:
Heinemann, 1919). The epigram is translated afresh from the Greek.
4 This date allows Gregory to be about twenty in 356 when he spent a few months studying under his brother Basil in 356. This would be near the end of the usual age for studies in rhetoric. May, 'Die Chronologie' p. 53, argues against the date of 331 proposed by Tillemont and followed by Aubineau, because an age difference of only one or two years hardly squares with the unqualified reverence
Gregory had for his older brother, whom indeed he regarded as 'father', so that henceforth the most appropriate dating of Gregory's birth is between 335–340.
5 Basil wrote his Pros tous neous for his nephews, sons of his sister(s). He states that he has the closest bonds of nature with them after their parents. Gaudentius of Brescia reports in Tractatus 17.15, that during a visit to Caesarea, he met two venerable nuns who gave him relics of the Forty Martyrs which they had received from their maternal uncle (ab avunculo), Basil.
6 Sozomen H.E. 4.24.
7 Other dates have been proposed. For arguments supporting this traditional dating, see my Asketikon p. 486, n. 1, and my 'The Date of Gangra and a Point of Comparison Between Basil's Small and Great Asketikon', forthcoming in Studia
Patristica.
biography
of these demands, and more likely sooner. Otherwise it is difficult to explain the credit he had in Basil's and Emmelia's family in the early 340s, for he was certainly known to them at this early stage.
Basil notes the services he rendered him as a child, and there is other evidence of the family's contact with ascetics of his kind.8
In the year 340 Macrina was about 12. Her father made plans for her future betrothal, which, in Christian families of the time would have taken place probably between 15 to 18, with marriage promptly following. But before that time came, the young man chosen as her future betrothed died. At that moment the fire of the young girl's resolve was kindled. She seized on virginity and asceticism for Christ, while claiming the social role of a 'widow', the one state of an unattached woman accorded dignity in pagan GraecoRoman culture. Nothing her parents said had any effect: she was adamant in her decision. This was the starting point of the remarkable transformations in this family household that were to come.
After Basil Senior died in about 345, Emmelia relocated the family seat to a country estate called Annisa, while maintaining a property portfolio with interests in three provinces.9 Annisa was a day's journey from the metropolis, about eight kilometres west of the junction of the rivers Iris and Lycus. It was also about half a day's journey north-west of Ibora and some fourteen days east of Constantinople.
High up on the slopes of a ridge, it overlooked the fertile plain of Strabo's Phanaroea to the south-east. The Via Pontica ran past the villa's front gate and on to the Roman bridge over the Iris. Today the Turkish town of Uluköy ('high town') occupies the site.10
Basil was the only son old enough to have begun his rhetorical studies under his father. After their father's death, the focus of the boys' formal education shifted to Caesarea of Cappadocia, doubtless because there they had the backup of maternal uncles and family.
Basil completed the standard curriculum in Caesarea before Gregory 8 Basil, Letter 244, Def. 3.448–51: 'You seemed like one at a loss and amazed, because that very Basil who from childhood (§k paidÒw) had ministered (douleÊsaw) to the fellow (Eustathius) in such a way, who had done such and such things on such and such occasions, who had taken up war against thousands because of his care (yerape¤aw) for one man—has now become different from what he was'; Letter
291, Def. 4.192–197, to the chorepiscopus Timothy whom the family knew as an immoderate ascetic when Basil was a boy.
9 VSM 7.4, GNO 8.1.375–377, Maraval 158–160.
10 It long maintained toponymic continuity, being known as Sonnusa till 1958.
biography his younger brother ever began his. In about 349 Basil went to Constantinople in quest of further studies. By that year Naucratius was well advanced in his own higher studies, while Gregory was yet to begin his, which would make him perhaps about 13/14 years old at the time.11
Meanwhile at Annisa, Emmelia came into a precious possession: relics of the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia. She had a martyrion constructed in which to lodge the sacred urn of their ashes, and in which members of her family might be buried. It is around this period, the late 340s or early 350s, that we must place an episode mentioned by Gregory in his second homily on the Forty Martyrs. On one occasion when he was a neos, a student in his early to mid teens, his mother had urged him to take part in the celebration for the martyrs. But he was preoccupied with other things (his beloved studies?), and only heeded her request very grudgingly. Falling asleep during the vigil he received a monitory vision of the martyrs that reduced him to tears.12 Their memory seems to have been close to his heart ever after. It is interesting that the highly intellectual Gregory not infrequently shows himself susceptible to prophetic dreams and visions—compare the warning dream he received before he arrived at Annisa to find his sister on her death-bed.
In about 351, Naucratius, at 21 years of age,13 on the brink of a career as Christian rhetorician quit it all and chose the life of virginity and asceticism instead. He was his sister's first disciple, and it seems for this reason she esteemed him as her 'dearest brother'.
Naucratius and his former slave, Chryssaphius, found a spot in the wooded hills on the river Iris, reasonably accessible to his mother's villa yet still at a distance, and made it their ascetic retreat. But five years later,14 in the early spring of 356 a tragic accident occurred.
While Naucratius was fishing in the river, his feet became entangled 11 See the discussion of Gregory's education by Aubineau, Traité de la Virginité,
41–49. At the head of bibliography on Gregory's intellectual formation is Meridier,
L'influence de la seconde sophistique sur l'oeuvre de Gregoire de Nysse, Paris, 1906.
12 On the Forty Martyrs 2, GNO 10.1, 159–169 at 167–168. Aubineau, Traité de la Virginité, p. 51, draws an interesting parallel in the more serious religious crisis being undergone at just that time by another young Christian enamoured of Hellenic culture: the future emperor Julian, confined to the estate of Macellum in Cappadocia from 345 to 351.
13 VSM 10.1, GNO 8.1, 378, Maraval 164.
14 VSM 11.1, GNO 8.1, 379, Maraval 168.