Letter 81 To Gregory of Nyssa
prelude 2: st gregory nazianzen But as for myself who write these words, what time or what words shall console me, except your company and your conversation, which the blessed one has left in place of all else, so that by discerning his character in you as in a bright and shining mirror, I might think myself to possess him still.
Letter 81 To Gregory of Nyssa18 Gallay (I, 104 n. 1) considers that Nazianzen wrote this letter to Gregory of Nyssa in 381, at the end of a long period (of some two or three years) during which the younger Gregory had been undertaking many journeys of visitation to churches as a representative of orthodoxy. One might be inclined to date it a little later, if the confirmation of his status as a living
'canon' of orthodoxy at the council of 381 involved him in still further journeys, such as the one to Jerusalem and Arabia (Gregory of Nyssa letters
2 and 3).
This letter replies to a letter from the younger Gregory, who undoubtedly began his letter with a lively description of the behaviour of driftwood and then applied it to his own situation. To this Gregory Nazianzen opposes the imagery of the beneficent circuits of the sun and of the planets that though they wander do so in good order.
To Gregory of Nyssa19 1. You are upset at your journeyings20 and you seem to yourself as unsteady as the driftwood carried along on a stream. But you must not, dear friend, continue to think like this at all. For the travels of the driftwood are will-nilly, but your journeyings are according to God and your stability is in doing good to others, though you yourself are not fixed in one place. 2. Otherwise one might as well blame the sun for circling the world dispensing its rays and sowing life wherever it passes, or, while praising the fixed stars, scorn the planets whose very wandering has a harmony in it.
18 Mss.: YM, LA, PR, P, LF, BJ, ed.: Gallay I, 104, tr.: NPNF 2nd ser. 7, 461.
19 All mss. attest Gregory of Nyssa as the addressee, except LF: 'to Gregory'.
20 tª periodƒ, the term used for the circuits of the heavenly bodies, shortly mentioned.