Further soundings in ON VIRGINITY
biography text suitable as a general introduction. One manuscript 'S',34 shows the shorter text with later elements such as uneven chapter titles and division of the work that crept in from scribal notes in the margin that had been copied later from a manuscript of the fuller version.
Seeking an explanation for the discrepancies, Cavarnos considered two possibilities: 1. There was at first just one text, later altered by scribes, resulting in two distinct traditions of text, or 2. There were in fact two editions of the work by the author himself. He concluded in favour of the second explanation: the additions and alterations that make up the longer version come from Gregory himself. Not the least of the reasons are that these elements are so much in his style. This can be seen, for example, in the way the index of chapters is introduced after the prefatory letter, using familiar elements of Gregory's vocabulary:
≤ d¢ ékolouy¤a t«n nohmãtvn §st‹n aÏth: This is the sequence of thoughts/ conceptions.
But most to the point, and confirming our reading of On Virginity is the title to Chapter 3. Since these are the words of Gregory they put the matter beyond all doubt: gÄ. MnÆmh t«n §k toË gãmou dusxer«n ka‹ ¶ndeijiw toË tÚn gegrafÒta tÚn logon mØ êgamon e‰nai: 3. 'A reminder of the difficulties of marriage and proof that the writer of the treatise is not unmarried.
Further soundings in ON VIRGINITY Gregory then, was definitely married, though not to Theosebia. With these co-ordinates in place, we press on with our enquiry. Further soundings in On Virginity yield some valuable hints, but from this point on, we pass increasingly from concrete evidence to possibilities and probabilities. We are in the realm of informed guesswork.
In estimating the timing and tenor of Gregory's marriage, we have a few considerations to go by. His ascetic sister Theosebia must be allowed to have spent some considerable time with him at Nyssa for 34 Codex Vaticanus graecus 1907, parchment, of the 13th century. The text of this manuscript is closest to the text of the printed edition first published by A. Morell in Paris in 1638, and republished by Migne, PG 46, 317 ff. There are, of course, no index of chapters and no chapter titles.
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her to be lamented in the mid 380s as his companion. She would surely never have been thought of in this capacity if his wife had still been his companion. Gregory's wife, therefore, must have died sooner rather than later—but how soon? Although arguments from silence are dangerous, specially with the paucity of writing from Gregory's earlier period, there is never a mention of her in his or the other Cappadocians' works, certainly not in On Virginity even though he had occasion to let it be known that he had in fact forsaken celibacy. If his wife were still alive at the time of this treatise, it is difficult to imagine her listening with equanimity to this first foray of her husband into the literary life, with his harrowing treatment of the trials of married life and the spiritual obstacles inherent in it, and her own complete anonymity. What would she make of her husband's essay of such a topic? How would it help build up their marriage? Would she pass it offlightly as the foolish exaggerations required by rhetorical art and none of it really meant, of course? No, the general tenor and context of the treatise makes much more sense if we suppose that the author was already a widower.
Since On Virginity is Gregory's earliest extant work, one might attempt to dredge it for a few more clues as to what might have happened in the years immediately preceding. A sensitive reading elicits some interesting pointers.
Just as in the prefatory letter he refers clearly to Basil without expressly naming him, and in On Virginity 20 rehearses implicitly the spiritual history of his own family and of Macrina herself, so it is possible to discern in the later part of On Virginity 23 a series of implicit allusions to Basil, Macrina, Peter—and himself. That he first points to Basil as the living model of the monastic life and the spiritual father par excellence is perfectly clear. But, he says, if this example is too lofty, look at the 'chorus of saints' around him. He then refers to the young who have anticipated old age by their steadfast and vigorous love of wisdom rather than of bodily pleasures, because they listened to the one who said of Wisdom (a feminine figure), she is the tree of life to those who grasp her (Prov 3.18). It seems that Peter here is the living example of what he means, and that his brother's preceptress, Macrina, is implicitly accorded the role of Wisdom:35 'Sailing through the waves of youth with that tree as if 35 The sketch of the two in VSM 14 (GNO 8.1, 383–384, Maraval, 180–184) fully backs up such an interpretation.
biography on a raft, they have moored in the harbour of God's will, and now, in tranquillity and calm, their soul is not washed by the waves'.
But then Gregory comes to his own case: 'Why (the Greek adds untranslatably a first person singular datives moi) are you so curious about some who have had intentions along these lines but faltered, and why, for this reason, do you despair as if the project were impossible?' Due to its position in the sequence of examples this is manifestly a description of his own case. If so, it means that Gregory himself was one who initially undertook the same ideal as lived in so exemplary a fashion by Basil and Macrina, and by the young
Peter, but that he defaulted from his original purpose.
This theme of regret for an earlier high ideal now lost recurs several times through the work. Notwithstanding Gregory's rhetorical aims, some passages seem invested with a personal note.36 One in particular is suggestive of what may well have happened in his own case. He speaks vividly of the death of a wife and child, or at least of the wife during her first labour, and of the plight of the husband so unexpectedly bereaved. While there may be an element of rhetorical furor in the tableaux presented by Gregory, nevertheless, the art seems to clothe a core of deep feeling:
Still burning with affection, still at the peak of desire, without having experienced the sweetest things of life, one is suddenly bereft as in a nightmare. And after this? One is besieged by relatives as if by the enemy. Now, instead of a bridal chamber, death has provided a tomb.
There are foolish shouts and the wringing of hands, recollections of one's former life, curses against those who advised the marriage, complaints against friends who did not prevent it.37
36 In Aubineau's assessment any reading of a personal note in On Virginity is an 'erreur d'interpetation' (Traité de la Virginité p. 96). If one could sum up his Chapter
II, 'Rhétorique et diatribe dans un plaidoyer pour la virginité' (83–96), nothing in what Gregory says in On Virginity is necessarily sincere or offers a clue to his own dispositions and experiences; it is an exercise in staged rhetorical pleading. The content of the treatise is determined entirely by rhetorical genre. Gregory lacks moderation and indulges too quickly in the conventions of pathos. After tracing the theme
'should one marry?' in late philosophers and early Christian writers, Aubineau concludes (96): 'il plaide sur un theme d'emprunt qu'il développe manifestement sans conviction.'
Needless to say, the approach here strongly dissents from such a time-worn reductionist critique. Gregory is not such a topoi driven paragon of artful insincerity even while exercising rhetorical skill.
37 On Virginity 3, GNO 8.1, 261, Callahan 16.
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What can 'recollections of one's former life' mean? The following passage is suggestive, though it may not compass Gregory's case in detail:
We ourselves have known many, who, from their earliest age, appeared especially to be lovers of moderation (§raståw mãlista t∞w svfrosÊnhw), but whose participation in seemingly lawful and permissible pleasures became the beginning of life on a low level. For once they have admitted such an experience, then, as in our analogy of the stream, the desirable (tÚ §piyumhtikÚn) is wholly changed for them; they alter the direction of their thought from the more divine to the lowly and the material and open up for themselves a wide channel for the passions . . .38
At the very end of On Virginity 13 svfrÒsunh (moderation) refers to sexual continence and specifically dedicated virginity (in a passage that fairly describes Macrina's spiritual motherhood). Hence the passage in On Virginity 9 describes one who in youth was disposed towards vocational celibacy, but who later, little by little, through recourse to legitimate pleasures, fell from this early spiritual promise.
If we are right to discern some personal quality amid these rhetorical set pieces, and given that we have already established that Gregory's wife must have died sooner than later then it seems more than possible that Gregory himself experienced some kind of dire misfortune in his married life. When he begins to detail the handicaps of marriage in On Virginity 3 he expresses above all an overpowering sense of the precariousness that hangs over the promise of this earthly happiness. Again and again he speaks of the 'sudden reversals' (éyrÒvw ta›w metabola›w), and the 'reversal of fortune' (t∞w metabol∞w) that mock human expectations. 'If only it were possible to know the things of experience before we experience them!' he laments. Towards the end of this chapter is an appeal that, however diffused as a general statement in the plural, refers patently to himself:
If you want to learn the disadvantages of the more common life, listen to what they say who know this life through experience, how they bless the life of those who chose a life in virginity from the beginning and did not belatedly learn through misfortune (diå sumforçw) which was the better.
Later, in On Virginity 14, in speaking of the kinds of misfortune (t«n sumfor«n) that beset marriage—most of them involving death—he concludes: 'The longed-for delights and joys and pleasures and 38 On Virginity 9 GNO 8.1, 287, Callahan 35.
biography whatever else is hoped for in marriage come to an end in such pains as these (ta›w toiaÊtaiw Ùduna›w).
If such a calamity came upon Gregory's married life, as seems possible if not probable, it brought to a premature end for him the promise of earthly marriage. What is noteworthy, he had already experienced it by the time of writing in 370/371.
A better idea of Gregory's situation as he wrote On Virginity is now possible. Firstly, for whom was he writing? In the prefatory letter he describes his work as 'advice to the young (toÁw n°ouw) to follow in the footsteps of one who has gone before them'—namely Basil, just referred to as 'our most reverend bishop and father'. The work therefore, is a protreptic aimed at persuading young men to adopt the life of virginity for the Lord—and not just any young men, but above all Christian students in the schools of rhetoric in Caesarea. They may not be quite ready for the strong meat of Basil's Asketikon and his detailed provisions for life in the monastic communities, but that is the direction in which Gregory wishes to nudge them.
It might even be possible to discern Gregory's purpose more closely.
The work ends with much talk of the priesthood, and we are perhaps somewhat startled at the recourse to Exodus 19.15 which encourages sexual abstinence as a preparation for theophany, and then
Exodus 19.22 which applies the practice to priests. Gregory is targeting his own students who might be thinking of enrolling themselves in the clergy for eventual ordination. But instead of their marrying in the meantime, he wants to attract them to the ideal of virginity for the Lord, and that not in any freelance fashion, but under the guidance of the way of life over of which Basil is the acknowledged master, the life of the monastic communities. He plays the same role as Basil himself toward the disillusioned young lawyer
Amphilochius in Letter 150.
But most interestingly, Gregory in some way associates himself in the same ascetic purpose—which makes all the more sense if he is a widower renegotiating his own spiritual path.39 This at any rate
39 Is it possible for someone not to be a virgin physically and yet make progress in parthenia? That seems to be implied in VSM 30.2 (GNO 8.1.401–402, Maraval,
234), in the case of the noble widow Vetiana, who 'made the great Macrina the guardian and guide of her widowhood, and stayed much of her time with the virgins, learning from them the life of virtue'. The interesting thing is that a few lines later, this school of virtue is called the 'chorus of parthenia'.
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seems to be the drift of such passages as the following in On Virginity 23. Observe the recurring first person plural:
For examples of the benefits of this life of ours (tØn z≈hn ≤m«n) are not lacking. Indeed now especially, if ever, its dignity is flourishing and taking root in our life (§pixvriãzei tª biƒ ≤m«n), being made accurate in the highest degree by gradual additions to it,40 so that it is possible to walk in such footsteps and have a share in it, and, following after the scent of the perfume, to be filled with the fragrance of Christ . . . Look to him [Basil] as your rule of life (tÚn kanÒna toË b¤ou).
God has made him as a model for our life (t°yeike skopÚn ı YeÚw tª ≤met°r& zvª).
Finally, notwithstanding Gregory's recurring sense of having defaulted from the better choice, he shows in these pages a remarkable maturity of spiritual insight and discourse. We should not be deceived by the status of On Virginity as a 'juvenile work' or by his own selfdeprecations. Gregory here is no beginner in rhetorical discourse or in Christian thinking. Somehow, he has maintained or picked up again the spiritual thread though a series of life's mistakes, setbacks and shocks—through his early gravitation to the ascetic life and to eventual ordination, his season of great refusal, his switch to a secular career and to marriage, the experience of some sharp grief in his married life, and so on up to the present moment. This man has suffered.
Moreover the treatise shows him already displaying great rhetorical power, well armed with Plato and other philosophers thoroughly digested; he is already possessed of a deep religious spirit, steeped in 'the holy books', able to propose a well thought-out religious anthropology in support of virginity for the Lord. He integrates his experience of sexuality as a married man by his affirmation of 'the erotic power'. For him it is a supremely valuable gift that only begs to be steered to its highest end. Then the soul will reach out without ceasing towards the ultimate and incomparable beauty of God.
He has caught the spiritual élan again, or perhaps now, for the first time. Here in his first work, the mystical themes that he will develop in a consistent pattern many years hence are already present as germinating seeds.
40 This refers to the ongoing additions to Basil's Asketikon, as a result of subsequent question and answer sessions in the communities.