Gregory of Nyssa

• 1. Introduction

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  Gregory of Nyssa wrote something no one in the ancient world had written before him: a direct, unequivocal argument that slavery itself was sinful. Not cruel slavery. Not mismanaged slavery. All of it. This was the fourth century, when the institution was so embedded in daily life that philosophers from Plato to Aristotle had simply accepted it as natural. Gregory did not. That single act of moral reasoning would make him extraordinary enough. But it was only one thread in a life that spanned heresy trials, deposition from his own church, diplomatic missions that repeatedly failed, and a body of theology so original that scholars spent more than a millennium underestimating it. Who was this bishop of a minor Cappadocian see, and why does his work still provoke argument today?

• 2. A Cappadocian Family

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  Gregory was born around 335, probably near the city of Neocaesarea in Pontus. His family was aristocratic, Greek, and deeply Christian, and it had already paid a heavy price for that faith. Gregory writes that his parents "had their goods confiscated for confessing Christ." His maternal grandfather was killed, as Gregory described it, "by Imperial wrath" under the Emperor Maximinus II. His paternal grandmother, Macrina the Elder, is venerated as a saint in her own right.

  The family was large and, historically, counted differently by different sources. A commentary in the Acta Sanctorum initially states nine children, then describes a later child as the tenth. Gregory himself clarified that the confusion arose from the death of one child in infancy. Among the surviving siblings were figures who would each become saints: Macrina the Younger, Naucratius, Peter of Sebaste, and Basil of Caesarea, who would become one of the most influential bishops in early Christianity.

  Between the 320s and the early 340s, the family rebuilt after its losses. Gregory's father worked as an advocate and rhetorician in Neocaesarea, the same craft Gregory himself would first pursue. Early education came at home, from his mother Emmelia and his sister Macrina. Later accounts place him studying in Athens, but Gregory of Nyssa's own writings suggest this was speculation borrowed from his brother Basil's biography. He more likely continued at Caesarea, reading classical literature, philosophy, and perhaps medicine. His own account of his teachers was characteristically personal: he claimed his only true instructors were Basil, "Paul, John and the rest of the Apostles and prophets."

• 3. From Rhetorician to Bishop

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  While his brothers Basil and Naucratius withdrew to live as hermits around 355, Gregory took a different path and worked as a rhetorician. He married a woman named Theosebia, who is sometimes identified with Theosebia the Deaconess, venerated by Orthodox Christianity as a saint. The identification remains contested; some commentators argue Theosebia the Deaconess was actually one of Gregory's sisters.

  In 371, the Emperor Valens divided Cappadocia into two new provinces, Cappadocia Prima and Cappadocia Secunda. The reorganization forced a redrawing of church boundaries and the creation of several new bishoprics. Gregory was elected bishop of the new see of Nyssa in 372, almost certainly with his brother Basil's backing. Basil was by then the metropolitan of Caesarea and clearly the more powerful figure.

  Gregory's temperament, described as quiet and meek in contrast to Basil's outspoken manner, did not translate into an easy episcopate. He sometimes worked against his brother's own positions. Where Basil condemned the Sabellianist followers of Marcellus of Ancyra as heretics, Gregory may have sought to reconcile them with the church.

  In 373, the bishop of Iconium had to travel to Nyssa to quell discontent within Gregory's own congregation. By 375, a synod at Ancyra charged him with embezzlement of church funds and irregular ordination of bishops. Imperial troops arrested him that winter, but he escaped to an unknown location. A synod in Nyssa formally deposed him in spring 376. He regained his see in 378, possibly due to an amnesty issued by the new emperor, Gratian. That same year, Basil died, and Gregory, despite holding a relatively minor post, stepped into many of his brother's former responsibilities across Pontus.

• 4. Missions, Failures, and Disputes

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  Gregory was present at the Synod of Antioch in April 379, where he tried to reconcile two opposing Christian factions - the followers of Meletius of Antioch and those of Paulinus. He failed. After visiting the village of Annisa to see his dying sister Macrina, he returned to Nyssa in August of the same year.

  In 380, he travelled to Sebaste in Armenia Prima to support a pro-Nicene candidate in a bishop's election. He was elected himself instead, apparently because the population associated him with his famous brother. Gregory did not want the role. He deeply disliked what he perceived as the relatively unhellenized society of Armenia, and he faced an investigation into his own orthodoxy by local opponents of Nicene theology. After staying several months, a substitute was found, possibly his brother Peter, who held the bishopric of Sebaste from 381 onward, and Gregory returned to Nyssa to write books I and II of Against Eunomius.

  At the First Council of Constantinople in 381, Gregory may have delivered his famous sermon In suam ordinationem. He was chosen to give the eulogy at the funeral of Meletius, which took place during the council itself. The council then sent him to Arabia, possibly to resolve a dispute in Bostra where two men, Agapius and Badagius, both claimed to be bishop. He failed there too; the see remained contested in 394. His subsequent visit to Jerusalem, where he attempted to mediate a dispute involving Cyril of Jerusalem, also came to nothing. Gregory himself was accused of holding unorthodox views on the nature of Christ during that trip.

  His later years in Nyssa were marked by ongoing conflict with his metropolitan, Helladius. A synod convened at Constantinople in 394 to address the still-unresolved problems in Bostra; Gregory was present. He died in 394, though the precise date is unknown.

• 5. The Architecture of God

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  Gregory followed his brother Basil in defining the Trinity as "one essence in three persons," the formula that the Council of Constantinople adopted in 381. His work Against Eunomius defends the full equality of the three persons against Eunomius's Aristotelian argument that the Father's substance is unengendered while the Son's is engendered, and therefore the two are not equal.

  Gregory's solution to how the persons differ while remaining equal was to locate the difference in their relationships of origin rather than in their nature. The Son is begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, the Father is the progenitor. This framework carries a tension: it can appear to rank the persons. Robert Jenson, one of the major figures in contemporary Gregory scholarship, suggests that Gregory resolves this by assigning each person a different kind of priority - epistemological to the Son, ontic to the Father, metaphysical to the Spirit. Morwenna Ludlow reads the same texts and argues that epistemic priority belongs primarily to the Spirit.

  Gregory was also one of the first theologians to argue that God is genuinely infinite. His core argument, laid out in Against Eunomius, runs: God's goodness has no limit; that goodness is essential to God's nature; therefore God is without limit. One consequence he draws from this is that a created being, being finite, can never fully comprehend an infinite God. In the Life of Moses, he puts it directly: "every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God." This apophatic approach - defining God by what cannot be said rather than by what can - leads Gregory to describe a spiritual life of perpetual progression, which he calls epektasis, a Greek term for the endless movement of the soul toward a God who can never be fully reached. Three stages mark the journey: an initial darkness of ignorance, then a period of spiritual illumination, and finally a deeper darkness in mystic contemplation of the incomprehensible.

• 6. Universal Salvation and Its Controversies

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  Gregory argued that God's stated intention is that every created being will ultimately be saved. Drawing on Paul's declaration that God will be "all in all," Gregory wrote that "no being will remain outside the number of the saved" and that "no being created by God will fall outside the Kingdom of God."

  He describes God's purpose in striking terms: from the first human to the last, whether purified in this life, healed afterward through fire, or having passed through life unaware of good and evil, every person will be offered "participation in the blessings which are in Him, which, the Scripture tells us, 'eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,' nor thought ever reached."

  The position seems clear, yet Gregory's own texts create complications. In the Great Catechism, he limits salvation to the baptised, while also allowing that those driven by passion can be purified by fire afterward. And in one passage that has drawn sustained scholarly debate, he writes that for sinners of the deepest depravity, "the chastisement in the way of purgation will be extended into infinity." Scholar Ilaria Ramelli reads the underlying Greek not as eternal punishment but as purification of indefinite duration, which would still be compatible with eventual salvation.

  Eastern Orthodox theologian Mario Baghos has tried to reconcile these passages by arguing that Gregory's universalist statements express God's intention, not a guarantee. The soul retains free will, and Gregory's many exhortations to pursue virtue voluntarily suggest that the choice remains real. Even so, most scholars affirm that universal restoration - apokatastasis - is genuinely what Gregory believed and taught.

  Gregory may have extended this hope even to demons: following Origen, some passages suggest, through the voice of his sister Macrina, that even they might find a place in Christ's "world of goodness." The Life of Moses offers the possibility that just as the darkness left the Egyptians after three days, redemption might reach those in hell.

• 7. Against Slavery

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  "If man is in the likeness of God," Gregory wrote, "who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller?" He answered his own question plainly: no human being can own another, because that authority belongs to God alone, and even God did not exercise it. "God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since God himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom."

  The stoic philosopher Seneca had criticized cruel slave masters and urged humane treatment of slaves with good character. Plato and Aristotle both defended the institution outright. No ancient voice before Gregory had challenged the institution itself as inherently wrong. J. Kameron Carter, writing in Race: A Theological Account in 2008, describes Gregory as a "fourth century abolitionist intellectual" whose position surpassed not only Paul's stance but also "those of all ancient intellectuals - Pagan, Jewish and Christian - from Aristotle to Cicero" and from Augustine to John Chrysostom. Carter notes that "the world would have to wait another fifteen centuries - until the nineteenth century, late into the modern abolitionist movement - before such an unequivocal stance against slavery would appear again."

  Gregory's argument rests on three theological premises: each human is an image of God and therefore free by nature; the equality of all humans reflects the equality of the divine persons of the Trinity; and just as the divine nature cannot be divided into mastery and servitude, neither can human nature. He drew on Plato's own definition of virtue as something that "admits of no master" and turned that philosophy against the institution Plato had endorsed.

• 8. Reception and Legacy

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  As late as 1942, the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote that Gregory's work was "virtually unknown." Gregory had never been declared a Doctor of the Church, unlike Basil or Gregory of Nazianzus. Professor of theology Natalie Carnes traces part of this to the Latin West's limited access: Gregory was rarely translated, and the scholar John Scotus Eriugena, working around 800 to 877, deserves much of the credit for whatever influence Gregory did have, both through his own writings and through his Latin translation of On the Making of the Human.

  A 6th-century Latin translation of De opificio hominis by Dionysius Exiguus did circulate widely through the medieval period. And Francisco Bastitta Harriet has argued that Gregory's ideas about indeterminate human nature and ontological freedom were formative for Renaissance anthropology, shaping the work of Nicholas of Cusa and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. A series of early Renaissance translations brought more of his texts to Western readers: George of Trebizond translated De vita Moysis in 1446, Pietro Balbi translated De vita Macrinae and De anima et resurrectione between 1465 and 1473, and the Byzantine scholar Athanasius Chalkeopoulos translated De oratione dominica around 1465.

  By the 1950s, partly through the work of Balthasar and Jean Daniélou, Gregory had become the subject of serious scholarly attention. A critical edition of his works, Gregorii Nysseni Opera, was published, and the International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa was founded. Contemporary research has centered on his eschatology and his reputation as a thinker whose ideas arguably prefigure postmodernism. Sarah Coakley, John Zizioulas, and Robert Jenson are among the major figures in that ongoing work. In 2003, theologian David Bentley Hart published a book seemingly influenced by Gregory. And in 2000, a portion of Gregory's relics held by the Vatican were transferred to the Greek Orthodox church of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Diego, California.