We're all turned on? Okay. Well, good to see you all again. I hope you're coping with the snow, as the visitors all seem to be. I wanted tonight to continue reflecting some more on Gregory of Nazianzus. I know some of you had a chance to look at that sermon. Probably not everybody has. It's kind of short notice to hand these things out in the morning, but maybe we can look at that a little bit together later on. I think it's a very beautiful sermon, and it gives you an example of his kind of flowery, but At the same time, he very carefully brought out style and the theological density that he brings to treating with a subject. I often wonder if people actually sat and listened to this and understood what he was saying. He clearly rewrote his sermons after he retired, and what we have is sort of an edited version. But on the other hand, it wasn't television, and there weren't a lot of amusements.

[01:01]

And I think people in the ancient world, especially in the capitals, really enjoyed a good speech. They were fascinated by rhetoric, and they came out to listen to elaborate show speeches by professional rhetoricians. And Gregory was a professional rhetorician, as was Augustine. I think it's highly likely that people actually did hear something like this, and were able to follow it, and to get involved in it. Probably, yeah. I mean, it probably would have taken about 45 minutes. We read the life of Lincoln, and they gave speeches throughout, and people came out just to hear the jokes. And then their speeches, they just had nothing else to do, I guess. Not as short of a speech. One thing I had just alluded to, but had forgotten to develop more at length this morning, was the effect of the reign of Julian, the emperor, in the early 360s.

[02:04]

I mentioned that Julian, who was a nephew of Constantine, was a kind of contemporary of Gregory of Nazianzus and of Basil. when they were studying in Athens in the early 350s. And Julian had been brought up as a Christian. He was brought up in a kind of, as he says, a hothouse atmosphere, surrounded by tutors and guards and nurses out in a country estate somewhere in the middle of what today would be Turkey. He grew up in a kind of a pious Christian family. He was baptized. But as he got older and got very interested in Greek philosophy and literature, he seemed to have kind of wanted more and more to get back to the classical tradition as a kind of a whole, not just for the cultural aspects it offered, but also as a kind of a way of life and a way of belief. So he became emperor in 361. He was kind of the only living male member of Constantine's family to have survived by that time.

[03:05]

And so he was elected emperor by the military as a young man. And he apparently, soon after that, announced that he was no longer a Christian and that he was going to try to reconstitute the traditional religion of ancient Greece and Rome. That's why he's often called Julian the Apostate in Christian literature. But it was kind of a grand plan. He had the idea that paganism, which was sort of just not a single religion at all, but a bunch of local religions and local cults and beliefs could be organized and centralized and given a kind of philosophical unity so that it would rival Christianity. And so he set about, on Neoplatonist grounds, with the help of some philosophers, trying to synthesize traditional Greek religion and make it into a monotheistic system that could be expressed sacramentally through the cults of the various gods.

[04:07]

And he also tried to get the pagan temples and priesthoods to be taking care of the poor, as the Christians were. He realized the Christians had a great advantage in that they were sensitive to human needs. They really had a very well-organized charitable endeavor. So Julian tried to organize the pagan priesthoods as well into being somewhat like the, as he called them, the Galileans, and not being outshone in this area of charity. One of his most memorable acts, though, halfway through his two-year reign in 362, June 13, 362, he issued a decree requiring that anybody who was going to teach Greek literature or philosophy at the public expense had to believe it. It would put the other way around that Christians, baptized Christians, were not allowed to teach Greek literature and philosophy in the public schools. And the idea of that was that if you were going to be talking about Homer or the tragedies, then you ought to take seriously the religious element that's in there.

[05:14]

But it was a way of kind of trying to weaken the influence of Christians in the educational and cultural sphere. And apparently it had a huge negative effect on people. People like the Cathodosians, who were highly educated by this time, who had spent a lot of time studying Greek literature as Christians and trying to organize, integrate this with their Christian practice, were really rocked by the decree of Julian. Even 40 years later, long after his death, people are still writing treatises against Julian. Cyril of Alexandria has a long treatise against Julian. But Gregory of Nazianzus and others also wrote pieces attacking Julian, in pretty strong terms, because of this decree that he had passed. They say, well, why did this affect people so negatively. They may have other things they could do. But I think it was a way of saying, if you're a Christian, you can't be a good heroine. You can't represent the whole Greek cultural tradition if you have gone after Christ.

[06:20]

And so it implied this kind of permanent opposition based on religion. And the result of it seems to be that right after this, Christian writers who were well-trained started trying to create a new body of literature. And you see a lot of different people in both Greek and Latin writing poems and plays and all the classical forms of literature using all the classical meters and the classical diction to deal with biblical fame. And it's really the beginning of a whole new period of kind of Christian literature that's meant to be given to kids in school, to teach them how to use the language properly and to speak correctly. And Gregory of Nazianzus was one of the people who was very much on board with this. He wrote, we have of his, something like 17,000 lines of poetry. He probably wrote more than that, but a huge output of poetry, most of which he seemed to have written after he retired from being Bishop of Constantinople.

[07:22]

And his reason, he says, in a little explanatory column, is that he wanted to leave something to be used in a Christian school, so the Christian kid didn't have to simply be exposed to what was thought of sort of morally risque literature from the classical tradition. And other people did the same thing. In the West, also, people start writing biblical poetry in Latin. But Gregory's poetry is actually very interesting, and later Byzantine scholars thought that he was one of the great poets of the Greek tradition. I don't know if modern people agree on that. One 10th century scholar compares him with Euripides as being one of the three best Greek poets. So he was taken seriously, at least, as a literary figure. I talked a little bit this morning about his emphasis on the Trinity as kind of a major theme, and that certainly, I think, is kind of his emblematic concern, that people have an understanding of God that takes seriously

[08:29]

the way God has acted in history, by the incarnation, by the sending of the Holy Spirit, and that these kind of three faces of God are not simply that, they're not just simply three ways of looking at God, but they're really three distinct personalities, or persons as we would say, who interact with each other and who play out that set of relationships in history. And for Gregory, that's centrally important because the way we are saved is by being drawn into their relationships, by becoming, with Christ, sons and daughters of the Father, through the gift of the Holy Spirit. And if there were not a Trinity, then Christian salvation would not be possible in the way that he concedes it, and would lack some of this vividness. Another really central part of Gregory's theological message, I think, is his presentation of the person of Christ. He's a very Christocentric writer.

[09:30]

I mean, all of these people are. Origen was, as I mentioned before. But Gregory, I think especially so, has a deep kind of personal relationship with Christ that comes out in a lot of ways. It comes out in some of his orations, his sermons, especially for the Great Feast, like the one we read tonight on Christmas, on the birth of Christ. But it also comes out in some of his poetry. He left us a lot of small prayers that are very personal. especially that he wrote as he was getting older and somewhat infirm and creaky. And these prayers are usually addressed to Christ and sometimes just complain about how hard life is and what are you doing to me? I'll read you a couple of those which I think are interesting because they show a different side of Gregory. There's one called a supplication. I won't read the whole thing, but he's kind of complaining about his bad health and the darkness of his life.

[10:33]

And he says, Lord Christ, why have you snared me in this flesh, this chilly life, this muddy pit of squalor? If I am, as they say, your heritage, truly divine, my limbs have lost their strength, my knees won't hold me, time has done me in, and raging illness, and consuming care, and friends whose thoughts are those of enemies. My sins won't let me be, but track me down in weakness, just as dogs track down a hare, or circle a fawn, craving to eat their fill. Have mercy, bring this misery to an end, or else decide I've struggled long enough and take me. Set some measure on my pain. If not, then let the sweet cloud of forgetting enfold my mind and shroud me in its veil." Prayer to Christ. It's a prayer, obviously, of someone who is finding life difficult. And he will pour these things out in a very personal way. There's another one simply entitled, A Prayer to Christ.

[11:35]

Where is the injustice? I was born human, well and good, but why am I so battered by life's tidal wave? I'll speak my mind, harshly perhaps, yet still I'll speak. Were I not yours, my Christ, this life would be a crime. We're born, we age, we reach the measure of our days, I sleep, I rest, I wake again, I go my way with health and sickness, joys and struggles as my fare, sharing the seasons of the sun, the fruits of earth, and death, and then corruption, just like any beast, whose life, though lowly, still is innocent of sin. What more do I have? Nothing more, except for God. Were I not yours, my Christ, this life would be a crime. There are a number of others like that, too. And often he speaks of my Christ or my Jesus, beginning of Oration 40, to once again a festival, once again my Jesus. It's a very kind of personal style of referring to Christ.

[12:46]

But I think to understand Gregory's Christology, you have to see it against the background of the other big controversy that was going on in his time, beside the kind of last stages of the Arian controversy, the controversy about Nicaea. And this was the controversy between the Orthodox leaders of the Church and the Polynarius of Laodicea. So just a little bit about Apollinarius because I think it gives us again a context for Gregory and his writings as well as for Gregory of Nyssa. Apollinarius was a Syrian from near Antioch in Syria, also from a cultured elite family and was another well-educated Greek of the late 4th century. His father was also called Apollinarius and apparently was a priest and wrote a lot of Christian poetry in the 360s after the time of Julian. And the younger Apollinarius got on the bandwagon and also with his father collaborated in writing Christian epics about the Exodus, a paraphrase of the Psalms, which might come from them.

[13:58]

But he was obviously a very gifted person and a gifted speaker. and was really from the same circle as the Cappadocians. He corresponded with Basil of Caesarea, we have several letters back and forth, and he seems to have been pretty well accepted by them and to have been considered a friend for a while. Apollinarius was also a follower of Nicaea. He wanted to affirm that the son is of the same substance as the father. And he also was opposed to anything that would reduce their personal distinction. He wanted to make sure that saying the son is the same substance as the father doesn't lead us to say then there's no difference, but rather that we have a relationship between them. So in that he was perfectly orthodox, perfectly on the same level as the Cappadocians. What was different about Apollinarius is that he took very seriously a traditional way of thinking about the incarnation, which was that the word became flesh by simply taking on a body.

[15:06]

Apollinarius seems to have understood the Logos, the eternal word or wisdom of God, to be a kind of divine mind, an eternal divine intelligence. And when the Word takes on humanity, Apollinarius conceives that as the divine mind becoming in Jesus what our mind is in each of us. So it's something that in some ways works rather neatly. We have each of us, a soul and a body, a mind and a body. The mind is meant to be in charge. to be controlling the actions of the body and synthesizing all of our sensations. Often enough it doesn't do that. Our minds are involved in sin and are darkened and turned away from God. And so we have the incarnate word, who is the divine mind, who is God, and he is the soul of a human body that therefore is as perfect as a human body can be.

[16:10]

He is what we were designed to be, but are not, because our minds have fallen. And so we have in him a kind of a model for the perfect human person. He seems to have based a lot of this on a little passage in 1 Corinthians 15, 47 to 49, where Paul speaks about Christ as the man from heaven. And so we look to the man from heaven as a model for our own resurrection. And Apollinarius seems to have understood this to mean that Christ is in a sense eternally incarnate, that his flesh even has a kind of pre-existence, which is not human and passable in the same sense that ours is. And it's this man from heaven who has come down through Mary into the world. He believes that his flesh is really material, but it's a kind of a divine materiality. It's kind of an archetype of our flesh.

[17:11]

So that Jesus is not fully human in the same sense that any of us are. It's, as I say, a way of thinking about Jesus that you find also in other earlier writers. Even Athanasius doesn't say much at all about the human mind of Christ. People assume that if you say the word became flesh, then the word is to Jesus what our minds are to us. But Apollinarius seems to have made this into a criterion for orthodoxy, and to have pushed it hard. And with a lot of Pharisees, the ideas are familiar, but the difference is that people really push them until they become kind of standards of the rest of the church's right belief, in their view. So he became more and more aggressive, entrepreneurial, pushing this idea, saying that if you didn't believe this, then you were essentially an Aryan. He started ordaining, he made a bishop, but he started ordaining priests under the condition that they subscribe to this position, and before long you have a kind of a separate community being set up, as so often happens, a kind of a schismatic community.

[18:19]

He began ordaining bishops, so that in Antioch, instead of just having three bishops, we now had four, because there was an Apollinarian bishop as well. And he was very enterprising, going around, sending his people around up into the hill country, up into Cappadocia and other places, trying to convince Christians in the local parishes that they had to accept the Apollinarian view of Christ if they're going to be genuinely in harmony with Nicaea. It's a pattern that we can see going on, I think, even in the church today. And eventually, some of the other leaders of the Church of Antioch blew the whistle. There's a man named Diodorus of Tarsus, who was also a friend of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory, who realized that this was an understanding of Christ that really severely shortened the reality of his flesh, the reality of his humanity. And so he got the Cappadocians, the two Gregories, Basil was now dead, to

[19:23]

look at the writings of Polinarius and to oppose them. And sometime after the Council of Constantinople, the Council of Constantinople in 381 mentions him among the heretics, but it doesn't say much about him. But sometime after that, Gregory wrote two letters to the priest who was in charge of his father's diocese in Nazianzus. Gregory never went to take over the diocese, the little church of Nazianzus, but he had a priest named Cladonius kind of acting as administrator for several years, and he wrote two letters to Cladonius, probably around 382 or 383, which are very interesting because they explain why he believes that the Apollinarians are dangerous and ought to be resisted, and he warns Cladonius not to let the people of Nazianzus get led astray by this Apollinarian view of Christ. The first letter to Cladonius is the famous one, the more important one. I'll just read you a little bit of it, because a lot of it is familiar.

[20:26]

But he says, do not let these people deceive themselves and others with the assertion that the man of the Lord, as they call him, this is a phrase that the Apollinarians had developed. Jesus was the lordly man, or the man of the Lord, who is rather our Lord and God, is without a human mind. For if we do, we do not sever the man from the Godhead, but we lay down as a dogma the unity and identity of Him, who old was not man, but God, and the only Son before all ages, unmingled with body or anything corporeal, but who in these last days has assumed humanity also for our salvation, passable in His flesh, impassable in His Godhead, circumscribed in the body, uncircumscribed in the spirit. at once earthly and heavenly, tangible and intangible, comprehensible and incomprehensible, that by one and the same, who is perfect man and also God, the entire humanity fallen through sin might be created anew."

[21:31]

And Gregory goes on to insist that Jesus has to have a complete human nature, including a human mind, a human soul, human freedom, what was the human problem, our alienation with God, is going to be healed and brought back into contact with God. He goes on and kind of develops some of the problems with the Apollinarian Christology. I won't read all of that to you. But he says, if any should say that the word acted in him by grace as in a prophet, but was not and is not united with him in essence. Let that person be empty of the higher energy or rather full of the opposite. If anyone does not worship the crucified one, let him be anathema and numbered among the deicide. So he sets out a number of norms for Christian faith in Christ. We want to worship him even in his crucifixion because he, God and man is worthy of worship.

[22:37]

We don't want to say that he makes moral progress, he said. He is, in a sense, a perfect man morally, from the beginning, in that he's perfectly the son of God. And we don't see two sons in him, but one son who is both fully human and fully divine. And then he says, if anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, He is really bereft of mind. If you don't believe that Jesus has a mind, you're kind of mindless yourself. And quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed, he has not healed. But that which is united to his Godhead is also saved. Famous phrase that keeps getting quoted even today. But the point is that the way Jesus saves us is by being everything we are. And yet being this as the Son of God. And so his assumption of our nature, including our souls and our freedom and our minds, is what saves our minds and communicates a kind of new energy to them.

[23:41]

That which he has not assumed, he has not healed. But that which is united to his Godhead is also saved. Then he goes on, if only half of Adam fell, only his body, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also. But if the whole of his nature fell, mind and soul, mind and body, it must be united to the whole nature of him that was begotten from the Father and so be saved as a whole. Let them not then begrudge us our complete salvation. For if his humanity is without a soul, even the Aryans admit this, that they can attribute his passion to the Godhead. But if he has a soul and yet is without a mind, how is he a man? For a man is not a mindless animal. So he's trying to argue, I think, that Christ has to have a complete humanity, just as we understand our own, although one that is shaped by the Incarnation, by union with the Word of God.

[24:48]

And so his humanity is one that is not sinful and that is, from the beginning, kind of focused on listening to God, on adhering to the Father, doing the Father's will. And yet it is a full human mind, a full human soul. This idea gets developed a lot later on. St. Maximus the Confessor, for instance, the great 7th century theologian, argues that if Christ has a human mind and a human soul, he must also have human freedom and must have, in a sense, two wills. And that too became part of the Church's doctrine. That Christ is not simply a human being controlled by the divine will alone, but that he has a human will which freely affirms the divine will, even though he's a single person. That the decisions he makes, he makes in two different levels, because being God is so different from being human.

[25:49]

But this really begins, I think, with an insight of Gregory of Nazianzus. the Apollinarian picture looks attractive but in a sense misses the mystery of the Incarnation. That in Jesus you have a complete human functioning apparatus which belongs to the Son of God and which he uses to live out what it is to be the Son of God. I think that we get a good sense of Gregory's Christology than by looking at this Oration 38, which I gave you. An oration that has been quoted a lot in the office, it's used also in the divine office in the Greek Orthodox Church, and it is a very, I think, a very beautiful and rhetorically powerful oration. We begin, as you were saying before, with a few chapters that contrast the Christian feast with the pagan feast.

[26:56]

Probably there were pagan feasts going on in the very days when the Christians now were beginning to celebrate the birth of Christ and also the the appearing of Christ in the world. One of the debates that liturgical scholars have is whether this oration was given on December 25th or whether it was more likely given on what we think of as the Epiphany on January 6th. It's part of a trilogy. Oration 39 is about the baptism of Christ. and Oration 40 is an exhortation to baptism, that the people who are going to be baptized at Easter should come and sign up and bring themselves forward for baptism. So he connects the coming of Christ in the world with baptism and with the manifestation of Christ in the world. So it could well be that this was given, say, on the vigil for the Feast of what we would think of as the Epiphany, which is the original Eastern Orthodox Christmas Feast. and then the one on the baptism was given the next day and the exhortation to baptism probably later on in the evening or on January 7th.

[28:01]

But this meditation is really about the mystery of the Incarnation, I think. And he begins by this contrast between pagan festivals and Christian festivals. And then in Chapter 7, he starts kind of laying out what the Christmas Feast, what the Feast of the Manifestation of Christ is all about. And we begin, surprisingly maybe, not with the beginnings of the Gospel, but with the being of God in God's self. It's kind of a philosophical reflection in chapter 7. God always was and is and will be, or better, God always is. And he goes on about the transcendent nature of God and how we can never understand God completely. God is boundless and difficult to contemplate. You wonder, what has this got to do with Christmas? And he goes on about the nature of God, how God is beyond our comprehension.

[29:08]

and how God is eternal and cannot be destroyed. Then he goes on and talks about creation, that God, who is self-sufficient, doesn't need creation for himself, creates to display his goodness. This is chapter nine. The good needed to be poured out to undertake a journey, that there might be more beings to receive its benefits. So this is the height of goodness. So God's creation is not out of need in a physical way, but because being all goodness, God is sort of naturally oriented towards communication of himself. And so he talks first of all about the creation of bodiless spirits, about angels, the intelligible beings. And then in 10, talks further about the creation of angels and intelligible beings.

[30:17]

And with 11, he begins talking about the creation of the humans. He even at the end of chapter 10, puts in a little concession to his audience. How does all this concern us? Some impatient person may ask. Over-eager, perhaps, to get on with the celebration. Spur your horse around the turn. Tell us something deep about the festival, about the reason we're seated before you. And you can imagine people saying, okay, all this philosophy and reflection about God and creation has nothing to do with Christmas or with the Feast of the Epiphany. And Gregory says, I will, certainly, but I have to tell the whole story. And so he then talks about the creation of the human person, whom he calls the little world, the microcosm. This is something that Gregory of Nyssa also does. The human person is kind of a small version of the world as a whole. And it combines both angels and animals. The human person is kind of half angel, half ape, if you want. It has the materiality and the instincts of animals, but is also able to love and to seek God.

[31:23]

And then in 12, we get to paradise, that the human pair are put in paradise and are given a command. not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Gregory's take on that, which is I think very interesting too, is that that was not meant as a permanent prohibition. That Adam and Eve were meant to know what was good and what was evil, but in the proper time. And the problem was that they tried to rush things. They tried to take charge of the rules for themselves and to determine what was good and evil by eating this tree. But the issue is really following God's process, following God's guidelines. And so they fall. And there is, in chapter 13, that he talks about this avalanche of evil that comes out of human rebellion. And so various things were tried. God sends Moses and the prophets, tries to kind of draw people back. He cajoles them. sends the flood to kind of scare them.

[32:27]

None of these things work. And so he says, since all these things required a greater help, they received one that was greater. This was the word of God himself, who is before the ages, invisible beyond comprehension, bodiless, cause from cause, light from light. So we build up this great picture of who the word of God is. He came to his own proper image and bore flesh for the sake of my flesh. and mingled with a rational soul for my soul's sake, holy cleansing, light by light. That's kind of his picture of Christ in a nutshell, I think. Paraphrasing the first chapter of John, he came into his own, who are his image, and bore flesh for the sake of my flesh, and mingled with a rational soul for my soul's sake. The soul of Christ, the human soul of Christ, for Gregory, as for Origen, is kind of the point of contact between the divine word and the human body. In every respect, save that of sin, he became human, conceived in the Virgin who had been first purified in soul and flesh by the Spirit, where this was fitting, coming forth as God along with what he had taken on, one from two opposites, flesh and spirit, the one of which shared divinity, the other which was divinized.

[33:39]

That's what salvation is. The human person is transformed in quality because Christ was two and became one. Oh, a new mixture. Unexpected blending. He's kind of a blending of divine and human. He who is had come to be. The uncreated one is created. The limitless one is contained through the mediation of a rational soul standing between divinity and the coarseness of flesh. He who is rich is a beggar. where he goes, begging in my flesh that I might become rich with his Godhood. So it's this very prayerful but rhetorical meditation on the contrasts of Christ. He establishes a second communication far more amazing than the first. Just as then he gave us a share of what was better when we were first created, so now he takes on a share of what is worse. This is more God-like than the first gift. This, to those who have any sense, is loftier still. And then he goes on and talks about the life of Christ and the humiliation of Christ.

[34:48]

Chapter 15 also is famous. He was sent, but as a human being, for he was twofold. since he grew tired and hungry and thirsty and was distressed and shed tears by the law of the body, and if he did these things as God, what can that mean? Think of the good pleasure of the Father as a mission, and that the Son refers all that is His back to Him, both because He reveres Him as His timeless source, and in order not to seem to be God's competitor. Being Son is really the heart of the mission of Christ, but being this in a human body and soul, as well as in His divine nature, Then he goes on talking about how Christ is handed over to his passion, how he's put to death. And for the rest of the homily, in a kind of increasing tempo, he reminds us of all the other aspects of the story of Christ. His birth, his baptism, his miracles, raising the dead even.

[35:54]

All of these things that are kind of part of the incarnation, the mysteries of the life of Christ, offered as a lamb, offering as a priest, buried as a human being, raised as God, and then ascending and coming again. And all of these are liturgical celebrations, Jesus. How many festivals there are for each of the mysteries of Christ? Yet there's one conclusion to all of them, my perfection. I mean, the liturgical year, for great, it becomes this kind of way of living through the life of Christ. Because they didn't have saints' festivals yet. And it's simply a way of entering into what is a single story of our salvation. But he says right now the feast has to do with his conception, his birth. I mean, he talks about Bethlehem and the Magi and the slaughter of the innocents. But his idea is that we participate in these things by celebrating them liturgically and by meditating on them. We can identify with him.

[36:57]

Be purified, be circumcised, remove the veil that you're born, then teach in the temple, drive out those who make a business of God. If you are scourged, then seek out the other sufferings too. Taste the gall because of that earlier taste, drink the vinegar, seek out the spitting. So we have to kind of share in the passion. In the end, be crucified with him, die with him, be buried eagerly with him, so that you may also rise with him and be glorified with him and reign with him. seeing God so far as that is attainable and being seen by Him. The one who is worshipped and glorified in the Trinity, who we pray might be revealed to us even now as far as that is attainable in the bones of flesh. In Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory and power for the ages of ages. So that What we seek to do is in some way to participate in the life of the Trinity by participating in the mysteries of the life of Christ, by being kind of reshaped by the incarnation. I think that's really what he's trying to hammer home, but he does it with this very grand style of creation.

[38:05]

Just a few things, then I'll stop talking so much. I feel like Gregory myself. One of the things he likes to talk about, as well as the Trinity and the Incarnation, is what he calls Christian philosophy. And I think it's important to keep in mind that when he talks about philosophy, he's not really talking about a technical intellectual discipline, but he's talking about living the philosophical life. which in his time for Christians mainly meant living an ascetical life. And the background of that is that in the ancient world philosophers weren't mainly academics or people who wrote, but there were people who through question and answer and through helping people to see what life is really about, tried to free people from their prejudices and their mental limitations and get them to live more completely and more intentionally.

[39:11]

You see that with Socrates, but many of the other philosophers, too, went around talking to young people in the streets, grabbing people in the square, asking them questions, getting them to reflect on what they thought was most important, what their ethical values were, so that they could live in some way more integrated lives. And there are all kinds of different schools of philosophers that did this. A lot of them were sort of like friars. The cynics, especially, whom Gregory admires, were kind of the barefoot philosophers, as they said. They sometimes went around shocking people, like hippies. But they basically were trying to live very simply, even sleeping outdoors, to give people a sense of freedom and of the value of moral commitment, rather than being wealthy or having slaves or whatever it was. And so when Christians started to promote the ascetical life in the fourth century, they tend to refer to it as our philosophy. And you find that like in the life of Antony by Athanasius, the great picture of Antony, the first known monastic figure.

[40:17]

He probably wasn't, but this portrait of Antony, the hermit, is a portrait of a philosopher, somebody who never went to school. And Athanasius presents him as illiterate, which may not be true, but he's there as somebody whose discipleship and simplicity of life enables him to confuse all the pagan philosophers and the Aryans and the different smart people of his day who had erroneous ideas. So that by Gregory's time, the Christian philosopher is precisely somebody who lives a a life of integrity and commitment to God, but who is indifferent to reputation or to wealth, worldly comforts, and who is able to derive great strength from that, simply being committed to God. He has a number of speeches where he talks about this. One is the funeral oration for his older sister, Gorgonia, who was married and had some children and who died after a very devout life.

[41:21]

And Gregory presents her as a kind of philosopher who was living in an ordinary family. But she's somebody whose life became more and more simple, more and more focused on prayer and on God, and who converted her husband and kept the whole family to live this somewhat austere way. But she, for him, is a philosopher, almost more than anybody else. And he speaks about himself, too, or at least his attempts to live the philosophic life. In one of his orations, he's kind of giving a justification for his behavior in Constantinople. And he talks about himself as a philosopher by painting a picture of the philosopher as a free, incorruptible human person who's focused simply on his desire for the good and for the beautiful and can give himself away. There's nothing more impregnable, nothing more unconquerable than philosophy.

[42:23]

Everything else collapses before the philosopher does. He is a wild ass in the desert, as Job says, unfettered and free. He scorns the tumult of the city. He does not hear the abuse of the tax collector. He is a unicorn, an independent animal. Takes everybody on. Will he be willing to serve you? Will you tie him to a manger? Will he be led under a yoke? When he is shut out of all earthly things, he will be fitted out with wings like an eagle and will turn again towards the home of the one he serves. He will fly up to God. Let me put it in a nutshell. Two things stand beyond our control, God and an angel. And in third place comes the philosopher. He is an immaterial being in matter, uncircumscribed while in a body, a citizen of heaven on earth, impassable in the midst of vulnerability, beaten in all things except his thoughts, a conqueror of those who think they have subdued him, simply by letting himself be conquered. It sounds sort of like Paul in 2 Corinthians, where he talks about all the things he's gone through and yet dying and beholding it.

[43:26]

But for Gregory, it's the Christian ascetic who somehow manages to endure. And in a number of his letters he speaks this way too. Just to read you a part of one of his letters to a man who was a rhetorician and who had various ailments. And so Gregory is urging him as a family friend, to become a philosopher and be able to put up with his illnesses. So you must find in your vulnerability a place to philosophize and purify your mind now more than ever and show yourself stronger than the things that hold you in check. And consider this illness a profitable training, namely to look down on the body and bodily things and all this fleeting and disturbing and passing away. And so become completely focused on what lies above, to live not for this present world, but for the world to come. making this life here what Plato calls a preparation for death and losing the soul as far as possible from what in his words we call either his body or his prison.

[44:28]

So he's quoting Plato here probably because the guy he's writing to had studied Plato as well and yet it's in the context of Christian asceticism and the ability to accept suffering as simply part of our way to God. So that's Another aspect of his thinking, he sometimes strikes it, I think, as overly ascetical. I suspect part of it is just temperament. Part of it is a rhetorical tapas of late antiquity. But part of it, I think, comes from his genuine desire to follow Christ and to let his life be shaped by passion. I just wanted, finally, to say something also about his idea of ministry, of priesthood, if you want. Gregory has a lot to say about his role as a priest and as a bishop. He was not a member of a monastic community. There really were none as such in Asia Minor in his time, except the groups that Basil was trying to organize.

[45:33]

But he does especially comment on this in his Long Oration II, which is his explanation of why he ran away when his father ordained him a presbyter. And his, at least what he says in that oration when he comes back to Nazianzus to help his father in his ministry, he says, I ran away because I was so overwhelmed by fear at this enormous responsibility. And then the rest of the oration is really about the responsibility of priestly service, and yet the realization that it is something that he's called to do, and so he accepts it to the end. He coins here the phrase that Gregory the Great picks up. This is the art of arts and the science of sciences. Gregory the Great picks that up and quotes it in the beginning of his work on pastoral care. But Gregory is the one apparently who developed it. And he tries to develop in this oration too a picture of what that art is about.

[46:36]

You have to have answers for people, you have to have instruction for people, But you also have to heal. You have to be a doctor. And in fact, in one interesting paragraph, he says you have to be an animal tamer as well. That being a priest is a way of kind of trying to calm the animals down. It's like being in a cage with lions a lot of times. But you have to have a sensitivity for what each animal needs if it's going to be, you know, brought under control. And like a physician, you have to be able to diagnose people's problems and meet them with something, with an appropriate remedy, with something that's going to speak to their needs and not just the needs of everybody else. He also, in another oration, emphasizes the centrality of the love of the poor. People don't often think of him as a promoter of social justice in a way, but one of his orations especially is a very powerful description of the needs of homeless people

[47:43]

probably in the city of Caesarea. There seems to be a outbreak of leprosy. A lot of people have been thrown out of their homes because their families don't want to have any contact with them and they're living out in the public square, disfigured, hanging out together but not able to get any help from anybody. Gregory calls on the people in the congregation to recognize in them the image of Christ and to see Christ in them and to go out and reach out to them and bring them into their homes. For him, I think being a priest and a bishop meant preaching the Word of God, but it meant at times intervening in situations like this, in social situations, to let the Word of God really shape the way people act. And I think that's a side of a lot of the Fathers of the Church that we're not always aware of. One of the things that strikes me also, reading Augustine's homilies, especially his Enarationism psalms, his works on the psalms, is that almost every one of them ends by being an appeal to care for the poor, no matter what the psalm is, because these are about the body of Christ, and the body of Christ is us, and Christ is united with us, and so we have to be attentive to the needs of those who are suffering.

[49:05]

And I think this sense of being a church made up of people of different economic situations, different health needs, different mental capacities and so on, was very strong in the early church because churches were small and your neighbor was just next door. And so that representing the word of God for him too is letting the word of God challenge us and make us live as the body of Christ. But I should stop there and give you a little chance to make some comments or whatever you'd like before we have to go. The person can teach the art of being human, which is how to live, how to die. Of course, that's very Platonist. Plato thinks that preparation for death is what the philosopher has to do.

[50:08]

Yeah. Right. I have poetry to share with you. When you speak to me, I try to remember when [...] you speak to me,

[51:24]

Right. Right, right. Right. He clearly doesn't want to say that, and he does want to say that Jesus had a complete human internal apparatus as well as an external apparatus. He wasn't simply a full human being bodily, but that he had a human mind and human will and freedom. I think it took the Fathers a long time to kind of tease out the implications of that. because the tendency is also to want to see Christ as a perfect human being, and to see that perfection as sort of freeing him from having to go through what we go through.

[52:29]

But I think the main thing there is to say that, as the epistle of Hebrews said, that he was human like us in all things except sin. And what does sin involve? It involves turning against God, trying to compete with God. And Jesus, apparently, from the very beginning is fully obedient to the Father, aware of his special relationship to God, aware of being Son. And so he's kind of acting out in his flesh what it is to be Son. But I think it's only sort of step by step that they kind of come to see the implications of that. They're kind of committed to that, as Gregory is from the beginning. But it doesn't say until Maximus where we have this reflection on what it means to have two wills. Jesus in some way humanly has to come to the conclusion of doing what he will do as son of God. And yet it doesn't mean that there's any doubt that he's going to do it. Otherwise, he wouldn't be himself.

[53:32]

So he couldn't sort of decide in the Garden of Gethsemane, I'm not going to go through with this and jump over the wall and run away, because then he wouldn't be the person that he was, a single divine person. But he still has to struggle. And we see that in Gethsemane. And Gregory doesn't talk specifically about that, but I think he is in the same trajectory, and that's why Maximus always quotes him as one of his favorite authors, and exposes his thought. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he will say that he makes what is ours his own, which is probably the same thing. He takes on a soul for my soul's sake and takes on a flesh like ours. What is not assumed is not healed. So I think the idea of identification with us is there, but I'm not sure that he ever uses that particular term or phrase.

[54:39]

That's a more modern term as far as I know. They assume, I think, what we call solidarity, that by being a member of our human community and sharing our human nature, There's a kind of energy that flows out of Christ and that becomes part of humanity. This is an athanasius to another, that just by the presence of the word in our flesh and our mind, there's a kind of a new dynamic set up, so that grace, in a sense, the power of God flows out of him, because he's a member of the same family. I think they assume solidarity, whereas for us we're more individualistic in the modern post-Enlightenment period, so we have to have more language to affirm that. But they do feel that if you're human, then you have a lot in common with every other human. Well, thank you.

[55:48]

We can talk more about this tomorrow if you'd like to do that. I wanted to talk tomorrow about Gregory of Nyssa a little bit, who's maybe the most famous of these Cappadocian fathers, today, anyway. Is it easy to make photocopies of you?

[56:03]

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