St. Gregory of Nyssa

• St. Gregory of Nyssa was born in the city of Caesarea.
• Unlike Sts. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, he did not study at the great centers of higher learning. His education seems to have been influenced especially by his oldest sister Macrina (the younger), and later in both rhetoric and theology by St. Basil.
• He was certainly married and did not join Sts. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus in their monastic retirement. He did return, however, into the full service of the Church and was ordained by St. Basil in 372 to the modest bishopric of Nyssa in Cappadocia.
• As an administrator, he was a disappointment to Basil (Ep. 58; 60; 100); because of accusations of mismanagement raised by the Arians, he was deposed in 376 but returned to his bishopric two years later. After St. Basil’s death in 379, Gregory became his recognized heir (St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 76) in the struggle against extreme Arianism, as represented by Eunomius, and began the most fruitful period of his life.
• In 379, he took part in the synod of the Nicene party held in Antioch; returning from there, he visited his dying sister Macrina, superior of a monastery of women in Annesi (Ep. 19;Vita Macr).
• Soon afterward, he traveled to Ibora and Sebaste in order to supervise the election of new bishops (Ep. 15; 18; 19; 22). In Sebaste, he himself was elected bishop, but he extricated himself, and, a short time afterward, his youngest brother, Peter, became bishop there.
• From May to July 381, St. Gregory played an important role side by side with St. Gregory of Nazianzus at the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople convoked by Theodosius I.
• On a mandate of this council, St. Gregory traveled in the same year to the Roman province of Arabia to intervene in a conflict concerning the bishopric of its capital,

Bostra. On this trip, he also visited Jerusalem to mediate in ecclesiastical controversies (Ep. 2.11-12) and in the process was constrained to defend the Orthodoxy of his own Christology (Ep. 3). He confessed that he himself did not experience an increase in faith as a result of his pilgrimage: “Change of places does not affect any drawing nearer unto God, but wherever you may be, God will come to you, if the chambers of your soul be found of such a sort that He can dwell in you.”

• St. Gregory’s presence at the Constantinopolitan synod of 383 is attested by a sermon. He delivered sermons in the capital on the occasions of the death of the young princess Pulcheria in 385 and her mother the Empress Flaccilla soon afterwards. We know that he was present at the synod of Constantinople in 394; he died probably soon afterwards.

• His range of thought is wide; with Origen, he enters on such vast problems as the origin of the soul, the nature of evil, the freedom of the will, the relation of matter to spirit, the constitution of the risen body, the restitution of all things.
• But as J Quasten states: “he does not share Origen’s ideas regarding the pre-existence and migration of souls and explicitly rejects the doctrine that they are enclosed in material bodies as a punishment for sins committed in a preceding world.”
• In his treatment of the great controversies of his time, St. Gregory is naturally far in advance of Origen, and follows in the steps of Sts. Athanasius and Basil.
• He is a mystic and an idealist. He is in some respects a greater theologian than St. Gregory the Theologian. While the latter popularized Orthodox theology, the former was an original and constructive thinker. 1. Dogmatic Works
• The most important is the twelve-books Against Eunomius.
• Other dogmatic works are treatises Against Apollinaris and Macedonius, a treatise Against Tritheism addressed to Ablabius, a tract Against Fatalism, On the Soul and the Resurrection, presented as a dialogue with the dying Macrina (who functioned as the teacher of Gregory), and the Life of Macrina. 2. His Catechetical Oration is a course of instruction in which St. Gregory carries the catechumen over the whole field of his theology. 3. His Exegetical Works are numerous, but less impressive than his works on doctrine.
• St. Gregory’s most extensive and mature works are the Song of Songs, and the Life of Moses, both treating especially the nature of Christian perfection as continuous progress, stem probably from St. Gregory’s last years (391-395).
• On the Making of Man and Hexaemeron explicitly complete and correct St. Basil’s homilies on creation and stem

probably from 379-389. 4. His Homilies and Orations lack the eloquence of his namesake of Nazianzus.

• On Virginity is St. Gregory’s first published writing, although its date can be set only approximately, between 370 and 379 (probably in the earlier years of this period).
• On the Lord's Prayer, The Beatitudes etc.
• He wrote in De virginitate that virginity is: the channel which draws down the Deity to share man’s estate, it keeps wings for man’s desire to rise to heavenly things, and is a bond of union between the Divine and the human, by its mediation bringing into harmony these existences so wildly divided…The real virginity, the real zeal for chastity, ends in no other goal than this, viz. the power thereby of seeing God. 17