Gregory of Nyssa

Saint Gregory of Nyssa is the quietest of the three great Cappadocians but in many ways the deepest. He was the younger brother of Saint Basil the Great and Saint Macrina the Younger, and the close friend of Saint Gregory the Theologian. He grew up in the same holy household, watching his older sister run the family monastery, listening to his older brother defend Nicene Orthodoxy against the Arian emperors. He started out as a teacher of rhetoric, may have been married, and was somewhat reluctantly drawn into the priesthood. His older brother Basil consecrated him bishop of the small town of Nyssa in 372. He spent the next twenty-five years writing some of the most beautiful theology the Church has ever produced, fighting Arianism alongside his brother, surviving exile and false accusation, completing his brother’s commentary on the days of Creation after Basil died, and serving as one of the chief figures at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381. The Seventh Ecumenical Council later called him "the Father of Fathers." Saint Macrina once wrote to him: "You are renowned in the cities, in gatherings of people, throughout entire districts. The churches ask you for help."

The family Gregory grew up in is one of the most remarkable in Christian history. His grandparents had been confessors during the Roman persecutions. His parents were Basil the Elder and Emmelia, who would also be canonized. They had ten children, and five of them are now numbered among the saints: Saint Basil the Great, Saint Macrina the Younger, Saint Gregory of Nyssa himself, Saint Peter of Sebaste, and Blessed Theosebia the Deaconess. Macrina was the oldest daughter and ran the family. After their father’s death she persuaded their mother to free the household servants, give away the family’s wealth, and turn the estate at Annesi into a women’s monastery. She raised her younger brothers in the spirit of the Faith. When Basil came home full of pride from his studies in Athens, Macrina sat him down and reminded him what his soul was for. The same sister did the same for Gregory. The whole rest of his life is in some sense the unfolding of what he learned from her.

Unlike his older brother Basil, who knew from early on that his vocation was the Church, Gregory took his time. He became a teacher of rhetoric, the same kind of work the young Saul of Tarsus had probably done. He may have married a woman named Theosebia (though some scholars argue his treatise On Virginity points to a single life). He was reluctant to be a priest. His brother had to push him. Saint Gregory the Theologian wrote him a letter at one point gently scolding him for staying in the rhetoric profession instead of using his gifts for the Church. By the year 372, when the Arian crisis was at its worst and Basil needed every faithful bishop he could ordain to push back against the heretics, Basil consecrated his younger brother bishop of the small town of Nyssa in Cappadocia. It was not a glamorous post. Basil sent Gregory there partly to put him in a strategic position against the Arians who controlled the surrounding sees. Gregory accepted, reluctantly, the office that would shape the rest of his life and bring his philosophical gifts into the service of the Church.

The Arians did not appreciate having Gregory as a neighbor. They began a campaign against him. They falsely accused him of mishandling church property. They got him deposed from his see and sent into exile in Ancyra. The next year a council of Arian bishops deposed him again in absentia. Gregory spent several years wandering from place to place, encouraging his scattered flock, surviving on the generosity of fellow Orthodox Christians, refusing to compromise on the Faith. His sister Theosebia was with him through some of these years and shared his exile. When the emperor Valens, who had backed the Arians, died in 378, the political climate suddenly changed. The new emperor Theodosius restored Orthodox bishops to their sees. Gregory came back to Nyssa. The Synaxarion says he "was joyously received by his flock." He had been gone for about three years.

In 381 the new emperor Theodosius called a great council at Constantinople to settle the Trinitarian controversies once and for all. It became known as the Second Ecumenical Council. Gregory was one of the central figures. The council had to address a new heresy, the teaching of Macedonius, which denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Macedonius said the Spirit was a kind of created instrument rather than the third Person of the Trinity equal to the Father and the Son. Gregory of Nyssa stood up against this teaching with the same clarity Athanasius had used against the Arians at Nicaea fifty years earlier. The Synaxarion says that on Gregory’s initiative the Nicene Symbol of Faith was completed at this council. What we now call the Nicene Creed and recite at every Divine Liturgy is more accurately called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed; the second half of it, especially the lines about the Holy Spirit, was given final form at the council where Gregory of Nyssa was a chief voice. Every time an Orthodox Christian recites the Creed, they are speaking words that bear Gregory’s philosophical and theological imprint.

Gregory taught something extraordinary about heaven. He said the soul’s union with God is not a destination where you arrive and then sit forever. It is an eternal growing into deeper and deeper union with God. The blessed in heaven do not stop hungering for God once they have him. They go on hungering more deeply, because God is infinite and the soul’s capacity to receive God grows forever. Gregory called this "epektasis," from a word in the Letter to the Philippians where Paul says he is stretching forward to what lies ahead. The hunger that drives the catechumen to the font, the desire that drives the monk to the desert, the love that draws the Christian deeper into the Liturgy — none of this stops at death. It deepens forever. The heavenly life is not boredom. It is endless adventure into the infinite love of God. Gregory of Nyssa is the patron of every Orthodox Christian who has ever wanted more of God than they currently have.

Gregory had a deep conviction that we cannot fully grasp God with concepts. The moment we think we have him pinned down with our definitions, we have made an idol. We have replaced the living God with our own idea of God. The only proper response to the divine reality is wonder. Stand at the edge of the mystery. Be amazed. Worship. Do not try to put God in a box you have built in your own mind, because the God you can fit in a box is not the real God. This conviction shaped his whole theology. He used technical philosophical vocabulary when it helped, but he never thought the vocabulary captured God. He was always pointing past his own words to the inexhaustible reality they were trying to describe.

The biblical foundation of Gregory’s teaching on epektasis is Saint Paul’s words to the Philippians. Paul, near the end of his life, says he has not yet arrived. He is still reaching forward, still pressing toward the mark, still climbing toward the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus. If even Saint Paul, who would die a martyr in a few years, was still stretching forward at the end of his life, then there is no point in the Christian journey at which we can say we have arrived. The reaching forward is the journey. The forgetting of what lies behind — the past failures, the previous achievements, the comforting plateaus — is part of the discipline. Gregory took this single Pauline verse and built one of the deepest theologies of the spiritual life ever produced from it.

Gregory lived another fifteen years or so after the great council of 381. He was sent on missions to settle disputes in Arabia and Palestine, where the Arian heresy was still active. He visited Jerusalem and the Holy Places. He kept writing. He preached funeral orations for the empress Placilla in 386 and probably for his sister Theosebia. He attended local councils. He kept defending Orthodox doctrine and pastoring his small flock at Nyssa. The Synaxarion remembers him as "a fiery defender of Orthodox dogmas and a zealous teacher of his flock, a kind and compassionate father to his spiritual children, and their intercessor before the courts. He was distinguished by his magnanimity, patience and love of peace." He died in old age, sometime after 394, surrounded by the deep affection of the Christian East he had served. The later Orthodox Church, looking back at the body of work he had left behind, called him "the Father of Fathers."

Gregory of Nyssa matters to every Orthodox Christian because he gave us the theological articulation of what the Christian life is actually for. We are not merely being saved from sin; we are being drawn into endless growth into the love of God. We are not arriving at a destination; we are climbing a mountain that has no top, and the climbing itself is the joy. We are not standing on a finished theology; we are standing in awe before a divine reality that exceeds every concept we can form of it. Gregory taught the Church to think clearly about the Trinity. He taught the Church to keep climbing. He taught the Church that the hunger for God is itself the most fundamental thing about the human person, and that the hunger does not stop at death but deepens forever. The whole Orthodox spiritual tradition, from the desert fathers to the hesychasts of Mount Athos to the Russian elders and the modern Orthodox saints, draws from his articulation of these convictions.