The Life
Saint Gregory the Theologian was the lifelong best friend of Saint Basil the Great. They met as students in Athens and from that day on they thought of themselves as one soul in two bodies. Where Basil was the great organizer and confessor, Gregory was the poet, the contemplative, the man of stillness who only wanted a quiet life with his books in the wilderness. But the Church kept calling him out of his hermitage to defend the Faith. He preached the Five Theological Orations at Constantinople when Arianism nearly drowned the city. He presided at the Second Ecumenical Council. He was given the title "the Theologian" — a title shared only with Saint John the Evangelist. Two thousand years later, when the Orthodox Church chants the Creed, half of what we say about the Trinity comes from him.
Gregory was born in 329 near the small town of Nazianzos in Cappadocia. His father, Saint Gregory the Elder, was the local bishop. His mother, Saint Nonna, was a remarkable woman — the kind of mother who literally prayed her husband into the Faith and her children into holiness. She had longed for a son and had vowed to God that if he gave her one, she would dedicate that child to him. He gave her Gregory. From the moment he could read, his mother put the Holy Scriptures into his hands. The whole shape of his life was determined before he was born.
When Gregory was on his way to Athens to finish his education, a violent storm caught the ship he was on. It lasted twenty days. Gregory was still only a catechumen, not yet baptized. He was terrified — not of dying but of dying without baptism. He lay in the ship’s stern, weeping, begging the Lord for mercy, vowing that if he were spared he would give his whole life to God. The storm passed. The ship reached Greece. Gregory never forgot that promise. The terror of those twenty days shaped the rest of his sixty years.
Gregory spent six years at Athens. He studied rhetoric, poetry, geometry, astronomy. He had famous teachers. But the great gift of those years was meeting his fellow Cappadocian Basil. They became closer than brothers. Gregory later said they thought of themselves as one soul in two bodies. While the future emperor Julian — who would later become an apostate from the Christian Faith — was studying philosophy in the same city, Basil and Gregory were spending all their free hours together in the small Christian community at Athens, dreaming of giving their lives to the Lord.
When Gregory came home from Athens, his father — who was the bishop of Nazianzus — ordained him to the priesthood against his will. Gregory was thirty-three years old. He had wanted nothing more than a quiet life of prayer and study. The weight of the priesthood horrified him. So he ran away to Pontus to live with Basil at the new monastery Basil had built. He stayed there for a long time. Eventually he came home and helped his elderly father, but the terror of the priesthood never left him. He wrote a famous treatise on it, called the Apologetic Oration, explaining why he had fled. It became one of the foundational texts on Christian priesthood for the rest of Christian history.
In 379 Constantinople was overrun with Arians, Macedonians, and Apollinarians. There was almost no Orthodox parish left in the imperial city. The bishops invited Gregory to come help. He arrived alone with nothing, and started preaching in a tiny private chapel he called the Anastasis — the Resurrection. People mocked him. A mob of armed heretics broke in on Pascha night while he was baptizing catechumens, killed one bishop, and wounded Gregory himself. He kept preaching. In the summer and fall of 380 he delivered five sermons — the Five Theological Orations — on the Trinity, on the Father, on the Son, on the Son again, on the Holy Spirit. The whole city eventually listened. Within a year the Orthodox were the majority. The line in the Creed about the Holy Spirit — "the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father" — came largely from Gregory.
In his fifth Theological Oration, Gregory turned to the question that nearly tore the Church apart in the late fourth century: is the Holy Spirit truly God along with the Father and the Son? Some had said yes to the Son’s divinity but no to the Spirit’s. Gregory answered with a question that has rung in Orthodox ears ever since: "What great things are there in the idea of God which are not in his power? What titles appertaining to God do not apply also to him, except for Unbegotten and Begotten?" If we look honestly at what Scripture says about the Spirit and what the Church does in his name, we are forced to confess that he is fully God. A year later the Second Ecumenical Council confessed exactly this.
After Gregory had saved the Church of Constantinople, restored Orthodoxy in the imperial capital, and presided at the Second Ecumenical Council, certain bishops who had arrived late at the Council refused to recognize him as patriarch. They argued he had been elected without their presence. Gregory could have fought. He could have called on the emperor. Instead he stood up before the whole Council and gave one of the most beautiful resignation speeches in Christian history. He compared himself to the prophet Jonah — the man on the ship who was the cause of the storm and asked to be thrown overboard so the ship could be saved. He left Constantinople and went home to die in peace.
Gregory devoted his entire theological life to a single conviction: that authentic theology is not the human mind reaching up to grasp God, but God descending to give us his own mind through the Holy Spirit. The theologian does not climb a ladder of speculation. The theologian receives, through purification of heart and obedience to the Church’s tradition, the mind of Christ.
After leaving Constantinople, Gregory returned to his beloved Arianzos. He wrote letters. He composed poetry — he was the great poet of the Cappadocian Fathers, and he wrote thousands of lines of verse, some of it on theology, some of it personal. He cared for his diocese for a while longer, then turned it over to a worthy successor and retired completely into solitude. He died there on January 25, 389, sixty years old, having outlived his beloved friend Basil by ten years. He is honored by the Church with the title "Theologian," shared only with Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Symeon the New Theologian. He is buried at Nazianzos. Some of his relics are now at Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos and in the Vatican.
Gregory matters to every Orthodox Christian because his words have entered the Creed itself. When we confess at every Liturgy that the Holy Spirit is "the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified," we are saying what Gregory taught us to say. He gave us the language for the Trinity. He taught us that you cannot truly speak about God unless you have been purified by prayer, that the theologian and the saint are the same person, that theology is something God does in us, not something we do to God. Sixteen hundred years after his repose, every Orthodox Christian still depends on what he wrote in those few astonishing years.