Gregory the Wonderworker

Gregory was born about 213 in Neocaesarea in Pontus, in northern Asia Minor (now Turkey). He came from a wealthy pagan family and was originally named Theodore. With his brother Athenodorus he traveled to Beirut to study law, but a detour through Caesarea in Palestine changed everything: there they met the great Christian teacher Origen and became his disciples for five years. When Gregory finished his studies he wrote Origen a famous letter of thanks. He returned home to Pontus and tried to live as a hermit, but the bishop of Amasea hunted him down and made him bishop of Neocaesarea. There were seventeen Christians in the entire city when he became their bishop. By the time he died about 270, only seventeen pagans were left. The Theotokos appeared to him — the first recorded apparition of the Mother of God in Christian history — and gave him the Creed he was to use. Through plague, Gothic invasion, and the Decian persecution, he led his flock with such quiet wisdom and such constant miracles that they called him Thaumaturgus, the Wonderworker.

Gregory and his brother Athenodorus had been raised pagan, but their schoolmaster had taught them to admire Christian thinking. After their father died they decided to study law at Beirut, the great Roman law school of the East, and on the way they stopped in Caesarea in Palestine to drop off their sister, who was joining her husband there. In Caesarea they met Origen. Origen was already famous: he was the most learned Christian of his age, known throughout the Roman world for the depth and scope of his knowledge, his memorization of Scripture, his ability to debate any pagan philosopher and convert him by reasoning. The two brothers went to one of his lectures — and stayed. They never made it to Beirut. They studied under Origen for five years, learning everything from logic and rhetoric to the difficult science of moral philosophy and finally the deepest treasure: the interpretation of the holy Scriptures. When Gregory finally had to leave to return home, he gave a long public speech of thanks to Origen, which has been preserved. It is one of the most beautiful tributes by a student to a teacher in the entire ancient world.

When Gregory was about to be consecrated bishop of Neocaesarea, he was anxious about how to teach the people the truth about the Holy Trinity in language that was both accurate and clear. He spent the night in prayer. As he prayed in his room, an old man appeared to him robed in priestly garments. Beside him was a Lady, radiant and majestic. They were the Apostle John and the Theotokos, the Mother of God. The Lady asked the Apostle to teach Gregory the mystery of the true faith. The Apostle then spoke, and Gregory heard from his lips a complete Confession of the Faith — the doctrine of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the perfect Trinity — in language so precise and beautiful that he wrote it down word for word as soon as the vision ended. He preserved that Creed throughout his life. He used it to teach his catechumens. Through Saint Macrina the Elder, who knew this Creed and taught it to her grandchildren, it became one of the foundational confessions used by Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory of Nyssa. This is the first recorded apparition of the Mother of God in Christian history.

When Gregory came to Neocaesarea to take up his episcopal duties, the city was almost entirely pagan. There were temples on every important corner. The festivals of the Roman gods were celebrated publicly. The educated classes were Platonist or Stoic. There were exactly seventeen Christians in the entire city. Gregory could have been overwhelmed; he was not. He understood that he had been given a mission and that the Theotokos and the Apostle had given him the dogmatic equipment he needed. He began with patient, systematic work. He preached at the modest church the seventeen had built. He visited the sick. He answered questions. He built up the community of catechumens. He performed many wonders, healing diseases that the local pagan physicians could not heal, casting out demons from the possessed, calming a dangerously flooding river by planting his staff in the ground at the riverbank, even moving a mountain that was blocking the construction of a church (according to Saint Gregory of Nyssa). Slowly, then increasingly rapidly, the city converted. By the time he died, only seventeen people in Neocaesarea remained pagan.

In the year 250 the emperor Decius issued a decree requiring everyone in the Roman Empire to perform a public sacrifice to the gods, in order to demonstrate loyalty. Christians who refused were arrested, tortured, and often killed. Gregory understood immediately what was happening. He did not call his people to mass martyrdom. Instead he led his entire community out of Neocaesarea into the mountains of Pontus, where they hid until the persecution was over. He stayed with them throughout, sustaining them with the Eucharist, with preaching, with his own calm presence. When the persecution ended in 251, after Decius died fighting the Goths, Gregory brought his people home and established annual feasts in honor of the martyrs who had refused to flee and had given their lives. Some historians have criticized his strategy of flight, but the Church has understood that a bishop is a shepherd, not a martyrologist; his job is to keep his sheep alive, and he is allowed to flee if flight will save them. Gregory’s method was vindicated by the survival of the Pontic church. He also had to work out, in the years after, how to deal pastorally with those Christians who had failed during the persecution and offered the required sacrifice. His Canonical Letter on this question is one of the foundational documents of Orthodox penitential theology.

After the Decian persecution ended, a new disaster struck Pontus. The Goths, a confederation of Germanic tribes from north of the Black Sea, swept across the empire’s northern frontier and devastated the Pontic countryside in 252–254. Cities were sacked, slaves were taken, churches were robbed, families were broken. In the chaos, some Christians did terrible things: a few collaborated with the Goths and led them to plunder their neighbors, some kept the goods that the fleeing Goths abandoned, others took advantage of the absence of the rule of law to seize property that wasn’t theirs, still others were captured and forced into pagan rituals. When peace returned, Gregory had to address all these failures pastorally. He wrote a long letter to a fellow bishop, the Canonical Letter, dealing with each case individually. Those who had collaborated with the Goths were treated most severely; they had to do years of penance before they could receive Communion again. Those who had merely kept goods abandoned by the Goths had to give them up. Those who had been captured and forced into rituals against their will were treated mildly. The Canonical Letter became one of the most important documents in the history of Orthodox canon law.

The Creed that Gregory received from the Apostle John in his vision was preserved word-for-word and used in the Pontic church for centuries. It is short, but it teaches the central truth of Christian faith with remarkable precision. There is one God, the Father of the living Word who is the Son. The Son is His own subsistent Wisdom and Power, His Eternal Image. There is one Lord, the Only-begotten Son, God of God, Image and Likeness of Deity, the active Word, perfect Wisdom of all created things, true Son of the true Father. There is one Holy Spirit, having His existence from God, who has appeared through the Son to humanity. He is the perfect Image of the perfect Son, Life giving life, Holy Fountain, holiness conferring sanctification. In Him is manifested God the Father, who is over all and in all, and God the Son, who is through all. There is a perfect Trinity, in glory and eternity and sovereignty, neither divided nor estranged. Saint Basil the Great cites this Creed in his treatise On the Holy Spirit as foundational evidence of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity from before Nicaea.

Paul of Samosata was the patriarch of Antioch, one of the most important sees in Christianity. Around the year 260 he began teaching a strange doctrine: that Jesus Christ was an ordinary man, born of Mary in the normal way, who was filled with the Word of God at his baptism but did not possess the Word as a personal Son of God from eternity. This was not the Christian faith. The bishops of the Eastern Church called a synod at Antioch in 264 to deal with the matter, and Gregory the Wonderworker, then quite old, traveled all the way from Pontus to Antioch to take part. The synod did not initially succeed: Paul defended himself cleverly. A second synod was called in 268, after Gregory’s death, and this one finally deposed Paul. But Gregory’s presence at the first synod was a witness to the unity of the Christian Church across the great distances of the Roman Empire and to the willingness of the Wonderworker, even in old age, to leave his beloved Pontic flock and travel hundreds of miles to defend the orthodox faith.

The vision of the Theotokos to Gregory the Wonderworker is the first known apparition of the Mother of God in Christian history, but it would not be the last. Throughout the centuries the Mother of God has continued to appear to her children, especially in moments when the integrity of the orthodox faith was at stake. The patristic theology behind this is profound. The Theotokos is not a remote heavenly figure who has finished her work and retired; she is the Mother of the Church, the New Eve, who continues to participate actively in the life of her Son’s Body. When Christ said to John from the Cross, Behold thy mother, He was establishing the Theotokos’s ongoing relationship to the entire Body of Christ — every Christian is in some sense John, and the Theotokos is in some sense the Mother of every Christian. Her appearance to Gregory the Wonderworker, dictating to him the orthodox Trinitarian Creed, is an icon of her continuing maternal care for the Church’s faith. She watches over what is taught about her Son. She intervenes when the integrity of that teaching is threatened. The Wonderworker’s vision is the first recorded instance of what has been a continuous reality in Christian history.

Gregory died peacefully about the year 270 in Neocaesarea, the city he had taken as a bishop with seventeen Christians and was leaving with seventeen pagans. He had served as bishop for approximately three decades. Saint Macrina the Elder, the grandmother of Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, and Saint Macrina the Younger, was his personal disciple. She had grown up hearing him teach and had memorized his Creed and his teachings. After his death she continued to transmit them to her family. Her son Basil the Elder married Saint Emmelia, and they had ten children, including the three great Cappadocian saints just mentioned. All of them grew up hearing about the Wonderworker from their grandmother, and all of them received his Creed as a foundational document of their own faith. The Cappadocian theological synthesis that culminated in the work of Basil and the two Gregorys, and that gave the world the developed doctrine of the Holy Trinity that we confess in the Creed today, traces its origins through Macrina to the Wonderworker, and through the Wonderworker to his teacher Origen.