Saint Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – 394/395)

The most speculative of the Greek Fathers

In the 4th century, the Greek Church produced a theological flowering without equal. Three figures dominate, grouped under the name of the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea, called the Great; Gregory of Nazianzus, “the Theologian”; and Gregory of Nyssa. If Basil was above all the organizer and the pastor, and Nazianzus the poet and the orator, Gregory of Nyssa was the speculative mind, the metaphysician, the one who pushed reflection on God, on man and on the hereafter the furthest^[7][8].

Later tradition sometimes judged him less “safe” than his elders, because he dared bold hypotheses; but it also recognized him as the most profound. The theologian Jean Daniélou, who contributed to his rediscovery in the 20th century, saw in him the true founder of Christian mystical theology^[9].

The youngest of a family of saints

Gregory belongs to one of the most extraordinary families in Christian history: a household that gave several saints in a single generation. His paternal grandmother, Saint Macrina the Elder, had been formed by the disciples of Saint Gregory the Wonderworker; his father and his mother, Emmelia, had ten children. Among them: Macrina the Younger, the eldest, a model of consecrated virginity; Basil, the bishop of Caesarea; Peter, the future bishop of Sebaste; and Gregory himself^[10][11].

This kinship is no biographical detail: it lies at the heart of his spirituality. It is his sister Macrina who will be, in his writings, the mistress of wisdom — he stages her on her deathbed as a new Christian Socrates, teaching the soul and the resurrection. It is his brother Basil who will be, after his death, the object of an admiring eulogy. Gregory is the last survivor of these siblings, the witness and memorialist of a family holiness.

“Father of Fathers”

Four centuries after his death, when the Second Council of Nicaea (787) met to restore the veneration of holy images against iconoclasm, the conciliar Fathers invoked the authority of the great ancient doctors. It is there that Gregory of Nyssa received, from the mouth of Epiphanius the Deacon, the solemn title of “father of fathers” (patèr patérôn)^[12]. The expression says the unique place he had won: not one Father among others, but a source from which the Fathers themselves had drunk.

See the Second Council of Nicaea (787) for the context of this acclamation, and the Doctors of the Church through history for the doctrinal posterity of the Cappadocians.

Emmelia, Macrina and the house of God

Gregory's formation came first not from schools, but from his home. After the father's death, his mother Emmelia and his sister Macrina turned the family estate of Annesi, on the banks of the Iris (Pontus), into a true ascetic community, mingling mistress and servant women in a single life of prayer^[13]. Macrina reigned there by gentleness and by knowledge of the Scriptures.

Gregory owed her everything, and he said so. In his Life of Macrina, he makes her the accomplished model of Christian philosophy — life according to the Gospel lived as the highest of wisdoms:

“She rose to the very summit of human virtue by philosophy, and it is not possible to say in words with what clarity of reason she advanced towards the goal.” — Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina^[14]

Basil, the elder brother and master

Gregory's relationship with Basil was that of a younger brother to a domineering and brilliant elder. Basil, returned from Athens where he had studied with Gregory of Nazianzus, became the great man of the family: organizing monk, theologian, then archbishop of Caesarea. It was he who, against Gregory's resistance, drew him out of secular life and directed him towards the Church^[15][16].

Gregory always recognized in Basil his master. Part of his work directly continues his brother's: he completes Basil's fight against the Arian Eunomius, completes his Hexaemeron with a treatise On the Making of Man, and defends his memory. But the pupil surpassed the master in speculative depth.

The married rhetorician turned monk

Unlike Basil, who chose asceticism very early, Gregory began with the world. Gifted in letters, he became a rhetorician (teacher of eloquence) and married — a rare fact among the great Fathers, but in no way scandalous: the marriage of clergy was not yet forbidden in the East^[17][18]. The name of his wife has not come down to us with certainty: she is sometimes identified with Theosebia, to whom Gregory of Nazianzus addressed a letter of condolence after her death; but that same letter calls her both “truly holy, truly a priest's companion” and “sister”, so that historians remain divided — wife or sister — over who Theosebia was^[19].

This first missed vocation gives Gregory a particular sensitivity: he knows what return is, second conversion, being torn away from the seductions of secular eloquence. When he writes of the soul's ascent, it will not be the theory of a man who never knew the depths: it will be the experience of a convert.

A small town, a great struggle

In 372, Basil, become archbishop of Caesarea, waged a trial of strength with the Arian imperial power for control of the episcopal sees of Cappadocia. He multiplied ordinations of reliable faithful. It was thus that he made his younger brother bishop of Nyssa, a modest town on the road to the Halys^[20][21].

Gregory had neither Basil's administrative temperament nor his political skill. Basil himself complained of his naivety in business. But what Nyssa lost in government, the universal Church gained in theology: from that small see came one of the most powerful doctrinal works of the century.

Deposition and exile (376-378)

Arianism, which denied the full divinity of the Son, was no school quarrel: it was supported by Emperor Valens, who persecuted the Nicene bishops. Gregory was an easy target. Accused of mismanagement of the Church's goods and of irregularities in his election, he was arrested by the governor, then deposed by an Arian synod gathered at Nyssa in 376, and forced to wander from town to town^[22][23].

This exile lasted until a decisive reversal: in 378, Valens perished at the battle of Adrianople against the Goths, and Gratian's edict of toleration restored their sees to the Nicene bishops. Gregory returned triumphantly to Nyssa, welcomed by his people. The trial had matured him: it was in the years that followed that his theological genius fully blossomed.

The triumph of Nicaea at Constantinople (381)

The death of Basil, at the beginning of 379, made Gregory the heir of the Cappadocian struggle. In 381, Emperor Theodosius convened at Constantinople the council that would become the second ecumenical council. Gregory played a leading part there: he was recognized as a pillar of orthodoxy, even entrusted with delivering official discourses, and he defended the divinity of the Holy Spirit which the council would proclaim^[24][25].

The council of 381 completed Nicaea: it affirmed that the Holy Spirit, “Lord and giver of life”, is Himself fully God, worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. This is the crowning of the work of the three Cappadocians. Gregory is, after Basil's death, its great surviving witness.

“It is not a matter of knowing something about God, but of having God in oneself.” — the summary Benedict XVI gave of Gregory's theology^[26]

For the detail of this council and its canons, see the First Council of Constantinople (381).

Against Eunomius: the defence of the Trinity

Gregory's great doctrinal adversary was Eunomius, leader of the radical Arians (“Anomoeans”), who claimed that one could define the essence of God by a word — the “unbegotten” — and that the Son, being begotten, was of another nature than the Father. Against him, Gregory wrote his immense Against Eunomius, in several books^[27].

His answer is twofold. On the Trinity, he fixed the formula that became classical: one single essence (ousia) in three Persons (hypostases), the Father, the Son and the Spirit fully and equally sharing the divinity. On the knowledge of God, he laid down a revolutionary principle: no name, no concept can enclose the divine essence, for God is infinite. Eunomius's claim to define God is not only false: it is an intellectual idolatry.

The Great Catechetical Oration

The Great Catechetical Oration (Oratio catechetica magna) is Gregory's great manual of theology: an argued defence, in some forty chapters, of the Catholic faith against Jews, pagans and heretics^[28]. In it he expounds creation, the fall, the Incarnation, Redemption and the sacraments with rare coherence.

There we find his famous image of the Incarnation as a fish-hook: the divinity of Christ, hidden under the “bait” of His flesh, is bitten by death, which finds itself trapped — seizing an apparent mortal, it discovers too late that it has swallowed God Himself, and dies of it. The boldness of the image says the optimism of Greek soteriology: Christ does not only redeem, He divinizes.

Man, image of God

In his treatise On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio), written to complete Basil's Hexaemeron, Gregory develops a luminous anthropology^[29]. Man is created in the image of God: not by his body, but by his spiritual soul, his freedom and his capacity to love. This dignity is, in the words of Benedict XVI commenting on Gregory, “the great gift God gave to our nature at the very moment of our birth”^[30].

“Man was created in the image of God: it is by freedom that he resembles Him, for virtue is masterless, it is voluntary and free from all constraint.” — after Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man^[31]

Sin has tarnished this image as rust tarnishes a mirror; the whole spiritual life consists in polishing the mirror so that it reflects the face of God anew. This idea — divinization (theosis) through purification and grace — connects Gregory with Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, the great doctor of divinization.

The soul and the resurrection: the dialogue with Macrina

Shortly after Basil's death, Gregory went to the bedside of his dying sister Macrina. From this visit he drew a masterpiece: On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione), a dialogue in which Macrina, like a Christian Socrates, teaches her stricken brother the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of bodies and the last end of man^[32].

The work is a summit of patristic literature: philosophical rigour weds fraternal tenderness there, and the death of a saint becomes a lesson in eternal life. It is also one of the texts in which Gregory's hope in a final restoration of all creation surfaces — the delicate question of the apokatastasis, which we address below.

Here Gregory is at his most original. Before him, one sought to “see” God as an end to be reached. Gregory overturns everything: since God is infinite, there is no end. Beatitude is not a halt but an eternal race, an ever-growing happiness. This intuition makes him the father of Christian mysticism.

Epektasis: the desire that is never sated

The word epektasis comes from Saint Paul: “forgetting what lies behind, I stretch myself out (epekteinomenos) towards what lies ahead” (Philippians 3:13)^[33]. Gregory makes it the law of the whole spiritual life. The soul that approaches God never saturates its desire: the more it receives, the more capable of receiving it becomes, in an endless surge.

“Such is the true vision of God: never to be sated with the desire to see Him. But always, looking at what one can see, one must rekindle the desire to see more.” — Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, II, 239^[34]

This doctrine resolves an old anxiety: is there not a risk of boredom in Heaven, once everything is obtained? For Gregory, never: Heaven is an endless discovery of an inexhaustible God. Beatitude is a perpetual beginning.

The three theophanies of Moses: light, cloud, darkness

In the Life of Moses, his spiritual testament, Gregory reads the prophet's ascent towards God as the itinerary of every soul. This ascent passes through three stages, marked by three encounters with God^[35]:

• first the light of the burning bush, when God reveals Himself to whoever comes out of the darkness of ignorance;
• then the cloud, when the soul learns that God surpasses sensible appearances;
• finally the darkness of Sinai, where Moses enters the “dark cloud” to meet God there beyond every image and every concept.

This paradox of luminous darkness — seeing God in not-seeing, knowing Him as unknowable — makes Gregory the ancestor of all apophatic mysticism, from Pseudo-Dionysius to Saint John of the Cross and his “dark night”.

God infinite and incomprehensible

The basis of all this mysticism is a metaphysical thesis which Gregory was one of the first to formulate clearly: God is infinite. And the infinite, by definition, cannot be circumscribed, neither by the mind nor by language. All true knowledge of God therefore begins with the admission of His incomprehensibility^[36][37].

Far from being agnosticism, this “learned ignorance” is the condition of love. One does not possess the infinite as an object: one abandons oneself to it. That is why, in Gregory, theology never ends in a system: it opens onto adoration.

Perfection without limit

From the infinity of God, Gregory draws a practical consequence for Christian perfection. One ordinarily believes that perfection has a summit where one settles. Gregory answers: no, for the good in which the soul participates is without limit, so the participation itself is without end.

“Perfection is bounded by no limit. The only limit of virtue is to have none.” — after Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, I^[38]

This saying frees the Christian from two traps: discouragement (“I will never get there”) and self-sufficiency (“I have arrived”). Holiness is not a state, but a movement: to be holy is never to cease becoming more so.

The hope of “God all in all”

Gregory, heir of Origen, nourished a bold hope: that of a final restoration (apokatastasis) of all creation, in which evil would be entirely vanquished and in which God would be, in the words of Saint Paul, “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28)^[39]. In this perspective, the pains of hell would be purifying and temporary, ordered to the ultimate healing of souls rather than to endless punishment.

The mainspring of this hope must be understood: for Gregory, evil has no substance of its own; it is a privation, an absence of good, which therefore cannot subsist eternally before an infinitely good God. His thought is no laxity, but the expression pushed to the extreme of God's almighty goodness.

What the Church retains — and what she has set aside

On this point, honesty imposes a clear distinction. The Church has never condemned Gregory of Nyssa: he remains a saint, a Father and the “father of fathers”. But she has set aside the doctrine of the apokatastasis in its rigid form, inherited from Origen, which affirmed the necessary salvation of all, including the demons. Origenism was anathematized in the 6th century, in the entourage of the Second Council of Constantinople (553)^[40].

How to reconcile the two? In several ways which theologians carefully distinguish:

• Gregory's hope is not exactly Origen's system: it remains subordinate to Scripture and to freedom, and does not deny the reality of hell;
• the Church firmly maintains the real possibility of eternal damnation, because God respects the freedom of man who can refuse Him to the end (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1035);
• but she permits hope as a disposition of the heart — weeping over the possible loss of souls and desiring their return — without ever making it a doctrinal certainty;

Gregory thus remains precious as a witness of Christian hope carried to incandescence, provided his intuition is not hardened into a thesis that would abolish freedom and empty Christ's warning. The wisdom of the Church has been to venerate the saint without canonizing all his hypotheses — which is the very mark of a living tradition, capable of distinguishing the gold of genius from its dross.

In praise of virginity

One of Gregory's first writings, On Virginity (c. 371), sings of the consecrated life as an anticipation of the life of angels and a privileged path towards God^[41]. A delightful and wholly Gregorian detail: he who was married recommends virginity not from contempt for marriage, but as the most direct way to union with the infinite.

Prayer, presence to God

For Gregory, prayer is not first a request, but a presence. In his homilies On the Our Father, he teaches that to pray is to stand with God — and whoever stands with God is, by that very fact, far from evil:

“Through prayer, we come to be with God. And whoever is with God is far from the enemy.” — after Gregory of Nyssa^[42]

Against slavery

Remarkable for his time, Gregory is one of the first voices of Antiquity to condemn slavery in itself as contrary to the dignity of man made in the image of God. In his homily on Ecclesiastes, he denounces the claim of one man to own another man, created free by God^[43]. This intuition, isolated in his time, shows the ethical fruitfulness of his anthropology of the divine image.

A crowned work

Gregory's last years were devoted to writing and to the service of the Church. He returned to Constantinople in 383 and around 385-386, still consulted as a theological authority of the Eastern Empire. He died at Nyssa around 394-395, having survived all his own — the last witness of the great Cappadocian generation^[44].

Doctor and “father of fathers”

The cult of Gregory established itself without the éclat of a trial, through the continuous veneration of East and West. His feast is celebrated on 10 January in the Churches of Byzantine tradition and on 9 March in the Roman martyrology. Above all, his doctrinal authority was consecrated by the Second Council of Nicaea (787), which bestowed on him the title of “father of fathers”^[45][46].

His rediscovery in the 20th century

Long less read than Basil or Nazianzus, Gregory underwent a spectacular renaissance in the 20th century. The works of Jean Daniélou (Platonism and Mystical Theology, 1944) then of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Presence and Thought, 1942) brought his depth back to light, to the point that one could speak of a true “Gregorian renaissance”^[47]. Benedict XVI devoted two catecheses to him in 2007, hailing in him a master of human dignity and of the mystical life^[48][49].

Sixteen centuries later, Gregory speaks to modern man with astonishing freshness. He offers first an answer to the fear of the infinite and to the anguish of boredom: if God is without limit, eternity is not a frozen immobility, but an endless adventure. The promised beatitude is not the end of desire, but its perpetual fulfilment.

He then teaches an intellectual humility which our time needs: God does not let Himself be enclosed in any formula, any ideology, any image. Every claim to “hold” God — whether fanatical or rationalist — is an idolatry. The true believer is not the one who possesses God, but the one who lets himself be seized by Him.

He finally recalls the inviolable dignity of every man, image of God: it was from this intuition that Gregory drew his condemnation of slavery, long before humanity formulated it as a right. The most mystical thinker of the Greek Fathers was also one of the most humane.

“Such is the true vision of God: never to be sated with the desire to see Him.” — This saying, engraved as a motto, says enough why the Church has never ceased to read Gregory of Nyssa: he is the doctor of hope that does not end.

• Saint Basil the Great — his elder brother and master, the organizer of monasticism and the pastor of Caesarea.
• Saint Gregory of Nazianzus — the friend of the family, “the Theologian”, third of the Cappadocian Fathers.
• Saint Athanasius of Alexandria — the great doctor of divinization, whose theology Gregory continues.
• The First Council of Constantinople (381) — the council where Gregory was a pillar of Nicene orthodoxy.
• The Second Council of Nicaea (787) — the council which bestowed on him the title of “father of fathers”.
• The Second Council of Constantinople (553) — for the condemnation of Origenism and the question of the apokatastasis.
• The dogma of the Trinity — the doctrine “one essence, three Persons” which Gregory helped to fix.
• The Doctors of the Church through history — the great patristic tradition of which the Cappadocians are a summit.