The Trinity in Gregory the Wonderworker

In this post I will be quoting from Life and Works (Fathers of the Church Patristic Series), translated by Michael Slusser, published by The Catholic University of America Press in 1998. All emphasis will be mine.

(5) Gregory is known in modern times less for his occasional appearances on the scene of history than for his writings, both those which are authentic and those which have been placed under his name in the hope that they might get a better hearing. The controversies surrounding issues of authenticity are complex and passionately argued, and the reader should be aware that in this volume I have taken what may be termed a “maximalist” position with regard to Gregory’s writings, ascribing to him as genuine not only the Metaphrase on Ecclesiastes (henceforth referred to as the Metaphrase) and the Canonical Epistle, but also the Address of Thanksgiving to Origen (henceforth the Address), To Theopompus, and To Philagrius, for reasons which I shall give below. As doubtful or spurious I have included To Tatian, a Glossary on Ezekiel, and the famous Creed, which appears in Gregory of Nyssa’s oratorical Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus.²³ For comparison, here are the lists of works accepted as genuine by two other modern students of Gregory: Henri Crouzel, in the introduction to his edition of the Address, accepts the Address, Creed, Canonical Epistle, Metaphrase, and To Theopompus, and questions To Philagrius, To Tatian, and the lost dialogue cited by Basil of Caesarea, ep. 210.²⁴ Constantinos Fouskas agrees with Crouzel on the first five items, but he would add To Philagrius to the genuine works.²⁵ (Pp. 4-5)

(15) The Holy Spirit appears but once each in the Address of Thanksgiving and the Canonical Letter, and not at all in the Metaphrase on Ecclesiastes or To Theopompus. In To Philagrius the Holy Spirit comes up in the formal setting of a trinitarian credal affirmation, and not in a functional role; that formal character itself is one of the reasons I am willing to accept To Philagrius as a genuine work of Gregory. As I suggest in a note to the mystagogical vision in the Life, where Gregory of Nyssa attributes quite a detailed creed to Gregory Thaumaturgus and says that it is still to be seen in the church in Neocaesarea written in the saint’s own hand, a trinitarian formula of a simple coordinate kind may be the occasion for Nyssa’s development of the trinitarian theme.

(16) In short, there is little dogmatic development in the genuine works of Gregory—even To Philagrius—that would tax the credulity of a non-Christian who was slightly acquainted with the particularities of Christian belief. There are three possible explanations of this phenomenon: (1) Gregory’s Christianity was rudimentary, and reflects the kind of simplification that can be expected when a religious faith is transplanted from a cultural setting where many corollary beliefs and practices support it to the stony soil of a new territory and population; (2) the works we have are exoteric, addressed precisely to outsiders, and present quite a different theological vision from the one which would have been the theme of Gregory’s preaching within Christian circles; (3) the works we have, apart from the Canonical Epistle, were produced by Gregory in his early enthusiasm for Christianity as a student under Origen, and document the process by which he was absorbing Christian ideas, rather than the developed vision of his later years as a bishop. The third suggestion has in its favor the fact that Gregory’s writings were preserved in Palestine and Syria, where he had been a student; the second, the avoidance of argument from Scripture (and in the case of the Metaphrase, its protreptic character); the first, the evidence that a century later Neocaesarea was still something of a theological backwater whose simplistic views taxed the patience of both Gregory of Nyssa and his brother Basil. While all three explanations are defensible, I tend to think that the sophistication of Gregory’s arguments speaks against the theory that these are all works of his early years as a Christian. (Pp. 9-10)

To Philagrius, on Consubstantiality

(46) While I believe that this small treatise is the work of Gregory Thaumaturgus, it must be admitted that there are plenty of difficulties involved in its evaluation. These difficulties begin with the title, which here is taken from the Syriac transmission.¹²² 

(47) “On Consubstantiality” is a phrase which seems more appropriate to a post-Nicene context,¹²³ and was probably added as an inscription in order to identify the subject matter for later readers. The addressee, “Philagrius,” has also been the object of much controversy. Ryssel himself wished to see it as a corruption of the name of the philosopher Porphyry,¹²⁴ but this suggestion has attracted no support.¹²⁵ This discovery that this treatise was widely known in Greek transmission¹²⁶ under the attribution to Gregory Nazianzen (as ep. 243) or to Gregory of Nyssa (as ep. 26) changed matters, because the Greek title is Pros Euangrion, “To Evagrius.” Which name was original could no longer be answered without a consideration of the authorship and the priority of the attributions.

(48) Neither the editor of Gregory of Nyssa’s letters¹²⁷ nor the modern editors of the works of Gregory Nazianzen¹²⁸ think that this work can be by their fourth-century Gregories; Sinko says that it cannot be by Nazianzen because the latter explicitly rejected both comparisons for the Trinity used in the To Philagrius.¹²⁹ Nevertheless, François Refoulé would like to assign it to the circle of Gregory of Nyssa, as influenced by Marcellus of Ancyra, sometime prior to 382, and take the addressee as Evagrius Ponticus, the deacon of Gregory Nazianzen who became a monk in the Egyptian desert.¹³⁰ Refoulé sets himself in opposition to Manlio Simonetti, who claimed that both the doctrine and the style of argument in To Philagrius fitted a third-century pupil of Origen, and matched the sentiment quoted by Basil of Caesarea, ep. 210, as coming from an otherwise unattested work of Gregory Thaumaturgus.¹³¹ Simonetti replied, saying that if it was the work of any of the Gregories it must be by Gregory Thaumaturgus, since neither Nazianzen nor Gregory of Nyssa could have proposed such a modalistic and nominalistic notion of the Trinity. If however one were to look for some unknown figure, as Refoulé had done, Simonetti thought it would be someone in the second half of the third century, not a hundred years later.¹³² Both Refoulé and Simonetti, however, were strongly affected by the difficulty of squaring the To Philagrius with the Creed attributed to Gregory Thaumaturgus by Gregory of Nyssa in his Life.

(49) Another suggestion as to the work’s authorship was made by Reinoldus Weijenborg, who said that it came from the sect of a modalist bishop of Neocaesarea named Atarbius; so far as I know, Weijenborg never wrote the promised study of the text.¹³³ Henri Crouzel thought that perhaps Weijenborg had thrown some light on the situation in Neocaesarea in Basil’s time, but withheld comment on his suggestion that To Philagrius might belong to that context.¹³⁴ 

(50) Michel van Esbroeck has contended for a similar fourth-century context for the treatise, and grouped it with the text quoted by Basil in ep. 210 and two other short spuria of Gregory Thaumaturgus.¹³⁵ Van Esbroeck promises a fuller publication of the texts in question, one of which (CPG 1787) exists only in Arabic and Ethiopic transmission.¹³⁶ For the other text, CPG 1781, besides the hard-to-find article by C. P. Caspari, in which he compares that brief text with one by Gregory of Nyssa “On what it means to be in the image and in the likeness of God,” there is now a critical Greek edition of both those texts by Karl-Heinz Uthemann.¹³⁷ I do not find the similarities among the texts which van Esbroeck presents to be so striking as to indicate a common provenance. For one thing, To Philagrius lacks the explicit “Trinity”-language of CPG 1781 and 1787. I see no reason here to change my earlier view that the To Philagrius should be assigned to the third-century Gregory Thaumaturgus.¹³⁸ 

(51) Two facts about the tradition of the Greek text point, in my opinion, to the greater claims of Gregory Thaumaturgus to its authorship. First, in the manuscript tradition of Gregory Nazianzen, ep. 243 (To Philagrius) appears in an appendix to his main works, and nearly always in close proximity to the Metaphrase on Ecclesiastes, Gregory Thaumaturgus’s best-attested work, and the brief Glossary on Ezekiel (which I have translated here among the dubia).¹³⁹ Second, in the six manuscripts of Gregory of Nyssa containing ep. 26 (our text) which I have located in catalogs, the oldest has ep. 26, lacking its first paragraphs, immediately after the Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus;¹⁴⁰ only the latest and most fragmentary of the other five does not also contain the Life. These are small pointers, but on this difficult question even slight external attestation is better than none at all.

(52) In view of the incorrectness of the manuscript attributions to Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, I suspect also the indication in their manuscript tradition of the addressee as “Evagrius”: Nazianzen’s famous deacon-turned-monk named Evagrius, and the “Evagrius” who sometimes features in the manuscript title of Gregory of Nyssa’s oration On his own ordination,¹⁴¹ are more likely to have displaced an original “Philagrius” than the other way around.

(53) The text translated here is that printed by Migne as ep. 26 of Gregory of Nyssa (PG 46.1101– 7), compared with that printed by the Maurist editors of Gregory Nazianzen. (Pp. 29-32)

131. Manlio Simonetti, “Gregorio Nazianzeno o Gregorio Taumaturgo?” Rendiconti, Istituto Lombardo di scienze e lettere, classe di lettere e scienze morali e storiche 86 (1953): 101–17. The passage from Basil reads as follows in the translation by Deferrari: “They made an attempt too by letter on my friend Anthimus, bishop of Tyana, on the ground that Gregory had said in his exposition of the faith that Father and Son are in thought two, but in hypostasis one. The men who congratulate themselves on the subtility of their intelligence could not perceive that this is said not in reference to dogmatic opinion but in controversy with Aelian” (Basil of Caesarea, The Letters, trans. Roy J. Deferrari [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962], 207– 9). (P. 31)

TO PHILAGRIUS [EVAGRIUS],¹ ON CONSUBSTANTIALITY

I am full of wonder [1101A²] and exceedingly amazed at the forthright way in which you raise such problems and such great inquiries by your precise questions, making it so that we are forced to speak and to undertake the hard work of demonstration, because you bring us questions which are both unavoidable and useful. Clearly there is every need, after your inquiries, for us to make clear responses. And right at this moment, the question you have proposed went like this and concerned this matter: in what way might the Father and Son and Holy Spirit have a nature (which one might properly call substance³ rather than nature)—would it be simple, or compound? For if simple, how does it allow of the number “three” of those just named? For what is simple is single in form and without number. [1101B] But what is in the category of numbers must be divisible, even if it is not numerable;⁴ but what is divided is liable to passion, for division is a passion. So if the nature of the Most Great5 is simple, the attribution of names is superfluous; but if the attribution of names is true, and one must rely on the names, suddenly the “single in form” and “simple” goes by the boards. So what kind of nature belongs to it?

(2)⁶ That is what you asked us. The doctrine of the truth will furnish the demonstrations of these things with exactitude, not by irrationally proposing the fantasy of an unprovable faith, from the difficulty of providing a proof; nor by trying to hide the unsoundness of its conviction with the testimonies of ancient myths; but, with discernment based on exact investigation and straight thinking, by setting forth the confirmation of the proposition until it is clear.

(3) [1101C] So come, let the doctrine commence our initiation here, and let it say how the divine ought to be conceived, whether simple, or threefold. For thus the triplicity of the names forces us to speak and likewise to believe. Some, contented with these things, have contrived unsound and totally outdated teachings, [1104A] thinking that the substance undergoes a passion of division corresponding to the application of the names. Granted, as you say, that they uphold the teaching of their hypothesis without a sound basis; but let us turn our own mind to the right conception of what is known. First we shall put forward what God is, and then in this way we shall come with exactitude to the demonstrations.

(4) It is an entirely simple and undivided substance, since it is what is simple and bodiless by nature. But perhaps the doctrine of the difference of names tells against me, abolishing the singleness of form of the Most Great by the number “three.” So on account of the singleness of form must we abandon the confession of Father, Son, and [1104B] Holy Spirit? Heaven forbid! For the attribution of names will not damage the undivided unity of the Greatest. Objects of intelligence,⁷ though they bear countless names (since they are called by lots of different names in different nations), are yet beyond all designation, since nothing is a proper name⁸ of intelligibles and incorporeals. For how might these things be designated properly, which are neither subject to our vision, nor capable of being caught by human senses at all? But let our soul be taken as the humblest member of the intelligibles, for the exact understanding of the All.

(5) [1104C] For soul is designated by a feminine name, but has nothing to do with female nature, since it is neither male nor female in essence. And likewise word, brought forth by it, has a masculine name but it too, as we say, is totally distinct from masculo-feminine bodiliness. But if the least of the intelligibles, soul and word, do not have a proper name, how shall we say that the first intelligibles, beyond all the intelligibles, are called by proper names? But the nomenclature is useful, necessary for leading us to an understanding of the intelligibles. But some, obtusely thinking that the substance is divided right along with the epithets, think entirely [1105A] unworthy things of the divine with their notions.

(6) But as a consequence we know, as people who have the truth, that the divine and indivisible substance of God is undivided and single in form; but for the usefulness of our souls’ salvation it seems both to be divided in designations and to submit to the force of division, as we said. For just as the soul, which is a kind of intelligible, gives birth to a multitude of infinite thoughts but is not thereby divided by the passion of thought, nor does the soul get a multitude of thoughts poorer by having had them, but becomes richer rather than poorer; and just as the uttered word is [1105B] likewise common to us all, since it is undivided on the one hand from the soul which has declared it, yet nothing less is hereby furnished to the souls of the hearers (since it is gained by the latter without being separated from the former, working unification rather than division between their souls and ours); thus it is I think that the Son is never divided from the Father, nor the Holy Spirit again from the latter, similarly to the idea in the mind.

(7) For as no division or cleft is conceived of between mind and idea and soul, so neither is cleft or division conceived of between the Holy Spirit and the Savior and the Father; [1105C] since, as we said before, the nature of intelligibles is indivisible, so is that of divine things. Or again, just as the relation between sun and ray is not such that division is found, because it is impassible and bodiless, simple and undivided; but the ray is joined to the sun while on its side the sun, like a kind of eye,⁹ pours out a river of rays onto the universe, making as it were floods of light for us, and making an ocean for the cosmos generally; in just such a way a kind of “rays” of the Father have been sent upon us, the resplendent Jesus and the Holy Spirit. For as the rays of light are naturally related to each other without division, neither separated from the light nor cut off from each other, and transmit the grace of the light even unto us [1105D]—in the same manner too, our Savior and the Holy Spirit, the twofold ray of the Father, ministers even unto us the light of the truth and also is united to the Father.

(8) But also just as from a certain spring of waters which ungrudgingly wells forth water like nectar, it happens that an abundant stream and unchanneled flood is carved into rivers which may be two as regards their stream, but have a single flow from [1108A] the beginning, from one eye of the well. Though it is double in its flowing due to the forms of the channeled rivers, yet there is no damage to its substance from the division, for while the stream is divided by the arrangement of the rivers, yet it possesses one and the same quality of the fluid: even if each of the aforesaid rivers should seem to be defined for a long way, and to be very remote from the spring, at least it has its beginning united to its origin¹⁰ for the continuity of the spring. In very much the same way also, therefore, the God of all good things, the Lord of the truth and the Father of the Savior, the first cause of life and the tree of immortality, the spring of life unending, though he sent us as intelligible grace a certain double flow of the Son and the Holy Spirit, did not himself suffer anything as if damaged in substance, for he did not undergo diminution [1108B] owing to their coming to us. And they both extend all the way to us and have remained no less undivided from the Father. For as we said from the start, the nature of the Greatest Ones is indivisible.

(9) It would have been possible to find much, O most reverend sir, even more than what has been said, in rigorous demonstration of the complete necessity of the union of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as one must needs accept it. But since it is easy for you and your companions to figure out much from little, for this reason I have thought it right to bring the discussion concerning this question to a close here. (Pp. 174-178)

Further Reading

Thaumaturgus On the Trinity?