Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus 893–911

The aim of our speech and of our present gathering is one. For Gregory the Great is set before you as the occasion of the assembly, and before me as the subject of the discourse. I think the same power is needed both to achieve virtue in deed and to recount noble things worthily in word. So we ought to call upon that alliance through which he achieved virtue in his life. And this, in my judgment at least, is the grace of the Spirit, which by itself strengthens those who have devoted themselves to either of these, to life and to speech. Since, then, that brilliant and celebrated life was achieved by the power of the Spirit, it is a matter for prayer that as much help may come to the speech as came to him for his life, so that the praise may not be found to fall short of the worth of his achievements, but that the man may be shown through remembrance to those present such as he himself was when he was seen in his deeds by the people of that time. Now if the remembrance of those who excelled in virtue brought no profit, and contributed nothing toward the good for the hearers, it would perhaps be superfluous and useless to bring a speech forward in praise for no useful purpose, the speaker going through it in vain and wearing out the hearing to no effect. But since such a gift of speech, if it is done fittingly, will be a common gain for the hearers, just as a beacon guides toward itself those sailing in from the sea who wander over the open water in the darkness, I think equal zeal is needed from each of us for this, from you for listening and from me for speaking. For it is clear that his virtuous life, shining out like a beacon in our souls through remembrance, becomes a road to the good both for the one who tells it and for those who hear. For we human beings are somehow so made by nature as to wish to make our own everything praiseworthy and honourable, and to come to desire to possess it. Such, then, is the subject of the speech. But for me, venturing on the subject, there is no danger from any side, whether my speech should have the strength to rise together with the greatness of the facts

or not. For the praise will be equal either way for the one praised. If the speech reaches the level of his wonders, it will surely astonish the hearing with his achievements; if it falls short of their greatness, even so the glory of the one praised is made more brilliant. For the best praise of a man is to be shown greater than the power of those who praise him. Let no one of those trained in the divine wisdom seek, after the custom of those outside, to have the one who is praised spiritually praised by the technical methods of encomia. For our judgment of what is noble does not rest on the same things as that of others, nor would one find the same notions about the same things among those who live according to the world and those who have risen above the world. To the former, wealth and family and glory and worldly power seem great and worth pursuing, and myths about the founding of their native cities, and stories that those with sense at least would shun: trophies and battles and the evils that come from wars. But in our reckoning one native land is honoured, paradise, the first hearth of the human race; one city, the heavenly one, built together of living stones, whose craftsman and builder is God; one dignity of family, kinship with God, which does not come to anyone by chance, as with noble birth in the world, which often flows down even to the base through this chance succession, but which cannot be acquired otherwise than by free choice. “For as many as received him,” says the divine voice, “to them he gave power to become children of God.” What could be more dignified than such nobility? The ancestral traditions of all others are myths and fictions, and deceits of demons mixed into the mythical stories; but our ancestral traditions need no storytellers. For if anyone looks at the sky and the beauties in it, and considers the whole creation with the eye of the soul, whatever wonders he is able to grasp in these he will find to be the stories of our native land; or rather not of the native land itself but of the colony, the present world, which we have come to occupy as colonists sent out from the higher life. And if the colony is such, one must reckon what the mother city of the colony is, what beauty is in it, what its royal palaces are like, what the blessedness is of those who have obtained that dwelling. For if the things that appear in creation are such as to be beyond praise, what must one reckon of what is beyond this, which the eye cannot take in, nor the hearing contain, nor the mind conjecture? By this spiritual commendation the divine kind of encomium separates the trifles of this world below from those it praises, judging it shameful that those known for such things should be dignified by

the things honoured on earth. For let a worldly man, looking to material prosperity, collect praise for people from such things: whether someone's native land was rich in flocks, whether a neighbouring sea supplies provisions in abundance to gluttons, whether rows of stone upon stone adorn its buildings. But one who looks to the life above, for whom beauty is purity of soul, wealth is poverty, native land is virtue, and city is the very palace of God, will count ambition in earthly things a reproach. So we too, standing aside from such praises, will neither add his native land to the praises of Gregory the Great nor take his ancestors as allies for the encomium, knowing that no praise is true which is not the praised person's own. And we call “one's own” what remains for ever beyond being taken away. Since, then, when we are separated from everything, wealth, distinction, glory, honour, luxury, enjoyment, relatives, friends, we remain inseparable only from our disposition toward vice or virtue, we judge only the virtuous man blessed. And let no one think that, because I have nothing dignified to tell about the man's native land or ancestors, I am stealthily hiding the reproach under the pretence of disdaining such things. For who does not know the name of the sea, given by all people as a special distinction to that nation, by which the virtue of those who first received the region is attested? For of all land and sea this sea alone is named the Euxine, “the hospitable,” whether the name testifies to their kindness toward strangers who visit them, or because the region is such as to supply the means of life abundantly not only to natives and those born in the land but also to those who come to it from everywhere. For such is the nature of the country that it bears everything needed for life and lacks none of the goods found among others, since the sea makes the produce of every place their own. And though the whole nation is such that whatever part of it one examines by itself one would think it surpasses the others, nonetheless, by the common judgment of the nation, the city of the great Gregory is like a summit of the whole surrounding region; an illustrious emperor, one of those who strengthened the rule of the Romans, Caesar by name, seized by love and longing for the country, saw fit that the city be called Neocaesarea after his own name. But these things have nothing to do with our aim, as if we thought to show that great one among the saints more dignified through them: whether the land is heavy with fruit, whether the city is adorned with buildings, whether through the neighbouring sea goods from everywhere are brought in freely for whatever is wanted.

Nor will I make mention in my speech of his ancestors, those who went before him in birth according to the flesh, recounting their wealth and munificence and worldly distinctions. For what would these contribute to the praise of one who raised himself above the whole world: tombs and pillars and inscriptions and dead stories? Besides, it is not possible to bring into a share of the praise those whose kinship he renounced for the sake of the kinship of the soul. For they were made futile in the error of idols; but he, looking up to the truth, adopted himself through faith into the kinship above. So how he was born, or from whom, or what city he lived in at first, we pass over as contributing nothing to our present purpose; and we will take as the beginning of our praise the beginning he himself made of the virtuous life. When, still quite young in body, he was bereft of natural care, his parents having ended their lives, at the age when the mind of most, unfinished through youth, errs in judging the good, he showed at once from the first what he would become at the full maturity of his age. And just as noble plants, when from their first growth they shoot up into straight shoots, show the farmers in their present season their later beauty, so he too, at the time when the soul of others is unsteady through ignorance, since youth for the most part slides readily toward vain and useless things, then by his first choice of life showed in himself that David spoke truly: “The righteous will flower like a palm tree.” For of all trees this alone springs up from the ground with the full thickness of its crown, and while its growth increases in height it receives no addition in breadth from time. So he too flowered from his first sprouting, rising up at once perfect and with a lofty crown by his choice of life. For standing aside from everything that excites youth, horsemanship, hunting, finery, clothes, dicing, luxury, he was at once wholly given to acquiring the virtues, always choosing in turn what suited the age he was at. The first thing in his acquisition of the virtues was his zeal for wisdom. With it, like a colt yoked alongside, followed self-restraint; and self-control was an ally for both; and his freedom from conceit and from anger was achieved together with his contempt of money. For conceit and arrogance have no other origin than greed, which brings such passions in with it. And just as the account holds that the patriarch Abraham,

having come to know the philosophy of the Chaldeans and considered the harmonious and ordered position and motion of the stars, used his knowledge of these things as a stepping-stone to the contemplation of the good that lies beyond, reasoning that if the things grasped by the senses are such, what must the things beyond sense be? And so he attained what he sought, mounting as it were upon the outside wisdom and becoming higher through it, so as in a way to draw near through it to the things that cannot be grasped. So too this great man, having diligently studied the outside philosophy, was guided by the very things through which Hellenism is confirmed for most people to an understanding of Christianity; and leaving the errant religion of his fathers, he sought the truth of the things that are, taught by the very labours of the outsiders the incoherence of the Greek doctrines. For when he saw Greek and barbarian philosophy alike split into different notions in their opinions about the Divine, and the leaders of the doctrines not agreeing with one another, and each contending to strengthen his own view by the subtlety of his arguments, he left them, as in a civil war, overthrown by one another; and he lays hold of the steadfast word of faith, which is not strengthened by any logical subtlety or technical intricacies, but is proclaimed to all alike in simple words, and which has its trustworthiness in the very fact that it is beyond belief. For if what is said were such as to be grasped by the power of human reasonings, it would not differ at all from Greek wisdom (for they too hold that whatever they are able to grasp is what exists); but since the comprehension of the transcendent nature is inaccessible to human reasonings, faith takes the place of reasonings, reaching out to what is beyond reason and comprehension. For this reason, as Scripture says of Moses that he was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, so too this great man, having gone through all the learning of the Greeks and come to know by experience the weakness and incoherence of their doctrines, becomes a disciple of the Gospel; and even before he was brought through the mystical and incorporeal birth, he so ordered his life that he brought no stain of sin to the washing. While he was spending his time in Egypt, in the great city of Alexander, to which the youth from everywhere who were devoted to philosophy and medicine streamed together, he was a hard sight for his age-mates: a young man adorned with chastity beyond his years. For the praise of the pure man was the reproach of the defiled. So, that the licentious might have some excuse in not seeming to be the only ones of that kind, a scheme was devised by them in a plot to fasten some blemish on the life of the great man. And they put forward, to slander him, a harlot, a woman from a brothel

condemned to disgrace. While he, as usual, was examining and practising some point of philosophy with the most eminent men in a dignified manner, the woman comes up, simpering and coy, and pretending by everything she said and did to be on familiar terms with him; then she said she was being deprived of her wages, and shamelessly added the occasions for which she claimed the wages were being withheld. Those who knew his pure life were indignant and stirred to anger against the woman; but he was neither disturbed along with those who were angry on his behalf, nor did he say anything of the kind that someone slandered would likely say in his vexation: he did not summon witnesses to his life, he did not repel the charge with an oath, he did not expose the wickedness of those who had contrived this against him; but turning in a calm and settled voice to one of his companions, he said, “Friend, pay her the money, so that she may not trouble us any longer and disturb the study of the discussion before us.” When the man given this instruction had learned from the harlot how much money she was asking of him and had readily counted it all out, and the plot of the licentious against the chaste man had reached its end, and the gain of the disgraceful woman was already in her hands, then indeed there came from God both the testimony to the young man's chastity and the refutation of his age-mates' slander. For at the very moment she received the money in her hand, twisted by a demonic spirit and crying out with a beastlike roar in place of a human voice, she falls headlong in the middle of the assembled company, suddenly become a dreadful and fearful sight to those present, her hair tossed about and torn by her own hands, her eyes rolled back, her mouth spitting foam. And the demon did not stop choking her until that great man called upon God and propitiated him on her behalf. Such are the stories of the great man's youth, preludes truly worthy of the life he lived afterward. And yet the wonder is so great that, even if there were nothing else to tell besides this, from this alone he would yield the second prize of praise to none of those who excelled in virtue: rich, young, living abroad, spending his time in a populous city in which, because the young lived with pleasures at their liberty, the purity of the chaste was a reproach to the senseless; with no mother busying herself

about his life, with no father guiding his daily conduct, he raised himself so far toward virtue through freedom from passion that he made the overseer of all things the witness of how he had lived, the one who exposed the woman's slander by that evil stroke. What could one devise greater as a subject for encomia? How could anyone admire him as he deserves? He wrestled nature down by reason, yoked his youth to reason like a tamed animal, became stronger than all the natural passions that rise up, and when he had stirred against himself the envy that grows up around all good things, he became stronger than this too, neither rousing himself to retaliate against the plot of his companions, and doing good to the woman who had served them for the slander by delivering her through prayer from the demon's affliction. Such we know Joseph to have been from the history: the lawless act with his master's wife lay within his power, she herself being mad for the young man's beauty, and there was no human witness of what might be dared; but he too, looking to the divine eye, chose to seem wicked rather than to become so, undergoing the lot of evildoers rather than becoming an evildoer. But perhaps this man has something to boast of even beyond the history. For, as regards turning away from defilement, the pollution of adultery is not equal to what is thought to carry blame as a lesser fault. He, then, who, in a case where there was no danger from the laws, judged that the pleasure that comes from sin is in itself more fearful than punishment, either surpassed Joseph by the greatness of the wonder, or at any rate will not be judged second to him. Such, then, was the prelude of his life. What was the life itself? When he had run through all the learning of the outside wisdom, he met Firmilian, one of the Cappadocian nobility, of similar character, as Firmilian showed by his later life, when he became the ornament of the church of the Caesareans. Gregory made plain to his friend the aim of his mind and of his own life, that he was looking toward God, and learned that his friend's zeal agreed in the same desire; then, leaving all zeal for the outside philosophy, he attends together with him upon the man who at that time was the leader of the Christians' philosophy (this was Origen, whose writings are much spoken of), showing by this not only his love of learning and of labour but also the restraint and moderation of his character. For though he was full of so much wisdom, he did not disdain to use another teacher for the divine branches of learning. Having spent with the teacher a time proportionate to his studies, though there were many urging him and holding him in the foreign land and asking him to remain among them, he preferred his native land to all of them and returns home again, bringing with him the manifold wealth of wisdom and knowledge which, like a mer-

chant he had acquired in his outside studies by dealing with all men of good repute. Yet to one who judges matters justly it will surely seem no small ground for praise that he disregarded so great a petition made in common by a city, and did not accept the zeal of all its leading men that he should remain, nor the eagerness of the governors residing among them for this very thing. The aim of all of them was that that great man should stay with them as a founder of virtue and a lawgiver of life. But fleeing on every side the fuel of conceit, knowing that the passion of arrogance becomes for the most part the source of a life of vice, he makes for the quiet life in his native land as for a harbour. The whole nation looked to the man, and all expected him to display his learning publicly in common assemblies, so that he might reap good repute for it as some fruit of his long labours. But that great man knew from what source true philosophy ought to be displayed by those who pursue it rigorously, so that the soul might never be wounded by some ambition (for the praise of hearers is apt to slacken the soul's tension with conceit and love of glory); for this reason he makes silence his display, showing the treasure within by deed, not by words. Separating himself from the noise of the marketplace and from city life altogether, he lived in some remote place alone with himself, and through himself with God, taking small account of the whole world and the things in it, not busying himself about kingdoms, not inquiring into offices, not listening to anyone going through how some public matter is managed; but taking thought how his soul might be perfected through virtue, he bent his whole life to this with zeal and, bidding farewell to the affairs of life, he was simply another Moses in our times, rivalling his wonders. Both went out from this turbulent and noisy life, Moses and Gregory, each in his own time withdrawing into himself, until to both the gain of the pure life was made manifest through a theophany. But Moses was accompanied in his philosophy by a wife as well, whereas Gregory made virtue alone his companion. Since the aim was equal in both (for the goal of both men's withdrawal from the many was to contemplate the divine mysteries with the pure eye of the soul), whoever knows how to look rightly at virtue may judge which of the two lived his life more through freedom from passion: the one who came down to the lawful and permitted share in pleasures, or the one who rose above it and gave no access against himself to material attachment. Now Phaedimus at that time

was presiding over the church of the Amaseans. He had from God, from the Holy Spirit, a certain power of foreknowledge, and he was making every effort to get the great Gregory into his hands and bring him to the leadership of a church, so that so great a good might not pass through life idle and unprofitable. Gregory, perceiving the bishop's purpose, contrived to escape notice, moving from one solitude to another. That great Phaedimus tried every attempt and used every device and contrivance, but he could not bring the man to the priesthood, for he guarded with countless eyes against ever being caught by the bishop's hand; and there was a rival zeal on both sides, the one eager to catch, the other to escape his pursuer (for the one knew that he would bring to God a holy offering, and the other feared that the care of the priesthood, laid upon his life like a burden, might become some hindrance to his philosophy). For this reason Phaedimus, lifted by a more divine impulse in the matter at hand, paid no attention to the distance that separated him from Gregory (he was three days' journey away), but looking up to God and saying that both he himself and the other were equally seen by God at that hour, he applies his word to Gregory in place of a hand, consecrating to God the one not bodily present, and allotting to him that city which up to that time was so held by the error of idols that, though the inhabitants of the city itself and of the surrounding region were countless, no more than seventeen were found who had received the word of faith. So, having come under the yoke by compulsion, and all the customary rites having afterwards been performed for him, he asked of the one who had proclaimed him to the priesthood a short time to understand the exactness of the mystery; and he no longer thought he should, as the apostle says, consult flesh and blood, but asked that the revelation of hidden things be given him from God; and he did not take courage for the preaching of the word until the truth was revealed to him through an appearance. For once, as he was pondering by night about the doctrine of the faith and turning over all sorts of reasonings (for even then there were some who counterfeited the godly teaching and through the plausibility of their arguments often made the truth doubtful even to the intelligent), as he lay awake thinking about it, someone appears to him in a waking vision in human form, aged in appearance, priestly in the style of his clothing, showing great virtue by the grace about his

face and by the composure of his bearing. Gregory, astonished at the sight, rose from his bed and asked who he was and why he had come. The other calmed the disturbance of his mind with a gentle voice and said that he had appeared to him by divine command on account of the questions he was in doubt about, so that the truth of the godly faith might be revealed to him; at this Gregory took courage at his words and looked at him with a mixture of joy and amazement. Then the other stretched his hand straight out and, as it were, pointed out to him with his outstretched fingers something appearing at the side; Gregory turned his gaze along the line of the hand and saw opposite the first figure another sight, in a woman's form, greater than human. Astonished again, he bowed his face and was at a loss before the sight, unable to bear the appearance with his eyes (for the marvel of the vision lay especially in this, that though it was deep night, a light shone out together with those who appeared to him, as if a bright lamp had been kindled). Since he could not bear the appearance with his eyes, he heard a conversation of those who appeared to him, as they went through the question with each other; through it he was not only instructed in the true knowledge of the faith, but also recognized by their names those who had appeared, each of them addressing the other by his own name. For he is said to have heard the one who appeared in a woman's form urging John the Evangelist to make plain to the young man the mystery of godliness; and John said he was ready to grant this too to the mother of the Lord, since it was dear to her; and having spoken the doctrine, well proportioned and clearly defined, they vanished again from his sight. And he at once recorded that divine instruction in writing, and afterwards preached the word in the church in accordance with it, and left that God-given teaching to those after him as an inheritance; by it the people of that church are instructed in the mystery to this day, having remained untouched by every heretical evil. The words of the instruction are these: “One God, Father of the living Word, of subsistent wisdom and power and of the eternal impress, perfect begetter of the perfect, Father of the only-begotten Son. One Lord, alone from the alone, God from God, impress and image of the Godhead, effective Word, wisdom that holds together the constitution of all things, and power that makes the whole creation, true Son of the true Father, invisible of invisible, and incorruptible of incorruptible, and immortal of immortal, and eternal of eternal. And one Holy Spirit, having existence from God and manifested through the Son, that is, to human beings, perfect image of the perfect Son, life,