Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus

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,

the cause of the living, holy fountain, holiness, the provider of sanctification; in whom is manifested God the Father, who is over all and in all, and God the Son, who is through all: a perfect Trinity, in glory and eternity and kingship neither divided nor estranged. There is, then, nothing created or servile in the Trinity, nor anything brought in, as if it did not exist before but entered afterwards. So neither was the Son ever lacking to the Father, nor the Spirit to the Son; but the same Trinity is ever unchangeable and unalterable.” Whoever wishes to be convinced of this, let him hear the church in which he preached the word, among whom the very characters written by that blessed hand are preserved even now. Does this not vie, in the greatness of the grace, with those tablets made by God? I mean those tablets on which the legislation of the divine will was imprinted. For as the account says that Moses, having gone outside what appears and taken his stand in his soul within the invisible sanctuary (for this is what the darkness hints at), learned the divine mysteries and through himself led the whole people in the knowledge of God, the same dispensation can be seen in the case of this great man too. For him the mountain was nothing perceptible or earthly, but the height of his desire for true doctrines; the darkness was the sight that others could not contain; the tablet was his soul; the letters on the tablets were the voice of the one who appeared; and through all these the revelation of the mysteries came to him and to those he instructed. Since, then, he had become full of boldness and courage through that vision, just as an athlete who has acquired from his trainer experience and strength enough for the contests strips confidently for the stadium and contends with his opponents, in the same way he too, having sufficiently anointed his soul by his own practice and by the alliance of the grace that had appeared to him, takes up the contests. For one must call his whole life in the priesthood nothing other than contests and struggles, in which he overcame through faith all the power of the adversary. For he at once raised himself from his remote place and set out for the city in which he was to establish the church for God. He knew that the whole region was dominated by the deceit of demons, that nowhere had a temple of the true God been built, but that the whole city and the region around were filled with altars, sacred precincts and images, the whole nation being zealous that the precincts of the idols and the temples be adorned and that the madness for idols might remain among men, strengthened by processions and rites and the pollutions upon the altars. So, as a brave soldier who has grappled with the commander of the battle line routs his subordinates through him, this great man too begins his deeds of valour with the demons themselves. In what way? As he was travelling the road from his remote place to the city, evening overtook him and a violent downpour held them back,

he goes inside a certain temple with those who followed him. That temple was one of the famous ones, in which a manifest visitation of the demons worshipped there came upon the temple-wardens, as oracular prophecy was worked by them. Having entered the temple with his companions, he at once terrified the demons by calling on the name of Christ; and having purified with the sign of the cross the air defiled by the fumes of sacrifice, he spent the whole night, as was his custom, awake in prayers and hymns, so that the place abominable with the gore on the altars and with the images was transformed into a house of prayer. When the night had passed for him in this way, he resumed his journey forward at dawn. When at dawn the temple-warden was offering the customary service to the demons, the demons, they say, appeared to him and said that the temple was inaccessible to them because of the one who had stayed in it; and he tried, using certain purifications and sacrifices, to settle the demons in the temple again by these means. But since, though he applied every attempt, his zeal had no effect, the demons nowhere answering his invocation as usual, the temple-warden, roused with rage and anger, overtakes that great man, threatening all the most terrible things: to denounce him to the magistrates, to lay hands on him, to inform the emperor of his audacity, namely that, being a Christian and an enemy of the gods, he had dared to go inside the shrines; that at his entry the power working in the temples had turned away, and the oracular working of the demons no longer frequented the places as usual. But Gregory put down the temple-warden's rash and uneducated anger with a lofty mind, setting the alliance of the true God against all the threats, and saying that he trusted so much in the power of the one who fought for him that he had authority to drive them out from wherever he wished and to settle them in whatever places he wanted, and he promised to give proofs of what he said at once. The temple-warden, wondering and astonished at the greatness of the authority, called on him to show his power on these very demons and to bring the demons back into the temple. Hearing this, the great man tore off a small piece of a book and gave it to the temple-warden, having written on it a word of command against the demons. The letters, word for word, were these: “Gregory to Satan: Enter.” The temple-warden took it and laid the leaf on the altar; then, having brought the customary

fumes and pollutions, he saw again what he used to see before the demons were driven out of the idol-temple. When this had happened, he came to the thought that there was a divine power with Gregory, through which he had proved stronger than the demons; and overtaking him again in haste before he reached the city, he asked to learn the mystery from him, and who that God was who had the nature of the demons under his control. When the great man told him briefly the mystery of godliness, the temple-warden reacted as one uninitiated in divine things would likely react, and thought it too small for the notion of God to be persuaded that the Divine had appeared to human beings through flesh. Gregory said that faith in this is not established by words but has its credibility from the wonders that happen; and the temple-warden asked to see yet another wonder from him, so that he might then be brought through what happened to assent to the faith. Then, they say, that great man performed the great wonder, the most incredible of all. For the temple-warden asked that one of the huge stones that lay before his eyes be moved without a human hand, through the power of faith alone, and be transferred to another place at Gregory's command; that great man, without delay, at once commanded the stone, as if it were alive, to move to the place the temple-warden pointed out. When this happened, the man at once believed the word; and leaving everything, family, house, wife, children, friends, priesthood, hearth, possessions, he made being with the great man, sharing his labours and that divine philosophy and instruction, take the place of all he had. Before these things let all the technical ingenuity of speech-writers fall silent, which magnifies wonders by some rhetoric and exalts them to something greater. For the wonder in what has been told is not such as to become less or greater than itself by the power of the speaker. For what could anyone say beyond what has been said that would add to the wonder? And how could anyone lessen the hearers' amazement at what happened? A stone draws away from stones those enslaved to stones; a stone becomes a herald of divine faith and a guide to salvation for the unbelieving, proclaiming the divine power not by any voice or word, but by what it did showing the God proclaimed by Gregory, whom the whole creation obeys as subject on equal terms; not only what is sentient and breathing and living, but whatever lies outside these also receives the command of his servant as though it did not lack sensation. For what hearing has a stone? What perception of the authority of the one commanding? What power of moving is in it? What arrangement of limbs and joints? But the power of the one commanding becomes all these and such things for the stone. Looking at this, that temple-warden at once understood and loathed the deceit of the demons practised to lead human nature astray, and went over to the true God, reckoning from what was done by the servant

the inexpressible power of the Master. For if the servant's power is so great as to move by a word what cannot be moved, to give orders to things without sensation, and to command lifeless things, how great an abundance of power is it fitting to recognize in the Master of the universe, whose will became, as it were, the matter, the structure, and the power of the world itself and of everything in it and of the things beyond it! Beginning from this his deeds of valour against the demons, and leading the temple-warden about with him like a trophy over the vanquished, and having first struck the nation with amazement by the report, he now rode into the city with confidence and boldness, not making a show with chariots and horses and mules and a crowd of followers, but escorted all around by the virtues. The whole population of the town had poured out en masse as if to look at some new spectacle, and all were eager to see who this Gregory was who, though a man, has authority like a king over those they held to be gods, carrying and leading the demons by command wherever he wished, and evicting and settling them from wherever he wanted at his pleasure, like slaves, and who brings along that minister, as if he had enslaved him by some authority, a man who had disdained the honour in which he formerly stood and exchanged all he had for life with him. With all of them in this frame of mind and waiting for him before the town, when he came up to them, all gazing intently at him, he passed the people by as if they were lifeless matter, turning to none of those he met, and walking straight to the city, and so brought them into much greater amazement, appearing to those who saw him greater than his report. For that, entering a great city for the first time, with no previous acquaintance with so many, he should not be overawed by so great a people gathered on his account, but should look only to himself and to the road, as if walking through a desert, turning to none of those crowded around him, this seemed to the people beyond the wonder worked on the stone. For this reason, though those who had received the faith before his oversight were very few, as has been said before, he went in hemmed in on all sides by those escorting him, as though the whole city honoured his priesthood. Now from the moment he took up philosophy he had freed himself from all things together as from a burden, and he had none of the necessities of life, no field, no place, no house, but was everything to himself (or rather virtue and faith were his native land and hearth and wealth). So when he was within the city, and there was no house

anywhere for him to rest, neither of the church nor his own, and those around him were troubled and at a loss how he could be lodged and with whom he could find shelter, the teacher says to them: “Why are you at a loss about this, as if you were outside God's shelter, as to where you should rest your bodies? Does God seem a small house to you, if indeed in him we live and move and are? Or are you cramped under the heavenly roof, and seek some other lodging besides it? Let your one zeal be for each person's own house, the one built up by the virtues and raised to the height. Let this alone grieve us, that such a dwelling should not be ready for us; for enclosures of earthly walls bring no gain to those who live in virtue. Rather, it would be fitting for those defiled with vice to be eager for walls, because a house often becomes a covering for hidden shame. But for those whose life has been earnestly spent in virtue, the walls have nothing to conceal.” As he was going through these things with those who were with him, one of the notable men, counted among the first in family and wealth and other power, came up (the man's name was Musonius). When he saw many eager in the same zeal to receive the man in their own houses, he got ahead of the others and seized the favour, begging the great man to be his guest and to honour his house by entering it, so that it might become more dignified and celebrated in its later life, as time passed on the memory of such an honour to later generations as well. And since many others also ran up and begged for the same, Gregory judged it just to grant the favour to the one who had begun first, put the others off and returned their honour with kind words, and lodges with the one who had come first. If the history of the things told about him is a plain narrative without adornment, our speech having willingly left aside the embellishments devised for events by some ingenuity, this itself would be no small testimony, for those who judge matters rightly, that the wonders of the one remembered are in no way magnified by invention, but that the memory of his deeds suffices for the most perfect praise, like a natural beauty in a face, made to bloom by no fussy art of cosmetics. Though those catechized in the word before were few in number, before the day had passed and the sun had set, so many joined at the encounter that the multitude of believers was enough to form a people. Dawn, and again the populace at the doors, men and women and children, and the aged, and those who had some bodily affliction from demons or some other harm; and in their midst he, fittingly for the need of each of those gathered, by the

power of the Spirit divided himself: preaching, examining together, admonishing, teaching, healing. For he drew the many to the preaching above all by this, that sight agreed with hearing, and through both the signs of the divine power shone out in him. For the word astonished their hearing, and the wonders done for the sick astonished their sight. The mourner was comforted; the young man was brought to self-restraint; the old man was cared for with fitting words. Slaves were taught to be well disposed to their masters, those in power to be kind to their subjects; the poor man was taught that virtue is the one wealth, whose possession lies open to all at will; the man who prided himself on his wealth was admonished as befitted him, being taught that he is the steward of what he has, not its lord. Distributing to women what was suitable, to children what was proportionate, to fathers what was fitting, and becoming all things to all, he soon gained for himself so great a people, by the co-operation of the Spirit, that he set about building a church, all serving the work with their money and their bodies. This is the church whose building he began; one of those after him adorned it worthily of him; it is shown to this day. That great man, as soon as he took office, laid it down in the most conspicuous part of the city as a kind of foundation and base for his own priesthood, and he completed the work by a divine power, as later time bears witness. For once, in our own times, when a very severe earthquake struck the city, and almost everything was utterly destroyed, all the public and private buildings being thrown down and laid waste, that church alone remained unbroken and unshaken, so that through this too it is plain with what power that great man took hold of the affairs of his time. But these things were shown by the divine power many years later as a testimony to the great man's faith. At that time, when everyone in the city and the region around was astonished at his apostolic wonders, and believed that everything he said and did was said and done by divine power, they thought that no other court had more authority for them even in the disputes of daily life, but every case and every tangle of affairs hard to unravel was resolved by his counsels. So good order and peace were present, in common for all and for each individual, through his grace, and there was much increase of good things, privately and publicly, with no vice cutting into their concord with one another. It would perhaps not be out of place to mention one of his judgments, so that, as the proverb says, the whole fabric may become plain to us from its fringe. For the divine Scripture too, though Solomon gave many judgments to his subjects,

was content to present the man's whole understanding through one. When he was judging between the two mothers, since the wrong could not be proved, each of them alike refusing the dead child and laying hold of the living one, he resolved to track down the hidden truth by an ingenious device. For since the wrong had no witness, and the suspicion of falsehood and of truth weighed equally on both, he brought in nature as his witness to the truth, concealing the aim of his intent by a clever threat. For by ordering, as it seemed, that the bodies of both the living and the dead child be cut in two equally with a sword and the halves of the children be assigned to both women, he handed over the judgment of the matter to nature, the witness of truth. For when the one gladly accepted the order and urged on the executioner, while the other, moved in her motherly heart, admitted defeat and begged that the child be spared (for she would be grateful if the infant were saved in any way at all), the king made this the test of truth and grants the winning vote to the one who had willingly given way, reasoning that the woman who did not shrink from the slaughter of the child stands accused by nature of not being the mother of the one whose death she was hastening. What judgment of the great Gregory, then, shall we recount? Two brothers, young in years, who had just divided their father's inheritance between themselves, laid claim to one lake, each contending to have all of it, and neither admitting the other to a share in the property. The teacher, then, becomes the arbiter of the case. Going to the place, he used his own laws for the arbitration, leading them to reconciliation, urging the young men to come to terms in friendship and to value the gain of peace above the gains of revenue. For peace, he said, remains for ever, for the living and the dead; but the enjoyment of revenues is temporary, while the condemnation for injustice is eternal; and he said whatever else he was likely to say to calm the disorder of youth. But when the exhortation had no effect, and youth was inflamed and burned up into anger, swelling with greater hope of gain, and an army was being prepared on each side from those under their control, a mass of hands thirsting for blood, led by anger and youth, and the time of the clash had been fixed, the battle being about to break out from both sides on the next day, the man of God remained on the banks of the lake and, persevering through the night in vigil, showed a wonder like that of Moses upon the water: not splitting the depths into two parts with a stroke of a rod, but by prayer drying it all up at once,

and at dawn he showed the lake as dry land, dry and without moisture, so that it held no remnant of water even in its hollows, though before the prayer it had been like a sea. Having judged these things by the divine power, he withdrew again to himself; and for the young men the verdict given by deeds dissolved their quarrel. For since the thing over which they were preparing war against each other no longer existed, peace took the place of anger, and nature recognized itself again in the brothers. And even now one can see clear signs of that divine verdict. For around what was once the lake some traces of the flooding of the water are still preserved to this day; but all that was then deep and at the bottom of the water has been changed into groves and dwellings and meadows and ploughland. In this judgment, I think, not even that famous Solomon himself would dispute the first prize. For what is so great in virtue, to save the baby at the breast between two mothers, for whom it was quite the same with respect to survival whether it was nursed by the one who bore it or by the other, as to award safety to two young men? They had just entered on the affairs of life, in the prime of youth; at the very flower of their age their anger had driven them mad toward murdering each other, and they were shortly to present a bitter sight to the people of that time, arming their hands against each other, in a case where the expectation was either that both would be destroyed by each other or that one would certainly come into the pollution of fratricide, to pass over those ranged on each side with equal anger, for whom the only limit to their onslaught against each other was the death of their opponents. He, then, who by his prayer annulled the sentence of death already ratified against them by the generalship of the evil one, and reconciled nature to itself again, and changed their zeal for slaughter into the joys of peace, how much more fittingly would he be admired for his judgment than the one who detected the harlot's wickedness? As for the wonder at the water, how a navigable place was at once changed into dry ground, and the lake became a plain and a hollow, and how what was formerly in place of a sea now yields a harvest of fruits, I think it better to be silent about this than to go through it in a speech unable to rise worthily with the story. For what such thing have we learned among the recorded wonders that could come to equal this by comparison? Joshua the son of Nun stopped the stream of the Jordan, but only while the ark was in the water; when the people had crossed and the ark had passed through, he gave back to the stream its usual course. In the Red Sea the bed of the depths is laid bare of water, the sea being pushed aside by the wind; but the time of the wonder was the passage of the army, made on dry land along the

depths. After that, the surface of the water becomes one again, and what had been divided for a short time flowed together. But here what was once done remained as it was done, so that the wonder is not disbelieved because of time, being attested for ever by what can be seen. Such, then, is what is told and shown about the lake. After this another wonder of the same kind is shown and remembered from him. A river flows through their region, which signals the roughness and wildness of its stream by its very name: it is called the Lycus, the “Wolf,” by those who live near it, because it is destructive. It comes down already large from its springs in Armenia, the country supplying it with an abundant stream from the mountains above. Flowing deep everywhere beneath the foot of the cliffs, it is made much rougher by the winter torrents, taking into itself all the streams that flow together from the mountains. In the flat part of the country through which it passes, often hemmed in by the banks on either side, it overflows the bank at some point on the side and floods everything beyond with its stream, so that it continually brings unexpected dangers upon those who live by the place, the river often invading the fields at dead of night or even by day. As a result, not only plants and seeds and cattle were destroyed by the rush of the waters, but the danger touched the inhabitants themselves, who were shipwrecked in their houses without warning in the flooding of the water. Since the wonders already achieved by the great man had spread through the whole nation, those who lived by the river in that district rose up, men and women and children, the whole population, and became suppliants of the great man, begging him to provide them some deliverance from their troubles beyond hope. For they said that God in him could do all things that are impossible to human devices and thoughts. For they had left out nothing that lay within human counsel and power, having tried everything, stones and embankments and whatever else is usually devised against such evils, and had been unable to hold out against the force of the evil. And so that he might above all be moved by them to pity, they asked him to become an eyewitness of the disaster, and to learn that they were not able to move their dwelling, and that death always lay before them at the onrush of the water. When he came to the place (for no reluctance hindered his zeal for the good), needing neither carriage nor horses nor anything else that could carry him, but leaning on a staff, he travelled the whole road, discoursing at the same time on philosophy with those who shared the road with him about the higher hope, in which he always spent his time as his chief concern, making everything else secondary to the more important pursuit. So when the turning of the stream was pointed out to him by those who had led the way, and the very sight declared the disaster, the place having been gouged into a deep ravine by the onrush of the waters, he says this to

those gathered: “It is not for human beings, brothers, to bound the movement of water with limits; such a thing is the work of the divine power alone, to shut in the rush of the waters within limits. For so the prophet says to God: ‘You set a boundary which it will not pass.’ The nature of the elements is subject to Christ alone, the Master of creation, and remains for ever in whatever places it is assigned. Since, then, God is the one who lays down laws of limits for the waters, he alone by his own power could fetter the disorder of this river too.” He spoke; and as if inspired by a more divine thought, he prayed in a loud voice that Christ would come as his ally for the task before him, and fixed the staff he carried in his hand in the damaged place of the bank. The ground there, being soaked and spongy, easily gave way into the depth, yielding to the weight of the staff and the hand of the one fixing it. Then, having prayed to God that this might become a kind of bar and barrier against the disorder of the waters, he went back again, showing by the deed that everything done by him was worked by divine power. For soon afterwards the staff, having taken root in the banks, became a tree; and the plant was set as a boundary to the stream, and to this day the plant is a sight and a story for the local people. For whenever that Lycus, swollen into a torrent by heavy rain, rushes along flooding and roughened as usual, fearsome as it roars in its current, then, having touched the foot of the tree with the edge of its water, it swells up again in the middle and draws its stream together, and as if afraid to come near the tree it passes the place by with an arched wave. Such was the power of the great Gregory, or rather of God who worked the wonders in him. For the nature of the elements was shown to be like a subject, changing at his commands as he saw fit, so that a lake was changed into wheat-bearing land, and the ravines of the water were inhabited, the staff having secured safety for the inhabitants. To this day the tree is called “the Staff,” a memorial of Gregory's grace and power preserved for the local people for all time. Which of the prophets' wonders do you wish to set beside these by comparison? Shall I mention the dividing of the Jordan, which Elijah made by striking it with his mantle before his ascent, and after him Elisha, the heir of the mantle and the spirit? But in their case the water was split for the prophets alone at the time of need, and through the

stream the Jordan became passable, opening its stream only so far as to let the prophets' feet walk through on the dry bed; in the time after, for the rest of mankind, it was as it had been before. But that Lycus, once driven back from its disorderly rush, makes Gregory's wonder last for ever, remaining for all later time as the great man's faith made it at the moment of the wonder. And the aim of what was done was not the astonishment of the onlookers but the safety of those who lived by the river. So, though the wonder is equal (for the nature of water gives way equally to the prophets and to the imitator of the prophets), if one may speak boldly, what was done by this man excels in kindness, since through it the safety of those living near was secured, the water being fettered once for all at that point of the stream and remaining immovable thereafter. Now since such wonders spread everywhere through the country, and were believed to be worked by the power of faith in Christ, all desired to share in that faith attested by such wonders; the preaching advanced everywhere, the mystery was effective, and zeal for the good increased, as the priesthood was established among all so that through all the faith might abound and grow. So an embassy comes to him from a neighbouring city, asking him to come to them and establish their church through the priesthood. The name of the city was Comana, and all its people together asked as a favour that the great man be their guest. He came to them and spent some days with them, kindling still more their desire for the mystery by what he did and said. When it was time for their embassy to reach its end, and for someone to be appointed high priest of their church, the opinions of all those in authority busied themselves with those who seemed to excel in eloquence and birth and other distinction. For they thought that, since the great Gregory had these things, the one who came to this grace ought not to lack them either. As the votes were divided in many ways and different people chose different men, the great man waited for some counsel to come to him from God about the matter. And just as Samuel is remembered not to have been overawed by bodily beauty and stature in choosing a king, but to have sought a kingly soul, even if it happened to be in a despised body, in the same way he too disregarded the efforts made on behalf of each of the candidates and looked at one thing only: whether anyone, even before his proclamation, carried the priesthood in his character through the care of his life and his virtue. While the others brought forward their candidates with praises, each promoting his own man, he bade them look also to those of humbler outward condition (for it was possible that even among such

someone might be found loftier in the wealth of the soul than those of more distinguished life), one of those presiding over the vote thought such a judgment of the great man an insult and a mockery, if, when the others had been chosen for eloquence and rank and the visible testimony of their lives, none of them was accepted for the priesthood, while some from among the menial workers were to be thought more worthy of such a grace. And at the same time, coming up to him in mockery, he said: “If you are ordering that these men, of such quality, chosen from the whole city, be passed over, and that someone from the riff-raff be taken up to preside in the priesthood, it is time for you to call Alexander the charcoal-burner to the priesthood; let us go over to him, if you like, and all agree on him.” So he spoke, disparaging Gregory's view and by this ironic vote finding fault with his strictness regarding the earlier candidates. But through what was said the thought came to the great man that it was not without God that Alexander had come up in the mention of those voted for and named. “And who is this Alexander,” he says, “whom you have mentioned?” Then one of those present, laughing, brought the man named into the middle, clothed in filthy rags that did not even cover his whole body, and at the same time showing his trade by his appearance, his hands and face and the rest of his body grimy from the charcoal work; for the others, Alexander standing such in their midst was a subject of laughter, but to that discerning eye what was happening and being seen gave great amazement: a man in extreme poverty and with a neglected body, looking to himself, and as it were exulting in the very appearance that was laughable to uneducated eyes. And so it was. For he had not come to such a life by the necessity of poverty; the man was a philosopher, as his later life made known, and loftier than the rest, so that he even attained martyrdom, finishing his course through fire. He tried, or rather made it his practice, to remain hidden, being superior to the good fortune pursued by the many, and counting this life as nothing, having his desire set on the higher and true life. And so that he might best succeed in his aim of virtue, he contrived to escape notice as such a man, hiding himself under the meanest of occupations as under an ugly mask. Besides, being in the full flower of youth, he thought it dangerous to the aim of chastity to make the beauty of his body visible, as if parading the good fortune of his nature; for he knew that such a thing

So that he might neither suffer anything unwanted nor become an occasion of passion to other people's eyes, he therefore willingly put on charcoal-burning like an ugly mask; through it his body was exercised by labours toward virtue and his beauty was covered by the grime of the coals, and at the same time what he gained from his labours was spent in service of the commandments. So Gregory took him aside from the assembly and inquired carefully into everything about him; then he handed him over to those around him, instructing them what they were to do, while he himself returned to the assembly and instructed those gathered from the matter at hand, setting before them discourses about the priesthood and through these sketching the life of virtue. He continued in such discourses, holding the meeting there, until his attendants, having carried out his order, came in, bringing with them Alexander, who had washed off in a bath the unpleasantness of the soot and was dressed in the great man's own clothes. For this is what he had instructed them to do. When all turned toward Alexander and were struck with wonder at what they saw, the teacher says to them: “Nothing strange has happened to you; you were deceived by your eyes and entrusted the judgment of beauty to sense alone. For sense is an unreliable test of the truth of things, since of itself it shuts off the way into the depth of the mind. And at the same time this was surely pleasing to the demon who is the enemy of godliness, that the vessel of election should lie idle, covered by ignorance, and that a man who would be the destroyer of his dominion should not come forward.” Having said this, he brings the man to God through the priesthood, consecrating him by grace in the customary manner. And when all were looking at the new priest and he was urged to address the church, Alexander showed at once, at the very beginning of his office, that the great Gregory's judgment of him did not lie. For his speech was full of meaning, though less adorned with the flower of diction. Hence one of the young men from Attica, an arrogant fellow who was staying among them, sneered at the plainness of his diction because it was not adorned with Attic elaboration; but they say he was corrected by a more divine vision: he saw a flock of doves shining with an extraordinary beauty and heard someone say that these were the doves of Alexander, whom he had made a laughing-stock. Which of these things should one admire more than the other: that the man was not put out of countenance by the vote of the dignitaries, and was not carried away by the testimonies of the prominent; or rather that he marvelled at the wealth hidden in the coals, and that God's testimony to his right judgment followed at once through the rhetorician's vision? To me each of them in itself seems such as to rival the other, and to stand first among almost all things remembered as wonders. For to stand against the impulse of the prominent

became the clearest mark of an unturning and lofty mind, for whom all the things that appear in the world were regarded alike, whether they tended to the greater and more distinguished or to the humble and obscure; assigning preference to virtue alone, and judging only a life in vice to be rejected, he counted as nothing all that in life is judged worthy either of pursuit or of dishonour. This is what he showed by what he did then. For seeking to find the one pleasing and worthy to God, he did not think wealth and rank and the distinctions of this world trustworthy enough to admit as testimony, none of which the divine word counted in its lists of good things. So this alone is not what is worthy of praise and wonder, that he did not give way to the efforts of the powerful, but that he also surpassed himself by what followed. For the one who merely rejects an unworthy vote, without supplying what is lacking to the need, has prevented the evil but has not done the good. But he, besides not agreeing to the worse, also found out the good, and so completed the good through both, neither allowing the evil a way in and bringing the good into action, so that the great Gregory's benefaction to the city was in both respects: he turned back the error they were committing through ignorance and brought to light, by himself, the good hidden among them. Since everything had gone forward according to the great man's mind with the alliance of the Holy Spirit, it would not be out of place to tell also an incident on the road, so that the grace present with the man may be shown through everything. Since it was plain to all that the man's first concern was to look to the comfort of those in need in everything, two of the Hebrews, either looking for gain or devising some ridicule against the man as one easily disposed to be deceived, lay in wait for his return. One of them, pretending to be dead, lay stretched out on his back at the side of the highway; the other, as if wailing over the one lying there, feigned the cries of mourners, and as the great man passed by he called out to him, saying that this wretched man had been suddenly seized by death and lay naked and unprepared for burial. He begged the great man not to neglect the holy rite for him, but, taking some pity on his poverty, to provide from what he had the last adornment to cast over the body. While the one was begging with these and similar words, the other, without delay, threw the cloak he was wearing over the man lying there and continued on his journey. When he had passed by and those who had played this trick on him were by themselves, that deceiver changed his feigned lament into laughter and bade the one lying there get up, cackling with pleasure at the gain the deception had brought them.

But the other stayed in the same posture, hearing nothing of what was said. When he used a louder voice and at the same time tried to rouse him with his foot, the one lying there no more heard the voice or felt the blow, but lay stretched out in the same posture. For he had died at the moment the cloak was thrown over him, having come in truth into the death he was feigning to deceive the great man; so that the man of God was not deceived, but the cloak became useful to those who received it for the very purpose for which he had given it. If such a work of the great man's faith and power seems grim, let no one be surprised, looking to the great Peter. For he too showed the power that was in him not only by his benefactions, showing the people the man lame from birth running and leaping, or healing the sufferings of the sick by the shadow of his body, cast on those the sun fell upon sideways as the apostle passed by; but when Ananias was contemptuously disposed toward the power that dwelt in the apostle, he condemns him to death, so that, I think, by the fear his case caused, everything contemptuous among the people might be brought to its senses by the fearful example, being taught not to fall into the same things. Fittingly, then, the imitator of Peter, having shown the greatness of his power through many wonders of benefaction, also made the one who tried to use deceit against the Spirit tell the truth about himself. For it was fitting, I think, that the destroyer of falsehood should change falsehood into truth even in the deceiver, so that it might become clear to all through this that everything said by the great man was true, and that whatever he accepted as true was no falsehood. So the Jews who in the way described mocked, as they thought, the great man's power became a lesson to others not to venture on deception against those for whom God becomes the accuser of what has been dared. After this, once, when an open-air gathering was held in one of the places of the country and all were struck with wonder at his teachings, a youth shouted to those standing around that it was not the teacher who was saying these things, but another standing beside him who was going through the words. When the boy was brought to him after the gathering broke up, the great man is said to have told those present that the youth was not free of a demon; and at the same time he took off the linen cloth from his shoulder, held it to the breath of his own mouth, and so threw it over the young man. When this was done, the youth began to be agitated and to shout, to fall down and toss about, and to suffer all the afflictions that come from demons. Then, when the saint laid his hand on him and calmed the agitation, the demon flew out of him, and he, restored to his right state, no longer said he saw beside the saint the one speaking with

him. For this too is one of his great wonders, that he performed the wonders of healing with no elaborate means, but that for the expulsion of demons and the healing of bodily illnesses the breath of his mouth, brought to the sufferer through the linen cloth, was enough. But to go through all his wonders in turn would take a long work and a speech beyond the leisure we now have; so I will mention one or two more of the things told about him, and with these I will bring my speech to a close. The divine preaching had by now spread everywhere, and all in the city and the region around had been converted to the godly faith of the doctrine; altars and temples and idols among them had been overturned, human life had already been cleansed of the pollutions surrounding idols, the foul fumes of sacrifices had been quenched, and the gore on the altars and the defilements from animal sacrifice had been washed away; and everywhere, place by place, all were zealously raising houses of prayer in the name of Christ. Then anger and envy entered the man who at that time presided over the rule of the Romans, because the ancestral objects of worship of his deceit were being neglected, while the mystery of the Christians was growing and the church was increasing in number throughout the inhabited world, rising to greatness through those who were constantly being added to the word. Thinking it possible to set his own bitterness against the divine power, and to stop the preaching of the mystery, to dissolve the assemblies of the churches, and to bring back to the idols those who had gone over to the word, he sends an order to the governors of the provinces, fixing a fearful threat of punishment against them unless they maltreated with all kinds of tortures those who worshipped the name of Christ and brought them back again by fear and the compulsion of tortures to the ancestral worship of the demons. When this fearful and godless proclamation had been announced to the governors, those appointed for this very purpose by the tyrant's cruelty having gone everywhere through the empire, there was a man ruling the province of that place who was such that he needed nothing from the higher authority, having cruelty at home by nature for his wicked impulse and bitterness and his hostility to those who believed the word. And he issues a fearful decree in public edicts: that they must abjure the faith or be punished with every kind of punishment and death. At that time nothing else, public or private, was done or pursued by those who had public affairs in hand except besieging and punishing those who held to the faith. Nor did the terrors lie only in the threats of words; along with them the varied array of instruments of punishment brought utter dismay, and

produced fear in people before they had experienced them. Swords and fire and beasts and pits, and instruments for racking the limbs, and iron chairs over fire, and upright stakes on which the bodies of those who resisted were stretched and torn by the strokes of fearful claws, and countless other things devised by them for the many kinds of torture of bodies were contrived; and those who held these offices had one zeal: that none should be shown milder than another in excess of bitterness. Some informed; others pointed out; others searched for those in hiding. Others set upon those who fled; others, eyeing the possessions of the faithful, harried those who held to the faith under the pretext of piety, so as to get control of their property. There was complete confusion throughout the province and great helplessness, all being suspicious of one another: for fathers the goodwill of their children did not last through the terrors, nor did nature guarantee to children the faithfulness of fatherly care. Families were divided against one another, split over their religion. A son who held to Hellenism became the betrayer of his believing parents; and a father who remained in unbelief was the accuser of his son who had believed. And a brother for the same reason made war on nature, judging it a holy act to punish his own kin if he held to godliness. As a result the deserts were full of those driven out, and the houses empty of their inhabitants. Many of the public buildings had been set apart for the needs of those imprisoned; for the prisons were not able to hold the multitude of those punished for the faith. All the marketplaces and gatherings, public and private, instead of their usual cheerfulness, took on such calamities, some people being dragged off and others led away, others laughing or weeping at what was happening. There was no pity for infants, no honour for grey hair, no respect for virtue came over the enemies; but, as in captivity, every age was surrendered to the enemies of the faith. Nor did the natural weakness of their sex allow women to remain outside such compulsions; there was one law of cruelty against all, subjecting the one estranged from the idols to an equal measure of punishment for what was done, without distinguishing nature. Then that great man, seeing the weakness of human nature, that the many were not able to contend for godliness to the point of death, counsels the church to withdraw a little before the fearful attack, thinking it better for them to save their souls by flight than to stand in the battle line of the contests and become deserters of the faith. And so that people might be most fully persuaded that saving the faith by flight brought no danger to the soul, he counsels withdrawal by his own example, himself withdrawing before the others from the onrush of the danger. At the same time this was above all the concern of the rulers, that by subduing him as a general they might break up the whole battle line of the faith; and for this

reason they were eager to bring him into the hands of the enemies. He had reached a deserted hill, having with him the man who had at first been brought to the faith from being a temple-warden, who was now serving in the grace of the diaconate. The pursuers followed close on his track in a great crowd, someone having informed them of the place where he was hiding. Some surrounded the foot of the hill and kept guard, so that he might have no way of escape from any side if he turned to flight; others climbed the mountain, searching every part, and were already in the great man's sight as they ran straight up toward him. He bade the man with him stand toward God with firm and undoubting confidence and entrust his safety to him, stretching out his hands in prayer, and not let his faith be knocked away by fear even if the pursuers came near. He made himself an example of his instruction to the deacon, looking toward heaven with unmoving eyes and standing upright with hands outstretched; and so they were. The men who ran up toward them looked all around the place, searched with all care every clump of brush, every jutting rock, every hollow of a ravine, and went down again to the foot of the hill, supposing that the men they were looking for had turned to flight in fear and fallen into the hands of those posted around below. Since, then, he was not found by them, and was not with the others either, the man who had spied out the place where the great man was staying described it by its marks, and in it the searchers insisted they had seen no one, only two trees standing a little apart from each other. When the searchers had gone back, the informer stayed behind, and finding the great man himself and the one with him at prayer, and recognizing the divine protection through which they had been taken for trees by the pursuers, he falls down before him and believes the word. And the pursuer of a little before became one of the fugitives. They remained in the desert a long time (for the war against the faith prevailed, as the governor raged fiercely against those who were added to the word of godliness), and everyone had turned to flight. Since, in the great man's case, they had given up hope that he would ever fall into the hands of the pursuers, they turned their furious madness against the rest and searched everywhere through the province all alike, men and women and children, to whom the name of Christ was venerable; and they dragged them to the city and filled the prisons, making godliness the charge against them in place of any other wrong, so that at that time the courts were busy with none of the public business, or this alone was the zeal of the rulers, to devise every kind of maltreatment and every sort of racking against those who held to the faith.

Then indeed it became still clearer to all that that great man planned nothing without God. For having kept himself safe for the people by flight, he was a common ally for all who were contending for the faith. For just as we hear of Moses that, standing far off from the battle line of the Amalekites, he put strength into his countrymen against their enemies by prayer, in the same way he too, as if watching events with the eye of the soul, called down divine help on behalf of those contending in the confession of the faith. Once, as he was praying to God with his companions as usual, he was suddenly filled with agitation and disturbance, and it was plain to those present that he was as if struck by something strange, in anguish at a sight, and listening as though some sound were reaching him. After no small interval, during which he remained the whole time unbending and unmoving, then, as if the sight before him had come to a good end, he returned to his usual state and praised God in a very clear voice, uttering the hymn of victory and thanksgiving that we often hear David say in his psalmody: “Blessed be God, who has not given us as prey to their teeth.” When those around him were struck with wonder and asked to learn what the sight before his eyes had been, he is said to have told them that at that hour he had seen a great fall, the devil being thrown down by a young man in the contests for godliness. As they still did not understand what was said, he told them more clearly that at that hour a young man of noble family, with a stronger help, had contended in the sweat of the faith, having been brought by the executioners before the governor. He added the name too, calling him Troadius, and said that after many tortures, which he endured nobly, he had bound on the crown of martyrdom. The deacon was astonished at what he heard; he did not dare to disbelieve any of it, and at the same time he thought it beyond human nature that one who was far from the city, with no one reporting events to him, should speak to his companions about what happened there as if he were present at the events. He becomes a suppliant of his teacher, asking to be allowed to know what had been done with his own eyes, and not to be prevented by him from going to the very places in which the wonder had happened. When Gregory said that it was dangerous to be among murderers, and that one often suffers something unwanted from the malice of the adversary, the deacon said he took courage from the help of his prayers, and spoke to him these words: “You commend me to God, and no fear of the enemies will touch me.” And when Gregory had sent God's help with him by prayer as a fellow traveller, he went his way confidently, turning to none of those he met. Toward evening he came inside the city, and tired from

the journey, he thought it necessary to relieve his fatigue with a bath. But in that place a murderous demon held sway, haunting the bath, whose destructive power became active after dark against those who came near; for this reason that bath was not to be entered after sunset and stood unused. Standing before it, he asked the attendant to open the door, to give him entry, and not to begrudge him the relief of the bath. The attendant protested that none of those who ventured into the water at that hour had come back on their own feet, but that after evening the demon overpowered everyone, and that many in their ignorance had already suffered fatal harm, and for them lamentations and wailing had taken the place of the relief they had hoped for. While he went through these and similar things, the deacon no more slackened his desire, but pressed him in every way, forcing him to let him inside. The attendant, counting it a gain not to share the danger of the stranger's ignorance, gave him the key and went off far from the bath. When the deacon had undressed and was inside, varied occasions of fear and terror were contrived by the demon: apparitions of every kind, showing a nature mixed of fire and smoke, falling upon his eyes in the form of men and beasts, sounding in his ears, coming close to his breath, swirling around his body. But he, holding out the seal before himself and calling on the name of Christ, passed through the first room unharmed. Going on to the inner room, he met more terrible sights, the demon having changed into a more fearful appearance; and at the same time he thought the building was shaken by an earthquake, and that the floor, breaking open beneath, showed the flame below laid bare, and that fiery sparks were sent out from the waters. And again the same weapon, the seal and the name of Christ and the help that came through his teacher's prayers, dispersed the terrors of what appeared and happened. When he had already relaxed in the water and was hurrying to get out, he was hindered again, the demon having seized the door. But this hindrance too was undone of itself by the same power, the door giving way to the seal. When everything had gone as he wished, the demon is said to have cried out to him in a human voice not to credit to himself the power by which he had escaped destruction; for the voice of the one who had commended him to the One who guards had granted him safety. So, having been saved in the way described, he caused astonishment to those in charge of the place, since none of those who had ever ventured into the water at that hour had been seen among the living. When he had told them what had happened to him, and had learned that the brave deeds of the martyrs in the city had happened in the very way the great man, staying in the desert, had described beforehand, he added to the stories

and wonders about him what he had seen and heard and had learned by his own experience of the power of the great man's faith, to which the demon too bore witness, and he hurried back to his teacher. He left to his contemporaries and to those after them a common safeguard: that each should commend himself to God through the priests. And even now this formula is used throughout the church, but especially among them, as a memorial of the help that came to that man from Gregory. When that tyranny had already been dissolved by divine help, and peace had again taken over human life, a peace in which zeal for the divine lay open and free to all at will, he came down again to the city, and travelling around the whole country he increased the zeal for the divine among the peoples everywhere by instituting festivals in honour of those who had contended for the faith. And people, distributing the bodies of the martyrs among themselves in different places, gathered at the yearly return of the annual cycle and rejoiced, holding festival in honour of the martyrs. This too was a proof of his great wisdom: when he was reshaping the whole generation of his day at once to a new life, like a charioteer set over their nature, having securely yoked them with the bridles of faith and the knowledge of God, he allowed the subject people to frisk a little under the yoke of faith through enjoyment. For he perceived that the childish and uneducated among the many remained in the error of idols because of bodily pleasures; so that the main thing might meanwhile be achieved in them above all, that they should look to God instead of vain objects of worship, he allowed them to make merry at the memorials of the holy martyrs, to enjoy themselves and rejoice, since in time life would of its own accord change to something more dignified and exact, faith leading the way to it. This has in fact already been achieved in most of them, all their delight having been changed from the pleasures of the body to the spiritual kind of joy. Governing the church in this way, and eager before his departure from life to see all converted from idols to the saving faith, when he foresaw his departure he diligently searched through the whole surrounding region, wishing to learn whether any were left outside the faith. When he learned that those who remained in the ancient error were no more than seventeen, he said, looking to God: “This too is grievous, that anything should be lacking to the full number of those being saved. Yet it is worthy of great thanksgiving that he leaves to the one who receives the church after him as many idolaters as he himself received Christians.” Having prayed for growth to perfection for those who had already believed and for conversion for the unbelievers, he thus passes from human

life to God, having charged his friends not to acquire a place of his own for his burial. For if while living he had not accepted to be called owner of any place, but had passed his life as a sojourner on what belonged to others, neither would he be ashamed of sojourning after death. “But let it be a story for later life,” he said, “that Gregory was not named after any place while he lived, and after death became a sojourner in others' tombs, having withdrawn himself from all possession on earth, so that he did not accept burial in a place of his own.” For he judged that the only possession precious to him was the one that admits in itself no trace of greed. Let each one who comes upon this speech admire the sudden conversion of the whole nation from Greek vanity to the knowledge of the truth, and let no one disbelieve it, looking to the dispensation through which so great a change came about in those who were converted from falsehood to truth. For I will now take up again and recount what happened in the first years of his priesthood, which my speech passed over in its haste toward the rest of his wonders. There was a public festival in the city, celebrated by an ancestral custom in honour of one of the local demons. Almost the whole nation streamed together to it, the whole country joining the city in the feast. The theatre was filled with those who had flocked to it, and the crowd of those streaming in overflowed on every side above the seats; and as all were eager to look toward the orchestra for the spectacles and performances, the stage was full of uproar, and the display of the performers came to nothing, since the commotion of the crowded people not only interrupted the enjoyment of the music but gave the performers no opportunity to show their skills. Then a common cry broke out from the whole populace, calling on the demon in whose honour they were holding the feast and asking that room be made for them by him. When, with all crying out together, the cry rose high, and the words seemed to be those of the whole city as from one mouth, offering this prayer to the demon (the prayer was, word for word, “Zeus, make room for us”), that great man heard the noise of those calling on the demon by name and asking him to make room for the city, and sending one of those standing by, he says to them that they would soon be given more room than they prayed for. When this saying had been uttered by him like a grim sentence, a plague succeeds that public holy season. At once lamentation was mixed with the dances, so that their merriment was turned into mourning and calamity, and in place of pipes and applause continuous dirges filled the city. For once the disease had fallen on the people, it went through the houses faster than one could expect, devouring them like fire, so

that the temples were filled with those wasted by the disease who fled there in hope of healing, and springs and fountains and wells were crowded with those burning with thirst in the helplessness of the illness (in their case the water was too weak to quench the burning of the disease, since those once seized by it were the same after water as before it); and many went off to the tombs of their own accord, and the survivors were no longer sufficient to bury the dead. The onset of the evil did not come upon people unexpectedly; but an apparition appeared to the house that was about to be destroyed, and so the destruction followed. When the cause of the disease became plain to all, that the demon they had called on was wickedly fulfilling the prayer of the foolish, producing this evil “room” in the city through the disease, they became suppliants of the great man, begging him to stop the course of the evil through the God he knew and preached, whom they confessed alone to be truly God and to have power over all. For when that apparition appeared beforehand, before the destruction that was to come on a house, and at once produced despair of life, there was one way of safety for those in danger: that the great Gregory should come inside that house and drive off by prayer the disease that had fallen upon it. As the report quickly spread to all through those who were the first to obtain such salvation, everything they had formerly pursued in their vanity, oracles and purifications and attendance on the idols, was idle; all looked to the great priest, and each drew his whole family to him for salvation. And his reward from those saved was the salvation of their souls. For when the godliness of the priest had been made manifest by such a proof, there was no more delay in assenting to the mystery for those taught the power of the faith by deeds. So for those people the disease proved stronger than health. For as much as in health they were weak in their reasonings toward receiving the mystery, so much were they strengthened toward faith by bodily disease. And so, the error about idols having been refuted, all went over to the name of Christ, some led by the hand to the truth through the disease that had come upon them, others putting forward faith in Christ as a safeguard against the plague. There are other wonders of the great Gregory still preserved in memory to this day, which we have not added to what has been written, sparing unbelieving ears, so that those who think the truth a falsehood because of the greatness of what is told may not be harmed. To Christ, who works such wonders through his servants, belong glory, honour, and worship, now and always, and to the ages of the ages.