Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop of Constantinople & Doctor of the Church
May 9 · d. 389
also known as Gregory the Theologian, Gregory Nazianzus, The Theologian
Gregory of Nazianzus was a Cappadocian bishop, poet, and preacher of the fourth century, and the friend of Basil the Great. For a few embattled months he led the Nicene congregation of Constantinople from a converted house, delivered the orations that won him the name "the Theologian," presided over the Second Ecumenical Council, and then resigned and went home. The Western church keeps him on 9 May, a week after Athanasius, as one who inherited his mantle.
Gregory of Nazianzus was born to a landowning family in Cappadocia, in the high, dry country of central Asia Minor, and his mother Nonna had given him to God before he was born. She had already brought her husband, Gregory the Elder, out of a sect of Most High worshippers and into the Church, and he was made bishop of their little town of Nazianzus. So the boy grew up in a bishop's house, and was sent away to be educated as gentlemen's sons were: to Caesarea in Cappadocia, to Caesarea in Palestine, to Alexandria, and at last to Athens.
Athens is where the story turns. Gregory spent the better part of a decade there under the rhetoricians Himerius and Proaeresius, and in that same classroom he met two men who would shape the rest of his life. One was Basil, and Gregory loved him. Years later he wrote of those years, "We struggled, not each to gain the first place for himself, but to yield it to the other; for we made each other's reputation to be our own. We seemed to have one soul, inhabiting two bodies." The other was a young man named Julian, who would become emperor and try to turn the empire back to its old gods.
Gregory went home about thirty years old and wanted quiet. He did not get it. At Christmas, in the year 361, his own father ordained him a priest without asking him, and Gregory fled to Basil in Pontus. He came back, and he wrote a long defence of both the running and the returning, in which he called the care of souls "the art of arts and science of sciences," harder than a physician's work because the soul is what comes from God. That is the shape of his whole life: office pressed on him, resisted, and then carried anyway.
It happened again. Basil, now a bishop fighting for the boundaries of his province, made Gregory bishop of Sasima, a waterless little way-station on a road, in order to hold ground against a rival. Gregory would not live there. The friendship was wounded and, in his own word, never altogether healed, and no letters between the two men survive from after it.
Then Constantinople. In 379 the Nicene party in the capital was tiny, and the great churches belonged to others; Gregory was asked to come and lead it. He turned a private house into a chapel and named it the Anastasia, the Resurrection, and there he preached the five orations on the Trinity that would earn him the title borne in the East by only two others besides him. It was dangerous work. At the Easter vigil that year a mob broke in while he was baptizing his converts; Gregory was wounded and another bishop was killed. A philosopher he had welcomed into his house and praised in public, Maximus, had himself secretly consecrated bishop in Gregory's place one night, and the people of the city drove the man out.
And then, on the twenty-fourth of November in 380, the emperor Theodosius came into Constantinople, put out the Arian bishop, and walked Gregory himself through an immense crowd to his enthronement. The following May the bishops of the empire assembled, and when their president died in the middle of the council, Gregory took the chair. He was, for that moment, the first churchman of the East.
He did not keep it long. He tried to settle a bitter quarrel over the see of Antioch and lost half the room; newly arrived bishops challenged his right to hold Constantinople at all, since he had been consecrated to Sasima; and Gregory, weary of all of it, resigned. He went back to Cappadocia, and later composed his farewell, in which he asked what a struggle he had had, seated at the helm, contending with the sea and the passengers alike, to bring the vessel safe to land through a double storm. He gave the church of his father to his cousin Eulalius, retired to the family estate at Arianzus, and spent his last years writing poems, among them the long, unsparing account of his own life, in which he does not hide how tired and disappointed he was.
There is no miracle told of him. He healed no one and stilled no storm, and the church has honoured him for sixteen centuries anyway: for what he wrote about God, for one unwanted year in a capital, and for a friendship he was still praising three years after his friend was dead. He had preached, near the beginning, that yesterday he was buried with Christ and today he rises with Him; and the chapel where he made his stand he had named Resurrection.
You have probably been handed something you did not want: a job, a family duty, a role in a church that nobody else would take. Gregory spent his life in that position. He was ordained against his will, made a bishop of a town he refused to live in, pushed into a capital he did not ask for, and he complained about all of it in writing that survives. What he did not do was pretend the burden was light or that he bore it gracefully. He did the work, badly at politics and well at the thing he was actually given, and then he laid it down and went home to write. Where has something been pressed on you that you would not have chosen, and what would it look like to carry it honestly, complaint and all, rather than either performing serenity or walking away?
The historical Gregory is unusually well attested, and almost all of the attestation is his own. Forty-five orations, roughly 245 letters, and several hundred poems survive in Greek, including a long autobiographical poem, De Vita Sua, written in retirement. That is the great strength of the record and also its great difficulty: for most of the pivotal moments of his life, our witness is a master rhetorician composing his own defence. He knew it, and in the funeral oration for Basil he worries aloud about being betrayed into praising himself.
External corroboration exists and is close. Jerome, who studied under Gregory at Constantinople between 379 and 382, wrote De Viris Illustribus at Bethlehem in 392 or 393, and four separate facts rest on it: that Gregory was schooled under the rhetorician Thespesius at Caesarea in Palestine alongside a fellow student named Euzoius (ch. 113); that Gregory was, in Jerome's words, "a most eloquent man, and my instructor in the Scriptures"; that he ordained a successor in his own lifetime and retired to live as a monk; and that he had died "three years or more ago, in the reign of Theodosius" (all ch. 117). Jerome also records, in chapter 128, that Gregory of Nyssa read a work against Eunomius aloud to Gregory of Nazianzus and to Jerome himself. Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, writing within a generation, supply parallel narratives of the Constantinople years, though Socrates names Gregory's own writings among his sources and so is not fully independent.
Two dates are genuinely unsettled, and it is worth saying why. The birth year is nowhere fixed by an inscription, an imperial record, or a dated letter from another hand. Every proposed year is calculated backward from Gregory's own remarks about his age. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907 to 1912) gives about 325 without showing its working. Most modern reference works give about 329. The nineteenth-century Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Prolegomena argues, from Gregory's statement that he left Athens in about his thirtieth year and from the independent dating of Julian at Athens in 355, to a floor of "not earlier than 330," and adds a second argument from a line Gregory addressed to his father implying he was born during his father's priesthood. Underneath all of it sits an unresolved one-year discrepancy: the Catholic Encyclopedia puts the departure from Athens in 356, the Prolegomena in 357, and a year's shift there moves every calculation. The death year is 389 or 390, anchored on Jerome's "three years or more ago." The day commonly attached, 25 January, is very probably a calendar convention rather than a documented date; the Prolegomena's flat assertion of 391 is hard to reconcile with Jerome and is the one place that otherwise careful source asserts without arguing. The baptism year is likewise unfixed: the sources cannot cleanly separate "baptized at about thirty" from "left Athens at about thirty."
In the East, Gregory has been venerated continuously and by a name almost no one else carries: ho Theologos, the Theologian, a title given besides him only to John the Evangelist and Symeon the New Theologian. His principal Eastern feast is 25 January. On 19 January the East keeps the deposition of his relics, brought from Nazianzus to the Church of the Holy Apostles by the emperor Constantine VII around the year 950 in a silver reliquary. And on 30 January he is honoured with Basil and John Chrysostom together as the Three Holy Hierarchs, a feast established around 1100 under Alexios I Komnenos to end a real quarrel: partisans in Constantinople had been arguing which of the three was the greatest, until, in the tradition recorded by John Mauropous, the three appeared together in a vision in 1084 and said that there are no divisions among them and no opposition to one another. In icons Gregory is an elderly bishop, balding, white-bearded, vested and holding a Gospel book or an open scroll of his own words, with no emblem of his own.
Western observance of him by name came very late. Before the reform of the Roman Breviary his feast was kept almost nowhere outside Spain, and there only from the beginning of the sixteenth century; it was Pope Pius V, in 1568, who placed him with Athanasius, Basil, and Chrysostom among the Doctors of the Church at the highest grade. Our own date, 9 May, sets him a week after Athanasius as a sign that he inherited his mantle.
His relics have travelled further than he did. From Constantinople they reached Rome and the church of Santa Maria in Campo Marzio, though by which road is genuinely disputed: one account has crusaders carrying them off in the sack of 1204, while the convent's own foundation tradition holds that Byzantine nuns fleeing the iconoclast persecutions brought his body with them around 750, and the house is documented in a charter of 937. Pope Gregory XIII moved them into the new St Peter's, into the chapel that still bears his name, in either 1578 or 1580. Then on 27 November 2004, Pope John Paul II returned the greater part of the relics of Gregory and of John Chrysostom to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and they now rest in the Patriarchal Cathedral of St George at the Phanar in Istanbul. Nazianzus itself is gone, a depopulated site in Aksaray Province with the ruins of three Byzantine churches.
Quotations in the Story and History above are from the standard public-domain English, the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers second series, volume 7 (1894), translated by Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, unless otherwise noted. The friendship with Basil is quoted from the Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil (Oration 43), section 20. The description of pastoral care as the art of arts is from In Defence of His Flight to Pontus (Oration 2), sections 16 to 17. The image of the helm and the double storm is from The Last Farewell (Oration 42), section 20. The paschal line about being buried and rising with Christ is from On Easter, and His Reluctance (Oration 1), section IV. Jerome's testimony to Gregory as his instructor in the Scriptures, to the ordained successor, and to the death "three years or more ago" is De Viris Illustribus 117; the schooling under Thespesius is chapter 113 and the reading against Eunomius is chapter 128, in the same NPNF series. All are available at New Advent's Church Fathers library and at CCEL. For the letters, the standard Greek text is Paul Gallay, Gregor von Nazianz: Briefe, GCS 53 (Berlin, 1969); the first complete English translation is Bradley K. Storin, Gregory of Nazianzus's Letter Collection: The Complete Translation (University of California Press, 2019). The modern critical text of the orations is in progress in Sources Chrétiennes (Paris: Cerf), including volumes 247 and 384 (Bernardi, 1978 and 1992), 250 (Gallay with Jourjon, 1978), and 318 (Moreschini, 1985); the older base text is the Benedictine edition of 1778 to 1840, reprinted in Migne's Patrologia Graeca XXXV to XXXVIII (1857 to 1862).
Three points of fact are frequently reported wrongly and should be stated plainly here. Gregory's farewell, Oration 42, was composed after his resignation and was not delivered to the assembled council; this is the position of the critical edition in Sources Chrétiennes 384 (Bernardi, 1992). The famous passage in which Gregory asks to be thrown overboard like Jonah is widely cited as Oration 42.17, and it is not there; it belongs to De Vita Sua, lines 1828 to 1855, and the English in circulation is John McGuckin's modern translation. And Gregory delivered the funeral oration for Basil in 382, three years after Basil's death on 1 January 379, which he was too ill to attend.
The manuscript picture is uneven. The letters are the best mapped: they survive across six main families, with roughly 228 of them appearing in four or more families and only thirteen in three or fewer, and the manuscripts group them by correspondent rather than by date. Paul Gallay's 1969 critical edition remains the base Greek text, and Bradley Storin's 2019 translation is the first complete English one. For the orations, no manuscript census is available in the material behind this page, and no figure should be supplied. The modern critical text is the Sources Chrétiennes series, built up across decades by Bernardi, Gallay with Jourjon, and Moreschini; where it has not reached, the base remains the Benedictine edition begun in 1778 and finished in 1840, reprinted by Migne between 1857 and 1862. The editing of the poems is still at an early stage. One consequence is worth naming: for most of the modern period, an English reader met Gregory in a single Victorian translation of a pre-critical text.
Finally, a negative finding that shapes everything else. No miracle tradition attaches to Gregory of Nazianzus. This is not a gap in the research. The wonder-stories that drift toward the name (a lake moved, a river halted) belong to Gregory Thaumaturgus, the Wonder-Worker of Neocaesarea, who died more than a century before Gregory was born. Nor should Gregory be confused with Gregory of Nyssa, who was Basil's brother and not his kinsman; with Gregory the Great, the pope who died in 604; or with his own father, Gregory the Elder, who bore the same name and the same town but never held any see but Nazianzus.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Gregory of Nazianzus special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Demophilus /dɪˈmɒfɪləs/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52