Gregory of Nazianzus: a biographical outline

Gregory of Nazianzus was one of the three leading orthodox Christians in the Greek church of the fourth century: like his friend Basil of Caesarea and Basil's brother Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory was a native of Cappadocia, in what is now eastern Turkey, and the three of them are therefore often referred to as the Cappadocian Fathers. Gregory of Nazianzus himself is also known as Gregory the Theologian in the Eastern church, largely on the strength of the five theological orations which he gave in Constantinople and which stand out among his forty-four extant orations for their detailed and precise discussion, based on principles laid down at the Council of Nicaea in 325, of Trinitarian doctrine — of the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The importance of his orations is shown by the fact that during the Middle Ages they were translated into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Georgian, Armenian, Slavonic and Arabic. Gregory enjoyed high prestige because of his outstanding rhetorical talents: he and John Chrysostom are generally considered the greatest Christian orators in the late antique Greek world and Gregory has been referred to as the Christian Demosthenes. His virtue in this field lay in his ability to communicate clearly, relying more on evocative images than on dialectic.

Throughout Augustine's long life (354–430) friendship was to play an important part, both in his everyday relations with others and in his thought. He valued his close friends highly and many of them remained his friends from youth to old age, men such as Alypius and Severus who, like Augustine himself, became bishops in North Africa. Other friendships developed in later life, as in the case of the government official Marcellinus whom Augustine became acquainted with at the time of the council of Carthage in 411 and with whom he maintained a correspondence when they were separated until Marcellinus' execution in 413. Augustine could also maintain affectionate relations over a number of years with men whom he had never met, as with Paulinus at Nola, with whom a friendship developed through their correspondence because they could recognise the friendly feelings each had for the other and they both adhered to the same Christian ideals. Although Augustine's thought was not static and he was led by a variety of factors to adapt his early ideas on many subjects in the course of his life, it is nevertheless accurate to say that he remained true to the ideal of friendship, in one way or another constantly giving it a central place in his way of life and in his theology, relating it closely to his idea of the supreme good (summum bonum) in terms of which his theological ideas were frequently expressed.

It was during the fourth century, as the threat of religious persecution came to an end and the supreme self-sacrifice, martyrdom, ceased to be a reality of everyday life, that Christian monasticism developed into an organised movement in both the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire. This century, when monasticism in its various forms was spreading so rapidly, is of great importance for it was at this time that so many of the theories upon which later monasticism was to be based were first worked out. Furthermore, in these early stages of its development the monastic life was still regarded as the life of the true Christian, the Christian who was most intent on the pursuit of perfection, and was not yet seen as something very separate from the life of those Christians who did not completely renounce the things of this world: those who opted for the monastic life were merely regarded, on the whole, as preferring a more radical approach to the question of Christian perfection. As a result of this proximity between the way of the monk and the life of clergy and laity, it is possible to see how the language of the legislators and theorists of monasticism overlaps at many points with the language used by Christian writers of this period in their discussions of friendship: in several aspects the ideals of friendship in Christian terms and the ideals of monasticism appear to coincide.