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Gregory of Nazianzus' Poemata Arcana: ἄϱϱητα and Christian persuasion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2012

Fabian Meinel
Fabian Meinel*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge, FU Berlin
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Extract

When Gregory of Nazianzus composed the Poemata Arcana in the early 380s AD, he had long been through the ‘moral and intellectual boot camp’ of Greek paideia. He was both a man of (Greek) culture and a Christian. He had plucked the ‘roses from the thorny field’ of paganism, and could now turn to the pressing issues of the day: the impieties of heretics. It is important to keep this in mind when reading Gregory's Poemata Arcana. Written in the form of didactic epic, these poems set forth the orthodox doctrine of the ineffable nature of Godhead and its manifestation in this world. In 713 hexameters, they expound the essential unity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit (poems 1 to 3), Christian cosmology (poem 4), Providence (poem 5), the relationship to God of human beings and angels (poem 6), the soul (poem 7), and finally the unity of the two Testaments and (the circumstances surrounding) the incarnation of Christ (poem 8). Because of this peculiar combination of Greek literary form with Christian content many modern critics have felt encouraged to pit Christian (content) against pagan (form) and locate the Arcana in the context of an on-going struggle of Christian writers anxious to appropriate Greek culture. But this entails not only a misplaced historical emphasis which overplays ‘struggle’ and ‘antagonism’. It has also led to an impoverished and truncated sense of the poems' literary style: a sizing up of Gregory against the didactic tradition of which to these critics he seems so anxious to be thought part.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 55 , 2009 , pp. 71 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2009

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