Gregory of Nazianzus: Ars Poetica (In suos versus: Carmen 2.1.39)

The aim of this article is to offer a new and detailed reading of the poem On His Verses. The poem is important because in it Gregory delineated his own poetic goals, which, apparently, were twofold. On the one hand, he wished to create a body of classicizing, scholarly Christian poetry, meant for instruction and edification, while on the other, he wanted to provide young Christians with some wholesome entertainment, that is, songs and poems that would have drawn, at least in part, on the sympotic tradition in Greek popular music. Also, in the poem Gregory took a definite stand against some contemporary trends in poetry, referred to as ametria, which in this case probably was a designation for iambics based on rhythmic and accentual, and not quantitative, prosody.

Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390), a supreme orator and a prolific poet, was so proud of his literary versatility that he wanted himself remembered as one “blessed with a two-edged speech” (ampheke muthon edoke logos: Carm. 2.1.103.4). A modern reader, however, may not agree with such a characterization. As an orator, Gregory was undoubtedly very gifted, but as a poet he might have been less so: all too often his poetry is wordy, rhetorical, and lacking in the cohesive force of inspiration. ¹

In any event, he apparently regarded prose and verse as two equal, easily interchangeable means of literary expression. A considerable number of his favorite themes and personal recollections, as well as various literary devices, common places, popular sayings, mythological examples, and so forth, can be found in either form. ² In the majority of these cases, the difference between the prose and verse versions is strictly formal, affecting not in the least either the meaning, tone or mood of what is being said. In other words, content and expression are treated as two distinct entities whose relative importance is rather unequal: the content is paramount, the mode of expression almost irrelevant. Or, as Gregory himself put it:

All composition is twofold really, made up of thought and expression. Expression is like an outer garment: thought is the body which it clothes.

(Carm. 2.1.12.267ff., transl. Meehan)

Thus, “changing the outer garment” was probably Gregory’s intention when in his later years he rewrote in poetic form some of his favorite thoughts and recollections, previously dealt with in prose in his oratory or his letters. Changing from prose to poetry was by no means unusual at the time, for it was part of the regular rhetorical training, called paraphrasing. The practice found encouragement from two directions: first, prose writing in itself had been highly poeticized through the influence of the Second Sophistic; second, rhetorical theory had come to consider poetry a mere subdivision of oratory. ³

Gregory’s own prose style is eminently poetic, so much so that it was his prose orations, and not his poems, that served as a source of inspiration to a long line of later Byzantine poets. ⁴ Moreover, he seems to have ignored whatever limits or subtle distinctions between prose and poetry some ancient critics were able to formulate. ⁵ Thus it would appear that it was only meter, and specifically that of the old, quantitative kind, that represented for him the distinctive feature of poetry as opposed to prose. Consequently, when referring to his writings, both prose and verse, he most often used the simple word logoi. And if he wanted to be more specific, he might use the expression ta emmetra to designate the poems. ⁶

His views on poetry, or at least some of them, can be found in the poem entitled On His Verses (Eis ta emmetra: In suos versus: Carm. 2.1.39). References to this poem, or to a part of it (lines 34–57), can easily be found in modern scholarly literature, but the full appreciation of the entire poem and its significance is still lacking. In some cases even the exact meaning of the text seems to be in doubt. ⁷ For these...