A Self-Made Holy Man: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen

Holiness in the First Person

Gregory Nazianzen lived in a far more comfortable, civilized world than the typical “holy man” of the Syrian outback. He received his cultural formation not in the desert but during eight years of literary studies at Athens, a period he still recalled fondly during his last years in ascetic retirement; and the setting for this final retreat, a garden refreshed by a fountain at his family estate outside Nazianzus, is again a world removed from the huts, caves, and cisterns of Theodoret’s heroes. ¹

Yet there are important similarities between Gregory and these rough-hewn hermits. Most important is that Gregory is presented to us pursuing his ascetic goals alone, by himself; and we are allowed to follow him doing so over the course of a life full of struggle. For like the typical holy man, Gregory is known to us chiefly through biographical texts. The longest of several contemporary vitae sets the tone for his career with a familiar hagiographical device, a divinely assisted conception and dedication to God at birth by a grateful mother (de vita sua 68–92), ² and proceeds to describe a life combining ascetic prowess and social engagement, which culminates in a call to Constantinople (592–605)—the holy man’s “toughest consignment” ³ —and a career there which includes constant mortification of the senses (1220–1223), a minor miracle to illuminate a moment of triumph (1351–1370), and a brave but futile attempt at mediation between disputatious bishops; when this fails, a bold display of parrhesia before the emperor (1871–1879) secures Gregory a retirement which is presented as an agreement to “suffer on behalf of the world,” in exchange for an imperial commitment to “enjoin a brotherly harmony” among the bishops (1888–1901).

This narrative differs from our standard hagiographies less in its contents than in its form—it unfolds in some two thousand fluent Euripidean iambics, which invoke the whole Hellenic heritage, from Homer to Demosthenes—and still more in its authorship: for Gregory of course wrote his de vita sua himself. ⁴ And his highly wrought, highly self-conscious artistry has helped obscure, for modern students of the holy man, Gregory’s kinship with the hermits of Syria. Peter Brown taught us, twenty-five years ago, to approach the latter from the standpoint of the “common man” and with the tools of the anthropologist: such has been the success of this approach, however, that the late antique holy man has become a figure in a distinctly—and misleadingly—unclassical landscape. Attuned now to “the murmurs and shudders, the thick voice of the circus,” we too easily forget that more refined accents were also part of the same clamor. We instinctively, but mistakenly, classify holy men in contradistinction to bishops. ⁵ Yet Gregory’s defiantly paradoxical self-presentation, as a “breathing corpse” who will yet take his stand with the angels, lays claim to the same sort of “achieved status,” independent of social or ecclesiastical rank, as Brown’s heroes. ⁶ We might therefore acknowledge a continuum of “self-created” holiness, from the rough shepherd Symeon or the Egyptian camel-driver Macarius, through maverick churchmen like Epiphanius of Salamis, contemptuously ignoring ecclesiastical procedure in the name of Christian lovingkindness, to include such figures as Paulinus of Nola, who would “pin his identity” upon Saint Felix in a series of exquisite verses. ⁷ The decisive criterion here will be the extent to which authority was derived from personally achieved sanctity (or, in Paulinus’ case, the sanctity of an exclusively claimed proxy) as opposed to institutional status: to distinguish between (say) Paulinus and Augustine, between Epiphanius and his fellow monk-bishop John of Jerusalem, and between Gregory and his friend Basil of Caesarea.

The Byzantine iconographers who brigaded Gregory among the great pillars of the orthodox establishment were in effect painting him up for posterity, “in the vivid colors of an acceptable ecclesiastical narrative.” ⁸ And although the paint has long since cracked, and the idiosyncrasies of Gregory’s career—such matters as his three abortive bishoprics—have...