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Gregory of Nazianzus on the Unity of Christ
- University of Notre Dame Press
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97 5 Gregory of Nazianzus on the Unity of Christ Christopher A. Beeley What we needed was a God made flesh and put to death, so that we might live. —St Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 45.28 One of the many fruits of Brian Daley’s career as a patristic scholar has been his demonstration that Cappadocian Christology is much richer than the received categories of interpretation have admitted. In two recent articles and in his 2002 D’Arcy Lectures in Oxford, Daley has shown that Gregory of Nyssa offers a consistent and powerful “Christology of transformation.”1 Despite his reputation for being puzzling and unsatisfactory according to the canons of fifth-century controversy , Gregory of Nyssa represents Christ as being so thoroughly divinized in his humanity—to the point that he is no longer even human, in the “fleshly” sense, after the resurrection2 —that all human 98 Christopher A. Beeley beings can find their own transformation in his. For similar reasons, the Christology of Gregory of Nazianzus—on whom Daley has also authored several studies3 —is in need of reassessment as well. Scholars have long recognized that Gregory’s Letters to Cledonius (Ep. 101–2) and to Nectarius (Ep. 202) are major christological treatises that significantly influenced later developments; his famous Theological Orations (Or. 27–31) have long been regarded as classic expressions of Trinitarian orthodoxy.4 Yet, as with Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen’s doctrine of Christ remains encumbered by anachronistic views that largely overlook his own rather substantial interests. To mention just two points of confusion: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Christology—like that of many pre-scholastic writers—has suffered the fate of being artificially separated from his doctrine of the Trinity, despite the fact that his work very strongly resists such a division. Even though Gregory’s doctrine of Christ takes shape primarily in Constantinople from 379 to 381 in opposition to homoian and anhomoian positions , scholars have typically focused on his late Ep. 101–2 and 202, from A.D. 382 to 383, at the expense of his more substantial, earlier work. A second, related matter is that Gregory’s Christology tends to be characterized primarily as anti-Apollinarian. For many years the standard handbooks have depicted Cappadocian Christology as essentially an orthodox response to the Apollinarian problem.5 Yet this is a rather odd judgment, if we consider that Gregory hardly mentions Apollinarius until the end of his career; and it is questionable whether even at this late date he thinks Apollinarius’s is the worst christological error on the contemporary scene, compared with the alternatives presented by Eunomius of Cyzicus and Diodore of Tarsus. The resulting neglect of Gregory’s central concerns is both unfortunate and ironic, considering his seminal place in later Christian tradition and the great esteem in which he was held by later theologians such as Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus Confessor. Central to the scholarly confusion is the question of whether Gregory ’s Christology is basically unitive or dualist. According to the received interpretation, Gregory holds a primarily dualist understanding of Christ’s identity. J. N. D. Kelly notes approvingly that for Gregory, Christ is “twofold” (diplou'~, Or. 38.13), though without implying [54.166.223.204] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:37 GMT) Gregory of Nazianzus on the Unity of Christ 99 that there are two sons.6 Alois Grillmeier focuses on Gregory’s twonature language, and goes so far as to conclude that “[Gregory’s] own Christological formula . . . sounds very ‘Antiochene.’”7 One can find similar assessments in more recent scholarship as well.8 On this reading , Gregory is a kind of proto-Chalcedonian—or even a representative Antiochene—stressing the distinction between the divine and human natures of Christ against imagined proto-Eutychians, who wrongly confuse them or collapse them into one another. While there are certain passages that might lend themselves to a dualist reading— several of which we will consider below—my contention is that the received view has it rather backwards and overlooks many of Gregory’s deeper concerns. In order to demonstrate the fundamentally unitive character of Gregory’s Christology, I focus here on the specific question of whether biblical references to Christ ultimately refer to one or two subjects.9 One Acting Subject Before we consider the more technical aspects of the problem, we should first observe the most typical way in which Gregory speaks of Christ. Throughout his corpus, Gregory often refers simply to...