The Greek and Eastern Churches/Part 1/Division 1/Chapter 5

by Walter Frederic Adeney

 

CHAPTER V

THE CAPPADOCIAN THEOLOGIANS

 

(a) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa; Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, Philostorgius.

(b) Besides works on the history mentioned in earlier chapters, Bright, Age of the Fathers, vol. i., 1903; R. Travers Smith, St. Basil the Great; Ulmann, Gregorius von Nazianz de Theologe, first part of first edit. trans. by Cox; Newman, Church of the Fathers, pp. 116–145; Ceilier, Auteurs Ecclés., tom. vii.; Tillemont, Memories, ix.; Dorner, The Person of Christ, Div. i., vol. ii.; Ottley, The Incarnation, vol. ii., part v., 1896; Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea, 1904.

 

The second half of the fourth century is the most brilliant period in the theological literature of the Greek Church. This fact creates a sore temptation to spend some time in the company of its great men rather than to hasten on to duller scenes and poorer minds. But the immense field to be covered by the present volume compels that act of selfdenial, and the more so since we are still dealing with the age of a united Catholic Church. Nevertheless, not only on their own account, but also for the sake of coming to a right understanding of the life and thought of later centuries in the East, we must have some conception of the teachings of the men who did most to shape the orthodoxy which it became the business of subsequent generations to defend.

After Athanasius, who stands apart, the one magnificent hero of the first half of the fourth century, the three greatest theologians of the orthodox Eastern Church appear in the second half of that remarkable century, all of them natives of the province of Cappadocia. These are Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Basil's brother, Gregory of Nyssa. The first two were highly educated in the university culture of their day; and, although Gregory of Nyssa was privately trained by Basil, he was even more well-read in classical literature. In these leaders of the Church, therefore, we see men endowed with a first-class liberal education bringing to bear on the problems of theology knowledge of the best things that have been said and done during past ages in the largo outer world. In this respect we may compare them with the Alexandrians, Clement and Origen, a century and a half before, or with such men of the "New Learning" among the Reformers as Erasmus and Melanchthon. Of these three Basil was the most prominent in his own day, since he was a man of affairs as well as a scholar and writer, energetic, courageous, masterful. He was born at Cæsarea, the capital of Cappadocia, in the year 329. Having distinguished himself at school in his native town, he was sent by his father to study at Constantinople and perhaps at Antioch under Libanius—the famous lecturer so much admired by Julian.^[1] After this he went to the university of Athens, then the intellectual centre of the civilised world, and there began his life-long friendship with Gregory Nazianzen, the two spending some years together in the delightful atmosphere of rich scholarship and refined thinking which was so congenial to both of them. Here too Basil met the future Emperor Julian and became intimate with that eager student on their common ground of intellectual interests. Flushed with the scholar's fame he had returned to Cæsarea, apparently as yet having no perception of his great mission, when his sister Macrina turned his thoughts to the higher aims, and he was baptised. Then he determined to devote himself to the ascetic life, and appointed a bailiff for his estate—for he was a wealthy landowner and always behaved like an aristocrat. Basil spent five years in the desert of Pontus, where he founded monastic establishments. He slept in a hair shirt, he had but one meal a day, and he lived only on a vegetable diet. The sun was his only fire. His constitution was not robust; and on one occasion, when the governor of Pontus threatened to tear out his liver, Basil replied, "Thanks for your intention; where it is at present it has been no slight annoyance."

Basil's monasteries were schools of Nicene orthodoxy, at which the clergy who had been banished from their churches took refuge and trained up a generation of men faithful to the oppressed faith, and Basil himself was indefatigable in labouring for its restoration. It seemed as though the mantle of Athanasius had fallen on his shoulders. Throughout the East he was recognised as the champion of the Nicene cause. At length some Church troubles led his friend Gregory to urge his recall, and on the death of the bishop he was elected to the bishopric of Cæsarea (a.d. 370).

Basil's commanding character was now felt most powerfully all over Syria and Asia Minor. When the prefect Modestus proposed to the bishops of his district the alternatives of Arianism or deprivation in accordance with the orders of the emperor Valens, he came to Basil and urged him to yield to the will of his "Sovereign." "I have a sovereign," he answered, "whose will is otherwise, nor can I bring myself to worship any creature" (alluding to the Arian Christ). The prefect threatened confiscation, exile, torture. "Think of some other threat," was the fearless man's reply; "these have no influence on me." Modestus was constrained to respect the great bishop's firmness, and he appealed to the emperor, who soon after visited Cæsarea, where, awed by the presence of Basil—the old writers add, by the miracles he wrought—he was generous enough to dismiss the bishop and his friends without punishment. Basil did not live to see the restoration of the Nicene faith. He died in the year 379.

The principal extant works of Basil consist of homilies entitled Hexæmeron, on the six days of creation; five books Against Eunomius, the extreme Arian, the last two of which are sometimes regarded as by another hand; an important work upon the Holy Spirit; Letters, which give a vivid picture of the writer's life and its surroundings; various ascetic works and sermons. The "Liturgy of St. Basil" and the "Liturgy of St. Chrysostom" subsequently used in the East were in all probability both based on an older liturgy that Basil used and gave to his clergy.

In defending the Nicene position Basil developed a new terminology which we may take as indicating some change of view. With Athanasius there is in God one ousia^[2] (essence) or hypostasis^[3] (substance), the two words being synonymous. But, according to Basil, while there is one ousia, there are three hypostases; and in this change of terminology the two Gregories agree, so that under the influence of the Cappadocian theologians it passes over into the language of the Greek Church. Meanwhile in the Latin Church there was no change of usage. Here it was taught all along that in the Trinity there was one substantia existing in three personæ.^[4] But the Latin Church used the word substantia as equivalent to both the Greek words ousia and hypostasis. Thus the East saw three hypostases in the Trinity, but the West only one. The difference however was not so great as it appeared to be on the surface. The Greeks had no word equivalent to the Latin persona which they could use with safety, because the nearest corresponding term, prosopon,^[5] was already appropriated in a Sabellian sense for a mere phase or aspect of God without any real distinction of person. Since the Arians were constantly charging the Nicene party with Sabellianism, it would never have done to adopt so suspicious a word. Accordingly a new term had to be found for what the West regarded as the personæ, literally the "characters" (as the word is used in a drama) of the Trinity, and hypostasis was taken over for this purpose. Nevertheless the change was more than verbal. Basil treated the difference between ousia and hypostasis as equivalent to that between common and proper nouns, as between "man" and "Peter, Paul, John, or James."^[6] When it was objected that the term homoousios implied a kind of division and distribution of a previously existing substance, Basil replied, "The idea might have some application to brass and coins made of it; but in the case of the Father and of the Son the substance of one is not older than that of the other, neither can it be conceived as superimposed on both."^[7] We must remember that the orthodox Greek theologians were Platonic in their spirit and thought, so that to them the idea corresponding to a general term was a high reality. Nevertheless, language such as this reveals a growing tendency to emphasise the numerical distinction between the persons in the Trinity. Surely Harnack goes too far when he regards this as virtually the adoption of the Semi-Arian position,^[8] for the firm adhesion to the unity of the substance (the ousia) seems to preclude that amazing conclusion. But undoubtedly some approach to it was made, perhaps in part owing to the fact that most of the Semi-Arians were coming over to the orthodox Church. The final result was that without any formal divergence of doctrine, while in the West the emphasis was always laid on the unity of the Godhead, in the East it came to be put more on the division of the persons.

Gregory Nazianzen was in some respects the opposite, or the complement, to his friend Basil in nature and disposition. An indefatigable student, retiring and unambitious, he would never have come out into a position of responsibility if this course had not been forced upon him, or at all events reluctantly accepted by him under a strong sense of duty. He was born in the year 325, or a little later, at Nazianzus in Cappadocia, where his father, the elder Gregory was bishop, honourably illustrating as late as the fourth century the right of bishops to live in the married state. He appears to have first met Basil at Cæsarea, where he had been sent to school. The schoolboy attachment ripened into a life-long friendship. Afterwards studying at Cæsarea in Palestine, and then at Alexandria, he came on at length to the great university of Athens, where he found Basil already winning a brilliant reputation for scholarship. In his funeral oration over his friend he gives a vivid account of university life at the classic centre of culture during the fourth century. Theatres, wine parties, frivolous discussions dissipated the time and energies of fashionable students. But the two Cappadocians had come to work, and sternly avoiding all these distractions, they gave themselves to severe study. Gregory stayed on longer than his friend, apparently for twelve years altogether, from the age of eighteen till he was past thirty. At last, fascinated by the attractions of the devotional life, he joined Basil for a short time in his Pontic retreat.

In the year 360 Gregory returned home, probably to assist his father. Much against his will, but at the urgent wish of the people of Nazianzus, his father ordained him presbyter. It was "good form" to appear reluctant to take office in the Church; but evidently Gregory's shrinking from the responsibility was genuine; he even described his ordination as an act of tyranny, and immediately after fled to his old retreat with Basil. His Defence of his Flight to Pontus—his first sermon after his return—sets forth the loftiest ideal of the Christian ministry with a richness of thought and a passionate earnestness of feeling that make this book live to-day as truly as Baxter's Reformed Pastor—a work on similar lines. But he could not long resist the call of duty. Subsequently Basil forced him to the episcopate of a little posting-station named Sasima, a noisy, dusty village of one narrow street with no grass or trees in its neighbourhood. The masterful Basil did this for the benefit of his friend's soul, as a discipline in submission and humility—an action the merit of which was not highly appreciated by its victim. After an obscure time at Seleucia in Isauria he was dragged out into the glare of day by being appointed to the charge of the one orthodox Church at Constantinople, when the Arian tyranny was at its height. There he preached his famous Five Theological Orations, which placed him in the foremost rank of Christian preachers; they are not unworthy of comparison with the utterances of the classic Greek orators. His sermons are his greatest works; after them his letters and his poems claim our interest.

On the accession of Theodosius, Gregory was rewarded for his fidelity in holding the fort during the Arian period by being made patriarch of Constantinople. In virtue of this fact he presided at some of the sessions of the council that assembled in that city in the year 381, till, feeling unequal to the distasteful task of maintaining order amid the wrangling of the bishops, he retired to his home at Nazianzus, although according to Socrates^[9] he had "surpassed all his contemporaries in eloquence and piety."

Gregory defended the Nicene position, as held by himself and Basil, by elaborating the mysterious connection of unity and threefoldness in the Trinity. He explained that the unity of the "monarchy"^[10] consisted in "common dignity^[11] of the essence," "harmony of sentiment,"^[12] "identity of motion,"^[13] and "inclination"^[14] of the Son and the Spirit towards the Father. How striking, even startling, are these various expressions, one and all indicating the distinctions of individuality in the Trinity even when toiling to find means to express the idea of the unity—so characteristic of the later development of the Nicene theology, so different from the attitude of the Western Church! Only the underlying Platonism can save such language from a charge of tritheism. But the unity is really found in the idea of derivation. The Son and Spirit are twin rays from one light and that by an eternally continuous process.

The third of the great Cappadocians was Basil's younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, who was born about a.d. 335 or 336. Owing to the delicacy of his health he enjoyed none of the university advantages that fell to the lot of Basil and Gregory Nazianzen. He was privately educated by his brother Basil, and he became a great reader on his own account. After this it is significant that he proved to be a much more original thinker than either of the two highly-tutored senior members of the famous trio. Basil appointed him bishop of the little town of Nyssa, (now Nirse) in the west of Cappadocia. During the Arian persecution under Valens he was driven from his church on a charge of irregularity of appointment by a too subservient synod held at Nyssa, and then banished by the emperor, to be restored after the death of Valens and "the crash of Hadrianople." On the death of Basil he became one of the two leading defenders of the faith.

Gregory of Nyssa is chiefly interesting to us on account of the profound arguments and daring speculations with which he justified the orthodox view against the Arians. These are elaborated in his great work Against Eunomius, as well as in some of his shorter writings. The Nicene fathers had simply thundered out a great affirmation—strong, definite, conclusive—still only an affirmation, a bare assertion voted by authority. Even Athanasius was content for the most part to defend it by rebutting false conceptions while tearing the rival theory to shreds. Gregory of Nyssa goes further. He digs into the roots of the mighty affirmation; he seeks to justify it metaphysically; he carries orthodox theology into the free atmosphere of philosophy and there attempts to argue for its truth on principles of abstract reason—a daring, a perilous effort, but still one that some minds not satisfied with authoritative dogma might welcome with a sense of liberty and enlargement. In particular, Gregory helped to develop a new line of thought that opened up fruitful sources of discussion among subsequent writers. Hitherto the nature of Christ had been almost exclusively considered on its Divine side. The one question had been, How did He stand related to God? The orthodox were content to affirm His full Divinity and also to assert the fact of the incarnation; but they made no attempt to correlate these two truths. They had no theory as to how the Divine and the human could subsist together, how there could be such a fact as an incarnation at all. The full discussion of this most difficult problem belongs to the controversies of later times—those of the fifth and sixth centuries. But before the end of the fourth century there had emerged a burning question as to the actual presence of complete human and Divine natures in the Person of Jesus Christ. Now both the Gregories, but Gregory of Nyssa the more emphatically of the two, followed Origen in pronouncing for a real human soul in Christ. According to Gregory of Nyssa, this was transformed under the influence of the Divine Nature after the resurrection and ascension. The very body of Christ was then sublimated into the essence of the Divine Nature, so that it has laid aside the attributes of gravity, shape, colour, and all limitation. Thus we have the omnipresence of that glorified body, for the body of Christ was transmute to the flesh of God by the indwelling word.^[15] It is easy to see how readily such a theory would agree with the doctrine of transubstantiation, a doctrine which Gregory did more than anybody else of his period to advance.^[16]

On the other hand, Apollinaris the younger, of Hierapolis, took the opposite line. A man of great intellectual power, he made an original attempt to shape an intelligible conception of the incarnation. But by abolishing its mystery he virtually denied the fact. His motif was opposition to Arianism. Nevertheless, he shared with Arius a view which the Church always rejected as false and fatal to the central idea of the gospel, the coming of the Divine into the human; for he too denied to Christ a complete human nature. Like Arius, he was Aristotelian in temper of mind and method of thought. His clear, crisp logic worked out definite conclusions without regard to side issues. Accepting the tripartite division of man into body or flesh, soul, and mind or spirit,^[17] he ascribed to our Lord only the first two, and taught that the spirit or higher consciousness of Christ was purely of Divine Nature, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity. He thought that you must sacrifice the personality on one side or the other. Paul of Samosata had sacrificed it on the Divine side; with him Christ was only a man completely influenced by God, the ego, the centre of personality and self-consciousness being human. To allow of two spirits or minds is to admit two wills—which the Church did actually admit and even affirm on peril of excommunication at a later time,—and so two persons. Then the human mind^[18] is naturally changeable, owing to its possession of free will; but to say that Christ was changeable was Arian, the Nicene party denying this. Further, Apollinaris thought that the usual way of representing the nature of Christ was inconsistent with the doctrine of redemption, since it only allowed the man Jesus, not the Divine Christ, to have suffered for us.

Apollinaris was vehemently assailed for the denial of the incarnation these ideas were supposed to involve. But he endeavoured to save that mystery in another region. Since man was made in the image of God, there must be something in God which is like man. In other words, there must be an inherent humanity in God. Now it was that man-like element in God which entered into earthly human nature in the incarnation of Jesus. Therefore it would exactly correspond to a perfect human spirit. We might compare this view to the Semi-Arian, by applying to the human nature of Christ the watchword that the Semi-Arians used to describe His Divine Nature, and say that, while the Athanasian party regarded Christ as homoousios with us in His humanity, Apollinaris considered Him to be only homoiousios with us. It will be found that most subsequent approaches to an explanation—over and above the mere orthodox affirmation—of the incarnation have moved in the direction here indicated by Apollinaris; they have denied the existence of the enormous gulf commonly thought to separate human nature from God, and they have asserted a natural affinity between God and man, a something in us that is akin to God, and therefore correlatively a something in God that is akin to us. Some zealous opponents of Arianism were driven by the recoil of their attack on the heresy back on the Sabellianism that Arius had originally set out to resist. Thus they played into the hands of their opponents, who could turn round on the Nicene party saying, "There; that is just what we told you—you are Sabellian." Marcellus of Ancyra was one of these too thoroughgoing champions of the homoousion doctrine. He was a friend of Athanasius, who long defended him from the suspicion of Sabellianism; but when at last his position became too clear to be doubted, the great patriarch was driven to correct him.^[19] Still more pronounced was the Sabellianism of his disciple Photinus, bishop of Sirmium, who was condemned in a synod at that city.

Meanwhile the Arians were pushing their views to a logical conclusion with regard to the whole conception of the Trinity. At first only the doctrine of the nature of Christ was in question. But the enquiry could not stop there. The notions we entertain concerning the second Person of the Trinity must affect our ideas of the third. If the Son is a creature, it will be impossible not to assert that the Spirit also is a creature. Athanasius met with this view when in exile in the Thebaid, coming across Arians who went beyond Arius in asserting that the Holy Spirit was not only a creature but "one of the ministering spirits";^[20] he says they were called Figuraturists, and Fighters against the Spirit.^[21] Probably not much would have been heard of this by-product of Arianism—since the battle was raging round the doctrine of Christ—if it had not succeeded in obtaining a champion in high quarters. Macedonius the patriarch of Constantinople maintained the same position, and consequently the party who agreed with him was known as Macedonian. Since this consisted largely of Semi-Arians, unlikely as we might have supposed it, the orthodox were quick to seize the new weapon, and call all the Semi-Arians Macedonians. But that was not just.

With this babel of voices from Eunomians, Acacians, Semi-Arians, Macedonians, Apollinarians, followers of Marcellus and Photinus, rending the air, all more or less opposed to the party of the three Cappadocians in their support of the Niceue position, there seemed to be an urgent need for another general council of the Church to settle the various disputes involved. Accordingly, Theodosius summoned a synod of the Eastern bishops at Constantinople. This synod is reckoned to be the second Œcumenical Council, none of the councils—at Tyre, Constantinople, Antioch, Sardica, Sirmium, Rimini—which had met in the interval since Nicæa, being regarded as of that character. And yet even this council at Constantinople only represented the Eastern half of the Church. Not a bishop from the West was present. Theodosius only ruled over the Eastern branch of the empire, and he was only able to command the bishops within the area of his jurisdiction. The sole justification for regarding the council as œcumenical is the fact that its decisions were accepted by the bishop of Rome and the Church of the West. This council first assembled in the year a.d. 381; then it broke up for a time. It reassembled the next year. There were 150 bishops present. The first president was Meletius of Antioch; but he died during the discussions and was succeeded by Gregory Nazianzen, who, as we have seen,^[22] retired because he felt out of his element among the wrangling, quarrelsome theologians, and his place was then taken by Nectarius, his successor in the patriarchate of Constantinople. The council reaffirmed the Creed of Nicsea and anathematised Eunomians, Semi-Arians or Pneumatomachoi, Sabellians, Marcellians, Photinians, Apollinarians. Our "Nicene Creed," which differs slightly from the creed as it was originally shaped at Nicæa, has been long regarded as the "Creed of Constantinople." But that view is now abandoned by scholars for the following reasons: The creed omits strong anti-Arian expressions,^[23] an omission that would be unaccountable at this council, since the council's raison d'être was to stiffen up orthodoxy against Arianism; it was in existence previous to the assembling of the council, since it was mentioned by Epiphanius at an earlier date; it is almost identical with the creed of Cyril of Jerusalem; for two hundred years after the council of Constantinople nobody is found connecting it with that council; we know that the council reaffirmed the Creed of Nicæa. Possibly Cyril—who was present—read his creed to the council and got an endorsement of it as a creed he might use in his own church, and if so this fact may have originated the legend.^[24]

Meanwhile the one important conclusion of the council was simply the reassertion of the Nicene position, together with an explicit repudiation of whatever more recent schemes and speculations were deemed inconsistent with it. Some advance of thought may be seen in the three Cappadocians, especially in Gregory of Nyssa; and a very original attempt to break up new ground and carry theological ideas further forward in explanation of the incarnation is to be acknowledged in Apollinaris. But the latter is denounced as a heretic, and even Basil and the Gregories have only been utilised in defence of the established position. Gregory of Nyssa, the most original thinker of the trio, comes to be regarded with some suspicion on account of his sympathy with Origen's universalism. The council thinks it can do nothing better than fall back on the decision of "the 318," now fifty-six years old, and treated with growing veneration as an inspired oracle. That decision was to be the stamp and seal of orthodoxy for all time. There remained to do nothing more in the matter than to safeguard it against the attacks of heresy, which in the meantime had risen up to assail it on all sides. Already the keynote of Eastern Christianity was sounded. This was to be orthodoxy—fixed, settled dogma, with no encouragement for widening views or the exploration of new realms of truth.

Having determined this point, the council only had to proceed to certain practical decisions in its later canons. The object of one of these was to confine a bishop's authority to his own district. Another, the third, declared that "the bishop of Constantinople shall have the privilege of rank next after the bishop of Rome; because Constantinople is new Rome"^[25]—a decision of great significance in view of the subsequent division of the Church.

 

1. Socrates, iv. 26; Sozomen, vi. 17. But a doubt has been raised on this point, and it has been suggested that his namesake, a friend of Chrysostom, may be confused by the historians with Basil of Cæsarea. See Blomfield Jackson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. xiii. p. xv.
2. οὐσία.
3. ὑπόστασις.
4. It has been suggested that the great test word was of Latin origin—ὁμοούσιον being a translation of unius substantiæ—an improbable hypothesis.
5. πρόσωπον.
6. Letter 38.
7. Letter 52.
8. History of Dogma, Eng. Trans., vol. iv. p. 82.
9. Hist. Eccl. v. 7.
10. μοναρχία.
11. ὁμοτιμία.
12. γνώμης σύμπνοια.
13. ταύτης κινήσεως.
14. σύννευσις.
15. Oratio catechetica magna, 37.
16. See Hebert, The Lord's Supper, vol. i. pp. 202–209.
17. The Greek σῶμα, ψυχή, νοῦς; the New Testament σάρξ, ψυχή, πνεῦμα.
18. νοῦς.
19. Oration against the Arians, iv.
20. καὶ τῶν πνευματῶν λειτουργικῶν ἔν αὐτὸ εἶναι, Letters to Serapion, 4.
21. τροπικοί, πνευματομαχοῦντες..
22. P. 77.
23. τοῦτ' ἐστίν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ πατρὸς and θεὸν ἐκ θεοῦ.
24. See Hort, Two Dissertations.
25. Τὸν μέν τοι Κωνσταντινουπόλεως ἐπίσκοπον ἔχειν τὰ πρεσβειᾶ τῆς τιμῆς μετὰ τὸν τῆς Ῥώμης ἐπισκοπον, διὰ τὸ εἶναι αύτὴν νέαν Ῥώμην. Observe the preposition—μετὰ, and note the reason for the position—a wholly political reason, and therefore thoroughly characteristic of the Greek Church.