680 Ft. Washington Ave., 1B Oxford Conference

Alexandra E. Honigsberg August, 2003 680 Ft. Washington Ave., 1B Oxford Conference New York, NY 10040-3917 USA approx. 2,800 words 212-795-0717 [email protected]

A City By Any Other Name...? Gregory of Nazianzus’ Constantinople1

As Socrates explains via Plato in The Republic (Books IV, VIII), a person defines and is defined by their interactions with and within their locus, in relationships, as citizens. It is personal, as well as communal. Two Worlds. “City is soul writ large.”2

The idea of city as not only a locus, but a metaphor, is continued in the Christian poetic tradition across the ages. This tradition was especially dominant in the Eastern part of the

Christian world during the 4th Century, and Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-390) is perhaps its finest proponent. As a theologian, he was steeped in Bible as an oral, as well as written, tradition, so much so that his metaphors and language are spontaneous biblical paraphrases.

Where one encounters Bible, Christianity, and poetry in all its forms, one encounters city.3 Cities are portrayed in sacred and secular texts as wombs, birthing places, whores, Queens. And

Gregory, as poet, sings of them.

Forever at odds with city as anything not seclusion or wilderness, Gregory was repeatedly

1 Note: general dates throughout from various sources, including Cross, F.L. & Livingstone, E.A.; eds.; The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1993; McBrien, Richard P., gen’l. ed.; The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995; Walton, Robert C.; Chronological and Background Charts of Church History, Zondervan Publishing House; Grand Rapids, Michigan; 1986. 2 Socrates (c. 470-399 BCE), Plato (c. 428-348 BCE); The Republic (c. 380 BCE); Plato, The Republic, Allan Bloom (trans. & commentary), 2nd ed., Basic Books, Perseus Book Group, US, 1968/1991, pg. 412 et al. 3 The word city is used nearly one thousand times in the Bible, as often as Jesus’ name, itself, or Jerusalem, specifically, which would seem to connect them as balanced and interrelated facets of the salvation story. Each city is like its own character in Christianity’s epic, a window on the works of God and Creation and their relationship, an icon of good and evil, the Two Worlds, The World and The Kingdom. City comes from Middle Latin civitat, civitas; from Latin’s citizenship, state, city of Rome, from civis as citizen – Home: an inhabited place of greater size, population, or importance than a town or village. In older derivations, it is from the Greek po,lij and the Hebrew ry[i (r[\), the latter also denoting a place of awakening, guarded, excitement, anguish, or terror. See Webster’s 9th Collegiate Dictionary, Bushell’s BibleWorks program (including Bible editions and lexicons). Honigsberg/City/2 torn between his familial and ecclesiastical duties therein and his desires for the aristocratic solitude of the villa, between the individual and the Church, the human and the Divine. Gregory of Nazianzus4 was the first Christian autobiographical poet and one of the greatest academy- trained Greek poets of all time and, in the Eastern Church, his works are second only to the Bible in their popularity. All his works were written during his retirement, when he finally achieved that peaceful solitude he’d sought all his life, at his villa near Karbala (c. 381-390).5

In his poem, “Concerning Himself and the Bishops,” written as a didactic text to his colleagues in the episcopate, he advises: “From cities, from the plaudits of the mob, from the whirl in which all public life is tossed, [the bishop] is a fugitive.”6 He views city in terms of

Empire, as in Meeks’ modern analysis thereof,7 though he is also a staunch advocate of celibacy and living the Christian life within one’s household, whatever its locus, as in Brown’s descriptions.8 For Gregory, people and their actions define city, as in Stark’s modern analysis9 and, often, those actions and people are in conflict.

Nazianzan’s struggles with city began at home, his birthplace, at his family’s estates at

Arianzus, in modern Turkey, his family-as-city and church-as-city, in Cappadocia.10 Gregory canonized his entire family in his verses, turning them and himself into biblical heroes in

4 aka “The Theologian” and “The Christian Demosthenes”. 5 His hillside villa, near Arianzus, which was near Nazianzus. 6 Gregory of Nazianzus; Meehan, Denis Molaise, OSB, trans.; Three Poems, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 75; The Catholic University of America Press; Washington, DC; 1992, pg. 67, lines 599-600. 7 Meeks, Wayne A.; The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, Yale University Press; New Haven, 1983. 8 Brown, Peter; The Body and Society: Men, Women, And Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity; Columbia University Press, NY, 1988. 9 Stark, Rodney; The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, HarperSanFrancisco, HarperCollins, 1996. 10 Cappadocia is at the heart of Asia Minor at a three-way crossroads, with travellers from Byzantium, Africa, and Syria passing through its heart around a triangle of the cities of Nyssa, Nazianzus, and Caesarea, each approximately 60 miles apart, the homes of the Cappadocian Fathers, who were all wealthy landowners. This fact cannot have escaped Gregory’s forever vigilant Trinitarian sensibilities, which also connected through locus, making his homeland even that much more significant as Divine warrant for his Call and the cause of his Nicene orthodoxy. See Jones, Hammond, and Chadwick/Evans. Honigsberg/City/3

Classical Greek forms within his extended biblical exegetical narratives. He revered and feared his severe father, Gregory the Elder (c. 280- 374), his ordaining bishop (c. 362), in death as in life.11 Nonna (d. 374), his saintly mother, had visions and had promised Gregory to the church.

Caesarius, Gregory’s younger brother, a physician, inspired the elder brother to join him at the academy and become a remedy for the woes of his Church,12 but broke Gregory’s heart by dying young in 368. Gorgonia (d. 369), his pagan older sister, was also beloved of Gregory.13

When Gregory left home for his rigourous education in Athens, Alexandria,14 and both the Caesareas of Cappadocia and Palestine, he grew to become a master rhetorician in the Stoic and Neoplatonic styles, possibly the most educated man of his age, and began to give form to, through words, the concepts of his Trinitarian theology. The academy equipped him to champion orthodoxy – not just belief but right belief – and fostered his Two Worlds mentality.

This dialectical tendency continued between him and his friends, including the Cappadocians,15 even his friend Basil “The Great” of Caesarea (c. 329-379). 16 Gregory was not prone to compromise. He saw the canons of the Council of Nicaea as the only way and fought for them with his whole body, unto physical and military altercations. He was an absolutist. It was the narrow way, through the eye of the needle, and he did not fancy himself the camel nor wish anyone under his care to be anything but right with God, in thought and Godly orientation, in understanding and use of words (Matt 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25).

11 This man betrayed and abandoned Gregory as the son in the form of forced ordination. 12 fa,rmakoj, pharmakos, the non-Scriptural word used in Ignatius of Antioch’s (c. 35-107) epistles to the Ephesians and Trallians. 13 All biographical information compiled from various sources, including ODCC and: Gregory of Nazianzus; White, Carolinne, trans.; Autobiographical Poems, Cambridge Medieval Classics, vol. 6; Cambridge University Press, 1996; Gregory of Nazianzus; Moreschini, C., ed./intro; Sykes, D.A., intro, trans., commentary; Poemata Arcana, Oxford Theological Monographs, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, and Meehan; also see McGuckin’s biography. 14 He would later, in many of his writings, repudiate Alexandria for its Arian heresy, as well as all of Africa and Macedonia, as a place from whence no good could come, especially during the succession conflict over Bishop Meletius’ seat at the Council (381). 15 Basil the Great (c. 329-379), his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330-395), some including their elder sister Macrina the Younger (c. 327-379), and Gregory of Nazianzus. 16 At Basil’s family estates in Annesi, together they compiled the Philocalia of Origen, to whom they were particularly devoted. Honigsberg/City/4

Nazianzan dedicated himself to the perfection of the word for the good of God and the

Church. Since the Lo,goj, the 2nd person of the Trinity, is the pre-eternal Word, in Gregory’s

Johannine cosmos, he shows that he is a holy man by writing, through logos, itself. Writing and words are essential to Gregory’s sense and experience of his own Call, his salvation and ability to save others. It is the word as weapon and fortress, his sacred naming of himself, just as Jacob became Israel by the angel with which he had struggled (Gen. 32:25-29). And though Gregory is a great complainer in the romantic and rhetorical sense, he never complains that writing is at all difficult for him or any sort of struggle. Always, it is the remedy, always related to a city locus and her people.

Gregory praises and elevates many locales, such as Bethlehem and his own homelands, as small in size but great in stature, often with city as mother, The Virgin herself, doxology. A funerary epigram as benediction, written in the voice of his bishop father, from on high, to the elder’s congregation and as warrant of authority for Gregory as the son and heir, states in

Trinitarian overtones:17

Small is the pearl, but the queen of jewels; small is Bethlehem, but yet the mother of Christ;

Similarly he writes on the death of his uncle (father’s brother) Amphilochus, who was known for his “fiery oratory” in the Courts of Law and was, as such, a lover of order, in the

Platonic sense, and Law as Word of God, in the Semitic sense. This adjudicator and citizen was one who exalted earthly life and community through words and likewise elevated others, so

Gregory exalts him via the sacrament of words, in his city’s own anthropomorphised voice:18

I, Diocaesarea, am a small city, but gave a great man...... boast of his native city, which his birth ennobled.

17 Paton, W.R., trans. & ed.; The Greek Anthology (vol. 2, Books VII-VIII), Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; Cambridge, MA; 1993 (1917), Epigram 21, pp. 410-11. 18 Paton, Epigram 135, pp. 458-9; Diocaesarea is the Roman name for Nazianzus. Honigsberg/City/5

Yet of all cities, Gregory’s bane and bride of his soul is the first Christian city,

Constantinople (f. 330), and all other cities are, next to her, smaller stars in the constellation.

Through his adventures there over a period equal to Jesus’ ministry (3 years) and just before

Gregory’s retirement, he describes his struggles and those of the post-Nicene church. For

Gregory, it is city, this city, which looms largest, to which he was summoned as a bishop (379), and in which he was briefly consecrated and served as its Patriarch (381), to rule in tandem with the Emperor.19 It is she who is his arena versus the Christological controversies of the Arians, the Alexandrians, the Sabellians, and his own bodily and spiritual health. She is his living icon of the Two Worlds, Us and Them (Matt 12:30, Luke 11:23), City of Man and City of God, through the Emperor and the Church, in every nuance of the city’s everyday life.

Combining Byzantine traditions and the concept of Trinitarian unity of rule with the Greek sense of polis, Gregory’s poetic vision treats the city and Church as one, empire and ecclesia joined. Constantinople is Gregory’s embodiment of order in the Platonic ideal of perfection, as opposed to Babel as the archetype of disorder. Gregory says in “On the Spirit”: “...that we may glorify the clear-shining unity of rule, rather than finding pleasure in some Babel governance by a host of gods.”20 When one calls, so does the other, and both are calls from God.

Constantine’s city, by fate and the Emperor’s design, was the archetype for his Imperial self in all its Human/Divine congruence. Even Rome as a patriarchate pales in its dotage when compared to this new Christian Queen, as well as to its former glory as Empire’s seat and a site of

Paul’s mission and martyrdom. Rome had become spiritually poor when Gregory speaks of her even next to her successor, Nicaea,21 as the Queen’s champion city. Constantinople had eclipsed

19 Theodosius I, “The Great” (c. 346-395, r. 379-395). 20 Moreschini & Sykes, “On the Spirit,” pp. 14-15. 21 30 miles southeast of Constantinople, 1st Oecumenical Council, 325. Honigsberg/City/6 even Jerusalem in influence and splendour, especially since the Romans had marched off with all of Jerusalem’s relics and reinterred them at Constantine’s center of the known world.22

Constantinople became thus for Gregory and other orthodox Christians the New Rome, part of the Two Worlds, as there was the Father and the Son, with orthodox Antioch completing the Trinity as Holy Spirit. She became the crown of the Christian Empire with the Emperor-as-

God reigning over her, though less literally than the Caesars before him had done, and with her population as citizens of the universe. The public spectacle that Constantinople was famous for was the manifestation of God’s majesty on Earth. The Emperor functioned as gateway to and agent of that Heavenly Power mirrored on that earthly throne, the material reaching up to Heaven and Divine reaching down to Creation. All this was a continuation of the Hebrew Temple and

High Priesthood, in combination with the Roman ideas of might and temple cultus as legacy –

God’s city, sacred space. This view was blessed by the third canon of the Second Oecumenical

Council of Constantinople I (381), and spoken of by Gregory in “Concerning His Own Life”:23

You men, the shining eye of earth, who inhabit the second world, as I see it, clothed in the beauty of earth and sea, the newly built Rome, the seat of new nobility, the city of Constantine and a monument to his power...

Yet as a manifestation of God’s continuous promise in two parts, the Old and New

Testaments, the Nazianzan world is configured in equal twos, supporting the Trinity, especially versus Arius and the Alexandrians, mirroring the co-equality of Father and Son (plus Spirit):24

22 Even moreso, its geographic location was north of all the other great cities, the apex of a mighty and holy triangle, flanked by Antioch in the East and Rome in the West, an Earthly Trinity in Creation’s very rock and guardian of the gateway to the narrow way that is the Bosporous; see Chadwick, Henry & Evans, G.R., eds.; Atlas of the Christian Church; Equinox (Oxford) Ltd, 1987, pg. 33. 23 White, pp. 10-11, lines 12-20; Meehan, pg. 77. 24 White, pp. 52-3, lines 562-4ff; pp. 120-1, line 1510; Meehan, pp. 93, 119; In contrast, the patriarchate of Alexandria is debased, known by its heretical fruits in the form of Arius and other heretics, who have disrupted sacred Constantinople, and Gregory’s life, against God and Creation: “...that vain city, filled with every wickedness, irrational in its recklessness...” using the Platonic ideal of moderation to illustrate said city’s lack thereof, on top of all the other manifestations of its fallenness from the great learning center and vessel of right words it had once been. Honigsberg/City/7

Nature has given us not two suns, but two Romes, beacons of the whole world, one ancient power and one new...... but in their beauty they are equally balanced...

Two worlds were embedded within Gregory’s conception of the Two Worlds – Church and City – just as the same two worlds were partners and a reflection of the Trinity.

Nevertheless, for all of Gregory’s devotion toward Constantinople as icon of God, it was the locus of some of the worst evils he had suffered during his lifetime, a paradox of earthly Heaven and Hell. Gregory had been summoned to take over the Church of the Apostles, as bishop (379), from the Arians who had held the city for a generation. He felt that, with his appointment, the orthodox Christian cell of Church within God’s city had cleansed herself of its Arian leprosy, restored control. He spoke of the city as a wayward believer who had finally “...abandoned its insolent behaviour...” As the disease had spread from a central location via the church’s and people’s incorrect beliefs, so would the cure spread, through him and the city’s people, souls newly reconciled to God, restored through repentance, returned to rightness. Constantinople became the source of all goodness, the font of God, and anything from outside was suspect.25

When Gregory arrived at Arian-controlled Constantinople, something drastic had to be done. Theodosius had called the council (381) to settle the violent conflicts over which form of

Christianity would be the one, true form. The conflicts intensified between rival clerical factions and their congregations when Bishop Meletius of Antioch died during the council without a clear successor. This total lack of unity amongst his holy colleagues, as well as amongst his flock, contradicted Gregory’s image of one Christendom embodied by and issuing forth from his

25 It is notable that the Greek word he used here for church is not the home or people-designate of oikos (oi=koj), but the word more often used for temple, especially the inner sanctuary thereof – naos (nao,j);White, pp. 112-13, lines 1402-3; Meehan, pg. 116; see also White pp. 62-3, 118-19, lines 686-7, 1470-9; Meehan pp. 96, 117-18, for further tales of church vs. city, in the form of polis vs. oikos. Here, even his beloved Constantinople has made accusations against his orthodoxy and numerous attempts on his life, murderer of prophets, like Jerusalem of Jesus, and devourer of everything good if not kept under strict control on all fronts, including within the Church, itself. He is an epic warrior in the arena, like the martyrs, in this portion of his story. Honigsberg/City/8

Queen of Cities, reflecting the unity of the Trinity.26 Gregory remained focused on unified community.

Gregory’s 10 years at the academy, including Athens,27 had honed in him that sense of citizenship and community. He speaks of Athens, especially concerning himself and Basil, as a place of friendship, synthesis of life.28 He contrasts this with the lives of the other students:29

...how we lived in fear of God, aware that first things are first: how among the youth’s elite, driven by recklessness... we led a life of such calm – ...we ourselves drew our friends on to higher things...

Despite horrific experiences in Cappadocia and his love for Constantinople, Gregory always wanted to retire to his home.30 It is countryside as remedy for what the city could inflict

26 Later named and extensively elaborated upon by Augustine of Hippo (354-430, ordained 391, consecrated 395) in his 22 books on the subject (413-26), but a concept that was by no means unique to or new with this Church Doctor. It is a common apocalyptic vision – see Rev. 3:12 with the concept of God’s New Jerusalem coming down from Heaven during the End Times and even this world’s Jerusalem is called “...the city of our God...,” in Heb 12:22. So it would be natural for Gregory to see Constantinople in a similar light and having superceded the patriarchate of Jerusalem post-Resurrection and with the Emperor’s holy presence. 27 Where he and Basil studied with the Armenian Christian professor of Rhetoric/Sophist, Prohaeresius. 28 He quotes Sappho nearly as often as he does the Bible, saying of the use of pagan literature for Christian enlightenment that we should grasp the rose but clip the thorns. 29 White, pp. 24-5, lines 212-20ff; Meehan, pg. 83. 30 With the image of the City of God or Heaven, Gregory cast another city as Hell – the backwater town of Sasima, not far from his home. It had been foisted upon Gregory as his bishopric by Basil, similarly to the way in which his father had betrayed him into ordination, as a purely political move. To Gregory, it is a place of emptiness and starvation. Sasima is city as the ruddy and hairy people of the outdoors, Esau to Athens-as-Jacob (Gen. 25:25). He describes this Cappadocian staging post at a three-way crossroads as completely uncivilized, a place of visitors and vagrants;: “...possessing in abundance only those evils with which cities are filled...” White, pp. 42-3, 45; lines 439-446, 471; Meehan pp. 89-90; see also Gen. 25:25; 27:11. Gregory never consummated this coerced marriage. Instead, he took up the stewardship of his father’s congregation back home in Nazianzus, during the elder’s illness and after his death. It is also interesting to note a Syrian connection here, as the year of Gregory’s consecration (372), ambush to and escape from Sasima coincide with the famine in another Christian poet’s city, Ephrem the Syrian’s (c. 306-373) final post at Edessa, just as Gregory’s ordination had coincided with Ephrem’s arrival at that same post city (362). But whereas the humble Ephrem sought out such a post and worked heroically on its behalf for years, the aristocratic Gregory fled from it. Two Worlds, indeed. Honigsberg/City/9 upon him. Home is the place of blessedness, site of sacred yizkor, healed person – funerary orations for his father and Basil and site of their tombs. Home was personal versus communal –

Constantinople as site of saved Humanity’s continuity, healed community.

Yet Gregory, the reclusive, romantic poet, would not allow himself to stay away whilst this world challenged the beauty of God’s world. So he dove into the fray, as in the physical and theological fights with the Arians. Finally, during the final eight years on earth, he could lay down his burdens and embrace his heart’s true delight. Until then, Gregory still worked with the people in parish ministry, preaching, and writing, with clergy and congregation, as a citizen of

Church and city. Thus he tells the Church’s and his own most difficult stories through his own human struggles within city, at the call of her people:31 “It was their prayers and protestations that swayed me [to come to Constantinople]; to have resisted them would be unduly proud.” His masterpieces help us to teach ourselves to be Christian citizens within our own cities. This quest is courageous, bridging the Two Worlds, living life to the fullest (John 10:10), making our cities transcendent and open to the immanence of the Divine city within them. In living in and working with our cities, as citizens we, like Gregory, can rise up, forever.

31 Meehan, pg. 51, Concerning Himself and the Bishops, lines 92-3. Bibliography

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