(JOSTEIN BØRTNES AND TOMAS HÄGG) Gregory of Nazianzus, Images and Reflections PDF [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS IMAGES AND REFLECTIONS Edited by Josrein B0frnes & Tomas Hagg

MUSEUM TUSCUl.ANUM PRESS UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

2006

i') !(I(,(, MUSCUIll

Tusculanum Press and the Authors

Contents

Ftiiini hy Jostcin B0rmes & Tomas Hagg Coyer design: Pemille Sys Hansen Set and printed in Denmark by Special-Trykkeriet Viborg a-s ISBN 87-635-0386-7

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

Introduction: Prompting for meaning in Gregory's rhetoric

9

Cover illustration: "Saint Gregory the Theologian." Author portrait in Byzantine manuscript written in

1091,

probably in Constantinople, and containing

16

of Gregory's

I.

Homili~!.

Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ms. Laur. Pluto 7.24, c. 3Y• Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e Ie Attividi Culturali. E vietata ogni ulteriore reproduzione con qualsiasi mezzo.

JOSTEIN B0RTNES

2.

Gregory contemplating the beautiful: Knowing human misery and divine mystery through and being persuaded by images FREDERICK W NORRIS

3. Rheroric and mental images in Gregory

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37

JOSTEIN B0RTNES

4. Gregory and the constraint of sameness Published with support from the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

59

STRATIS PAPAlOA."INOU

5.

Skiagraphia: Outlining the conception of God in Gregory's Theological Orations ................................ . EDGARS NARKEVICS

6. The Cappadocians on the Areopagus SAMUEL RUBENSON

7. Playing with expectations: Gregory's funeral orations on his brother, sister and father . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I33

TOMAS HAGG

Museum Tusculanum Press Njalsgade 94 DK-Z300 Copenhagen S www.mtp.dk

8. Life after death: The martyrdom of Gorgonia and the birth of female hagiography ................................. . VIRGINIA BURRUS

9. Gregory's women: Creating a philosopher's family SUSANNA ELM

17 1

10.

Gregory: The rhetorician as poet A. McGUCKIN

193

JOll'"

Acknowledgements II.

Among the hellenists: Gregory and the sophists NEIL MCLYNN

21 3

n. Two Gregories and three genres: Autobiography, autohagiography and hagiography ..................... . STEPHANOS EFTHYMIADIS

239

13. Theosis according to Gregory ......................... . TORSTEIN THEODOR TOLLEFSEN

257

14. The appeal to the Cappadocian Fathers and Dionysios

the Areopagite in the iconoclast controversy .............. . ANDREW LOUTH

27 1

15. Retrospect: Images, reflections and the "essential" Gregory .... PHILIP ROUSSEAU

Bibliography ......................................... .

297

Contributors ......................................... .

323

Index locorum

32 7

General index ........................................ .

343

Much of the reading and thinking behind the contributions to the present volume was made possible through the generous hospitality and creative atmosphere of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo. The undersigned were invited to assemble an international group of scholars there to work together during the academic year 2002/03 on the research project "Aesthetics and Cognition: the Development of an Anthropology and an Aesthetic in Early Byzantine Theology." Some of the participants in the project were able to spend the whole year with us, others were our guests and collaborators for shorter periods. On behalf of all the participants and guests, we would like to thank the adminisrration of CAS 0Ie-}0rgen Skog (scientific director), Unn Haaheim Hagen (office manager), Maria M.L. Sretre, and Marit Finnemyhr Str0m - for their kind efficiency and COnstant good spirits. The international conference that concluded the project, held at the Solstrand Fjord Hotel outside Bergen (21-25 May, 2003), was devoted to "Gregory of Nazianzus: the Theologian, the Hellenist, the Man." Most of the chapters in this book are revised versions of papers given at the conference, while three (by Stephanos Efthymiadis, Susanna Elm and Andrew Louth) are papers originally delivered at CAS in Oslo. As editors of the volume, we would like to thank all the contributors for their loyal concern in making the book as coherent a unity as possible, focusing on the fascinating figure of Gregory of Nazianzus. Ursula Phillips (London) assisted us with copy editing and revision of the English style. We are deeply grateful for the care and competence she brought to her task. The miniature used on the cover and as frontispiece is reproduced with the permission of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana and the Ministero per i Beni e Ie Attivita Culturali.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Finally, we would like to thank Museum Tusculanum Press and its director, Marianne Alenius, for the positive interest with which they greeted our proposal to publish the volume with them and for their help along the way. Bergen, April 2005

I

In troduction: Prompting for meaning in Gregory's rhetoric }ostein B(Jrmes

Jostein B0rtnes

Tomas Hagg

The Cappadocian Fathers Basil the Great, his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend, Gregory ofNazianzus - were born around 330. Gregory of Nazianzus was the oldest of the three, Gregory of Nyssa the youngest. They grew up in an environment in which Christianity was no longer a forbidden faith. The Edict of Milan, which had followed the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312, had already granted freedom of worship to the Christians. In 325 the emperor had convoked the first ecumenical council of the Church at Nicaea, where the participants had decreed the full deity of the second person of the Trinity, the homoousia or "consubstantiality" of the Son with the Father, anathematizing such statements as "the Son was created", and "there was a time when he was not", ascribed to the Alexandrian priest Arius and his followers. In spite of the apparent victory of the Orthodox faction at Nicaea, the doctrinal struggles continued. In the 34os, the Neo-Arian Aetius won the support of Constantius, and from 353 onwards, when Constantius became sole emperor, the Neo-Arians seemed to gain the upper hand. The most radical Neo-Arian party, the so-called Anomoians, led by Aetius and his disciple Eunomius, claimed that the Son is anomoios or "unlike" the Father. Basil of Ancyra and Eustathius ofSebaste took a less extreme stance, maintaining that the Son was homoios or "like" the Father, a definition that came close to the Orthodox doctrine of homoousia, i.e. "of same substance" as the Father.' It was this more moderate, homoian version ofNeo-Arianism that prevailed under both Constantius and Valens. But the struggle between the two parties raged back and forth until the death of Val ens in 378 and the enthronement of the Orthodox Theodosius as ruler of the eastern parts of the empire the following year. With these events, Arianism finally collapsed.

, Rousseau 1994: Basilo/Caesarea, 93-132, in particular 95-99.

8

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JOSTEIN B0RTNES

1. INTRODUCTION: PROMPTING FOR MEANING

The Cappadocians developed their trinitarian theology in opposition to the doctrines of both the Anomoians and the Homoians, basing their own creed on the Orthodox Nicene doctrine of homoousia, the "consubstantiality" of the Son with the Father. In their writings they defended their belief in the unknowability of God as the first principle, in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as the three persons or hypostases of the one godhead, in the Son as the eikon of the Father, and in theosis, the possibility of every Christian being assimilated with God in imitation of the incarnate Son as the divine model and archetype. In his Christianity and C!tJssical Culture, Jaroslav Pelikan asserrs that

erful metaphysician whom one discovers in reading the attacks of Nyssa and Marius Victorinus on later Arians":

Careful study, including the study that has led up to this book, has confirmed the impression of "a striking similarity among the Cappadodans" in thought and even in language, a similarity that reflects but goes beyond their having shared a common background and social class (whether this be the "country aristocracy", the "Roman senatorial class", or the "Cappadocian curial class").'

Pelikan's insistence on a striking similarity among the Cappadocians is reinforced by a reference ro Frederick Norris' study of Gregory. Norris, however, is more careful in his characterization. In some instances, he suggests, the Cappadocians perhaps "divided up topics and shared the results". This strategy "allowed them to go on to further stages of discussion and not cover exactly the same ground".l Other scholars have been less concerned with their similarities and have accentuated instead their differences. Johannes Quasten, for instance, distinguishes between Basil as "the man of action", Gregory of Nazianzus as "the master of oratory", and Gregoty of Nyssa as "the thinker."4 This distinction is particularly appropriate in the present context, since the orations and poetry of the Theologian are the main subject of our book. Norris characterizes Gregoty as a "philosophical rhetorician" who through his paideia "grasped fundamental truths about both the content and the method of Christian theology". He was not, however, "the pow-

, Pelikan 1991: Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis ofNatural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism, 5. 3 Norris 1991: Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations afGregory Nazianzen, 185. 4 Quasren 1960: Patrology, Vol. III, 204, 236, 254, cf. Pelikan 1991, 5.

10

He may, however, have chosen not to be. His rhetorical theology does avoid the dangers of systematic foundationalist programs better than theirs, while it demonstrates his command oflogic and grammar. His lackluster reputation in some modern circles has probably been influenced by the rwentieth-century misunderstandings of the Aristotelian heritage and the contemporary penchant for the philosophical justification of theological programs rather than Nazianzen's own lack of skill. Historically, both worshiping Christians and students of culture have praised his efforts.'

The constructive revaluation of Gregory's "rhetorical theology" proposed by Norris, coincided with the emergence of a modern rhetoric and the revival of classical rhetoric in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990S. This reappraisal is particularly evident in the studies of Mark Turner.6 Turner developed his cognitive rhetoric on the basis of the theories of metaphor that were being pur forward in contemporary linguistics and the cognitive sciences by researchers such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.' This research, he observes, "has demonsrrated that metaphor is not merely a matter of words bur is rather a fundamental mode of cognition affecting human thought and action, including everyday language and poetic language".· Likewise, classical rhetoric, before it abandoned thought for stylistic concerns, reducing itself to cataloguing what it rook to be kinds of surface wordplay, "sought to discover what knowledge and thought members of an audience brought to communication": How could a speaker, through language, move his audience from one locus of thoughr ro another? What were the commonplaces of knowledge> What were the connections berween thought and language, and how could one work those connections to evoke, invent, and persuade.' , Norris 1991, 38-9. • See in particular Turner 1987: Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism; Turner 1991: Reading Minds: The Study ofEnglish in the Age of Cognitive Science; and Turner 1996: The Literary Mind: The Origim ofThought and Language. , For example, Lakoff 198]: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories &veal about the Mind; Johnson 1987: The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason; and Lakoff & Turner 1989: More than Cool Reason: A Field Guitk to Poetic Metaphor. • Turner 1987, 9. 9 Turner 1987, 9.

II

I.

JOSTEIN BI1JRTNES

Turner brings in Aristotle and Cicero in order to demonstrate how ancient rhetoricians wanted to understand the connection between figures of diction and figures of thought and mental ptocesses such as invention and conception. These are problems with which Gregory, too, would be familiar as a result of his hellenistic paideia, and he raises similar ptoblems in his own writings. For instance, in the following lines from Oration 32, where he admonishes his audience to seek to comprehend

~II' I, ,", ( ;rq"ory's? The answer is that we still experience the world in ways

;regory. We still share a number of his cultural presuppositions. ,11'.1 allitudes, and much of our cultural knowledge takes the form of . ""1"",,,,,,:11 images that have remained the same over the centuries. His " " .. '\'lIk.. i mages stored in our long-term memory that enable us to .. ' ,,"',11 Ii" the meanings prompted by his rhetorical apparatus. Take, for •• ""1,1" iI.(, t(lllowing lines from Gregory's Or. 14-4-5: ,lIlId,1I I" (

\ ,,I,,.,

'"ll1cmplation is a fine thing, as is action:'l the one because it rises

how the various senses function and how the mind uses these to relate to objects outside itself and rake them in; how it receives the forms; and what is meant by the retention, or memory, of what it receives; and what by the retrieval or recall of what is past; how word is engendered by mind and engenders word in another mind, and how thought is transmitted through word ... W

Gregory the "philosophical rhetorician» knows that theology is not merely a matter of words, that words are expressions of cognitive processes and that texts, in order to be understood, require the active mental response of readers and listeners as welL This brings us to the crucial observation that the instruments of thought when applied to inventing and interpreting literary texts are also basic to everyday thought. II True, in literature and rhetorical speech these instruments may be used in more specialized and inventive ways than in the everyday mind. Nevertheless, the fact that they are the same in principle is the reason why rhetoricians and poets are able to communicate with ordinary readers and listeners. In spite of their lack of special training in verbal art and rhetorical reasoning, ordinary audiences are able to understand and respond to what they read and hear. What we are normally not aware of, however, are the conceptual systems activated in the mental process of meaning construction. And since linguistic expressions "prompt for meaning rather than represent meanings, linguistic systems do not have to be, and in fact cannot be, analogues of conceptual systems", according to the findings of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. "Prompting for meaning construction is a job they can do; representing meanings is not". 11 How, then, is it possible for us today to interpret ancient Christian texts

>0 Or, 32.27,12-16. Vinson 2003: Gregory of Nazianzus, Select Orations, "Turner 1996, 7, n Fauconnier &Turner 2002: The way We Think, 277,

I2

111,

INTRODUCTION: PROMPTING FOR MEANING

"how this world and advances rowards the Holy of Holies and conducts

"'" ,"illds upward to what is akin to it, the other because it welcomes 1111 i,\1 :tnd serves him and confirms the power of/ove through good works. F;I"h of these forms a single road to salvation, which has as its certain ,I""i"ation one ofthe blessed and everlasting abodes "," I ,," 1",Lly readers of this translated passage will understand that Gregory , ,I. '" III,i 11[', alternative paths through life that lead to different destina-

",,,,', '\"'VI' this world. The source of his turn of phrase are two basic con-

'1Il"I:lphors: LIFE IS A JOURNEY and GOOD IS UP. In combination

, '1'111,.1

, I" '" "" '1:1 pllors yield the metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY UPWARD or LIFE IS Ii

r. By mapping this metaphor onto the targets of contemplation

I,' 1 N

.Ii, I 1"." .. 1 works respectively, Gregory interprets the former as a "mental I"'" 'I>

\,", the latter as its physical equivalent: I•• , Jllst as there is a wide variety in life so in God's house also there are

rooms, assigned and distributed on the basis of individual merit, One 111.11. may excel in one particular virtue, a second in another, a third in sev-

1"