HE was younger brother to St. Basil the Great; was educated in polite
and sacred studies, and married to a virtuous lady. He afterwards
renounced the world, and was ordained lector; but was overcome by his
violent passion for eloquence to teach rhetoric. St. Gregory Nazianzen
wrote to him in the strongest terms, exhorting him to renounce that
paltry or ignoble glory, as he elegantly calls it.[1] This letter
produced its desired effect. St. Gregory returned to the sacred ministry
in the lower functions of the altar: after some time he was called by
his brother Basil to assist him in his pastoral duties, and in 372 was
chosen bishop of Nyssa, a city of Cappadocia, near the Lesser Armenia.
The Arians, who trembled at his name, prevailed with Demosthenes, vicar
or deputy-governor of the province, to banish him. Upon the death of the
Arian emperor, Valens, in 378, St. Gregory was restored to his see by
the emperor Gratian. Our holy prelate was chosen by his colleagues to
redress the abuses and dissensions which heresy had introduced {553} in
Arabia and Palestine. He assisted at the council of Constantinople in
381, and was always regarded as the centre of the Catholic communion in
the East. Those prelates only who joined themselves to him, were looked
upon as orthodox. He died about the year 400, probably on the 10th of
January, on which the Greeks have always kept his festival: the Latins
honor his memory on the 9th of March. The high reputation of his
learning and virtue procured him the title of Father of the Fathers, as
the seventh general council testifies. His sermons are the monuments of
his piety; but his great penetration and learning appear more in his
polemic works, especially in his twelve books against Eunomius. See his
life collected from his works, St. Greg. Nazianzen, Socrates, and
Theodoret, by Hermant, Tillemont, t. 9, p. 561; Ceillier, t. 8, p. 200.
Dr. Cave imagines, that St. Gregory continued to cohabit with his wife
after he was bishop. But St. Jerom testifies that the custom of the
eastern churches did not suffer such a thing. She seems to have lived to
see him bishop, and to have died about the year 384; but she professed a
state of continency: hence St. Gregory Nazianzen, in his short eulogium
of her, says, she rivalled her brothers-in-law who were in the
priesthood, and calls her sacred, or one consecrated to God; probably
she was a deaconess.
Footnotes:
1. [Greek: {apstzen eaostzian}], Naz. {}.