Transcript

Okay, so we are moving on now, and today we're going to talk about the Cappadocians.

We have already covered the Council of Nicaea and then we went kind of ahead of ourselves to talk about the Council of Constantinople so that we could finish our conversation on the Creed, just so that we could do the Creed all at once.

But in reality we have to back up a little bit and talk about some of the things that took place between those first two ecumenical councils.

So we're still in the fourth century.

And we are going to talk about the Cappadocians, or as some people pronounce it, the Cappadocians.

And actually that's probably more right, but I don't care.

The Cappadocians, or alternately the Cappadocian Fathers.

Now, we're talking about a place, Cappadocia is a Roman province in Asia Minor, and so by calling them the Cappadocians, we're saying this is where they're from.

And specifically, we're talking about three theologians, Basil, Caesarea.

Now, by the way, this is Caesarea in Cappadocia.

This is not the same as the Caesarea on the coast of Palestine that we saw, like with, for example, Eusebius and Caesarea.

It's a different city.

And unfortunately, you know, this one also named after Caesar, so it can be a little confusing.

But at any rate, we're talking about Basil.

We're talking about Basil's brother, Gregory.

Gregory of Missa and their friend, also named Gregory, Gregory of Nazianzus.

Okay, so these three theologians are the ones that we refer to as the Cappadocians or the Cappadocian Fathers.

They become extremely important in that time period between the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople.

By the way, Cappadocian Caesarea is the capital of the region of Cappadocia, and if you think of it on the route from Constantinople to Antioch, it becomes an important city because it's on that route.

Now all three of these theologians come from wealthy families, which means they have access to the best education.

It also means they are open to philosophy.

Now, in the West, we've seen people like Irenaeus and Tertullian.

Tertullian famously said, you know, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

Meaning, what does philosophy have to do with theology?

And making that distinction.

But the older tradition, going all the way back to the Apologists, It was to see philosophy as at least potentially a positive thing and maybe not make so much of a distinction between philosophy and theology.

Now we're kind of back to that.

Or in some ways maybe the Eastern Church never really lost it.

These theologians are educated in Greco-Roman thought, philosophy, and also interestingly enough, Because they were from wealthy families and because they were meant to be given a good education, the best education possible, they postponed their baptisms until adulthood.

And this is a decision that their parents would have made to sort of leave their options open for secular careers.

In the end, they all chose monastic or church careers and so they all chose to get baptized.

They knew Athanasius, who died in 373. Athanasius had a long career.

He died in 373, and so these guys sort of pick up from Athanasius as the defenders of Nicene orthodoxy.

And so they're heavily influenced by Athanasius.

They're all aesthetics, and they all supported monasticism.

And we're going to talk a little bit about monasticism in the next hour.

But just to point out that the monastic tradition often has a lot to do with Well, you know, being alone, right?

You're a hermit, you live out in the desert by yourself, so being alone means there's really nobody to talk to.

So it has a lot to do with finding God in the silence.

You know, in academic worlds, we try to find God in all the words.

But they understood about finding God in the silence, which meant that they are proponents of what we call the apophatic Or the via negativa, the negative way, the way of negation.

In other words, sometimes the best you can say about what God is, is really just to say what God is not.

Sometimes all we know about God is to admit that God is mystery, to admit our humility before the unknowable.

As monastics, they really just wanted a life of study.

to live a life that wealth can afford, a life of privilege, a life of contemplative study.

But in one way or another, they are all pressed into service as clergy.

Now, one of the greatest contributions that they make to the church is in clarifying the theological language.

The Council of Nicaea.

You remember that when we were talking about the Council of Nicaea, we ran into a word, this word homoousios, right?

Homoousios, same essence.

And this essence language was exactly the thing that some of the bishops were not comfortable with.

This question of the father and son being of the same essence.

Sounded like modalism to some people.

Sounded like too much unity.

Sounded like confusing the father with the son, like as if you're saying they're one and the same.

And so a lot of people were uncomfortable with this Lucia language.

And in fact, in the Creed of Nicaea, the original one with the anathemas, the language used in that was not very precise, because you have this Lucia language For essence.

But you also have this word, hupostasis.

Hupostasis.

Hupo as in under, like a hypodermic needle.

Hypodermis goes under the skin, right?

Under.

And stasis is a state of being.

So, hupostasis is that which stands under.

It doesn't mean understanding.

It means that which stands under, like as an underlying reality.

So, you know, in some sense, the Council of Nicaea was using these words interchangeably.

The problem is, is that some people in the East were using this word to talk about the oneness of God and they were using this word to talk about the threeness of God.

So the Trinity was one Hosea and three Hupostases.

Some people, though, were using this word to talk about the oneness of God, and saying God is one, hupostasis.

Well, all that is to say that these words, this semantic issue, had to be nailed down, and the Cappadocians were instrumental in clarifying Before the Council of Constantinople in 381, clarifying that the standard Greek terminology in the church was going to be one usia, three hypostases.

So, this is the equivalent of Tertullian's one substance, three persons.

But it took a long time actually for that to catch on.

In fact, even by the time of Augustine, we haven't talked about Augustine yet, but if you read some of Augustine's works, he will say that when it comes time to translate between Greek and Latin, we're not sure what words mean what, right?

People are using the same words to mean different things, and people are using different words to mean the same things.

And so in the debates that we're going to talk about, actually over the next couple of weeks, This semantic issue plays a big part.

And unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of problems because people are talking past each other and they're not agreeing on the definitions of words.

But anyway, as it's going to play out, usia or essence, essence becomes the word that is equivalent with Tertullian substance.

So there's one essence in the Trinity.

And then hupostasis is going to be the word that becomes the equivalent of Tertullian's persona or person.

So this is the same as three persons.

I don't know if you can even see that down there, sorry about that, but you get the idea.

One essence, three gluco-staces, and that's the language that the Cappadocians will begin to clarify and solidify for the church.

And what that does for the church is, It allows a lot of people who were uncomfortable with the Creed of Nicaea to start to get on board with it and to start to accept Nicene theology as acceptable.

And so that in the time period between the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople in 381, Nicene Orthodoxy sort of comes around to be accepted by most of the bishops in the East.

Some even who had supported Arius would be able to get on board with it and accept it.

Now, at the same time though, there were those bishops who had opposed the idea of homoousios, who had opposed the idea of essence language, who started to come on board and say, okay, we'll give you that the Father and Son are of the same essence, But not the Holy Spirit.

You know, they'll say, we'll give you the divinity of the Son.

We'll accept that.

But not the Spirit.

The Spirit's not divine.

And so there was a group that emerges after the Council of Nicaea that wants to deny the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

And in fact, pretty much all of the debate that centered around the Son at Nicaea is now projected on the Spirit.

And the same sorts of questions are being asked about the Holy Spirit.

Is the Holy Spirit created, like an angelic spirit, or is the Holy Spirit creator, divine?

Is the Holy Spirit co-eternal with the Father and the Son?

The people who are asking those questions, and the people who are denying the divinity of the Holy Spirit, are given a name.

Pneumatomachians.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't make these things up.

But it means spirit fighters.

Pneuma, spirit.

Spirit fighters in the sense that these are the ones who supposedly fight against the Spirit.

So they're labeled people who fight against the Holy Spirit because they deny the divinity of the Spirit.

They're also referred to as Macedonians after one of their leaders.

So they become a faction of sorts or group of factions after the Council of Nicaea and in that period between Nicaea and Constantinople.

Alright, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to talk about the three Cappadocians, kind of in order, and tell you what their contribution is, and we'll see where that takes us.

The one thing I want to say at the beginning is you are going to read a document called The Life of Macrina.

Macrina is the older sister of Basil and Gregory, and she is really their first teacher of theology.

There is a strong tradition of the women in this family learning theology from important theologians in the East.

And so Macrina becomes the first teacher of Babylon Gregory, and she is the one who encourages them into the monastic life.

Which, when you read the life of Macrina, the monastic life is called the life of philosophy.

So the word philosophy comes to be kind of a code for the monastic life, so watch for that.

Alright, so let's talk about Basil of Caesarea.

Basil is born somewhere around 329 or 330, and he died in 379. And so you'll notice right there that he did not quite make it to the Council of Constantinople in 381. He is one of four so-called Eastern Doctors of the Church.

The Doctors of the Church are theologians who are designated as especially important.

He is also known as Basil the Great.

Even though it was Macrina who convinces Basil to go into the monastic life, because she went there first.

In fact, Macrina convinced all of her brothers to become ascetics.

When they had all sort of trained for these careers as basically the ancient world's equivalent of a lawyer, she's the one who convinced them to To become ascetics.

And she seems to have been the real pioneer in the family, creating a family monastery on their estate where they took in homeless people, homeless women, and created this monastery with their mother and really sort of took Paul's words in Galatians to heart, this idea that there's no longer slave or free.

And so basically, The people that were, up until that point, servants in that household became monastics alongside of the mistress of the house and the sisters.

So Macrina is the one who really pioneers all this.

But then Basil will come along and he will write a rule, a rule of life, that will influence all of monasticism after him.

After his studies, he traveled around to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to meet the desert hermits in person.

By their example and Macrina's persistence, he eventually accepted the monastic life.

Eventually, because of him, in a large part because of him, the Eastern Church will come to the point where it's pretty much assumed that the bishops ought to be monks.

Now you already know that one of the differences between the Eastern and the Western Church is that in the Western Church, The celibacy of the priesthood develops relatively early and eventually kind of sticks, more or less, to the point where now Western Roman Catholic priests are celibate, right?

But you may know that the Eastern Orthodox priests are not necessarily celibate.

So an Eastern Orthodox priest can be married and have a family.

However, the bishops cannot.

To be a bishop in the East still means to be celibate because the bishops come from the monasteries.

So the idea is that the best bishops are the monastics.

And this tradition really goes all the way back to the time of Basil.

The interesting thing about this is that A lot of what we've done so far has assumed that Christianity is an illegal, persecuted sect, right?

And so, once we hit Constantine though, Christianity is legalized.

And after the legalization of Christianity, a lot of people become Christians for all the wrong reasons.

Because, you know, imitating the emperor, or for networking, or upward mobility, whatever.

You all of a sudden have a situation in the church that you didn't really have before, and that is that people could become Christian and join the church for reasons other than actual faith.

So now that Christianity is legal, to be converted in the Christian sense now is going to come to mean something more than just joining the church.

And so when you read the writings of the likes of the Cappadocians, you get the sense that, well, anybody can get baptized and join the church, but to really be converted is to sort of take on another whole level of commitment.

And that often means taking on the life of philosophy or the ascetic life.

And so conversion is not anymore simply from paganism to Christianity.

That's too easy.

Conversion is now from nominal Christianity to true philosophy, meaning the ascetic life.

One of the issues the church has to deal with is whether it wants to promote this idea of two classes of Christians, the everyday Christian and the really committed Christian who has committed to a life of asceticism.

Basil is going to be the one, though, who will sort of critique the life of a hermit and say, you know, if you always live alone, whose feet will you wash?

So, in other words, how can you obey the second most important commandment, to love your neighbor, if you have completely withdrawn from society and you have no neighbor?

So that's going to be an issue.

We'll talk a little bit about that in the next hour, too.

So, Basil was eventually coerced into being ordained a priest by the previous bishop of Caesarea, but when the previous bishop died in the year 370, it was not necessarily clear that Basil would be elected the next bishop.

Now, if you've been following along in the story, There are plenty of instances where a famous theologian becomes the deacon, right-handed man to the bishop, and when the bishop dies, the famous theologian becomes the next bishop.

And you almost expect that story to play out here.

And it does, but it almost didn't. Basil almost didn't get elected because too many people feared that he would insist on too strict of a life for all Christians.

In other words, if he's our bishop, is he going to make us all be ascetics?

That was the fear.

And he actually had to enlist the help of the father of Gregory of Nazianzus, who was the current bishop of Nazianzus, to help get him elected.

And this begins Basil on a path that his career has often been criticized as being sort of opportunistic and maybe overly aggressive in terms of working toward his own goals.

In fact, even the Gregory's will be annoyed with him at times for ways in which they felt they were manipulated by him.

At any rate, he does become the next bishop and he becomes the successor to Athanasius as the great defender of Nicene orthodoxy.

Now remember, Arianism hasn't gone away.

So one of the first things Basil does when he gets elected as bishop of Caesarea is he works to get other orthodox or Nicene bishops elected in other cities.

He got Gregory of Nazianzus elected as bishop of a little town called Sassima.

A little sort of border town that was really only significant because it was on a trade route.

Gregory of Nazianzus was annoyed with this to the point that he never set foot in that town, ever.

And then Basil also got his brother elected as bishop of Nyssa.

And Basil himself would admit that those appointments were out of political convenience rather than because either of these two guys was ready to be bishop.

So, Basil was kind of annoyed with them for not being good bishops.

They were annoyed with him for sort of forcing them to be bishops in these places that were supposedly strategic.

At any rate, Gregory would later take over as acting bishop in Nazianzus after his father, and that's why we know him as Gregory of Nazianzus.

But in spite of Basil's flaws, he makes a huge contribution to the church, especially to monasticism.

I already mentioned that he came to an awareness that a solitary life was too much about individual salvation.

And that was too individualistic for him.

He said you can't love your neighbor, you can't feed the hungry if you live as a hermit.

So the monastic life can't be all about withdrawal from society.

Rather, it should be like what we read of in the second chapter of Acts, where the apostles and all of the disciples sort of live communally, sharing what they had.

That should be the model for the ascetic life.

While up until the time of Basil, the monks have been moving farther and farther out into the desert, Basil brings them back to the outskirts of the city and reorients the focus of the monastery outward in the sense of ministry, ministry to the poor.

One of the classic Vows of the monastic life is poverty, but it's voluntary poverty.

Voluntary poverty, Basil would say, is for the purpose of helping the poor, not just to be the poor.

If you just take on a life of poverty to be in solidarity with the poor, the poor will say, gee, thanks.

But voluntary poverty should mean a self-sacrificial life so that one can Help the poor.

Give to the poor.

Also, Basil said, you cannot learn humility and obedience if you answer to no one.

This is the other problem with a totally solitary life.

If you live a solitary life, you are your own boss.

Which sounds like a good idea, but how will you grow in spiritual maturity if there is no one there to keep you humble?

And so, one of the other classic vows of the monastic life is obedience.

The rule of obedience Brings the monks under the bishop's authority.

Now, Brandon, he's the bishop, so you can see why he'd want to bring the monks under the bishop's authority.

So there is some of that.

But also, he truly believed that there was an advantage in terms of spiritual maturity here, that monks ought to be under the authority of someone else.

On the other hand, Basil always maintained that one can live as an ascetic without actually being a monk.

So he did not require that everyone should be a monk.

In fact, he did not require that everyone should be celibate, obviously, because the struggle, asceticism means striving, struggling, working.

The struggle is an inner struggle.

It's not an external struggle.

You know, the old school thinking that you went out to the desert to meet the demons and fight with the demons, well, really it's about an internal struggle.

And anyone can be involved in that as a Christian.

Anyone can practice works of compassion.

And so, Basil rejects this idea that there are levels of Christianity, that somehow the monks are better than everybody else, that the celibates are on a higher spiritual plane.

He actually rejects that idea, and he really doesn't even call his monks, monks.

He just calls everybody brothers and sisters.

And he rejects the idea that non-celibate or non-ascetic Christians are somehow second-class citizens or should be criticized.

He rejects any idea that marriage should be condemned as unworthy or anything like that.

He has all these ideas about monasticism and what it's supposed to be like, but he was never really able to live it out because he was pulled into the administrative office of the episcopacy.

Instead, he planned to build a city, A city on the outskirts of the town that was going to be like a little complex with a hospital with a lever wing and a hostel for pilgrims and a monastery and a school and shops and a welfare office and it was going to do all of this stuff.

And that ideal for monasticism as being a part of a community that reaches out is really the basis for medieval monasticism.

Even though it's not clear that he ever really actually built this thing, but that was the idea, he wrote about it.

Now as far as theology, Basil's main contribution to theology is in this conversation about the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

Basil is the one to propose that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, he'll say from the Father, through the Son.

He doesn't go so far as to say that the Holy Spirit is homoousios, or consubstantial.

But he does say that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life, and is to be worshipped and glorified.

Words that find their way into the Creed.

Now why is that significant?

Think about it.

The Holy Spirit is giver of life, not receiver of life.

So that speaks to the Spirit's divinity.

The Holy Spirit is not the recipient of life, but a source of life.

And the Holy Spirit is being worshipped and glorified along with the Father and Son, so also that speaks to the Spirit's divinity as well.

So, you know, he doesn't go quite as far as maybe, you know, Gregory of Nazianzus would want him to, but we're going to see each one takes it a little bit farther.

You are going to read Basil's document on the Holy Spirit.

And when you read that, especially look for the doctrine of inseparable operation as an argument for the divinity of the Spirit.

In other words, all divine activity is the result of all three persons of the Trinity acting together.

All three persons of the Trinity are involved in all divine activity.

Inseparable operation, yeah.

This stuff should be kind of old hat to you by now, but inseparable operation has been something that came up in the discussion about the relationship between the Father and the Son, but now Basil extends that to the Spirit as well.

Inseparable operation means all three persons of the Trinity are involved in all divine activity.

And if that's the case, then that means the Holy Spirit is divine.

So that becomes the argument, or an argument, for the divinity of the Spirit.

In 379, Basil was only 49 years old.

Which occurs to me that's how old I am right now.

But I have not yet ruined my health through extreme asceticism.

In fact, I'd probably go to the other extreme.

So, Basil was such An extreme ascetic that he ruined his health and he lived only to be 49. After he died, the two Gregories were kind of out from under his shadow, which allowed them then to come into their own as theologians.

Not that they didn't write anything before his death, but you get the idea, especially the brother, Gregory of Nyssa, the younger brother.

So let's talk about this.

But first let me see if there are any questions about Babylon.

Yes?

When you say aesthetics, are you talking about a very personal life, like the apostles' life?

With Basil, especially, it's more than that.

It's more than just living simply.

It's actually denying oneself things that we might consider necessities.

Eating very little, sleeping very little, not sleeping on anything soft.

He's not even sleeping laying down.

Never mind, I guess this is a vision that's not involved, so that was a big talk there.

Well, you know, that's exactly right.

I don't want to make it sound like he could just simply appoint them, because he doesn't have that kind of authority.

What he has to do is work behind the scenes and lobby for their election.

But yes, theoretically, if Gregory is from Danseanzis, How does he get elected in Sassouma?

It shouldn't happen, but he's bending the rules.

And certainly there would have been people who would have said something about it, but eventually he was able to make it happen.

Now, you use the phrase for his own political gain, and certainly that is true, although if we were to ask Basil, he would say it's not for himself, it's for the cause of Nicene Orthodoxy.

It's to get the Aryans out Okay, so let's talk about Gregory of Nyssa.

He's born somewhere around 330, or depending on who you ask, 330, 334, 340, somewhere in the 330s.

He died in 385, or 386, or 394, depending who he asked.

So, you know, we're not exactly sure.

But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that he died in the late 80s, maybe the late 380s.

So, as I said, Basil had gotten him elected as Bishop of Nyssa, but there were a lot of Aryans in that city, and they immediately started trying to get rid of him.

They got him accused of all kinds of trumped up charges, including theft, you know, like he was accused of stealing money from the church.

He almost got thrown in jail, but Gregory of Nyssa fled, took off, left the city.

At the end of the day though, Gregory of Nyssa is really the only one of the three to be influential at the council of Constantinople in 381. He was there.

Now, I'm going to tell you in a few minutes that Nantianzus actually starts out as the chair of the council, but he quit.

Nyssa is the one who is sort of the theologian at the Council of Constantinople.

He wrote documents for the Council, became the lead theologian there.

After the Council, he became an advisor to the Emperor, Theodosius.

And he also wrote the Life of Macrina that you're going to read.

When you read the life of Macrina, remember your rules about how to read each document, right?

There's an agenda here.

What do you think Gregory of Nyssa's agenda is in writing the story of his sister?

Say that louder, please.

Yes, right, to promote Nicene Orthodoxy.

That's a big part of it.

And anything else?

To promote monasticism.

She's held up as a pioneer of the aesthetic life, the life of philosophy.

Anyway, it's not too long and it's definitely good to read.

The theological document that you're going to read from Nyssa is called On Not Three Gods.

I'm not three gods.

Or, you know, a better translation might be something like, concerning the fact that we do not believe in three gods.

And this comes up because, you know, after Basil's On the Holy Spirit, some people were bound to say, well look, if you're talking about the divinity of the Father and the divinity of the Son and the divinity of the Holy Spirit, That sounds like three gods.

That sounds like tritheism.

It sounds like you're worshipping three divinities.

And so Gregory comes along and says, here's how it's not three gods.

Here's how it's one God.

Talking about the unity of God in spite of the fact that there are three divine persons.

And the argument goes kind of like this.

I'll give you the overview so you can have this in your head when you read it.

The argument goes kind of like this.

And it has a lot to do with inseparable operation again.

Inseparable operation, the fact that all three persons of the Trinity are involved in all divine activity, inseparable operation is a function of divine simplicity.

We've talked about divine simplicity before, but maybe not a lot, so I'll remind you.

Divine simplicity is the doctrine that says that God is simplex.

In some translations it says God is simple, but that makes it sound like God is dumb, so I don't like that term.

God is simplex, and by simplex we mean not composite, not composed of parts.

God doesn't have parts, because Anything that has parts can then be taken apart or broken down into its parts.

Anything that is made of parts can disintegrate into its parts.

And God cannot disintegrate.

There are no parts into which God can be broken down.

So you can't call the three persons of the Trinity three parts of God.

It doesn't work like that.

God is one.

So the oneness of God is understood as God's simplicity.

That God is one throughout, the one divinity, without any division.

Question here?

Yeah, so did Gregory of Nazareth believe that all three parts of the Trinity were pretty resistant to creation as well?

All three persons of the Trinity are co-eternal, because that's part and parcel with divinity.

If you start with the assumption of divine simplicity, that naturally leads you to inseparable operation, because if the Trinity doesn't have parts, you can't talk about the three persons of the Trinity off doing their own thing separately.

So, the three persons of the Trinity work together.

This also rules out the possibility of degrees of divinity.

There are no degrees of divinity such that the Father is the most divine, the Son is a little less divine, the Holy Spirit is a little less divine.

None of that.

There is one divinity, and the three persons share the one divinity.

But not share as in divvy up.

Share as in equally own the one divinity.

And so this is how then we are not talking about three gods, we're talking about the one God.

Okay, so when we talk about the language then, remember that this word, hupostasis, Some people were using that word to mean the same thing as essence.

So, if you say in Greek, three hupostasis, that the Trinity is three hupostasis, some people are hearing that as if you're saying three substances.

And that's why it sounds like three gods to some people.

So, Gregory of Nyssa has to emphasize the meaning of hupostasis, as in to say, three hupostasis does not mean three gods.

Yes, question over here.

Yeah, sorry, I'm trying to follow through.

Was he still going with the whole hierarchy model of the Trinity?

Well, there's always a hierarchy in the Trinity, but he will say that the hierarchy cannot be ontological.

In other words, it's not a hierarchy of being where the Father is something and the Son is something else on a lower scale, and then the Spirit.

It's not that kind of a hierarchy.

There's a hierarchy that maintains the distinction between the three persons, In this case, the hierarchy is described in terms of the proceeding.

The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, but it's not an ontological hierarchy, because ontologically, in terms of ethics, the three are one.

Any other questions about Gregory of Nyssa?

Alright, so let me talk about Gregory of Nazianzus then.

Born around 325, or some say 329. It's always interesting to me that you can read different books and they can differ that much.

I mean, it's four years, it doesn't sound like a lot, but why pick 329 if somebody else has picked 325? I don't know, and I don't claim to know, but born in the 320s, shortly after the Council of Nicaea, died 389 or 390, somewhere around that.

So I'll just say 390, just for the sake of argument here, but somewhere around 389 or 390. Gregory of Nantianzus is actually another one of the four so-called Eastern Doctors of the Church.

I don't know why Gregory of Nantia gets passed over as one of the Doctors of the Church, especially since he seems to have been the more important one at the Council of Constantinople.

But at any rate, Gregory of Nantianzus, the one we're talking about now, Gregory of Nazianzus.

His father was actually the bishop of Nazianzus, and his father ordained him priest to assist him.

And Gregory didn't want to be ordained, and so the story is that he ran away for a short time and eventually came back.

And actually, he would spend part of his life going back and forth, you know, sort of Getting out of town, and then his father would get sick, and so he'd have to go back and help his father, and then he'd get out of town, and then his father would pass away, so he had to go back and put things in order, and I think he's the one who first said, just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

I think I'm pretty sure.

Or that might have been Michael Corleone, yeah.

So now, was he doing all this along with the Bishop of Salsima?

Well, yeah, but he did.

He never actually physically accepted that role because he never showed up there.

So yeah, technically he is.

And actually that will come back to haunt him because when he is in Constantinople, someone's going to say, hey, wait a minute.

Aren't you supposed to be the bishop of that little town?

Actually, at one point when his father had died, I believe, another heretical group The Apollinarians.

I think we're going to get to them next week.

But in this time period between the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople, yet another heresy will emerge based on the teachings of a guy named Apollinarius.

And so we'll get to that.

I don't want to get off track.

But they're around as well, and so Gregory of Nazianzus keeps having to go back and forth, back to Nazianzus, and when his father died, he became the acting bishop of Nazianzus.

So there's some debate about whether he was ever officially the bishop of Nazianzus, but we call him that, so I guess that means he was.

But in 379, In the year 379, he was invited by the Nicenes, the Orthodox, the pro-Nicenes, in Constantinople to come to be their bishop.

Now look, in the capital city of Constantinople, the official bishop was Arian.

And so there's this minority party of Nicenes who occupy this little chapel And so they invited Gregory of Nazianzus to come and be their bishop, which would have meant two bishops in the city.

And he did.

And again, you know, this is where it's going to come up that, hey, aren't you supposed to be the bishop somewhere else?

But eventually, a new emperor comes to the throne, Theodosius.

And Theodosius is Orthodox.

He's pro-Nicene, and so he is going to be instrumental in putting an end to the back and forth between the Nicenes and the Arians.

Emperor Theodosius.

This is Theodosius I. In the year 380, Theodosius issues an edict The Edict of Thessalonica says this.

What Constantine never did.

You know, the Emperor Constantine has a reputation for creating a marriage of church and state, and for making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, but by now you know that's not the case.

Constantine never did that.

What Constantine did was issue an edict giving freedom of religion to all religions.

Now Theodosius comes along, and he's in a bit of a different position, because after all the back and forth with Arianism, and actually after a brief stint with a pagan emperor, Julian, Theodosius wants to solidify the position of Christianity within the Empire, and specifically 19 Christianity.

So he is going to say, by the way folks, Christianity is now the official religion of the Roman Empire.

And he's going to go so far as to say, and here's what I mean by Christianity, because that Arian stuff won't do, The true faith is the Nicene faith.

And the edict of Thessalonica in 380 basically says this.

It says that the faith of the Roman Empire that everyone is expected to accept is the faith that Peter delivered to the Romans.

So notice, an eastern emperor Putting Rome in first place.

Now, he also goes on to say, which is also taught in the city of Alexandria, But Alexandria is mentioned in the sense that it agrees with Rome.

So, again, we're going to get around to a lecture on the development of the office of bishop of Rome, the bishop of Rome as the papacy.

And along the way I was pointing out the sort of stepping stones on that road.

And this is another one of those stepping stones where The Christian faith is now defined by the Emperor as the faith that Peter delivered to the Romans.

Gregory of Nazianzus was probably behind this, at least instrumental in defining this.

You are going to read a section from his Theological Orations.

specifically the bit on the Holy Spirit.

So continuing the discussion on pneumatology of the Holy Spirit.

In his writing, Gregory solidifies the term procession as the specific term that refers to the Holy Spirit.

The Son is begotten, the Holy Spirit proceeds.

And so here we get, again, I've talked about this a little bit in the past, but When we talk about the doctrine of appropriation, where anything you can say about one person of the Trinity, you have to be able to say about the others.

Or anything you can say about the Trinity as a whole, you have to be able to say about each person of the Trinity.

With those few exceptions, And so here, again, Gregory is solidifying the exception word that relates to the Holy Spirit.

So, the Father is the only one who can be said to be unbegotten, the Son is the only one who can be said to be begotten, as generated, and the Holy Spirit proceeds.

That's the specific word about the Spirit.

And then he says, beyond this is a mystery, so don't ask.

Okay, so as Bishop of Constantinople now, we come to the year 381 and the Council of Constantinople and so, naturally, Gregory of Nazianzus was chosen by the Emperor to be the chair of the Council of Constantinople.

So here we are.

381, the Second Ecumenical Council, the Council of Constantinople.

And like I said, this is one of those dates that everyone should have memorized, whether they care or not.

Nicaea 325, Constantinople 381. And if I meet you 30 years from now, I'd better be able to say, what year was the Council of Constantinople?

You'd be like, 381, of course.

So the problem is that Gregory of Nazianzus did not remain chair of the council for very long because he was disillusioned by what he considered to be the politics of it all.

Now, by politics, though, part of the politics was the attempt on the part of many of the bishops of trying not to alienate too many people, but instead looking for as much consensus as possible.

Because think about it, if you're going to be defining the boundaries of Orthodox or correct theology, you really want to define those boundaries as widely as possible Why did you constand it so that you don't alienate too many people?

Because if you define the boundaries too narrowly, you won't get a majority to vote for it at the council, right?

The vibe at the Council was to draw those boundaries a little wider to try and bring in some of these people who maybe used to be Aryans or were semi-Aryans and get them on board with Nicene's theology.

Not in the sense of compromise.

It's not that orthodoxy can be compromised in that sense, because the understanding is that there are right answers and there are wrong answers.

It's not like if I say, 2 plus 2 is 6. You say 2 plus 2 is 4. It's not as though we can agree on 5 and I'll be happy with that because that's not how it works.

There's still a right answer.

So it's not about compromise.

It's about saying less.

To include more.

It's about saying as little as you have to, to get the job done, that you include as many people as possible.

And so that you don't alienate the semi-Aryans whom they hoped would get on board.

Yeah, question here.

Yeah, realistically, like, how many Aryans and semi-Aryans would have been at this council?

Ah, good question.

How many are we talking about?

I don't offhand know the answer to that.

But...

Again, it's not as though they went into the council I'm absolutely sure of a victory for Nicene Orthodoxy.

Because I think there's a sense that if they just came back to the council with the creed from Nicaea, slapped it on the table and said, well, sign up, that might not have worked.

And in fact, you remember when we were talking about the creed, that in the original creed of Nicaea, there were two instances of Ussia language, two spots that had that essence language, And when you look at the creeds after Constantinople, one of them is gone.

So there, you know, a concession is made to the semi-Arians.

I have to look up the actual numbers.

Theodosius who's against Arianism and Gregory who's against Arianism.

If they're in charge of this council, it would be easier for them just to not invite the Aryans.

Ah, I see.

That would be fair.

Then it wouldn't be ecumenical.

It wouldn't be an ecumenical council.

You have to invite everybody.

Now, the problem becomes...

With the first two ecumenical councils, we don't have a lot of good records in terms of who was there and who wasn't there.

So like with Nicaea, for example, depending on who you read, some say there were over 300 bishops there, some say there were 200 and something.

If Gregory of Nazianzus had had his way, The Creed would have proclaimed the Holy Spirit also homousios with the Father and Son, but you'll notice it doesn't do that.

The Son is homousios with the Father, but it doesn't use that word of the Holy Spirit.

In fact, Gregory of Nazianzus, as I hinted earlier, criticized Basil for not going farther in talking about the consubstantiality of the Spirit.

So when you read the theological orations, you'll see that Nazianzus goes the farthest of the three of them in terms of explicitly talking about the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

But, the creed itself, the bishops' self could not go any farther than it did, it couldn't say any more on the spirit than it did because they were afraid of alienating the homoiousians, or whomever, and so they took out that phrase from the ousia of the Father, from the essence of the Father.

Gregory resigned over this kind of stuff, and went back to his home to be Bishop of Nazianzus again, and in the end the Creed does not go so far as to say that the Holy Spirit is consubstantial, or homousios, with the Father and Son.

So, he quit, turned in his resignation as both Chair of the Council and Bishop of Constantinople, went back to be Bishop of Nazianzus, and When you read the Fifth Theological Oration on the Holy Spirit, notice also that there's another argument that pops up, that some people were apparently saying that the Holy Spirit is not a substance, but is an accident.

Do you know what I mean by an accident, philosophically?

I don't mean that it was a mistake or that something suddenly and unexpectedly happened.

An accident is something that is sort of tangential to the essence.

I'm trying to think of a good example.

But I am a human being, so my humanity is essential to who I am.

The fact that I'm wearing a red striped shirt is not essential to who I am.

It is accidental to who I am.

So it's an accident.

Now what that might mean for the Trinity is that some people seem to be arguing that the Holy Spirit is not of the same substance as the Father and Son.

but is an accident, is accidental to the Trinity, as in maybe the Holy Spirit is an energy of the Father and Son.

Or in some cases, even the analogy that the Holy Spirit could be the love that's shared by the Father and Son makes the Holy Spirit sound accidental to the Trinity.

And so, you will also notice in the theological oration that he's arguing against that too, that the Holy Spirit is not accidental to the Trinity, but that the Holy Spirit is substance and is consubstantial with the Father and Son.

Okay, now, any questions about Gregory of Nazianzus?

Alright, let me just say a couple more things and then we'll be ready to take a break.

Alright, so we talked about the idea of divine simplicity and how divine simplicity naturally leads to inseparable operation.

In other words, if God is simplex, then the three persons of God can't be off doing separate things, but must be working together.

So divine simplicity sort of logically leads to inseparable operation.

Inseparable operation logically leads to appropriation.

And all of this logically leads to a concept called perichoresis.

Put it up here.

Perichoresis.