WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Cloud of Witnesses: St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Pt. 1

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Join Dominic as he sits down with Hillsdale College Chaplain Rev. Dr. Adam Rick to discuss the life and teachings of St. Gregory Nazianzus

Welcome back to Cloud of Witnesses. Today we have a very special first episode of a multi-episode series on St. Gregory Nazianzus. This is editing Dom. I just wanted to pop in and talk a little bit about St. Gregory's Feast Days. I realized that I forgot to do that on our main recording day. So we're recording this podcast on the 8th of May to coincide with his feast day on the 9th of May, which is celebrated by the Episcopal Church and then other American Anglicans. That's when they do it.

But in the Catholic Church and the Church of England, they celebrate it on the 2nd of January, along with St. Basil the Great, who was one of the Holy Hierarchs and Capadocean fathers. This is also what the LCMS does in America, and they do it on the 10th of January. They celebrate St. Gregory with St. Basil of Cessaria and St. Gregory of Nissa. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic Church have a couple of feasts for St. Gregory of Nazianzus, because he's a really big deal, as we'll hear about later from our guests. On the 25th of January is his primary feast, as that as St. Gregory's. And then on January the 30th, they celebrate the feast of the three holy hierarchs, which is St. Gregory the Great, Saint. Basil and St. John Chrysostom. And then on the 19th of January, they commemorate the transfer of

his relics. On the 14th of June, the evangelical Lutheran Church in America, celebrate St. Gregory along with St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nissa. And the Armenian Apostolic Church celebrates St. Gregory twice during the year. He's commemorated with the 11 other doctors of the church. on the Saturday before the feast of the discovery of the Holy Cross, which is generally observed the Sunday closest to the 26th of October. The Armenian Church also has a feast that is dedicated solely to St. Gregory. This falls either on the Saturday before the fourth Sunday of the Transfiguration or if that day falls during the feast of the assumption on the Saturday before the third Sunday after Nativity.

So generally a little bit later in the year. So as you can see by sort of this menagerie of various traditions celebrating him in a bunch of different and unique ways, St. Gregory's kind of a big deal to everyone. He is venerated by the Eastern Orthodox Church. Eastern Catholic Church is the Catholic Church, Oriental Orthodoxy, Anglicans, Lutherans, and a bunch of other, you know, smaller, more Eastern-oriented groups. So without further ado, I'm going to throw us over to our special guest that we have on today to talk about his boy, St. Gregory Nazianzus. Hope you guys enjoy. Welcome back to Cloud of Witnesses, where we share the stories of the saints who help shape the church. Today we have a very special episode because we have a special guest. We are unfortunately missing Mark Ayers, but in his stead we have Father Adam Rick, now Father Dr. Adam Rick, the chaplain here at Hillsdale College,

here to talk about one of his favorite saints. So Father Adam, how are you doing? I'm doing great, and it's a privilege to talk about my boy today. That's what I call him. Well, I'm excited for this. This is going to be sort of, I guess, the most conversational episode that we've had. Normally Mark and I just kind of like go down a laundry list of stuff

about the person we're talking about. Today it's going to be more of a conversation. So it's going to be a lot of fun. That's great. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. Well, let's just start from the beginning with St. What's his sort of like childhood, you know, years like? Was he educated? Did that have much of an

influence on his life as a saint? Sure, yeah. So the Gregory we're talking about here, we've got to be clear because there's several of them, is St. Gregory of Nazianzus. He's one of the three holy hierarchs in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. He's known by modern patristic scholarship as one of the three Cappadocian fathers, along with Basil of Cessoriah and Basil's brother, Gregory of Nissa, so there's two Gregories. But Gregor of Nazanza's is also known as Gregory the the theologian in the Eastern tradition because of his contributions to the doctrine of the Trinity. So he was highly educated, and he was especially adept at sort of Greek rhetorical style, so trained in the classical art of rhetoric and oratory. And he was most famous in his day as

a preacher. And so when you think of the great preaching fathers, you tend to think of Augustin, John Crosostom, the Golden Mouth. But Gregory is up there as, one of the great preachers of that post-Nicine era. And his festal homilies in particular continued to be read out in some quarters of the Eastern Orthodox Church on the High Holy Days to this day. So that's who he is.

And so to your question about whether he was educated, yes, absolutely he was educated. Gregory was the son of a local Roman aristocrat in the region of Cappadocia, which is central plateau of modern-day Turkey. And just north, of the area that we know in the New Testament is the area of Galatia.

Okay. So he's just north of that region. And he was born to a local aristocrat. He was not a Christian. His mother was a Christian. And there's definitely layers of, that sort of aristocratic elitism in Gregory's style. We can talk about that later if you want.

But he definitely saw himself as part of what you might call a custodial class, right? Like classes in charge of sort of maintaining the fabric of society. Okay. His father eventually does become a Christian and is eventually elevated to be a bishop himself. And he's a bishop of an area called ASEANZus, which is near Nazianzus, excuse me. And eventually Gregory succeeds him in that sea.

That's also a long convoluted story. I should just say, quickly, out of the gate, that Gregory is one of the fathers that we know the most about in terms of his biographical detail. because Gregory actually writes them down for us. For a lot of the church fathers, we are dependent on later narratives about their life, reconstructing their chronology from their letters, their literary output, things that they mention in their own, in passing, in letters they write or whatever else.

The great father that comes to mind when you think about autobiography is St. Augustine of Hippo, who writes his confessions. Augustine is a younger contemporary of Gregory's. towards the end of Gregory of Nazianz's ministry is when St. Augustine's in the western half of the Mediterranean is just starting. Yes. So we don't know if they ever...

I mean, we're pretty confident they never met each other. There's some debate about whether or not Gregory's writings were familiar to Augustine. Yeah. He never cites him explicitly, but there's some evidence that he might be. We can talk about that, too, if you want. But Gregory actually beats Augustine on the confessions by about 10 years. So Augustine writes the confessions About 10 years after he converts to Christianity

Shortly after he becomes a bishop Gregory writes an autobiography of himself At the end of his life Which is, I have a volume here His autobiographical poems. He writes his autobiography in Greek verse Rather than in prose. Yeah, I was going to ask about that

Because it's the first autobiography in the church And it's in the form of poetry as opposed to prose. Which tells you about Greek sort of, Gregory's commitment to Greek's style. Okay, yeah. And the title of the poem tells you a little bit about Gregory. It's called In Defense of My Life. And he's eager to defend his legacy after what he believed to be a fairly embarrassing boondogal in the imperial city. He retires to Nazianzus after the Second Ecumenical Council, what we now call the Second Ecumenical Council. And he didn't think his departure

from the Capitol wasn't a willing one. So he's eager to defend. his legacy and he records for us this account of his life. He actually writes several autobiographical poems, the longest, the most important is his indefense of my life. And he just tells us copious details about his life. Some of them are a little embarrassing. It's like, why would you admit this? Because you don't get any of the sense out of it that he, that he's aware that some of the things he's saying don't exactly do what he thinks they're doing for him. And maybe that's just the modern buys as you read it. You definitely get all kinds of wifts of humility off of Augustine's confessions. With Gregory, his tone's a little different, and he admits some things in the effort to defend,

defend, I get scared quotes here, defend himself that as a modern reader, we're just like, huh, I'm surprising that he would mention that. So, yeah. Yeah, so he was educated in the classical way that sort of upper class children were. He was privately tutored. he spent some time in school in Alexandria at Egypt. He did what we would now call something resembling a college education in Athens, which is the Oxford of the day. That's where he met Basil. They were college buddies, actually.

And was trained in the art of rhetoric. Okay. That's how he enters into, you know, the ministry. That's how he enters into his public life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was just listening to that, I, so one of my favorite saints of St. Augustine. Yeah.

As I know. Yeah. Didn't you just write a thesis? I did, I did actually, yes. And there sort of seem like there are a lot of biographical similarities between the two where they both have, you know, devout Christian mothers and their fathers, at least for a time, or maybe not so devout, trained, you know, in the art of rhetoric, right autobiographies. So the more I've learned about St. Greg, and then I'm like, oh, this is, this seems familiar to me.

He comes by his Christian faith sooner than Augustine does. Yeah, okay. Which is a wild story. He's on a boat, actually, he's on a ship carrying him. from Alexandria to Athens across the Mediterranean and there's a wild storm that almost sinks the ship.

I mean, everybody's worried that it's going to sink the ship. And Gregory records that during that journey, he was absolutely convinced he was going to die. And he spent that storm cowered in the prow of the ship crying and begging God to spare his life. And of course,

the storm abates and the ship makes it safely to Greece and it was after that point that Gregory really starts committing himself to walking out his Christian faith. So it's before he starts college. So I'm not sure exactly the exact age that he was, but late teens, early 20s is when that moment happens for him. Yeah. That's awesome. So you talked a little bit about his role in the second ecumenical council. You just sort of elaborate a little more like was he like a sideline Pilar, was he really important in the council? Yeah. How was, and you said, you know, he didn't think that he, he didn't, you know, recall his time there fondly.

So, like how, what was, what was all his involvement there? Yeah. Well, Gregory was, I mean, like a lot of saints in this era, what he really wanted to be was a monk. And that's what Augustine wanted to be. Actually, when he moved back to North Africa. And he was actually in the church and hippo scouting potential monks when the aging bishop there saw him, recognized him, and then, well, the rest is history. Gregory was the same.

I mean, he really, he set out with his friend Basil after they left college to start a monastery and spent some time with Gregory, with Basil doing that work before he was sucked into his father's affairs. And that's, we can tell that story later. But by the time of the Second Ecumenical Council, there were a number of theological debates raging in the church, sort of attempt to settle the legacy of Nicaea, which at this point had a couple of, occurred about 50 years before. And you have a number of movements in the church that modern scholars just tend to call neo-Aryanism as a shorthand, but it's actually a description of several different theological tenors and currents, some of which are well-meaning orthodoxies that just

aren't sure about homoousius and whatever that terms ability to sort of capture orthodoxy. And some of them are just full-blown sort of rebrands of Aryanism or whatever else. So Gregory is already engaged in the fight against some of these ideas. And he's already a bishop, which is another story again that we can tell later if you like. But the bishop of, well, the emperor is a man named Valens

and he's not, he's one of the, you know, the Senate of Constitines, he's not a Christian, and he's not a Trinitarian Christian. He's a member of the Neo-Aryan, whatever. And he's ensured that the bishop in Constantin, So, Nopold is also an Aryan. So he's no friend of the Nicene Bishop's in Antioch and Alexandria in Rome. And Valens, and most of the city clergy are therefore also new Aryans.

Valens dies in a battle, and the man who succeeds him is a man named Theodosius, and he is an I-Seen Christian. But he's not in the city. He's in the west. And so he has to travel. Okay. And so there's this moment where the city has no emperor in it, and the bishop of the city, a man named Diascoris is an Aryan, a neo-Aryan. And the Orthodox bishops

around the Mediterranean are thinking, like, here's our chance to swoop in and reclaim the city for Orthodox, because Theodosius is on his way, and they know that he's not going to tolerate the Aryan. He's there very long. Yeah. So Alexandria and Antioch conspired together to install Gregory. So they send him to the city. Okay. And he gets there. He's a bishop by rank, and they haven't formally invested him with the title of Bishop of Constantinople, but I mean, they're sending him there as their Nicayan representative, you know, against the backdrop of a bishop whose ministry they don't recognize. And so he's there kind of de facto as, like, the legitimate bishop of Constantinople. But of course, when he gets to the city, he can't, he doesn't

control any of the city churches. He doesn't have any authority in the city. He certainly doesn't have hardly any contacts in the city. He's, you know, from a relatively parochial part of the empire. And so when he gets there, he just, he sets up. house church. He calls it Anastasis, which is Greek for resurrection, because he's going to resurrect the Orthodox faith in Constantinople. And one of the things he does during his several months there is he preaches a series of sermons on the doctrine of the Trinity. Those sermons have come down to us as his five theological orations. And they're one of the most important patristic source texts. Right up there with Athanasius is on the incarnation or Augustine's Day Trinitatte on the doctrine of

Trinity. Okay. Because he sort of outlines, and these are homilies, not treatises, where he unpackes his understanding of the doctrine of God. And in the fifth theological oration, he's particularly forceful about the Holy Spirit also being homooseous with the father like God the son is. He's the first church father to say that in writing. Okay. Well, in his case, it was in a sermon. But so in addition to preaching these sermons, he also celebrates the Easter Vigil in the city at his house church. And only the bishop of the city generally celebrates the Easter vigil in that place, right? So Gregory is certainly communicating who he thinks he is in relation to the place when he does this. And of course, the Aryan bishop, who actually controls the city's churches, finds out about this.

And classic ancient church style sends a mob after Gregory during the service. And so he's stoned in his church at the Easter vigil. Wow. On another occasion, he's fallen ill, and an assassin is hired to kill him in his sick bed. And the assassin comes in with these group of people who are mourning over his illness, because, of course, the illness is in the intramal or potentially serious affairs. Yeah. And the room kind of vacates, and this guy lingers, and he's weeping.

And Gregory tells him, don't worry, like, I have confidence. this will pass. I've got work to do in the city. And the guy falls on his bed and says, like, you don't understand. I mean, I was sitting here to kill you, but I just can't go through with it. And Gregory, you know, with the story, at least he tells, you know, God knows what actually happened. But the story that he tells is that he converts the guy to Christian faith. Okay. At that occasion. Wow. And then he presents him to the, to his congregation the next Sunday as a man, as a penitent who, like, look, he came here to kill me, but he's been slain by the Holy Spirit for Christ, you know. Yeah.

And this act of magnanimity actually begins a process of converting some of the city over to Gregory. Like they kind of see him as this sort of great... In addition to, of course, the force of his oratory, he's this gesture of mercy and magnanimity begins to win the populace over to him. So that by the time Theodosius arrives in the city a month or two later, and promptly kicks out the Aryan clergy and their bishop, now technically the sea is vacant. there's a big procession into the city church. Holy Apostles is the cathedral at that time, not Holy, not Holy, Hia Sophia.

And according to, again, Gregory's own account, when the procession's entering into the building, and when he, it's a cloudy day, an overcast day, when he walks into the building himself, when he passes through the doors of the cathedral church, the sun breaks through the clouds, and illuminates all of the golden mosaics on the ceiling of the building.

and when Theodosius sees this, the emperor is present. He sees it immediately as a sign from God that Gregory needs to be the next archbishop of the city. So he's consecrated right then in there. And then Theodosius convenes a council in the city to settle some of these theological disputes. And so as the presiding bishop of the city, he becomes the presiding officer of the council. That's what he's doing there. He's only been in the city for less than a year at this point in time. And he actually only presides over the council for a couple of months before he,

feels the need to leave quickly. It's another story. Again, we have so many details of Grigger's life because he just tells us. And he left the council before it concluded. So he didn't, so he's opened the council, but he didn't finish it. And one of the charges brought against Griger

at the time was that he was already a bishop in another place and that you're not allowed in the ancient an Isia past a canon that prevents what we now call the translation of bishop from one sea to another. It's a fairly common practice now, but Nicaea ruled it illegal. You couldn't do that.

So if you're a bishop installed in one place, the idea is to sort of smack down careerism. You know, like that's your city. Now that's, you're the bishop of that city. And he was already a bishop of a city. And the argument was that he wasn't legally transferred to Constantinople. Gregory's kind of argument is he never actually took up the reins of the sea where he was installed as bishop,

because that's a whole other story that I could tell if you want to hear it. and that he was never more than just a suffragan for his father in practice, despite what he was consecrated to be for. Anyway, so he leaves the city kind of in disgrace. People kind of see him as a country bumpkin. You can't handle the politics of the imperial city. That's probably true. He was a pretty sensitive soul, pretty pure soul,

interested in sort of monastic rigor. And many people at the time just thought he got outwitted and outmaneuvered by people that were just more politically adept than him. Okay. And so he requests to leave. He preaches this powerful sermon to the emperors, like begging to be released from this duty. And it's becoming clear that there's major opposition to him. And this classic Gregory, like the emperor has moved to tears by his sermon and sort of stands up and applauds and immediately grants his request to be released.

And Gregory's takeaway from this is that he stood up and applauded a little too quickly. There should have been a more sadness that he was leaving. And so he leaves the city. He spends the next few years of his life, the last few years of his life, managing his father's diocese in as he ends. His father had died or shortly thereafter died. And then Gregory just becomes the bishop of the place.

And that's where he sort of puts together his literary corpus, writes these poems about his life, and then he dies in Capadocia. So that's not a summary. I was fairly long-winded there. but that's how he ends up at the Second Ecumenical Council. Okay. Well, that's, that's, I mean, we could...

There's so much, right? Yeah, there's so much. Yeah, there's so much. This entire show just talking about his biography. Yeah. But unfortunately, that's all the time we have this week. But tune in next time as Father Adam and I finish talking about St. Gregory Nazianzus. See you next time.