This study on the life and thought of St. Gregory of Nazianzus was
written by feminist theologian and Patristic scholar, Rosemary
Radford Ruether, as her doctoral dissertation and originally
published by Oxford University Press in 1969. The focus of the
study is the tension and conflict in the life of Gregory of
Nazianzus and his contemporary Christian companions, such as Basil
the Great and Gregory Nyssa, between rhetoric and philosophy. This
is a conflict that has deep roots in Greek culture, going back to
the time of Isocrates and Plato. It reflects two major streams of
Greek culture, the literary tradition of classical education and
public argumentation, with its often specious use of language, and
the philosophical search for truth which saw itself as culminating
in spiritual communion with the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
In the Christian context of the fourth century A.D. this conflict
had been translated into a tension between classical literary
education, which still shaped the socialization of Christian
leaders such as Gregory and informed the patterns of their
preaching, and their search for contemplative union with God.
Gregory and others spoke of the ascetic life of emerging Christian
monasticism as the philosophical life, thus incorporating this
tension between rhetoric and philosophy into their own lives. For
Gregory and other Christian leader of his time, Christians should
renounce worldly ambition and even Christian positions of power,
such as episcopacy, to pursue the separated life of monastic
discipline, yet even in this ascetic retirement they found it
difficult not to continue to employ the much-loved literary culture
of their youthful education. This book shows how this tension
played out in Gregory's own life, including his relation with his
friend and school companion, Basil the Great, who shared the quest
for the monastic life with Gregory, but later became a bishop and
sought to secure his power against church rivals by forcing
episcopacy upon both Gregory Nazianzus and his own brother, Gregory
Nyssa. The volume also studies the way in which Gregory of
Nazianzus employs rhetorical conventions to shape his own literary
style in his sermons and treatises. It then focuses on the
anthropology and cosmology that underlay Gregory's understanding of
the philosophical life as a journey of communion with God. In the
final chapter it reviews Gregory's own struggles to find a modus
vivendi between the two cultures of classical literary education
and the ascetic, contemplative life. This is a struggle that did
not end with the fourth century, but continued to shape a Christian
culture that adopted classical Greek literature as the basis of its
educational curriculum and yet also taught the ideals of the soul's
quest for God. Rosemary Radford Ruether has been a pioneer
Christian feminist theologian for over three decades and is among
the most widely read theologians in the world. Her book, Sexism and
God-Talk, a classic in the field of theology, remains the only
systematic feminist treatment of the Christian symbols to date.
With wide-ranging scholarship, Dr. Ruether has written and edited
over thirty books and hundreds of articles and reviews.
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