SECTION V.-GREGORY OF NYSSA, A.D. 390.*

Gregory, brother of Basil the Great, devoted himself for many years to the calling of an orator and rhetorician. About the age of forty, and about the year 372, he was consecrated Bishop of Nyssa, in Cappadocia, by Basil. He was a married man, for Gregory of Nazianzum† condoles with him on the loss of his wife after he had been admitted into the Christian priesthood. In common with many of his contemporaries, he suffered much discomfort and persecution in consequence of the bitter controversies which distracted the Church. The time of his release by death from the burden and cares of a servant of Christ is not certainly known; it could not have been before the closing years of the fourth century, for he was unquestionably present at the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 394. Besides those works of Gregory the genuineness of which is not disputed, some are ascribed to him which are justly suspected. On other subjects of theological inquiry it would be necessary to have the question settled, as best it might, which of those works should be received as genuine, and which should be considered as spurious. § With reference, however, to the question now before us we need not dwell

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* Three vols. fol. Parts, 1638. + Epist. 95. † Fabricius, vol. ix. p. § It may be well to observe that some of these works must be set aside as spurious; e. g. the Homily "In Occursum Domini," that feast not having been instituted till long after the time of Gregory; and the sermon containing expressions which certainly were not in use up to the time of the Council of Chalcedon, such as Geoμnτnρ аρθενος. In the Homily on the Nativity, the writer quotes at length from a work which he calls an apocryphal history, and dwells much on the unsullied purity of the Virgin.

upon that point; for in none of the works, whether rightly or incorrectly referred to Gregory as their author, is any countenance whatever given to the invocation of the Virgin Mary. In other departments of faith and practice, we perceive traces of credulity and superstition in his own mind, and indications of that growing corruption and degeneracy which then began to tarnish many portions of the Christian Church. In his harangues over the ashes of martyrs, (if those homilies be the genuine productions of Gregory,) whilst we are offended by much of the declamation of the sophist, we seek in vain for that soberness of judgement which is indispensable in a teacher of divine things. But in his genuine works, whilst he is writing his thoughts calmly and deliberately, there is much worthy of the pen of a Christian philosopher. Thus, in his elaborate work written against the errors of Eunomius, we find these reflections on the object of Christian worship, worthy of the best age:

"That nothing which is brought into existence by creation is an object of worship to man, the divine word has enacted, as we may learn from almost the whole of the sacred volume. Moses, the Tables, the Law, the Prophets in order, the Gospels, the decrees of all the Apostles, equally forbid us to look to the "That we may, therefore, not be subject to these things, we, who are taught by the Scriptures to look to the true Godhead, are instructed to regard every created being as foreign from the divine nature, and to serve and reverence the uncreated nature alone, the characteristic and distinguishing property of which

creature.'

* Vol. ii. book iv. p. 572.

R

is neither to have had any beginning of existence, nor ever to cease to exist."*

In his comment on the Lord's Prayer,† which will repay a more minute examination, Gregory defines prayer to be "a petition for some good presented with supplication to God;" adding this among other valuable suggestions," Have a pure mind, and then boldly address God with your own voice, and call him your Father who is the Sovereign of all. He will look upon you with fatherly eyes; he will clothe you with the divine robe, and adorn you with his ring; he will prepare your feet with Gospel sandals for the journey upwards, and will settle you in the heavenly country."+

As we might have expected in one who entertained these principles on the unity of the object of worship, and on the duty and privilege of drawing nigh unto God our own selves in prayer, we can discover not a single trace, however faint, of any invocation of the Virgin in any one of his works. But the evidence arises not merely from the absence of any expression of religious feelings towards her in discussions which might not naturally suggest them, and where silence might be compatible with such feelings: When speaking of God manifest in the flesh, of the pure and spotless nature of Christ as man, of God becoming man, taking upon himself a body which should bear God, though he dwells much and repeatedly on the miraculous conception and the miraculous birth, he seems of fixed purpose to draw our minds away from the person of her who gave birth to the Saviour, and to fix them on the office or part assigned to her in that mysterious dispen

*Vol. ii. p. 574.

+ Vol. ii. p. 724.

P. 731.

sation. There may be exceptions which even a careful examination may have passed by unobserved; but in general, when he is most specific in maintaining the immaculate nature of Christ's birth, he never mentions Mary by name: his expressions for the most part are, "the Virgin purity," "the Virginity," and, much less frequently, "the Virgin. "the Virgin." His object is to maintain that God became man by a miraculous birth of Virgin purity, and he seems to regard the Virgin as having discharged her office in this mysterious economy of grace when she had given birth to the Redeemer, who took our nature of the seed of David from her substance.

A few examples will suffice. In his work on the life of Moses and his account of the Creation he thus speaks of Christ :

"This is the only-begotten God, who himself comprehends all things, and yet pitched his tabernacle among us. . . . . Marriage did not produce his divine flesh, but he becomes the framer of his own body, marked out by the finger of God; for the Holy Ghost came upon the Virgin, and the power of the Highest overshadowed her."*

It is remarkable that, whereas the Roman Ritual applies the language of the book of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon to the Virgin Mary, and authors who have written in defence of her worship appeal to those oracles of truth as evidence of her exalted character yet, this Gregory, in his elaborate interpretation of those books, though he speaks very

* Vol. i. pp. 224 and 234.

+ Coccius (vol. i. 262) appeals to Canticles, iv. 7, as a Scripture proof of the supreme excellence of the Virgin. See also Breviarium Romanum, [Husenbeth, Norwich, 1830,] Est. p. 600.

much at large, and very minutely, of Christ's birth, does not allude to Mary at all. This point is more especially observable in his spiritual application of the Song of Solomon to the Christian dispensation. He considers that under the figure of a marriage is represented the union between the human soul and God. In the course of his discussion he refers to St. John lying on our Lord's bosom; he invites the daughters of Jerusalem to look to their mother, Jerusalem which is above; he interprets one passage as foreshadowing the angels attending our Lord when he became man; another as fulfilled in the devotedness of the twelve Apostles; another, in the beauty of the Christian Church; he speaks of the genealogy of Christ traced from Abraham and David; he directs our thoughts to Nathanael, and Andrew, and the great Apostle John; he tells us of Paul pouring the pure doctrine of truth into the ears of THE HOLY VIRGIN, but that Virgin was Thecla.* Of the Virgin Mary he says nothing. If from the works of Gregory of Nyssa we turn to the Roman Ritual as established and observed at the present day, every impartial inquirer will see that Gregory and the framers of that Liturgy have not drawn from the same source. Passage after passage in the Roman service on the feasts of the Virgin are applied to her, which Gregory applies to the glory of Christ's divinity, of his truth, and of his Church. Nay, when he dwells upon the mystery that Christ alone, of all the myriads on myriads of men, was born, not as others but, of the purity of a virgin,† he applies no single passage of the whole book to Mary; nor does + P. 667.

* Vol. i. p. 676.