Gregory Nazianzen

Gregory Nazianzen

Regarding his conflict with Julian

….Gregory attacks the claim that the Greek lan­guage, mathematics, po­etry, etc., belongs to pagan­ism.  No race or religion has an exclusive claim to culture, for culture has been derived from many sources.  Julian had taken the Christians at their word:  if nothing is required beyond or­thodox faith, if the wisdom of the world is vanquished by God’s fool­ishness, if lit­erature and philosophy are superflu­ous beside the scriptures, then it is in­consistent for Chris­tians to be professional teachers of rhetoric.  Therefore they were to be excluded from this profes­sion.  By this edict, Ju­lian aimed to turn the schools into centres of pagan pro­paganda.  If the pagan reac­tion had been stronger and more lasting than it proved to be, the church could have found it­self deprived of educated leaders within a generation.  Gre­gory may have criticized Gregory of Nyssa for adopting the pro­fession of rhetor, but he knew that the church could not afford to lose the only in­tellectual tools available for the educa­tion of theologians and the development of apologetic argument [emphasis mine].

But Gregory’s anger was not merely academic; his emotions and person­ality were involved.  In spite of some conventional polemic against literature and philosophy, he of all men could not disclaim the classical her­itage.  Athens, not Palestine, had held him in his twenties [emphasis mine].  In his epistles and poems, we see his real feelings, his genuine devotion to litera­ture, philosophy and rhetoric.  These he re­garded as the aux­iliaries of Christian doctrine.  In him, more that in any other of the Fathers, ac­cord between Hellenism and Christianity was realized [emphasis mine], con­cludes Fleury….Gregory was prepared to admit that Chris­tianity owed much to “external wisdom”, since, for him, classical culture was an ancient and treasured heritage, a legacy to all men; indeed, culture was the foundation of human, as distinct from bes­tial, life.  Pagan philosophy was only false be­cause it tended to be distracted by beautiful discourse and inessential vani­ties; philosophy Christianized, however, re­lated human lo­gos to the divine Logos, produc­ing practical virtue and contempla­tion, and so leading to the truth [emphasis mine]. [1]

[1] Young, p. 103 ,104.