A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

remote area of Cappadocia that, since 374, he had been living in a monastery in
southern Asia Minor. It was from there that he set out to Constantinople in the
autumn of 379, full of misgivings about his new role. 2
When Gregory arrived in Constantinople, the city was still in fear of the
rampaging Goths who had swarmed into its suburbs and even swept up to its
walls in the aftermath of the Battle of Adrianople. No one yet knew whether
Theodosius would be able to restore order to Thrace. Gregory himself reported
that ‘what is seen and heard now is terrible, devastated homelands, thousands of
victims, the ground covered with blood and ruins, people speaking like
barbarians’. 3 Within the city, Gregory’s own congregation proved to be an
arrogant and elitist group who ridiculed this shabbily dressed newcomer whose
body was withered from fasting. In his long (and somewhat self-pitying) poem
on his own life, De Vita Sua, Gregory tells how he was mocked for his refusal to
enjoy fine food and bask in imperial glamour. 4 As courtiers, his congregation
had learned the art of flattery and a readiness to change their colours when the
political climate shifted from emperor to emperor, and they were critical of the
rigidity with which he expounded his Nicene beliefs.
When Gregory arrived, the Nicenes did not even have a church, and it was
lucky that a cousin of his, Theodosia, who had married one of the city’s senators,
owned a villa in the residential part of the city. It was large enough for Gregory
to set aside a room for his eucharistic services for those baptised, while he would
preach to a larger audience in the open courtyard. He called his church
Anastasia, ‘resurrection’, in recognition of the fact that he was ‘resurrecting’ the
Nicene cause after forty years of subordinationist bishops in the city. With
remarkable energy for a man of fifty who had known many periods of ill health,
he set himself a punishing schedule of orations.
Fundamental to Gregory’s preaching was the belief that only a few, very
committed, thinkers were able to tackle theological issues, and that they alone
could discern and preach what was the unassailable truth (which Gregory
believed, of course, was the Nicene faith). Here were shades of his mentor Plato:
the select few ascend to a deeper understanding of the immaterial world, whose
‘reality’ they alone have the right to interpret for others. It was not an easy
message to sustain. Gregory’s own congregation found his lack of social graces
unsettling, while the wider population of the city, who had, in any case, heard
only subordinationist teaching, were hardly likely to relish being told that they
had no contribution to make to theology. Everyone had become used to talking