Providence, Eros, and Constraint

Tu m'hai di servo tratto a libertate per tutte quelle vie, per tutt' i modi che di ciò fare avei la potestate.

You drew me out from slavery to freedom, by all those paths, by all those means, that were within your power.

The opening pages of the Address are so highly stylized, so unmistakably the product of an author trained in the mechanics of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, that the reader might despair of any possible encounter with the living relationship between teacher and student. This conclusion would be natural and yet mistaken. Gregory's text, while deeply inflected by the training he had received and so successfully assimilated, is at the same time one of our very rare, documented points of entry to the intimacy of ancient educational practice. Nowhere is this more tangible or poignant than in his evocation of the earliest stages of the relationship with Origen: the unpredictable path that led him from his home in northern Asia Minor to the coast of Palestine, the unlikely nature of their initial encounters, the unforeseen emotional depth of Gregory's attachment. Indeed, there is an opportunity to turn what might be perceived as a textual cul-desac, the highly rhetorical framing of his initial encounter with Origen, into a privileged means of access. Behind Gregory's language, traditional and formulaic in its basic features, lies invaluable testimony to intimacy and its cultural expression.

PROVIDENCE

Having weighed the constraints of silence (1.1–2.20) against the offense of ingratitude (3.21–30), Gregory reluctantly embarks on his "thanksgiving address" (logos charisterios [3.31]), and from the outset issues of agency and freedom come to the fore. Deeply conscious of the need to offer hymns and praises of gratitude toward the Deity, yet overwhelmed by the concomitant impossibility of doing so in a fitting manner, Gregory describes God as the "leader and cause of all things" (3.32). Turning to a more accessible and appropriate object of thanksgiving, the Savior and the "first-begotten Word," Gregory assigns the corresponding title of "creator and pilot of all things" (4.35). These functions and concomitant titles would appear to be neither accidentally nor loosely attributed; rather they have been chosen to emphasize the guidance and control that the Deity, in its different aspects, exercises over both the natural world and human affairs.

Descending the scale of divine hierarchy, Gregory ultimately focuses on his very own angelic escort. Here, the theme of divine oversight is both strengthened and personalized: "appointed by some great judgment to manage and to raise and to guide me from childhood" (4.40), this guardian figure served as Gregory's own "personal pedagogue" (4.43). In a proleptic summary of the circumstances that were to bring him ultimately to Caesarea Maritima and to Origen, Gregory acknowledges the unfailing intervention of this angelic guide:

Aside from his being good in every respect altogether, he was my tutor and guardian. ... Both then and still today he rears and trains and leads [me] by the hand; and above all else he arranged to introduce me to this man [Origen]. ... With truly divine and wise foresight he [the angelic guide] brought us together and contrived this meeting as my salvation. I can only suppose that he foresaw this earlier, from my first birth and upbringing. (4.44–46)

Gregory's experience is, of course, deeply rooted in a broader cultural ambience: the acute sense of the presence of an invisible guide, the confidence in an unseen but no less real companion, were staples of widely variant forms of late ancient spirituality. Gregory's angel is repeatedly described in terms drawn from the realm of training and education: "personal pedagogue," "nourisher and protector," "divine pedagogue and true guardian," "good guide and protector."

No less significant, however, is the emphasis on the elements of "foresight" and "management" (oikonomia), which lend a providential atmosphere to the passage. This theme represents in many respects the infrastructure of the entire opening movement of Gregory's narrative. As his personal story unfolds (5.48–72), relating the unlikely chain of events that brought him into the sphere of Origen in Caesarea, Gregory also deepens his reflection on the guiding hand of divine providence. This alone could make sense of the series of personal circumstances that were to lead him from birth and childhood in a distant land plagued by "misguided ancestral customs" (5.48) to an unforeseen and unintended destination, bathed in the light of the "true sun" (6.73). Following a prolonged description (5.50–54) of his youthful awakening to the power of reason (logos), human and divine — which scholars continue to find perplexingly ambiguous — Gregory offers a very few, but enticing details of his early education. Following the elementary stages of study, and through the concerns and efforts of his mother, he had been sent to study rhetoric in order that eventually he might too acquire that profession. In this manner, the chain of events had been set in progress. At this stage, Gregory's "divine pedagogue and true protector, ever wakeful" (5.57), takes matters under control: the rhetorician (and teacher of the Latin language) to whom Gregory has been entrusted suddenly finds himself moved, "by a more divine inspiration" (5.61), to employ his estimable powers of persuasion in order to encourage his charge to study Roman law (5.58–61). In this manner, Gregory's teacher too had become an unwitting agent of the divine plan concerning the student's ultimate destination.

A tone of forcefulness and purpose pulses throughout this account of divinely inspired progression from rhetoric to the study of Roman law: "When I became a student of these very laws, whether of my own will or not, somehow bonds already had been forged" (5.62). While the ultimate consequence couldn't have been appreciated by Gregory or those around him, the geographical effect was immediate: transfer to the city of Berytus, present-day Beirut, on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean —"most Roman in character and with a highly regarded school for the study of the law." This was quickly to prove a further and essential component of the divine scheme. For only several years earlier (233/4?) a very differently motivated journey had transpired further south along the Mediterranean coast: under circumstances not completely transparent to the modern historian, though certainly far from irenic, Origen had departed his native city of Alexandria in order to take up duties as teacher and presbyter in the city of Caesarea on the coast of Roman Palestine. While these relocations, to Berytus and Caesarea respectively, had closed the distance between the unknowing student and his divinely appointed teacher, the two men would have remained, nevertheless, at a significant remove from each...