INTRODUCTION.

Jerome speaks of him as "my teacher, from whom I learned the explanation of the Scriptures." "I had," he says, "Gregory of Nazianzus and Didymus as catechists in the Holy Scriptures." He speaks of having written a work at Constantinople "when... I was being educated in the study of the Holy Scriptures under the most eloquent man, Gregory of Nazianzus, who was then the bishop of that city." From a modern point of view, however, Gregory cannot be said to rank as high as some of his contemporaries in this respect. He did not possess the critical instinct of Basil. Basil, for instance, in arguing upon Proverbs 8:22, dwells on the facts that the expression "the Lord created Me," if attributed to our Saviour, would stand alone in Scripture; that the book in which it occurs is a book of enigmatic sayings, not of theological statements; that the Hebrew word likely means "possessed" rather than "created"; that "created" is often used in senses other than those the Eunomians affirmed here, and so on. Gregory, on the other hand, only discounts the authority of Solomon to a certain extent; he mentions, but rejects, Basil’s view that the speaker in the passage is not the Eternal Word, but a personification of Wisdom; and he then argues (following Athanasius) that the creation spoken of is the creation of the human nature which the Word assumed. There are other passages where Gregory shows both acumen and candor in his interpretations, but he does not often rise above the exegetical methods of his age.

It is in his lucid expositions of the doctrine of the Trinity that Gregory chiefly excels. By these it was

that he won the title of "the Theologian." In simple and reverent language, without presumptuous over-definition, he enunciates the traditional belief, as championed by Athanasius, in a way that became the standard for future theologians. Sentence after sentence from Gregory is incorporated into the de Orthodoxa Fide (On the Orthodox Faith) of John of Damascus. Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity could not be better expressed than in such passages as III.2 and V.9-10.