Abstract
During the 380s, Gregory of Nyssa wrote two works against the Christological teachings of Apollinarius that are capably translated and excellently introduced in this volume, namely, Gregory’s Refutation (or Antirrhetikos) of Apollinarius’s largely lost treatise ‘The Demonstration’ and Gregory’s letter to Theophilus of Alexandria ‘Against the Apollinarians.’ The former is a technical, sprawling polemic; the latter is concise and more easily approachable, and would serve teachers well to illustrate the Christological problems at stake. As to those problems, the major theme for which Apollinarian Christology is remembered is the teaching that, in Christ, the Logos takes the place of that component of the human corresponding roughly to the mind; or, to use terminology that seemingly goes back to Apollinarius himself, his is a nous ensarkos Christology. Although there were more prominent debates at the period, chiefly revolving around questions of how to understand the Son’s relationship to the Father, the debates sparked by Apollinarius’s teaching foreshadow later controversies that are more strictly Christological. The essential commonality running through these controversies is an insistence characteristic of emergent orthodoxy that Christ is to be understood as both wholly divine and wholly human. Gregory’s own contribution to the emergence of Christological orthodoxy is slight but, as Robin Orton persuasively demonstrates, real.
It is sometimes difficult for scholars to treat of minor works such as these two without diffusing the analysis by comparing the works to antecedent and to subsequent events, persons, or texts. Dr Orton’s work in this volume is exemplary for maintaining a well-defined focus. His introduction situates Gregory’s polemical activity within the multilateral debates and controversies over Triadology and Christology that were current in the latter decades of the fourth century. The introduction demonstrates a ranging knowledge of the relevant contemporary research, but also an independence of perspective. Although Orton is critical of the texts translated, noting for instance shortcomings in Gregory’s argument, this critical engagement does not overflow into casual advocacy in behalf of Apollinarius. The claims by Gregory and by Apollinarius are treated with commendable even-handedness.
On a similar footing, Orton avoids another problem evident in much scholarship dedicated to the patristic era, whereby inordinate attention is paid to a text’s compatibility with subsequent standards of theological orthodoxy. (It is fair to call such attention inordinate, I suggest, when the scholarly treatment in question is not thoroughgoing in its comparison, analysis, or systematic treatment, but instead rather simplistically offers up a few contrasts showing that the text under consideration falls short—as if these contrasts were somehow meaningful in themselves.) Orton judiciously notes when elements in Gregory’s interpretation of Apollinarius are defective and when Gregory’s own Christology is itself problematic, but these are ancillary to the translation and commentary. To put it otherwise, Orton’s substantial introduction and running notes—about which, more anon—do not labour under the strange but too common presumption that Gregory wrote these documents for the benefit of academic researchers as yet 15 to 16 centuries unborn and that they can therefore be criticized simply for their value today. To the contrary, Orton’s observations about the Christological problems in these two texts are sound, non-partisan, and sensitive with respect to both history and theology.
Orton’s fair and impartial evaluation of the two treatises is presented throughout the volume, but in a way that makes for a departure in the Fathers of the Church series. In the series, the convention is that the translator’s notes are relegated to an apparatus. In this volume, as well as footnotes the text features substantial remarks by Orton interleaved with his translation. The remarks sometimes compare in length and scope to the passage that they introduce, but the remarks are italicized. I am, as it were, in two minds about this formatting. The comments are learned and judicious, and they are visually distinct from the translation—unlike, for example, the extraordinary formatting of Owen Chadwick’s Western Asceticism in the Library of Christian Classics series, where parenthetical comments in the original are sometimes relegated to footnotes and modern headings are presented without adequate differentiation. Even so, it could be argued that here the balance between a synthetic presentation and a modern translation has shifted in a significant way. The balance struck in this volume is not objectionable. But it is easy to imagine a volume prepared by a less competent commentator being profoundly compromised if it were published in this format. As for this book, it is a fine and welcome addition to a distinguished series.