Saint Gregory the Wonderworker
The Thaumaturge
Join me today to meet the philosopher saint who worked wonders.
Name: Gregory, Gregory the Wonderworker, Gregory Thaumaturgus, sometimes (mistakenly) Theodore
Life: c. 210/5 - 270/5 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: November 17
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A storm blew in on the day that Gregory, the new bishop, arrived on the outskirts of the Roman city of Neocaesarea, modern Niksar in the North of Turkey. The rain began to fall as he was approaching the city limits. Even though he was close, Gregory decided to stop where he was, and spend the night, as people sometimes did, in one of the many pagan temples that dotted the city.
Gregory went in and got out of the rain. As his clothes dried, he must have considered again the mission before him. It would not be easy. Christianity was still quite new; it had been less than two hundred years since Jesus had died, risen again, and ascended into heaven. Out here on the fringes of the empire, Christianity had not made much of an impact. Neocaesarea had many temples but no churches. There were exactly seventeen Christians in the city. As night fell, Gregory began to pray: for the place he was in, for the city he had come to lead.
In the morning, the pagan priest arrived in the temple - and immediately noticed that something was off. He found he couldn’t get through his morning ritual. The priest realized that the presence of his gods had left the temple, and when the priest asked the servants if they had seen anything amiss, all they could think of was the man who had spent the night in prayer. The furious priest confronted Gregory and - perhaps not quite sure what else to do - threatened to sue him.
Gregory, not intimidated, made the priest an offer. He would be happy to restore everything to the way it had been before. He took a scrap of paper from his pack, wrote on on it, and told the priest to put it on his altar and he would find that he could perform his morning ritual as before. And, I have to imagine with a slight smile, Gregory handed the scrap of paper to the priest.
It was a challenge, of course. Everyone in the ancient world understood that the difference between gods and mere spirits was that spirits could be commanded by magic and sorcery, while gods, who were more powerful, could only be won over with prayer and ritual. Obviously, the priest thought, Gregory was some sort of sorcerer. He must be offering to bring back the gods with magic. But curious in spite of himself, the priest put the paper on his altar and began his morning ritual. Everything worked again, the way it had the day before.
The priest was shocked. What kind of sorcery could do this? He picked up the paper, expecting some sort of arcane spell. It said:
“Gregory to Satan: Enter!” (Michael Slusser translation)
The pagan priest could hardly believe his eyes. Who was Gregory’s God, whose priests could give commands to the gods of the pagans as though they were disobedient servants? The priest went from accusing Gregory to asking to learn from him. In a few hours, he had left his position behind, and was following Gregory into the city.
And so it was, that, the day after the rainstorm, Bishop Gregory and his new deacon-in-training entered the city of Neocaesarea to minister to the Christians - who now numbered eighteen.
For Gregory, this was a return to the area where he had grown up. He came from a wealthy pagan family who lived in the North of modern Turkey. He had left his home in search of education, headed South to the cultured city of Berytus, modern Beirut in Western Lebanon. Gregory set out overland, and on his way he passed through the provincial capital of Caesarea. As he was passing through he heard about a local teacher who was supposed to be quite good, a philosopher and a member of the new religion of Christianity. Gregory looked the teacher up, and heard him speak. He went back the next day, and the next, delaying his departure. Without really making a conscious decision, Gregory found himself becoming the man’s student.
Gregory had been drawn into the orbit of a man who remains controversial to this day. He is a Church Father, but not a saint: Origen. Bishop Origen had come from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, far to the South on the other side of the Mediterranean. Origen’s blessing and curse was his philosophical genius. He put his powerful mind to the task of knitting together Greek wisdom and Christianity. People found the result dazzling - and unsettling. Some thought Origen had veered into heresy, and from their day to ours there has been a lively debate about whether he did. Origen was a living example of what it means to be too smart for one’s own good.
Young Gregory was used to being the smartest man in the room. Now he was meeting a true master, who easily deflected Gregory’s arguments and put his understanding of the world into question. Gregory wanted to hear more. So Origen introduced Gregory to philosophy, starting with the words that had inspired Socrates, and were still legible on the temple of Apollo in Greece: Know Yourself. Origen showed Gregory how to understand our own nature as thinking creatures, as beings with souls, and then showed him how to take a step back to consider a universe in which there was a Creator of soul as well as body. Soon, Gregory was a philosopher - and a Christian.
We get a glimpse into Gregory’s mind through one of his surviving works, a speech he gave in Caesarea at a kind of graduation, thanking Origen. With deep gratitude, Gregory speaks of the labyrinth of philosophy, one he had wandered with Origen as a guide. As the speech wears on, we learn that it is also a goodbye. Gregory was feeling a call back North, toward the Black Sea. He was being called to live as a hermit, alone in the wilderness, thinking, praying, and seeking God.
And so Gregory left Caesarea, and here he might have dropped out of history, if not for the actions of a man named Phaidimos. Phaidimos was Bishop of Amaseia, modern Amasya, a little to the West of Neocaesarea in the North of Turkey. Phaidimos knew that Neocaesarea had no church leader and barely any church to speak of. When he heard that there was a hermit nearby, trained by the great Origen, Phaidimos had an idea. He went to try to find Gregory in the wilderness. But Gregory was elusive. He could guess the burden that Phaidimos was going to put on him, and Gregory didn’t want it. Gregory’s biographer explains that it became a game of cat and mouse, the hermit always one step ahead of the bishop, until Phaidimos became tired of chasing Gregory around the wilderness and decided to catch him in philosophy instead. He sent a message to Gregory, explaining that even though he could never track him down, there was one place where both men often were together: before God, in prayer. In prayer, before God, Phaidimos was going to ordain Gregory as a priest and bishop. Was this valid? Maybe, maybe not: Gregory would have to decide for himself.
Gregory got the message. And probably he was feeling a call to the priestly life, because he crankily came out of hiding and went to get properly ordained by Bishop Phaidimos, who gave him the task of going to Neocaesarea to take charge of the tiny Christian community there.
Gregory prepared himself for the journey. The truth was that, despite all his studies, he still felt unprepared. Gregory’s teacher and friend Origen had divided the Church with his teachings, especially those on the nature of the Trinity. Gregory didn’t want to do that. He lay in bed at night, worrying about how things were going to go. And then, as he lay in the dark, he suddenly had the impression that he was not alone.
Gregory sat up in the dark and could just make out the figure of an elderly gentleman in the room, who explained that he had been sent to talk to Gregory about theology. To talk to him, not really with him, the kind old man explained. And then light began to pour into the room, and as Gregory looked, he saw that it was coming from a second figure, a woman. The woman and the old man spoke about the Trinity, and Gregory realized whom he was seeing: this was Our Lady with the most philosophical of the evangelists, Saint John. Gregory took careful notes, producing a clear, simple, orthodox statement of Trinitarian theology. The handwritten document would become one of the treasures of the church he was about to build, and it would guide his teaching for the rest of his life.
In the morning, Gregory finally felt ready for what he was being called to do and so, as his biographer put it, he took his place on the front line and began his journey.
By the time Gregory got to Neocaesarea, what he had done at the pagan temple had the whole town talking. Bishop Gregory used the opportunity to offer an open air catechism class. By nightfall, he had a starting congregation, already making plans to build their first church.
Time passed. The church grew in Neocaesarea. Gregory healed and helped, cast out demons and offered advice. He gained a reputation as a worker of miracles, or wonders, a thaumaturge to take the word that comes to us from the Greek. When some local peasants asked Gregory to help them because they lived near a river that tended to flood suddenly and wash away people and houses, he turned his trip out to their village into a philosophical conversation.
Part of God’s creation, Gregory explained to his companions on the journey, is the setting of limits. You need limits and order to have a comprehensible world. Water is separated from air and land. Plants and animals grow in their kinds. Natural forces operate in regular ways. Upon arriving in the village, Gregory prayed, and took the stick he had been using as a staff and drove it into the mud of the riverbank on the side of the village in the place where the river tended to flood. The staff stuck in place, and in time the locals noticed that it was taking root with fresh branches growing on it. A century later, when the story of Gregory was being told, the staff had turned into a tree, although locals still called it Gregory’s Staff. The water had not risen past it in a hundred years.
As the wonderworking bishop of Neocaesarea became well known, Christians from surrounding regions sought out Gregory’s advice. One city asked Gregory to choose their new bishop. He ignored all the official candidates, scandalizing the people by appointing the man who ran the kiln to carbonize wood and make charcoal. But the scandal didn’t last long, and soon the locals were wondering how they could have not noticed the saint who had been living in their midst: Saint Alexander the Charcoal Burner, as we remember him today.
In 250 AD, when Gregory was in his late thirties, the Emperor Decius initiated a persecution of Christians. He decreed that everyone in the empire must on pain of death make a sacrifice to the gods, and have the sacrifice witnessed by an official. The only exemption was for Jews. Christians would have to choose between their faith on the one hand, and their careers and lives on the other.
Christians reacted with both courage and cowardice. Many were martyred. Some hid. Some gave in and made the pagan sacrifice. The great saints of the age tried to shepherd the Church through the moment as best they could. Saint Cyprian continued to lead his church in Carthage without being found. Saint Dionysius the Great was captured by Rome’s secret police in Alexandria, although the result was not what the secret police expected. In far away Neocaesarea, Christians at least had the advantage of being remote and of having a bishop who knew what it was to live in the wilderness as a hermit. Gregory led those of his flock who could leave out of the city, to wait for the end of the persecution.
This strategy did not take the Roman authorities totally by surprise. They had a spy, who watched Gregory leave and noted where he went. Gregory and his deacon, the man who had once been a pagan priest, went on alone, climbing up a bare hill and standing on the top, standing to pray in the old way, arms lifted toward the sky. It was not a good place to hide. The spy hurried back and reported everything to the Roman authorities, and a patrol went out to capture the bishop.
To the spy’s amazement, the patrol came back empty-handed, wet and angry. They had found the hill, and searched every part of it, as Gregory’s biographer puts it, “looking all over the place and searching every stand of bushes and every pile of rocks and every bend of the stream with all diligence”. They had looked all around the two trees on the top of the hill, their branches stretching up into the sky, they said, and there was nothing. The spy’s information must have been bad.
Only, as the spy knew, there were no trees on the top of the hill. Somehow the guards had looked at the bishop and the deacon in prayer, and seen only trees. The spy puzzled over this strange miracle. The patrol wasn’t even aware of it. God could have simply hidden Gregory and the deacon away, or told Gregory to move to another hill. In a moment of insight, the spy realized that the miracle could only be for one person: it was for him. He packed up his belongings, and hurried out of the city, looking for the Christians again, this time to join them.
After a year, the persecutions of Decius ended. The emperor had been battling tribes of barbarians who were trying to press into Roman lands, the Goths. Decius was lured into an ambush and his army was destroyed. After his death, the persecution of Christians stopped.
Gregory would lead Neocaesarea for another two decades. It would not be easy. The tribe whom the Emperor Decius had failed to stop, the Goths, would move through Neocaesarea, leaving chaos in their wake. Gregory helped in the rebuilding.
As the 3rd century came to an end, Gregory was dying. His city of Neocaesarea had been transformed. Most of the people came to the church that Gregory had built, and the pagan temples were so ill-maintained that in the coming decades, an earthquake would knock most of them down, leaving Gregory’s church standing. But there were still pagans left in Neocaesarea, a fact which grieved Gregory on his deathbed. He had hoped to bring every soul in the city to Christ. Still, when he asked his assistants how many pagans were left, the irony was not lost on the philosopher bishop.
The number of pagans remaining in the city was seventeen.
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I'm new to your work but i’m here to stay. Phenomenal post on a phenomenal Saint!