Healing in weakness

Gregory spoke of a suffering Christ for the first time in his oration, On Love of the Poor (Or. 14),Footnote ⁶ the Christ ‘who bore our weakness, who humbled himself to the point [of assuming] our lump, who became poor in this flesh and earthly tabernacle for us, who suffered pain and became weak for us that we might become rich in divinity’. Composed in either 366 or 367, the oration focused on the plight of the lepers and of the poor in Roman Cappadocia. It publicised the fundraising effort for the leprosarium his friend Basil of Caesarea planned to build just outside of his bishopric in the city of Caesarea (c.368).Footnote ⁷ The first of its kind in Byzantium, the leprosarium was part of a larger philanthropic complex, which the church historian Sozomen called the ‘Basileias’.Footnote ⁸ In the funeral oration (Or. 43) Gregory delivered on the anniversary of Basil's death c.381, he referred to the complex as ‘the new city’, a place ‘where disease is regarded spiritually, and misfortune is considered a blessing, and sympathy is tested’.Footnote ⁹ Although there is no mention of the complex in On Love of the Poor, we should not be surprised by the omission. John McGuckin has argued that Gregory composed the oration with a broader social and theological vision in mind. He never meant to limit it to the task of publicising Basil's project, for he probably also delivered the oration ‘at times of public celebration, religious holidays, when the town would be crowded and the suffering would come to listen as well’.Footnote ¹⁰

To understand what Gregory meant in saying that Christ ‘bore our weakness’ I shall consider the literary context of the oration. It is filled with images of human suffering which suggest the dire extent of the human weakness that Christ had assumed.Footnote ¹¹ One passage, in particular, evoked the lepers’ experience of misery by using musical metaphors for unity and concord where one might have expected the language of isolation and dissonance. ‘Who is not overcome’, asked Gregory, ‘by those who harmonize a pitiful symphony in lamentations?’Footnote ¹² Alluding to the contrapuntal connections of a musical composition, he described the lepers lying beside one another joined by their disease. While each leper was pitiful in his isolation, together they were even more poignant in their musical collaboration.

The musical metaphor did not merely describe the lepers’ plight. It also opened new avenues for the moral development of Gregory's listeners. The tragedy was that those who witnessed the lepers’ suffering failed to be moved by what he later called their ‘pitiable songs’.Footnote ¹³ We might imagine people walking past the lepers, even stepping around them, as they entered the church for a feast day or for some other public celebration. He surely had in mind such a failure of compassion when he called his listeners ‘a mixed crowd of spectators, sharing in their suffering, but only for a moment’.Footnote ¹⁴ Those who witnessed such misery were to be appropriately moved by the experience.

Portraying the lepers’ cries as the interwoven notes of a symphony helped Gregory's listeners imagine a new relationship among them. The lepers were not the isolated sufferers they appeared to be. In the light of the musical metaphor, they were a unified and harmonious group that the bystanders should acknowledge and respond to.Footnote ¹⁵ The musical order and symmetry made the lepers’ suffering seem more manageable than the hopeless misery of an endless array of individual lepers.Footnote ¹⁶ Their incorporation into a larger ensemble would have challenged his listeners to re-examine their prejudices.

Gregory expanded the metaphor further to incorporate the ensemble of lepers into the congregation of the church. This new image contrasted the symphonic lament of the lepers gathered outside the church with the sacred melodies coming from within. While the lepers’ songs may have clashed with those coming from the congregation, the dissonance did not preclude the lepers from participating.Footnote ¹⁷ Rather the musical counterpoint challenged listeners to imagine themselves as part of a larger chorus which included the lepers’ songs.Footnote ¹⁸ Even though the contrapuntal melodies he evoked were not harmonious, the imagery implied that the intermingling of the songs allowed the voices of the lepers to be heard.

The lepers signified not only the tragedy of human misery, but also the possibilities for healing and redemption. With their gnarled limbs and unrecognisable faces, they were the isolated sufferers gathered outside the church that people were reluctant to look at. Yet through their songs they had formed a harmonious group which allowed them to interact with the sacred chants coming from the church. In their mutual suffering, they had healed their wounds of social isolation and despair. From their suffering came their redemption. Because the lepers exemplified the common weakness of humanity, they would be ‘buried with Christ and raised with him, provided they suffer with him in order that they may also be glorified with him (Rom 8:17)’.Footnote ¹⁹ He left no doubt that the lepers, with their broken bodies, had suffered with Christ.

It is no accident that Gregory spoke of a suffering Christ ‘who became weak for us’ in the context of an oration which dealt at length with the lepers’ misery. The juxtaposition of human suffering and divine weakness implied that Christ had suffered with the lepers and that there was no affliction too grotesque for Christ to have assumed. The suggestion was not without its theological difficulties. It may have prompted his listeners to consider that the Godhead had been vulnerable to the almost inhuman suffering the lepers had endured.

A theology of the suffering Christ

Gregory considered the extent of Christ's suffering approximately twelve years later in the Theological Orations (Or. 27–31) he delivered at Constantinople in the summer or autumn of 380. A distinctive feature of the christology described there is the insistence that God suffers. Such theologians as Leo the Great would resolve the theological conundrum of a suffering God some seventy years later by distributing the sayings, actions and experiences of Christ among his divine and human natures. Gregory established the framework for this eventual resolution by attributing ‘the loftier and more appropriately divine expressions [of scripture] to the Godhead, the humbler and more human to the one who for our sake is the New Adam and the suffering God so as to vanquish sin’.Footnote ²⁰ His approach differed from Leo's, nonetheless. Frederick Norris has shown that Gregory did not articulate the human nature of Christ as distinct from the divine for the purpose of ascribing to it every human quality and experience that was inappropriate to the impassible nature of the divinity.Footnote ²¹ The sorting out of scriptural texts between the divine and human natures in Christ did not deter him, as it did some of his successors, from thinking about the deeper theological implications. He continued to contemplate the paradox of a suffering God.

There were several ways in which this occurred. Gregory explored the suffering that Christ experienced on the cross in his interpretation of the mournful cry, ‘God, my God, protect me, why did you abandon me?’Footnote ²² Some of his contemporaries had understood the cry to mean that God the Father had abandoned the human nature of Christ in its hour of need for fear that God might suffer.Footnote ²³ Gregory considered two more nuanced possibilities: first, that Christ had experienced our condition parenthetically, ‘for He himself has not been abandoned either by the Father or, as some think, by his own Godhead, as if it feared suffering and for that reason withdrew from the sufferer’.Footnote ²⁴ This would mean that God had not been subjected to suffering because Christ had never really felt the abandonment. Yet, the theological expediency of preventing God from suffering did not address Gregory's concern to integrate human experience into a larger moral framework. The second possibility was that Christ had suffered the range of human misery, for he ‘measures all our sufferings by his own by means of his love, so that he can know ours by his own’.Footnote ²⁵ This would mean that Christ had experienced the abandonment on the cross as paradigmatic of the human condition. Yet, the theological conundrum of a suffering God remained.

To resolve the tension between human weakness and divine transcendence, Gregory distinguished two types of abandonment. First, there was the state of being abandoned by the Father as well as by God, such that God was no longer involved in what was happening to Christ. He rejected this option as failing to account for the emotional richness of Christ's human nature. Second, there was the state of abandonment that human beings experienced as a result of their submitting themselves to God imperfectly. He thought this type of spiritual abandonment was consistent with the human condition and with what Christ had undergone in modelling our condition of abandonment in his experience on the cross.Footnote ²⁶ The abandonment Christ felt was the abandonment we had experienced prior to having been saved. This is what Gregory meant when he said that we had been among the abandoned and overlooked until we were ‘saved by the sufferings of the impassible (σεσωσμένοι τοῖς τοῦ ἀπαθοῦς πάθεσιν)’.Footnote ²⁷ Christ's lamentation conveyed his experience of our abandonment rather than his own. Because his emotions were ‘by means of his love for humanity (τέχνῃ φιλανθρωπίας)’, they expressed his profound empathy for our weakness.

It is relevant to our understanding of how Christ suffered that Gregory thought Christ modelled our abandonment ‘in himself’ (ἐν ἑαυτῷ).Footnote ²⁸ Kenneth Wesch has remarked that while Cyril of Alexandria had used the word ‘hypostasis’ to articulate the union of God and man in Christ, Gregory used ‘heautos’. ‘In himself’ Christ experienced the human condition on the cross; ‘he bears the whole me in himself with what is mine that he might consume in himself what is inferior’.Footnote ²⁹ Gregory thought that humanity had changed as a result of Christ bearing ‘in himself’ everything appropriate to the human condition. Not only were the inferior elements burned away, as ‘fire [consumes] wax, or as the sun [consumes] dew’. The process transformed human beings that they might partake in divinity. The notion ‘in himself’, therefore, evoked the mingling (σύγκρασις) not merely of the divine and human natures in Christ, as we might expect, but of the divine and the human between Christ and human beings.

The interconnections drawn by this mingling (σύγκρασις) – between the divine and human in Christ and between the divine-human Christ and human beings – further implied that the suffering Christ endured on the cross and elsewhere happened not merely to his human nature apart from the Godhead, but to the hybrid mixture of God and man. That Christ modelled our abandonment in every part of himself shaped the human suffering he experienced. When Gregory said that Christ ‘measures all our sufferings by his own by means of his love, so that he can know ours by his own’,Footnote ³⁰ he implied that Christ did not take on human suffering as if it were something other than himself. He thoroughly understood and experienced it.

Gregory articulated the paradox of a suffering God in his integration of Stoic philosophical ideas into a christological framework.Footnote ³¹ Using such Stoic terminology as ‘intermingling’ (μῖξις) and ‘mixture’ (κρᾶσις), he posited a genuine union between the two natures of Christ. The concepts allowed ‘the two elements to remain what they were, but to become one’.Footnote ³² His dispute with Apollinarius, the bishop of Laodicea in Syria who had replaced Christ's human mind with the logos, also helped him articulate the means by which the two natures existed in the Godhead. In his Letter to Cledonius (Ep. 101), which he wrote after his return to Cappadocia in the summer of 382, he described the relationship between the natures according to the logos of their intimate union.Footnote ³³ The word Gregory used to articulate this union was κιρνάω. According to Liddell, Scott, JonesFootnote ³⁴ the word refers to the mixing of water with wine or the alloying of different metals, while according to LampeFootnote ³⁵ it refers to the mixing of wine, as well as to the metaphorical sense of mixing, blending, joining and uniting. In using the word, Gregory did not mean to conjure images of the two elements being entirely subsumed into a new mixture. Such an image would have left only a hybrid substance of the two original elements. Rather he meant that the natures flow into one another harmoniously.

This idea was further explored in the same letter to Cledonius when he spoke of the two perfect things (δύο τέλεια) in Christ. The word τέλεια implied the two natures, which Apollinarius could not envision because he could not fathom how two such perfections could be contained in the Godhead. Gregory attributed this misunderstanding to Apollinarius’ failure to appreciate the philosophical implications of incorporeality. It was not like a bushel holding two bushels, or a body holding two bodies, but rather like one person containing soul, reason, mind and the Holy Spirit.Footnote ³⁶ The image of bodily containment reveals how he conceived of the two perfections in Christ. They functioned more like incorporeal, intelligible things than like bodies: ‘For such is the nature of intelligible things; incorporeally and without mixture, they both mix together in bodies and with one another.’Footnote ³⁷ It brings into sharper focus the watery metaphor he used to describe the union of the two natures: the natures flow into one another because they are intelligible and incorporeal. They are not the static perfections Apollinarius imagined them to be.

Gregory's response to Apollinarius can be summed up in the theological saying for which he would become famous: Christ assumed a complete human mind, for ‘what he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved’.Footnote ³⁸ It meant that every part of the fallen human being, including the mind, must be present in Christ if humanity was to be saved. Gregory confirmed this interpretation when he said of the redemption of fallen humanity, ‘If only half Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also; but if the whole [of Adam] fell, it must be united to the whole [of Him] that was begotten and so be saved as a whole’.Footnote ³⁹ It also raised questions about the theological mechanism by which this saving act occurred. How does the human being that Christ assumed save the human being that fell in Adam?

Gregory illuminated this process in the following ways. First, the metaphor of the two natures flowing together in Christ suggested that the human being Christ had become was not a static entity separate from the Godhead. It was a human nature with properties which could be readily communicated. This was why he said that the two perfections in Christ were more like the intelligible mixture of soul, mind, body and logos in a human being than like such purely physical objects as two bushels or two bodies. Because the two natures alloyed like metals and flowed together like water with wine, the complete human nature which Christ had assumed could be communicated along with the saving properties of the Godhead. Although Christ became a human being with a physical body, the theological representation of his physicality took place in an intelligible nature.

Second, Gregory used the image of holistic healing – what is not assumed is not healed – to consider the absurdity of treating only the foot of a man whose eye and foot have been injured, or of altering a picture which had been painted poorly while failing to correct the artist responsible.Footnote ⁴⁰ Against Apollinarius, whose philosophical convictions led him to conclude that Christ did not assume a human mind, Gregory said that everything that was injured needed to be healed and that everything wrong needed to be corrected. The philosophical principle underlying this healing metaphor was ‘like sanctifies like’. It encompassed both the ancient epistemological idea ‘like knows like’ and the ancient medical practice which attempted to heal a disease by using ‘treatments that generally resemble the disease they seek to cure’.Footnote ⁴¹

It meant that Christ saved the human condition from sin because the human being he had become was the same in every pertinent respect as the human being that had fallen in Adam. The principles ‘like knows like’ and ‘like heals like’ enabled fallen human nature to line up with the human nature of Christ and to mingle with the healing properties of the Godhead. This mingling took place because the natures in Christ were intelligible and fluid. The results were profound. That Christ had experienced and comprehended the range of human suffering enabled human beings to know and become like God. As Gregory remarked, ‘What is greater for the weakness of man than to be taken up in God and to become God from the mixture?’Footnote ⁴²

Mingling of flesh and spirit in human beings

Gregory is well known for his conception of the human being as a mixture of the spiritual and material realms.Footnote ⁴³ This is relevant to understanding the human condition which Christ assumed because our hybrid nature of spirit and flesh is the primary way in which Gregory conceived of our suffering.

The full articulation of this idea is found in On the Theophany of Christ, which Gregory delivered in Constantinople on 25 December 379.Footnote ⁴⁴ In it he recalled a primordial time when mind was distinct from sense, each remaining within its limits and bearing witness silently to the majesty of the creator Word.Footnote ⁴⁵ There was no mingling of these opposite natures, the temporal and immortal, the visible and intellectual, flesh and spirit, until the Word decided to fashion a single living being from the invisible and visible natures, ‘taking a body from existing matter and placing a breath in it taken from himself, which the Word knew to be an intelligent soul and the image of God, as a sort of second world’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This image of humanity as a microcosm of the intelligible world was at once beautiful for its symmetry and haunting for the paradoxical being which it created.

To describe this mixture of opposites that the Word fashioned in human beings Gregory used the words ‘mingling’ (τό κρᾶμα) and ‘mixture’ (ἡ μίξις). The latter was the same word he used to explain the relationship between the human and divine in Christ. Regarding the similarities between Gregory's anthropology and christology, Peter Bouteneff has remarked that, ‘Christ is double in the same way man is double’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Likewise, Anna-Stina Ellverson has noticed the correspondence between Gregory's way of understanding the mixture of natures in Christ and in human beings.Footnote ⁴⁸ She has suggested that the theological problem resided for Gregory not in how these opposite natures come together – the language and metaphors he used to account for the mixture make this clear – but in why they should have come together at all.Footnote ⁴⁹

The question is well posed. Throughout Gregory's corpus she has found three reasons the Word fashioned a dual nature for human beings: the lowliness of our material body prevents us from feeling unduly exalted;Footnote ⁵⁰ the beauty of our spiritual nature allows us to live with God; and the double nature of human beings summarises the two created natures in one mixed being. The first explanation, the body as corrective, was not new with Gregory. Irenaeus had proposed a similar theory more than 200 years earlier when he argued against Gnostics, who had denied the salvation of the body, by confirming that humanity had learned of its weakness and mortality through its bodily suffering.Footnote ⁵¹ The second explanation, the body as the vehicle of spiritual ascent, was destined to become the foundation for ascetic theology. The third, the double nature of human beings as a microcosm of the material and spiritual creations, expressed the theological value of perceiving the relationship between humanity and the cosmos as one of order and symmetry.Footnote ⁵²

Gregory was not content with the aesthetics of this microcosmic creation for long. He realised that the dual nature of our being produced an ontological tension between our spirituality and materiality. It was a tension ripe with meaning and with existential pain. As he asked in Oration 2.75: ‘[Who] mingled dust with spirit, and compounded a living thing visible and invisible, temporal and immortal, earthly and heavenly, able to touch God but not to grasp Him?’Footnote ⁵³ The same creative process that related humanity to the cosmos and made us at once similar to God and to the material world also gave rise to our inherently problematic nature.

The idea is explored more fully in a poem he composed towards the end of his life, On Human Nature. In it he reflected upon his soul's unlikely mingling of ‘spirit with thickness, flesh with mind, lightness with weight’.Footnote ⁵⁴ These things which ‘fight in opposition to one another’ (Ταῦτα γὰρ ἀλλήλοις μάρναται ἀντιθέτως) made him feel anxious and unsettled as he contemplated how he who was ‘a current of a troubled river, always moving, having nothing fixed’ might ever be able to profit from Christ having blended God with a human form.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even as he confessed being ‘worn out with worry, night and day’, lying helpless with the divine terror of his uncertainties, he admitted that wicked people who considered ‘all a myth’ (μῦθος ἅπαντας) and ‘value only what is right in front of them’ (τὸ δ’ ἐν ποσὶ μοῦνον) did not suffer the mental anguish he endured.Footnote ⁵⁶ As problematic as his dual nature of flesh and spirit was, the suffering he endured because of it confirmed that he was not among the wicked.

The realisation that his struggle with duality was consistent with the challenges of living a moral life turned this poem into a virtuosic performance in its own right. It was a literary recreation and interpretation of what it means for humanity to exist as a microcosmic duality of natures in mutual opposition. Gregory gave meaning and content to his mental suffering by contrasting the suffering he felt because of his dual nature with the lack of suffering experienced by the wicked. We are meant to conclude that we suffer in the duality of our flesh and spirit in order to make us reflect more deeply upon our metaphysical constitution and upon our place in the world. That is why Gregory insinuated that his mental suffering, though painful, was the right kind of suffering. By the end of the poem, the insight made him cheerful, if only for a moment: ‘And late from the shady grove I headed home, now laughing at these strange thoughts, then once again heart in anguish smoldering, my mind battling.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Inspired by the exercise of thinking his anguished thoughts and writing them down in a poem, he at once laughed at his existential pain and felt its torment. We are left with the thought that experiencing this unresolved tension, which the poem both enacts and explores, is the only way to negotiate the reality of our two-fold being.

Gregory had earlier considered, in On Love of the Poor, that our dual nature of flesh and spirit might lead to a variety of physical and social maladies. There he argued that leprosy was the cruellest type of suffering the human condition had given rise to. He thought it was worse than ‘orphanhood, exile from homeland, brutality of tyrants, callousness of magistrates, inhumanity of tax collectors, bloodthirstiness of bandits, greediness of thieves, confiscation of property, or shipwreck’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This is because the lepers, more than any other suffering human being, both embodied and experienced the tension of their dual nature.

They embodied that tension because their flesh was a hybrid mixture of the healthy person they used to be and a grotesque distortion of what they had become. In commenting upon the lepers’ precarious position between two incompatible worlds, Gregory said of their rotting limbs, ‘some have been consumed unfortunately, others have been more unfortunately preserved; some are gone before burial, others can find no one who will surrender them for burial’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The implications were grim. If parts of the lepers’ flesh had died and belonged among the dead, while other parts remained among the living, then they were caught in an impossible hybrid state in which they, being a kind of living dead (νεκροὶ καὶ ζῶντες), would never receive a proper burial.

They experienced the tension of their dual nature because they were not accustomed to their misfortune. The word Gregory used to express this idea of customary suffering was ‘ethos’ (ἕθος), which means ‘custom’ or ‘habit’. He contrasted ‘ethos’ with ‘par’ axian’ (παρ’ ἀξίαν), which means ‘unworthily’ or ‘unfairly’, to suggest that those who suffered unfairly were more pitiful than those who suffered habitually. In a note to Migne's Patrologiae Graecae edition, we are told that the scholiast, Nicetas, commented upon the problem of contrasting ‘unfairly’ with ‘habitually’ and added the phrase ‘παρὰ τὴν τύχην ᾖσάν ποτε’ to bring out the contrast which Gregory implied.Footnote ⁶⁰ The emendation suggests that the lepers did not experience habitual suffering because there was a time when fortune had been kind to them. This was the main reason Gregory thought we should pity the lepers above all others.

We might raise the objection that orphanhood, exile, and all the other miseries Gregory enumerated, involved a sudden change in fortune no different from what the lepers experienced. What distinguished the lepers was that their bodies served as a graphic reminder of the person they used to be and of the former life they remembered and longed for. Their change in fortune from being the healthy members of society they once were to the wretched exiles they became not only preyed on their minds, but was also inscribed on their bodies. They were a walking, visual symbol of the tensions and paradoxes Gregory had been alluding to – between sickness and health, fragility and flourishing, flesh and spirit, humanity and divinity. Their healthy limbs functioned side-by-side with their lifeless and decaying flesh.

The plight of the lepers made Gregory realise that his own body, a mixture of flesh and spirit, was just as improbable and fraught with paradox as theirs. It was at once the image of God and formed of clay; it fought against him when it was healthy (εὐεκτοῦν) and when fought against it was in pain; it was the fellow-servant he loved and the enemy he opposed; it was the fellow-servant he escaped from and the heir he felt shame before (αἰσχύνομαι); it was the helper he needed to attain the most excellent things and the insurgent he did not know how to escape from; it was a sympathetic (εὐμενής) enemy and a treacherous friend.Footnote ⁶¹ The apparent contradictions lay in the fact that the body, with its unholy passions, was both an obstacle to and an avenue for attaining the image of God. It was an obstacle because its passions ensnared him in the materiality of this world, and an avenue because it was the only means by which he could remake himself in the image of God.

Gregory lamented this duelling sense of wonder and frustration when he said, ‘What an alien combination!’ (Ὤ τῆς συζυγίας καὶ τῆς ἀλλοτριώσεως). Just as there was a purpose to his suffering (in On Human Nature, discussed above), there was meaning in these inherent contradictions. Our mixture (τὸ κρᾶμα) ‘takes this form so that whenever we feel exalted because of the image [of God in us], we may be humbled because of the clay [of which we are made]’.Footnote ⁶² His listeners were supposed to let the impossible contradictions of a life in the body remind them who and what they really are.

Gregory also placed his personal suffering in the context of the suffering of individuals other than himself, the suffering of neighbours, and the collective suffering of the body of Christ. The relationships between and among these various groups were slippery. First, he urged each of his listeners to serve his neighbour (ὁ πλησίον), both the healthy and the sick, no less than he would his own needs. Then he dissolved the distinction between personal suffering (τό ἑαυτοῦ) and the suffering of others (ὁ πλησίον) when he urged people to expand their sphere of concern to include their neighbours: ‘we are all one in the Lord, either rich or poor, slave or free, healthy or ailing in the body (see Gal 3:28)’.Footnote ⁶³ Second, Gregory, echoing the words of the Apostle Paul (e.g. Rom 12:5), said that Christ was the head of this unified body and that ‘the way that the members relate to one another is also the way that each relates to each and all to all’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The web of relationships between and among the members of the body of Christ, and between and among the individuals and the collective which comprised this body, had profound ethical implications. Because of these human connections, we ‘must not overlook or neglect those who have fallen into our common weakness’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Finally, Gregory collapsed his previous distinctions into a basic theological premise: the welfare of our bodies and souls depends on the love for humanity in each of us (τὴν εἰς ἐκείνους φιλανθρωπίαν). By considering the different ways in which to conceive of the relationships among the suffering, he transformed the ethical demand ‘to care for those nearby as much as we care for ourselves’ into the theological truth that ‘the suffering of one member of the body of Christ impacts the welfare (ἀσφάλεια) of all’.

In contemplating the paradox of our dual nature as a source of both suffering and of salvation, Gregory expanded the isolation of individual suffering into the suffering of the collective. Like the lepers who had eased their pain with their mutual lamentations, people who cared for their neighbour were no longer alone in the duality of their human condition. Modelled on Christ, they had become integrated spiritual and material beings.

Reflections

Two speculative questions emerge from bringing together Gregory's reflections on the paradox of the suffering Christ – from his oration On Love of the Poor, to his Theological Orations and Letter to Cledonius more than a decade later, and finally to the poem On Human Nature which he wrote towards the end of his life. First, does Christ take on the suffering of individuals, or of the collective, and what does this suffering consist of?

To answer this first question it is useful to consider the lepers. As the outcasts of the ancient world, they figured prominently in Jesus’ ministry as recorded in the Gospels. That might be reason enough for Gregory to designate leprosy the ‘sacred disease’ as he did. He deepened their significance when he made the lepers stand for the suffering of the collective. This subtle transformation was accomplished in two ways. In On Love of the Poor he made the suffering of individuals flow into the suffering of the group using the musical imagery I have already described. Then he normalised the lepers’ suffering by presenting a material description of their plight. We are told that they suffered because of a lack of resources, because of the seriousness of their disease, and because of the disgust that people felt for them. By attributing their suffering to external circumstances they could not control, but that people could relate to, he urged his listeners to feel the lepers’ suffering as they would their own. As he put it: ‘I cannot bear the suffering of such things without tears and am overcome by the mention [of it]. You should also suffer the same, so that you may dry [their] tears with [your] tears.’Footnote ⁶⁶ He meant to convince the same people who had turned away from the lepers in disgust to feel what they felt and to suffer with them.

There is also a christological reason for having the lepers stand for the collective suffering of humanity. By making the lepers a kind of synecdoche for all human suffering, Gregory allowed Christ to assume their misery without his listeners having to imagine Christ suffering every gruesome detail of their physical and emotional distress. This transference of collective suffering to the body of Christ worked in the following way: the individual suffering of the leper flowed into the collective suffering of the group, which connected with, and was incorporated into, the collective suffering of the Christian body. Christ then suffered as the head of this body.

The second question which comes to mind is whether the suffering that Christ assumed also included the ontological tension inherent in our hybrid nature of flesh and spirit. I think it is unlikely for the simple reason that Christ is not precisely the same as a human being and, therefore, would not have suffered the same sort of existential pain. Perhaps the extent to which Gregory envisioned Christ's suffering in this regard is analogous to the abandonment that Christ experienced on the cross. Just as Christ felt our sense of abandonment without himself having been abandoned, he also felt ‘in himself’ the ontological tension we feel because of our hybrid nature. The reason for the difference is that Christ is made of created and uncreated nature, while human beings are a material and spiritual creation. Christ feels empathetically what we, as hybrid beings, feel, without embodying such an ontological tension.