Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job is probably best known for expansive allegorical exegesis, intensive theological psychology and extensive length. But the Moralia also merits attention in several standard histories of the doctrine of the atonement, in which it is cited as marking an important transitional phase of development of that doctrine between Augustine and the Middle Ages: the ‘beginning of a tendency’ or ‘inchoate expression’ of what would later be expressed in terms of vicarious penal suffering.Footnote 1 It is notable that some of those writers are keen to characterise this as merely an ‘approximation’ of similar language,Footnote 2 and others who acknowledge the superficial similarity are confident that ‘substitutionary atonement…was far from Gregory's mind’.Footnote 3 Gregory's understanding of the atonement, however, is worthy of investigation in its own right, and particularly in the context of the place it occupies in the spirituality of the Moralia. In what follows, I outline how Gregory understands Christ's redemptive work to achieve something in two directions simultaneously: towards God, a vicarious payment of humanity's debt of punishment; towards humanity, an efficaciously convicting and restorative example. This sustains a spirituality in which exacting and self-denying moral effort rests on freedom from judgement and on the death accomplished by the Mediator, which is to be thankfully contemplated. Engaging the Moralia in this manner both illuminates patristic exegetical sensibilities and proves instructive regarding perennial questions of where (and whether) the fathers fit into later taxonomies of atonement models.
Situating the Moralia and Gregory's hermeneutic
According to Gregory he delivered the bulk of his reflections on Job to his monastic brethren prior to his elevation to the papacy, and later edited them into the thirty-five books and six volumes of the Moralia.Footnote 4 Gregory records how at first he ‘sank’ under the ‘burden’ of expounding so ‘obscure’ a work, ‘which hitherto had been thoroughly treated by none before’. However, raising his hopes ‘to Him, by Whom the tongue of the dumb is opened’, he pressed on, despite being ‘afflicted with frequent pains in the bowels’.Footnote 5 While he pleads the latter as an excuse for any deficiencies in the work, he also remarks that ‘Divine Providence designed, that I a stricken one, should set forth Job stricken, and that by these scourges I should the more perfectly enter into the feelings of one that was scourged.’Footnote 6 According to Wilken, ‘no exegetical work from the early church was more admired, studied, excerpted, and cited’.Footnote 7 Aquinas, introducing his own commentary on the literal sense, declaims any necessity of explaining the mystical sense on the grounds that this has been done so ‘accurately and eloquently’ by ‘the blessed Pope Gregory…that nothing further need be added to this sort of commentary’.Footnote 8
Gregory sets out his exegetical approach succinctly in his preface. He follows traditional patristic practice in discerning two layers of meaning in the text: the historical and the allegorical or spiritual. The allegorical meaning is further subdivided into a typical sense, conveying spiritual truths, and a moral sense. Thus, Gregory can explore any given passage from one, two or all three of these angles. Usually, this follows a standard order: ‘first, we lay the historical foundations; next, by pursuing the typical sense, we erect a fabric of the mind to be a strong hold of faith; and moreover as the last step, by the grace of moral instruction, we, as it were, clothe the edifice with an overcast of colouring’.Footnote 9 However, following Origen, Gregory is plain that not every text contains a historical sense, for ‘the plain words of the historical account … sometimes … cannot be understood according to the letter, because when taken superficially, they convey no sort of instruction to the reader, but only engender error’. In such places, the words of the text themselves indicate they should be read spiritually ‘as if with a kind of utterance they said, “Whereas you see our superficial form to be destructive to us, look for what may be found within us that is in place and consistent with itself.”’Footnote 10 So Gregory is justified in taking different texts from these three different angles. Moreover, as the goal is edification, not exhaustive explanation, ‘sometimes happens that we neglect to interpret the plain words of the historical account, that we may not be too long in coming to the hidden senses’.Footnote 11 However, this patristic commonplace regarding the relation between the historical and spiritual senses should not be misunderstood as affording the interpreter carte blanche to ditch the historicity of the biblical text where it seems convenient to do so. Gregory warns explicitly against such practice, both out of reverence for the history,Footnote 12 and because in rushing over the history the interpreter may miss simple benefit from it in search of deeper truths.Footnote 13
The fathers also recognised that the thematic centre of a given biblical text was important to grasping the meaning of the parts.Footnote 14 Job the book revolves around the sufferings of Job the character, and the great question for all readers is why righteous Job should suffer. Gregory addresses this at the outset. He notes first that there are many kinds of suffering that relate to human sin: ‘the scourge whereby the sinner is stricken that he may suffer punishment without withdrawal, another whereby he is smitten that he may be corrected; another wherewith sometimes a man is smitten, not for the correction of past misdeeds, but for the prevention of future…’.Footnote 15 Job's comforters erred in ascribing Job's suffering to reasons directly connected with some sin belonging to Job. But, Gregory continues, ‘sometimes the person is stricken neither for past not yet for future transgression, but that the alone mightiness of the Divine power may be set forth in the cutting short of the striking’.Footnote 16 It is this case that applies to Job: the true purpose of Job's suffering is not to rectify his own sin, past or future, but in what he and subsequent generations of the faithful would learn through his experience and his words. Job was struck ‘that the stroke might redound to the praise of God's glory’.Footnote 17
What is it that we learn that resounds to God's glory from Job's afflictions? Gregory sets out two foci, corresponding to his twofold spiritual sense: extensive moral instruction about the life of the faithful under affliction and the benefit gained by suffering; and a typical demonstration of the sufferings of Christ. The two are not separate, for it is in his moral example of bearing righteously under affliction that Job points forward to Christ, whose life is that same example to us perfected. Indeed, Job takes his place in the line of Old Testament saints who all ‘gave promise of Him by prophesying both in deeds and words’,Footnote 18 each showing us some facet of holy living (Abel, innocence; Enoch, purity; Noah, endurance; Abraham, obedience; and so on), ‘till the true Morning Star should rise, Who, being the herald to us of the eternal morning, should outshine the other stars by the radiance of His Divinity’.Footnote 19 All these saints were types of Christ therefore, but Job in particular ‘by all that he underwent should show forth what were to be His sufferings; and should so much the more truly foretell the mysteries of His Passion, as he prophesied then not merely with his lips but also by suffering’.Footnote 20 Moreover, Job is a type of the whole Christ, both head and body, and so he prefigures sufferings in both: ‘either our Mediator's Passion, or the travails of Holy Church, which is harassed by the manifold toils of this present life’.Footnote 21 Job's comforters, in like fashion, are typical of heretics, for ‘they address the blessed Job as though in behalf of the Lord, but yet the Lord does not commend them, that is, because all heretics, while they try to defend, only offend God’.Footnote 22
This tight web of concepts is at the heart of Gregory's approach to Job. The flow of his commentary is dictated by the biblical text, so following his train of thought can prove challenging.Footnote 23 But the res of the text, the reality to which it points (in which Gregory is most interested), provides the continuity. The central summary concept or ‘scope’ of Job at the historical level is Job and his suffering; the centre of the spiritual meaning is Christ, the whole Christ (unfolded as head and body). Christ, of course, is the scope of scripture, and so in this way Job is also keyed in to the cohering centre of scripture as a whole.Footnote 24 This foundation gives Gregory immense confidence that the entire text in front of him will naturally yield both spiritual truths relating to Christ's work of redemption (which, characteristically of the fathers, focuses as much on the incarnation as a whole as it does on the passion) and thoroughly applicable moral lessons for the church throughout the ages, as he works through the historical, typological and moral angles text by text.
The language of punishment and Job's sufferings
The question of God's justice in permitting Job's afflictions is as central to the book as the sufferings themselves. It is the issue over which the comforters stumble, and key to whatever lessons are to be drawn from the narrative. Given the connection Gregory makes between Job and Christ, the question also naturally transfers over to God's justice in relation to the sufferings of Christ. We have already noted Gregory's taxonomy of reasons for affliction within the divine purpose, and that he denies that Job's afflictions are retribution for specific sins (which is the mistake made by the comforters). For some interpreters, once the first of Gregory's list (direct punishment for specific personal sin) has been ruled out, we have left the domain of punishment all together: ‘When our sufferings function in a way in which the divine glory is revealed in us they lose their penal character.’Footnote 25 We have seen that Gregory undoubtedly views Job's sufferings as functioning to reveal God's glory in Job, and yet as he exegetes the book of Job he continues to use the vocabulary of punishment applied to a wide range of situations of affliction, including Job's, Christ's and the believer's.Footnote 26 How can this be consistent?
One of Gregory's key theological notions is the divine order of the universe and of all events in history. God, the divine light, which ‘abides unchangeable in itself’, ‘orders all things that are subject to change’.Footnote 27 Indeed, when commenting on the heavenly scene in which Satan appears before God in Job 1, Gregory points out that all language in scripture ascribing temporal attributes to divine acts is a condescension so as to ‘gradually transfer to the eternal world those who are habituated to the things of time’.Footnote 28 There is no ‘lapse of time’ from God's simple and eternal point of view, just one instantaneous immutable beholding of all things in the divinely decreed order.Footnote 29 This naturally encompasses the order of justice. It is axiomatic that God ‘can will nought that is unjust’. This is the primary comfort to sufferers such as Job: that ‘what is disagreeable to us… comes to us by His disposal, to Whom nought but justice is pleasing’.Footnote 30 We cannot suffer unjustly in an absolute sense, for God would permit no injustice. Even what Satan ‘unrighteously desires to do, God does not allow to be done except with justice’.Footnote 31 Likewise, God's punishments are always carried out with order: ‘Almighty God, Who punishes evil things well, never permits even the torments to be “without order”’; and ‘according to the measure of his guilt is likewise the recompense of vengeance which pursues every one of the damned’.Footnote 32
When God seems to admit, then, that he has afflicted Job ‘without cause’ (Job 2:3), Gregory is at pains to explore how this is compatible with God's justice. On the one hand, this is explained simply in line with Gregory's comments in his preface that we have already noted: there was not a cause in the sense of a specific sin that justified retributive suffering, but there was another kind of cause in God's purpose for Job and the enduring lessons his sufferings would provide.Footnote 33 But that is not the complete answer. Explaining Job's reply to his wife (2:10), Gregory considers how Job could rightly say that anyone receives ‘evil’ from the Lord. Clearly evil, which ‘does not subsist by its own nature’, cannot be created by God; rather, God ‘turns into a scourge the things that have been created good for us, upon our doing evil’.Footnote 34 Such things are evil from the point of view of the pain they inflict, though good ‘by the nature whereby they have their being’, and good in the restorative impact of which they are divine means. ‘For we by the love of things present have been led away from the love of our Creator… by the same means whereby man in his pride was not afraid to commit sin, he might find a punishment to his correction.’Footnote 35
What is vital to note here is that for Gregory, even corrective afflictions are justified partially in that they are penal responses to our own sinful turning away from God. The principle is succinctly put: ‘For we are become at variance with God by sin. Therefore it is meet that we should be brought back to peace with Him by the scourge.’Footnote 36 Gregory clearly views the everyday suffering of humanity as penal: ‘our life is every day bruised with the scourge of vengeance on account of sin’.Footnote 37 This is not punishment for specific sins, but for the primordial sin of Adam: ‘for we are born condemned sinners after punishment has begun [post poenam], and we come into this life together with the desert of our death’.Footnote 38 It is instructive to compare Van Nieuwenhove's treatment of Aquinas’ view of suffering here: he acknowledges that Aquinas connects original sin with afflictions in a general way but leaves the connection swiftly behind on the basis that the traditional understanding of original sin is ‘in need of reinterpretation, to put it mildly’ (a view Van Nieuwenhove assumes to be self-evident and in need of no defence).Footnote 39 The connection between original sin and suffering disappears from view in the rest of his argument, even though original sin is the key notion that confirms a penal aspect of general suffering. Gregory, in contrast, speaks of God explicitly as the one who ‘condemns even without works some that are only bound with the guilt of original sin’.Footnote 40 Although it is not front and centre in Gregory's explanation of Job's suffering, it is an essential part of the theological matrix within which he justifies it.Footnote 41
In addition, throughout his commentary on Job's words, although Gregory is adamant that Job is not being punished for specific sin, he is equally insistent that Job is a sinner. When Job says of God that ‘He destroys the perfect and the wicked’, Gregory concludes:
The ‘perfect man is destroyed’ by the Creator, in that whatever his pureness may have been, it is swallowed up by the pureness of the divine immensity. For though we take heed to preserve pureness, yet by consideration of the interior Perfection it is shown, that this which we practise is not purity.Footnote 42
Gregory even seems to come close to ascribing sin to Job in his approach to his sufferings. While he repeatedly affirms that Job did not sin in his words (as per Job 1:22, 42:7), he is finally ‘reproved in his own person’ (while being defended against Satan and preferred to the comforters) and ‘blamed for imagining that the intention of the scourging was different’ to what it was (i.e. believing it was a punishment). After all, although ‘the holy man surpassed all men by the virtue of his merits’, ‘yet, inasmuch as he was man, could not possibly be without blame before the eyes of God’.Footnote 43
These are the conceptual underpinnings for Gregory's continued use of the vocabulary of punishment to describe Job's sufferings, even though he sees it as crucial to the meaning of the whole narrative that Job is not suffering as a specific punishment for some specific sin that he refuses to confess. It is in this manner that Gregory can speak of Job's sufferings as ‘a punishment to his correction’, and apply the language of punishment to the sufferings of temporal human life in general. Moreover, that Job is part of sinful humanity is a crucial part of the justification for God afflicting him.
Vicarious punishment
What then of the analogous question of justice in the sufferings of Christ? Gregory puts the question lucidly as he turns from the historical to the allegorical sense of Job 2:3: ‘But we must consider how He is righteous and orders all things righteously, if He condemns Him that deserves not to be punished. For our Mediator deserved not to be punished for Himself, because He never was guilty of any defilement of sin.’Footnote 44 We have seen that Job was afflicted both ‘without cause’ (in that his sufferings were not specific punishment for specific sins) and yet ‘with cause’ (in that his sufferings were just owing to Job's original and general sin, and were ordered towards a good end of increasing his merit). The same logic applies to the suffering of Christ insofar as he suffered both ‘with’ and ‘without’ cause in difference senses:
For ‘he was destroyed without cause’, who was at once weighed to the earth by the avenging of sin, and not defiled by the pollution of sin. He ‘was destroyed without cause’, Who, being made incarnate, had no sins of His own, and yet being without offence took upon Himself the punishment of the carnal.Footnote 45
Christ was not punished for cause of his own sin, but because of the sin of humanity: ‘He never was guilty of any defilement of sin’, but he ‘underwent the penalties of our unrighteousness’.Footnote 46 Unlike Job, however, Christ is punished wholly vicariously on account of the sins of others, and wholly for the good of others (whereas Job's sufferings were partly justified by his own general sinful state, and increased his own merit).Footnote 47
It should be noted that Gregory's language of vicarious penal suffering is repeated multiple times, with some precision. It is not accurate to Gregory's mode of expression to simply state that Christ's sufferings were ‘on our behalf’ in a nebulous way: Gregory is explicit that Christ suffered humanity's punishment in place of humanity to free us from the same. Consider such expressions as:
‘the Mediator, Who was without guilt, discharged the guilt of that pride’;Footnote 48
‘He Who is above all underwent the penalties of our unrighteousness’;Footnote 49
‘He took upon Him the punishment due to wickedness… and moderated the wrath of the Judge by undergoing death’;Footnote 50
‘He underwent our punishment out of pity for us’;Footnote 51
‘the Creator of our life would come even to the punishment of our death’;Footnote 52
‘to gain propitiation for mankind… a way of justly propitiating for him… the Lord endured our punishment in His death…’;Footnote 53
‘He then came without sin, Who should submit Himself voluntarily to torment, that the chastisements due to our wickedness might justly loose the parties thereto obnoxious…’Footnote 54
Note the unmistakable logic of substitution: justice is maintained when Christ suffers our punishment in our stead, setting us free.Footnote 55 In addition to these texts, there are multiple places in which Gregory refers to sin as incurring a debt of penalty.Footnote 56 This debt ultimately can only be settled by Christ's death, in which ‘our Redeemer by His own death paid man's penalty’.Footnote 57 It is this that lies behind the understanding of the death of Christ in sacrificial terms. Humanity, by sin, was ‘made the debtor to death’, and ‘saving by sacrifice’ this debt could not be paid. ‘Thereupon in our behalf the Son of God came … [and] offered a sacrifice in our behalf’; ‘He set forth His own Body in behalf of sinners.’Footnote 58 Only the redemptive death of Christ is sufficient to meet this need: ‘if He had not Himself undertaken a death not due to Him, He would never have freed us from one that was justly due to us’.Footnote 59
This need is appreciated, at some level, by even Job himself. On several occasions, Gregory interprets Job's impassioned cries of need in his affliction as cries for the Redeemer to come. When Job ‘demands the shadow of death’ (Job 3:5), Gregory explains that ‘for the obliterating of our sins in God's sight he calls for the Mediator between God and man, who should undertake for us the death of the flesh alone, and Who by the shadow of His own death, should do away the true death of transgressors’.Footnote 60 When Job asks of God, ‘If he scourge, let him slay once for all’ (Job 9:23), he ‘begs the grace of the Mediator’, ‘[a]s if he besought in plain words, saying, “Whereas our life is every day bruised with the scourge of vengeance on account of sin, let Him now appear, Who for our sake may undergo death once for all….”’Footnote 61 The ‘eagle that hastes to the prey’ (Job 9:26) is a picture to Gregory of all the Old Testament saints, who, like an eagle turning down from gazing at the sun to seek prey on the earth, turn from contemplating the sight of the Creator down to ‘behold Him, Who was to suffer and to die for mankind, by which same Death they know that they are themselves restored and fashioned anew to life’.Footnote 62 They knew that they needed the death of the Redeemer.
To conclude that ‘substitutionary atonement…was far from Gregory's mind’, then, is simply mistaken.Footnote 63 On the contrary, vicarious penal suffering or substitutionary atonement plays a vital role in his understanding of how Christ's death meets the need of humanity. The Old Testament saints knew it was needed; Job's sufferings richly prefigured it. Naturally, it does not stand alone, nor exhaust Gregory's thought on the means by which the Redeemer meets the need of his church. It is particularly woven into his understanding of redemption alongside the notion of self-sacrifice, in a manner to which we will now turn.
Self-punishment and vicarious punishment
While this reading of Job's sufferings as typological of the vicarious penal suffering of Christ is pervasive, it does not exclude from the Moralia equally pervasive parallel commentary on those same sufferings as typological and exemplary of suffering as a means of moral progress. Commenting on Job 1:5, which speaks of Job's continual sacrifices for his sons, Gregory first explains that this refers to ‘our Redeemer’ who ‘offers a holocaust for us without ceasing, Who without intermission exhibits to the Father His Incarnation in our behalf… washes out man's misdeeds, and in the mystery of His Humanity offers a perpetual Sacrifice’.Footnote 64 However, in returning to this verse from the moral angle, Gregory treats Job dwelling in the (wicked) land of Uz as allegorical of the elect person dwelling in temporal scenes but yearning for eternal things.Footnote 65 The interior mental state of the believer is the focus: Job's seven sons are ‘the seven virtues of the holy Spirit [that] spring up in us’.Footnote 66 Job's offering of sacrifices, in turn, corresponds to when believers ‘pour out our prayers to the Lord in behalf of each several virtue, that it be free from alloy’, ‘to light up the whole soul with the fire of compunction, that the heart may burn on the altar of love, and consume the defilements of our thoughts, like the sins of our own offspring’.Footnote 67
Sacrifice, as Straw puts it, ‘is the core of Gregory's moral theology’.Footnote 68 We have met this already in the notion of ‘a punishment to his correction’. Job's sufferings, while extreme, represent the life of the believer, in which it is appropriate that ‘every being created good turns to pain for us, [that] the mind of the chastened man may be renewed in a humbled state to peace with the Creator’.Footnote 69 What it also amounts to in the course of the Moralia is an exacting, demanding emphasis on the need for punitive self-correction. The consuming fire of sacrifice frequently signifies rigorous and painful internal purification.Footnote 70 By this work, we remove that in us which is liable to receive punishment at the final judgement: present enjoyment of sin ‘will not be required by the Lord, if it be visited with self-punishment of our own accord, as Paul testifies, when he says, For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged of the Lord (1 Cor 11:31)’.Footnote 71 Gregory exhorts the reader stringently: ‘the mind must be cleansed from defilement by being wrung harder with the hand of penitence, in proportion as it sees itself to be more foully stained by the yielding of the consent’.Footnote 72
It would be unfair, however, to characterise this as a Pelagian tendency that makes the redemptive work of Christ in need of being supplemented by our own moral efforts, as part of a zero-sum game.Footnote 73 Even this self-punishment only permits the avoidance of divine wrath by mercy.Footnote 74 In one and the same place, Gregory both records Job's cry for the Redeemer to come who ‘may snatch from the death of the flesh and of the spirit, us that are debtors thereto, [and] may, though no debtor, discharge the death of the flesh’ and also immediately concludes:
since the Lord lets no sin go unpunished, for either we visit it ourselves by lamenting it, or God by judging it, it remains that the mind should ever have a watchful eye to the amendment of itself. Therefore, in whatever particular each person sees that he is succoured by mercy, he must needs wipe out the stains thereof in the confession of it.Footnote 75
Our own self-punishment alone cannot rescue us from divine judgement, for it only has efficacy when accepted by divine mercy and is not sufficient to cancel out the death that we owe as a debt of sin. ‘Now any of the righteous may sometimes be able to resist the visitations of a present judgement, by the merits of a derived innocency, but they have no power by their own goodness to rid mankind of the woes of the death to come.’Footnote 76 But those whose death is discharged by the Redeemer still face a purifying judgement, and so are all the more eager to purge their sin now by moral effort. A clear distinction, meanwhile, is made between those who benefit from the death of Christ and those who do not. God's wrath will be visited on the unrighteous in hell, but for the righteous it is dealt with by the Redeemer.Footnote 77
The two strands of Gregory's thought, then, do not simply sit side by side. The plight of sinful humanity is met by the action of the Redeemer, which cancels out the debt of death, and on that basis enables and inspires the life of the righteous to consist in moral progress away from present, temporal, sinful, earthy matters towards eternal things. The two elements are particularly unified in his notion of the ‘double death’ that humanity has incurred by sin, and the twofold manner in which Christ rescues us from this plight. As Gregory explains:
For in that we have both in spirit departed from God; and that in flesh we return to dust, we are obnoxious to the punishment of a double death. But there came unto us One, Who in our stead should die the death of the flesh only, and join His single Death to our twofold death, and set us free from either kind.Footnote 78
The first death is a spiritual death, humanity's departure from God in sin; the second is the consequential and penal physical death, the return of human flesh to dust. Christ meets both of these, but in different ways. He only dies a single death: he comes in the flesh and dies physically to discharge our penal debt of death. Our spiritual death of sin, however, he reverses not by undergoing it himself (as he never sinned); rather, his sinless obedience turns us from sin and draws back to spiritual life. This twofold aspect is further developed in Gregory's commentary on Job 9:23.Footnote 79 It is the work of the Mediator to deal with divine wrath and to turn us back from our sin, both of which he achieves by his death: ‘brought to the punishment of sin, [he] did both convict man, that he might not sin, and withstand God, that He might not smite’.Footnote 80
Gregory's musing over this theme (from a passage to which we have already referred) is worth quoting at length:
Thus by suffering He convinced both the One and the other, in that He both rebuked the sin of man by infusing righteousness, and moderated the wrath of the Judge by undergoing death; and He ‘laid His hand upon both’, in that He at once gave examples to men which they might imitate, and exhibited in Himself those works to God, by which He might be reconciled to men. For before Him there never was forthcoming One, Who interceded for the guiltinesses of others in such wise, as not to have any of His own. Therefore none could encounter eternal death in the case of others, in the degree that he was bound by the guilt of his own. Therefore there came to men a new Man, as to sin a rebuker, as to punishment a befriender. He manifested miracles, He underwent cruel treatment. Thus He laid His hand upon both, for by the same steps by which He taught the guilty good things, He appeased the indignant Judge.Footnote 81
The death of Christ works in both God-ward and man-ward directions. It would be a mistake to conclude that one element of Gregory's thought here excludes, minimises or even relativises the other. As a true mediator, Christ works on both warring parties: dealing with punishment by acknowledging the justice of the sentence and undergoing it, he appeases the judge; dealing with sin by rebuking it by his perfect example, he restores and turns back humanity to good. Because the death of the Redeemer both achieves what needs to be done for humanity and enables the necessary completion in our own deeds, even that stringent effort (as Gregory goes on) is motivated by love, not fear. ‘For the holy man, because he beholds the Redeemer of the world coming in meekness, does not assume fear towards a Master, but affection towards a Father.’Footnote 82 So while ‘we do not render real service to God, so long as we obey His commandments from fear’, ‘when the love of His sweetness is kindled in our mind, all desire of the present life goes for little’. And in turn, when ‘the present life has once begun to grow tasteless, and the love of the Creator to become sweet’, this stirs up not complacency but action: ‘the soul inflames itself against self, that it may accuse self for the sins, wherein it formerly vindicated itself, being ignorant of the things above’.Footnote 83
Conclusion
In a lucid essay, Benjamin Myers argues that the concept of sacrifice functions in the patristic understanding of atonement only to prove the universality of the atonement, not to explicate the mechanism. To think it does the latter, and therefore find notions of substitutionary atonement in the fathers, is to project back on to them ‘Anselmian and Calvinist assumptions’.Footnote 84 It seems likely that similar reservations underlie the hesitance of some to allow the presence of substitutionary atonement in Gregory's understanding. What we have seen in the Moralia, however, provides strong counter-evidence to Myers’ claim. Gregory's understanding of the death of Christ as vitally involving vicarious penal suffering is expressed with clarity, and Christ's sacrifice is specifically explained as the mechanism of the atonement. This should be instructive for these ongoing discussions of how the fathers fit into taxonomies of atonement models. Of course, Gregory's doctrine of redemption is not formulated in terms identical to later Reformation and post-Reformation expressions, with the same weight and emphasis. It is not as if an idealised penal theory lay submerged in toto in the tradition, to be glimpsed under the waves in patristic sources, peek above the surface in Anselm, and only burst forth with the Reformers. The claim here is simply that Gregory's reflections make use of substitutionary logic, explaining one aspect of the efficacy of the atonement in terms of Christ bearing punishment on behalf of humanity. This cannot be waved away by appeal to the context of his thought or the dominance of other themes (such as self-sacrifice), for this strand is well-integrated within his overall approach.Footnote 85
The Moralia also illuminates how the mode of patristic exegesis guides the manner in which theological themes are incorporated into the whole. We have seen that Gregory does not merely hold simultaneously the twin themes of redemptive vicarious punishment and self-punishment towards moral improvement, but also integrates them; he knows how it is that both can be true. Together they comprise the notion of sacrifice that is so central to his commentary. But this kind of move arguably flows from his core assumption that the entire narrative is typological of the whole Christ, body and head, whose various sufferings cohere in ‘the grace of the Economy in his Flesh’.Footnote 86 If modern exegetes struggle with the seeming looseness of connection between Gregory's exposition and the text, we should also note how in this way the focus on Christ and his body, the reality of which the text speaks, unifies and gives immediate relevance to every detail for the church throughout time.
