A Re-evaluation of Marriage, Celibacy, and Irony in Gregory of Nyssa's On Virginity

Karras, Valerie A.
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 111-121 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/earl.2005.0009

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A Re-evaluation of Marriage, Celibacy, and Irony in Gregory of Nyssas On Virginity*

VALERIE A. KARRAS
In a 1992 article, Gregory of Nyssas Ironic Praise of the Celibate Life, Mark Hart challenges the traditional view that Gregorys treatise On Virginity is a straightforward paean of virginity that emphasizes the virtues and benets of the single life in part by pointing out the pitfalls and disadvantages of marriage.1 Noting apparent internal contradictions in some of the Cappadocians arguments, Hart, both in this article and in an earlier one,2 re-interprets On Virginity as an example of rhetorical irony. He believes that Gregorys purpose was not, in fact, to encourage people to join the celibate communities being organized by his brother Basil.3 Rather, Hart argues that, far from denigrating marriage and considering it vastly inferior to celibacy, Gregorys deliberate exaggeration of the pains and problems of marital and family life served a deeper end, namely, to extol the superiority of marriage through a nontraditional understanding of its virtues. Harts work is important in focusing attention on the treatises positive aspects of marriage, particularly its nontraditional virtues. Closer examination of the

* The author is grateful to Brett Huebner for his research and proofreading assistance, and to the two anonymous JECS reviewers for their very helpful comments. 1. Mark D. Hart, Gregory of Nyssas Ironic Praise of the Celibate Life, Heythrop Journal 33 (1992): 119. For the critical text of Gregorys On Virginity, see Michel Aubineau, ed. and trans., Trait de la virginit, SC 119 (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 1966); for an English translation, see Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, FC 58 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1967). Secondary works on this treatise include Michel Barnes, The Burden of Marriage and Other Notes on Gregory of Nyssas On Virginity, SP 37.2 (2001): 1219; Jean Danilou, Le mariage de Grgoire de Nysse et la chronologie de sa vie, REAug 2 (1956): 7178; and J. Gribomont, Le pangyrique de la virginit: Oeuvre de jeunesse de Grgoire de Nysse, RAM 43 (1967): 24966. 2. Mark D. Hart, Reconciliation of Body and Soul: Gregory of Nyssas Deeper Theology of Marriage, TS 51 (1990): 45078. 3. Hart, Ironic Praise, 2.
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text itself, however, reveals that his argument that Gregory is using irony in his criticisms of marital life has little foundation. Irony (to say one thing while implying its opposite) is associated far more with oratorical works than with speculative theological treatises, and its use by someone versed in rhetoric should be identiable, consistent, and contained.4 Thus, an ironic statement would not be followed by one or more entire chapters providing extensive nonironic support for the statement, which, as ironic, is not supposed to be true.5 In fact, Harts rationale for when Gregory is using irony seems to be based largely on a commitment to sustaining his thesis that Nyssen must really be extolling marriage rather than on an impartial application throughout the work of a set of norms for discerning irony. Thus, Hart has inconsistently interpreted the Cappadocians criticisms of marital life as ironic, while simultaneously taking at face value his criticisms of celibate life. In reality, Gregorys treatment of marriage is part of a larger framework, of which Hart has grasped the marital aspect without recognizing its position within the broader whole. On Virginity deconstructs both the traditional late antique virtues attached to marriage6 (companionship and procreation) and what Nyssen considers to be the misconceptions attached to Christian virginity (i.e., that the virgins removal from concerns for family and worldly life automatically makes him or her impervious to spiritual passions such as pride and envy). Moreover, Gregory then reconstructs both marriageas the context for a virtuous life of service (leitourgia)7and virginity, through the encomium to Basils seless, service-oriented celibacy, which Gregory still favors over even a properly oriented marriage. In other words, the bishop of Nyssa creates a hierarchy of lifestyles, with a properly oriented virginity accorded highest place and properly oriented marriage a close second. The unifying thread between the two reconstructed lifestyles is an ethical spirituality that allows for the exercise of true virtue in noninstinctual, passionless activity for God and others that duplicates the pure act of Trinitarian love.8

4. A perfect example occurs in an oration Gregory of Nazianzus delivered on his departure from Constantinople. He ironically apologized to the capitals populace for not leading the lavish, proigate lifestyle they apparently thought more suitable for him than the sober, Christian one he preferred (Or. 42.24 [PG 36:488]). See Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gregory of Nazianzus: Rhetor and Philosopher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 82. 5. Irony normally varies in length from a sentence to a paragraph. Examples of irony in the Apostle Paul may be seen in R. Dean Anderson, Jr., Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Paul, rev. ed. (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 152 and 172. 6. For a discussion of how both marriage and virginity were viewed in late antiquity, see Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 7. Gr. Nyss. virg. 7.3.5 (SC 119:356; Callahan, FC 58, 53). Callahan translates leitourgia as duty (cf. Aubineaus charge in the French translation [SC 119] and his citations in n. 6). 8. Noninstinctual and passionless should be understood as contrasts to the instincts and passions of our current biological existence. However, Gregory recog-

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In his article on ironic praise, Hart points out four major inconsistencies or difculties in On Virginity that he proposes may be resolved through recognition of Gregorys use of rhetorical irony: (1) an exaggeration in chapter 3 of the hardships and sufferings within marriage; (2) the assertion in chapter 4 that marriage is the origin of vice; (3) what Hart considers an illogical argument in chapter 14 that we overcome death by ending procreation; and (4) the inconsistency of the general point of the treatisenamely, an exhortation to the monastic lifewith Gregorys assertion in chapters 8 and 9 that spiritual contemplation can exist within a marital lifestyle. Irony, however, is not the only solution to these difculties. For instance, Peter Brown places Gregorys stress on the hardships and sufferings within marriage within the broader context of his obsession with the temporary nature of our current existence and its ultimate futility in light of the grave.9 Disputing Michel Aubineaus assertion that the Cappadocians extensive description of the pains of losing ones spouse or child is mere sophistic rhetorical ourish, Michel Barnes provides an alternative rationale, demonstrating not only that Gregorys themes of the distractions and sorrows of marriage are consonant with the philosophical writings of Stoics such as Epictetus but also that they are mirrored in Ambroses Concerning Virgins.10 Moreover, the length of chapter 3 is compelling in itself and argues against a mechanical display of rhetoric. Although On Virginity comprises a total of twenty-three chapters plus an introduction, chapter 3 alone accounts for over ten percent of the entire treatise. Such length is probably indicative of personal experience rather than rhetorical exaggeration, as Barnes suggests.11 That Gregory himself was married is still disputed12 but seems likely given his wistful
nizes passionate love for God as truly instinctive since it lies at the heart of human nature, which is created in the image of God (Gen 1.2627; see below), seeking union with its prototype. 9. Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 29798. 10. Barnes, Burden of Marriage, 1419. He observes that an argument that the treatise is an ironic send-up of the practice of celibacy . . . can only be credible to the extent that one imagines Gregorys argument to be his own constructionwhich it is not (ibid., 17 n. 18). 11. Barnes, Burden of Marriage, 1617, notes that by comparison the recitations of the problems and pains of marriage in both Ambrose and the Stoic Epictetus are only a couple of paragraphs in length. Thus, he observes that Gregorys discourse on the sorrows of marriage is seemingly developed from the experience of married life (ibid., 13). 12. Most scholars, however, do believe Nyssa to have been married. In addition to Danilou, Mariage de Grgoire, see Aubineau, SC 119:6576; Barnes, Burden of Marriage, 13 n. 7; Brown, Body and Society, 292; and Anthony Meredith, The Cappadocians (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1995), 52.

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lament at the beginning of chapter 3 that virginity is a choice no longer open to him because of the life that he had previously taken up.13 The argument that the bishop of Nyssa wrote from personal experience is also strengthened by his focus on the emotional pain of married life (unlike Epictetus and Ambrose), with comparatively less attention to its distractions,14 and by his composition of an entire treatise on the death of infants.15 In addition, the modern reader must cautiously avoid anachronistic views that fail to appreciate fully the likelihood of the death of mother and/or newborn in childbirth, or the death of young children. Mortality rates in the ancient world were far higher than today, especially for children; moreover, young adult womens life expectancy was lower than mens precisely because of the common danger of death in childbirth.16 Thus, against Aubineau and Hart, neither Gregorys arguments against marriage nor the length of his diatribe against it is necessarily an example of rhetorical irony. Rather, Greek Stoic philosophical inuences, the realities of high mortality rates for women of childbearing age and for children in late antiquity, and the possibility of Gregorys writing from his own painful experience would well account for the energy he devotes to this issue. Irrespective of whether or not Gregory lost a wife and child, chapter 3 shows an extraordinary degree of pastoral sensitivity and even empathy with the deep pain caused by such loss. As Hart notes when discussing generally the theme of companionship in marriage: What [Gregory] portrays in chapter 3 is a particular experience of married life that inevitably occurs to the extent that one seeks in married life gratifying symbiosis. In that respect his account of marriage is no rhetorical exaggeration but an account that is all too true.17 In

13. According to Barnes, Burden of Marriage, 13 n. 7, Virginia Burrus opines that Nyssas lament is rhetorical, i.e., that the virtue which is the subject of his praise is beyond his capabilities rather than physically impossible because he is no longer a virgin. While it is true that the phrase nun d could simply be a grammatical trope for contrasting the hypothetical with the actual (Aubineau, SC 119:273 n. 5), it is difcult to understand as anything but a statement of personal fact Gregorys declaration in the following sentence: Makrioi d ow n jous& tn beltinvn stn aresiw, ka ok peteixsyhsan t koin prolhfyntew b, kayper mew on tini xsmati prw t tw paryenaw kaxhma dieirgmeya, prw n ok stin panelyen ti tn paj t kosmik b t xnow naperesanta (SC 119:274). (Blessed are they who have the power to choose the better things and those who are not cut off from them by having chosen the common life previously, so that we are kept as if by an abyss from the boast of virginity to which one cannot return once he has set his foot upon the path of the worldly life [Callahan, FC 58, 12].) Note his use of (1) the rst person plural, (2) the aorist participle for prolambnv, and (3) the adverb paj. 14. Barnes, Burden of Marriage, 17. 15. Gr. Nys. infant. (Gregorii Nysseni Opera, vol. 3.2, ed. Werner Jaeger [Leiden: Brill, 1987]), 6797. 16. See, e.g., Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 8485. 17. Hart, Reconciliation, 456.

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fact, probably the only real rhetorical barb in the chapter is in the Cappadocian fathers wry and all-too-accurate observation that after a spouses death, [t]he house is invaded by relatives as if by the enemy.18 Gregorys purpose in this chapter is thus to deconstruct two of the fundamental virtues of marriage namely, companionship and childrenin the eyes of late antique society. By focusing on the loss of both, he demonstrates that their ephemeral nature makes them inherently incapable of providing lasting happiness. Gregory follows chapter 3s realistic summary of the emotional traumas inherent in marriage and parenthood with chapter 4, in which he uses the term marriage as code for worldly concerns and vices. Near the beginning of the chapter, for instance, the bishop of Nyssa proclaims that the person who perceives the deceitfulness of this life . . . and refrains from marriage during his whole life has no share in human evils, I mean in greed, envy, anger, hatred, the desire for empty fame, and all such things.19 Obviously, this statement is not to be taken at face value since celibacy is no guarantee of freedom from any of these vicesas Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, the desert fathers, and a whole host of other ascetics have made clear. But Gregorys hyperbolic assertion may be understood in a symbolic rather than an ironic sense. As Hart himself notes, the key to chapter 4 is that Gregory is using the terms marriage and virginity as metaphors for attachment and nonattachment, respectively, to earthly things and concerns.20 The Cappadocian father perceptively observes that possessing virtue, unlike owning property and other commonplaces of worldly life, is not a zerosum equation: For the possession of virtue, even if all men share in it, each according to his own ability, is always sufcient for those who desire it.21 This chapter, then, marks an important development in Gregorys argument. His theory of attachment and nonattachment is closely linked to his understanding of virtue, as seen in his theological treatises as well as his ascetic works. Virtue is a free activity. Therefore, any action that either is constrained by circumstances or is instinctual in terms of humanitys animalistic, passionate nature is not virtuous.22 Gregory here presents his case for an anagogic lifestyle, a mode of living that will consistently draw a person toward God. The opposite of this is a lifestyle rooted in the cares and troublesthe attachmentsof this world, which distract the mind and soul and thus draw a person away from contemplation of God and toward the baser passions that feed off of this worldly life (i.e., the greed, envy, etc., that the Cappadocian enumerates). Traditional late antique marriage thus becomes a shorthand for expressing an entire worldly oriented and death-avoiding lifestyle concerned not only with careers, property, clothes, and jewels but also with the continuation of the family line through children, the dynastic connections to be made through ones childrens marriages,

18. Gr. Nyss. virg. 3.5.1417 (SC 119:286; Callahan, FC 58, 16). 19. Gr. Nyss. virg. 4.1.917 (SC 119:302; Callahan, FC 58, 2021). 20. Hart, Ironic Praise, 10; and idem, Reconciliation, 458. 21. Gr. Nyss. virg. 4.1.2527 (SC 119:304; Callahan, FC 58, 21). 22. Gr. Nyss. virg. 7.2 (SC 119:35256). Cf., for example, Gr. Nyss. hom. opif. 16 (PG 44:184b).

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and all the other shallow and ultimately futile attempts to cheat the implacable grave.23 Gregory continues expounding on the virtues of nonattachment in chapters 5 and 6, then returns specically to consideration of marriage in chapters 7 and 8. First, in chapter 7, he distinguishes himself from extremists who denounce marriage per se, explaining that its obvious goods are so evident and enticing that a recital of them is unnecessary and counterproductive. Then, in chapter 8, we see him drawing the logical conclusion of his argument in chapter 4 that distractions and passionswhich he has summed up as marriageare the core problem. Therefore, he contends in chapter 8, If it is possible, one should neither remain aloof from the more divine desires, nor should one reject the idea of marriage.24 Gregory then illustrates his understanding of moderation, which he already introduced in the previous chapter, with the analogy of a farmer who skillfully directs water from a stream into a small channel for irrigation and contrasts this with a less skillful farmer who is unable to control the water and thus destroys his eld. Hart correctly notes that the Cappadocian bishop, equating the skillful farmer with the married person who correctly balances her responsibilities with attention to God, makes the married person superior to the weak virgin, who like the unskillful farmer is better off not even trying to channel the water at all since he will be unable to control it properly.25 In chapter 9 as well, Gregory deates monastic egos when he dryly opines that it is advantageous for the very weak to ee for refuge to virginity as to a safe fortress.26 Thus far Gregory of Nyssa has ranked three levels of lifestyle. At the bottom is the traditional marital life, consumed with the concerns of society and susceptible to the lower passions. Barely above that comes the virginal life chosen because of the persons acknowledgment that he or she is unable to control these passions and thus must not be exposed to passionate situations at all. Much higher than weak virginity is the marital life that is balanced and virtuous, a deconstructed marriage in terms of the values of late antique society (and of our own). Nevertheless marriage, even in its deconstructed and reconstituted state, is not at the apex of this pyramid. In chapters 4 and 8 Gregory of Nyssa warns of the sheer difculty in balancing God and family life. The difculties are twofold: on the one hand, marriage can lead to distraction and vulnerability to such vices

23. See, e.g., Brown, Body and Society, 301: It was by the accumulation of wealth, by the retaining of power, above all, by marriage and the search for direct and palpable continuity in the form of sons and daughters, with all the social arrangements which dynastic continuity implied for members of the upper classes, that human beings sought to remedy the discontinuities inicted on them by death. As a result, Gregorys thought tended to glance off the individual body into the extended body of a human society forever braced against death. 24. Gr. Nyss. virg. 8.1.35 (SC 119:358; Callahan, FC 58, 33). 25. Hart, Ironic Praise, 4. In this regard, Nyssa follows the line of reasoning of Clement of Alexandria. See Brown, Body and Society, 12937. 26. Gr. Nyss. virg. 9.2.13 (SC 119:366; Callahan, FC 58, 35).

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as greed and vanity; on the other hand, it requires necessary compromises that make it difcult to attain the goal of a single-minded focus on God (an argument also used by the Stoics).27 Thus, there is a fourth and highest level in this hierarchy of lifestyles: the virginal life entered into not from fear of lack of selfcontrol but because of a single-minded orientation toward an eschatological life in God. It is this eschatological focus that provides the logical structure for the seemingly illogical argument in chapter 14 that death is overcome by ending procreation. Gregory segues into this in chapters 11 and 12, which discuss the difculty in recognizing true beauty (kallos) and hence the need for nonattachment and self-purication in order to perceive this divine beauty, particularly within oneself. In this context the Cappadocian fatheras he does also in his treatise On the Creation of the Human Being 28bases his concept of puried, ontological human nature on prelapsarian anthropology, specically on the imago Dei of Gen 1.2627, excluding from the image of God the passions as a restraint on true freedom: For this reason, even in the exercise of choice, man is like the One who has power over all things, being enslaved by necessity to none of the things outside of himself, and he acts according to his own judgment of what seems best to him.29 The Fall has created a condition in which the image is intact but obscured by the lth of the cares and pleasures of life, and our task is the restoration to the original state of the divine image which is now covered by the lth of the esh.30 Signicantly, for Gregory the return to our prelapsarian state is not a regression to our primordial state but a progression beyond it toward our eschatological state. This connection, but not tautology, between humanitys prelapsarian and eschatological modes of existenceas well as the connection between marriage and humanitys postlapsarian conditionappears in most Greek Christian writers in late antiquity (in fact, what would be curious and beg a cogent explanation would be how and why Gregory of Nyssa differed from the broad spectrum of Greek patristic thought in this area).31 Both the prelapsarian and the

27. Barnes, Burden of Marriage, 1517. 28. Gr. Nyss. hom. opif. 16 (PG 44:17786). 29. Gr. Nyss. virg. 12.2.1217 (SC 119:402; Callahan, FC 58, 43). Against the general scholarly consensus that Nyssas theological anthropology is rooted in the imago Dei to the exclusion of sexuality as an ontologically signicant aspect of prelapsarian/eschatological human nature is John Behr, The Rational Animal: A Rereading of Gregory of Nyssas De hominis opicio, JECS 7 (1999): 21947. Behrs argument is unconvincing, however, since he frequently conates Gregorys discussions of the attributes of human nature in its prelapsarian, postlapsarian, and eschatological stages. See Valerie A. Karras, Sex/Gender in Gregory of Nyssas Eschatology: Irrelevant or Non-Existent? SP 38 (forthcoming 2005). 30. Gr. Nyss. virg. 12.4.23 (SC 119:416; Callahan, FC 58, 45). 31. For more on the connection between prelapsarian and eschatological anthropology in Greek patristic thought, including but not exclusive to Gregory of Nyssa, see, e.g., Verna Harrison, Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology, JTS, n.s., 41

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eschatological states are characterized by a nonbiological mode of existence, that is, by a mode of embodiment that is material but entails neither such aspects of humanitys current biological existence as the need for food, sleep, and sex nor the inevitability of sickness, decay, and death.32 It is for this reason that in chapter 13 Gregory advocates avoidance of marriage as the rst step in this return to paradise, since marriage was the rst step taken after the expulsion from paradise into this mortal, passionate, biological life. Note that Nyssen does not make marriage, sex, or the passions generally the cause of the Fall; likewise, Hart is correct in noting that the church father sees nothing intrinsically evil in sex and marriage in our postlapsarian state. In fact, Gregory considers them to be what might be considered ongoing therapy for a chronic condition, that is, they are aspects of the garments of skin bestowed by God on Adam and Eve so that humanity might survive in some way despite breaking its communion with the one who is the source of life.33 For Gregory, however, as Christians we are called not merely to continue to survive biologically but truly to live and grow spiritually. This requires a return to the original mode of existence, and ultimately, as is clear in chapter 10 of On the Soul and the Resurrection,34 a progression even beyond that. Because marriage, with its sexual and procreational core, is part and parcel of our biological mode of existence, Gregory argues in the last half of chapter 13 and in chapter 14 that virginity overcomes death. His argument has an internal logic based on his distinction between our current postlapsarian, biological mode of existence, embedded with corruption and death, and the nonbiological, eschatological existence to which we are called. The Cappadocian rightly recognizes that we can never overcome death as long as we are tied to our current mode of existence; procreation may ensure the continuation of the human species

(1990): 44171; Valerie A. Karras, Theological Anthropology and Sexual Differentiation, ch. 1 in The Liturgical Participation of Women in the Byzantine Church (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2002); Panayiotis Nellas, Deication in Christ, trans. Norman Russell (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1987), passim, but esp. 173ff; Teresa Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 181219; and Ton H. C. Van Eijk, Marriage and Virginity, Death and Immortality, Epektasis: Mlanges patristiques offerts au Cardinal Jean Danilou (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), 22035. The author is grateful to one of the anonymous JECS reviewers for noting the signicance of this theme. 32. It is appropriate to underscore at this point that Gregory believed that the eschatological body, although nonbiological and light, would still be material and participate in physical creation. Because the virgin does not participate in the procreative biological function, he/she is closer on a physical level to the angelic life of the eschaton than is the married person; but of course Gregorys argument in this treatise, as Hart has rightly pointed out, is that a life that is angelic only in terms of physical celibacy is not enough. 33. Nellas, Deication in Christ, 4391, esp. 7185. 34. Gr. Nyss. anim. et res. (PG 46:145b160c).

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for a time, but it does nothing for the individual person, nor is there any guarantee that it will preserve humanity indenitely. The only true solution, he argues, is transcending the frustrating circularity of biological existence through a spiritual mode of being and even through a spiritual procreation of virtues. As Gregory remarks near the end of chapter 13, [E]veryone knows that the function of bodily union is the creation of mortal bodies, but that life and incorruptibility are born, instead of children, to those who are united in their participation in the Spirit.35 This distinction of anthropological stages of existence also explains Gregorys argument later, in chapter 20, that although two kinds of marriage are possible, the one accomplished through the esh and the other through the spirit, a desire for the one necessitates the exclusion of the other.36 Physical marriage for the Cappadocian father inevitably entails a commitment to postlapsarian human existence and consequently excludes a truly eschatological lifestyle. Conversely, the true virginwho lives eschatologicallycannot be drawn down by worldly cares and concerns without regressing to a postlapsarian mode of existence. Having set out his argument in chapters 13 and 14 for virginity as a necessary rst step backward/forward toward a prelapsarian/eschatological life, Gregory of Nyssa then proceeds in the succeeding chapters to describe the true virgin, that is, to give substance to the virginal life. It is important to note that in this description of the content of the truly virginal life Gregory includes abstention from marriage, while at the same time arguing that physical virginity alone does not sufce: Achieving it is not as simple as one might think, nor is it conned to the body; it pertains to all things and extends even to thought which is considered one of the achievements of the soul.37 The key for Gregory is freedom from all passions, both physical and emotional. Thus, physical virginity begins to deal with the rst level of passions but is nowhere near sufcient to counteract the full range of physical and especially emotional passions. Hence, he criticizes physical virgins who are not true virgins because they commit adultery spiritually by giving in to envy, malice, slander, and hatred.38 As he explains in chapter 21, reiterating a theme from chapters 16 through 18, the passions are interconnected; therefore, one cannot give in to just one without its having a ripple effect on the others as well. Consequently, in chapter 22 the Cappadocian counsels the exercise of moderate self-control in order neither to give in to physical passions and pleasures nor to

35. Gr. Nyss. virg. 13.3.913 (SC 119:430; Callahan, FC 58, 48). For more on the subject of spiritual procreation in Gregory, see Verna E. F. Harrison, Gender, Generation, and Virginity in Cappadocian Theology, JTS, n.s., 47 (1996): 4546. 36. Gr. Nyss. virg. 20.2.58 (SC 119:494; Callahan, FC 58, 62). 37. Gr. Nyss. virg. 15.1.26 (SC 119:444; Callahan, FC 58, 51). Also see, e.g., virg. 18.5.14 (SC 119:476; Callahan, FC 58, 59): But, again, the argument returns to the original point, that perfect freedom does not consist in this alone, in abstaining from marriage. Let no one think that virginity is so small and cheap that it can be thought of as attainable through a slight control of the esh. 38. Gr. Nyss. virg. 16.1.811 (SC 119:450).

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waste away through self-mortication (excessive fasting was a continuing concern for ascetics39). In his nal chapter Gregory advises those seeking the virginal life to model themselves after someone (commonly assumed to be his eldest brother, Basil of Caesarea) who exemplies this moderation by standing between life and death . . . in those matters in which the life of the esh is esteemed, remaining more idle than the dead, but in those deeds of virtue by which those living in the spirit are known, being alive and energetic and strong. . . .40 Given that Basil apparently requested that Gregory write this treatise41 and that the elder brothers monasticism included considerable service to the community through soup kitchens, hospitals, etc.,42 one may conclude that here the bishop of Nyssa is advising celibates to combine their practice of negative virtues (the elimination of envy, pride, hatred, etc.) with the cultivation of positive virtues such as love and selfsacrice, lived out through their own actions on behalf of others.43 This was also a crucial aspect of Macrinas monasticism, evidenced by the mourning of the exposed-orphans-become-consecrated-virgins for whom she cared.44 That Gregorys nal chapter raises the issue of monastic charitable activity reinforces his paradigm of spiritual contemplation as a necessary precursor to active love, and conversely of active love as the necessary consequence of true spirituality or virginity. It is clear that for Gregory of Nyssa the truly virginal life means not simply physical virginity, nor even detachment from worldly concerns, but an active love for others as well as for God. In other words, he has replaced the instinctive and preferential love of family rooted in biology with the virtuous, freely willed, nonpreferential love of the true virgin toward all of humanity. In conclusion, Gregorys criticisms of marital life are not ironic; they are as real as are his criticisms of mere physical celibacy as an unspiritual and selsh lifestyle. But equally real are the praises he bestows on both modes of life. The secret to understanding Gregorys ambivalence with respect to both virginity and marriage is twofold. First, one must recognize that neither marriage nor virginity is monolithic for the Cappadocian father; On Virginity describes two types of both marriage and virginity, one bad and one good for each. Secondly, the bishop of Nyssa does indeed order these four hierarchically, corresponding to his hierarchy of the severity of physical and emotional passions. Gregory considers the physical passions and the lower emotional passions the easiest to control and least important; therefore, traditional late antique marriage ranks lowest because its emphasis on physicality, companionship, perpetuation of the family line, property and social standing, etc., will never lead toward God. The physical

39. See Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, passim. 40. Gr. Nyss. virg. 23.6.38 (SC 119:544; Callahan, FC 58, 72). 41. Gr. Nyss. virg. 2.3.1517 (SC 119:270). 42. For a discussion of Basils social welfare philosophy and activities, see Philip Rousseau, City and Church, ch. 5 in Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. 13344. 43. See Brown, Body and Society, 3034; and Meredith, Cappadocians, 27. 44. See Gr. Nyss. v. Macr. 26.2934 (SC 178:232).

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virgin (the next rung up the hierarchy) has taken the rst step by controlling one aspect of the physical passions but is not much farther up the ladder toward God than the traditional married person. However, since control of the higher spiritual passions and cultivation of virtue through active love are the most important elements in the spiritual life, the married person who can exercise proper control (channeling the water, to use Gregorys analogy) ranks signicantly above the mere physical virgin. The highest level, however, is the true virgin who lives an eschatological existence in anticipation by combining control of the negative passions with nurture of the positive virtues, exemplied in active love for others. Thus, On Virginity may be read as a subversive restructuring of the traditional foundations of both marriage and virginity. Gregory rst deconstructs late antique assumptions and certain Christian misconceptions of the virtues of marriage and virginity, respectively. He then reconstructs both marriage as a lifestyle that offers the possibility for a virtuous life of service (leitourgia) and virginity as a positive and active mode of life, using his brother Basils serviceoriented monasticism as his model. In other words, by eschewing irony as an interpretive paradigm and instead taking seriously both the extensive criticisms and the nuggets of praise that the Cappadocian father bestows on the two lifestyles, one may discern an ethical, other-oriented basis for Gregory of Nyssas spirituality that transcends the division between virginity and marriage.

Valerie A. Karras has just completed an appointment as research associate at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, University of California, Irvine