St. Gregory of Nazianzus - The Doctors of the Church with Dr. Matthew Bunson

Born: 329 AD
Died: January 1, 390 AD
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From Vatican.va, an excerpt from the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI General Audience 2007:
It was because of these orations that Gregory acquired the nickname: “The Theologian”.
This is what he is called in the Orthodox Church: the “Theologian”. And this is because to his way of thinking theology was not merely human reflection or even less, only a fruit of complicated speculation, but rather sprang from a life of prayer and holiness, from a persevering dialogue with God. And in this very way he causes the reality of God, the mystery of the Trinity, to appear to our reason.
In the silence of contemplation, interspersed with wonder at the marvels of the mystery revealed, his soul was engrossed in beauty and divine glory.
While Gregory was taking part in the Second Ecumenical Council in 381, he was elected Bishop of Constantinople and presided over the Council; but he was challenged straightaway by strong opposition, to the point that the situation became untenable. These hostilities must have been unbearable to such a sensitive soul.
What Gregory had previously lamented with heartfelt words was repeated: “We have divided Christ, we who so loved God and Christ! We have lied to one another because of the Truth, we have harboured sentiments of hatred because of Love, we are separated from one another” (Orationes 6: 3; SC 405: 128).
Thus, in a tense atmosphere, the time came for him to resign.
In the packed cathedral, Gregory delivered a farewell discourse of great effectiveness and dignity (cf. Orationes 42; SC 384: 48-114). He ended his heartrending speech with these words: “Farewell, great city, beloved by Christ…. My children, I beg you, jealously guard the deposit [of faith] that has been entrusted to you (cf. I Tm 6: 20), remember my suffering (cf. Col 4: 18). May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all” (cf. Orationes 42: 27; SC 384: 112-114).
Gregory returned to Nazianzus and for about two years devoted himself to the pastoral care of this Christian community. He then withdrew definitively to solitude in nearby Arianzo, his birthplace, and dedicated himself to studies and the ascetic life.
It was in this period that he wrote the majority of his poetic works and especially his autobiography: the De Vita Sua, a reinterpretation in verse of his own human and spiritual journey, an exemplary journey of a suffering Christian, of a man of profound interiority in a world full of conflicts.
He is a man who makes us aware of God’s primacy, hence, also speaks to us, to this world of ours: without God, man loses his grandeur; without God, there is no true humanism.
Consequently, let us too listen to this voice and seek to know God’s Face.
In one of his poems he wrote, addressing himself to God: “May you be benevolent, You, the hereafter of all things” (Carmina [dogmatica] 1: 1, 29; PG 37: 508).
And in 390, God welcomed into his arms this faithful servant who had defended him in his writings with keen intelligence and had praised him in his poetry with such great love.
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[@n1ch0la5p]

To be fair to Saint Gregory the Theologian, the name theologian was not attributed to him because he "studied" God, but because God revealed Himself in him, and he professed God who was revealed in Him. The first one who was named "theologian" was John the Evangelist, and he hardly had the education and intellectual acumen to develop any form of systematic approach to theology. He was named theologian for one reason: his love for Christ allowed him to approach and express the mystery of incarnation of Christ as the Son and Logos of God. This does not mean that Peter or Paul or any of the other apostles were any less theologians than he. Following Holy Pentecost, and following that revelation to Paul on his way to Damascus, all were true theologians. John however differed because he expressed this common experience of revelation as the Son and Logos of God, Logos being more than Word, but also the raison d'être and principle of all Creation. The other evangelists and apostles knew Christ as the Son of God, and the Creator and the one Adam conversed with in Eden, but had never before expressed him in human terms as Logos.
For the Church, Theology is not an academic exercise, and God cannot be fathomed or studied, since He exceeds human experience, and there are no paradigms that can be used to either imagine or express him. Gregory corrects Plato and writes, that some philosophers say that to conceive God is difficult, express him impossible, but according to him, contrarily, he says to express God is impossible, and to conceive Him even more impossible." (« Θεόν νοήσαι μεν χαλεπόν· φράσαι δε αδύνατον», ... Εγώ αντιθέτως λέγω· «φράσαι με αδύνατον, νοήσαι δε αδυνατότερον»). Therefore, God cannot be conceived by the human mind, and cannot be an object of study or scholarship. Not only God himself, in His being is unknowable, but even His very revelation to His creation, actualized (energeia) in His energies are also inconceivable. This is why the metaphysics of "proving" the existence of God was by a large a gross human misunderstanding. Today, no serious scientific mind accepts the art of metaphysics and its realm of immutables, nor Plato's realm of pre-existing ideas. All of this has been debunked by modern science, and as a result, all of theology produced in the Middle Ages collapsed along with it. So, the Fathers, who had essentially studied Greek philosophy under the best teachers of their times and rejected it as speculation. Some noted that the ancient philosophers were the inspiration of all heretics (ex. Eunomius, Apollinarius, etc.). They knew these systems thoroughly, and understood that biblical theology, revelation and anthropology were different from philosophical counterparts. For this reason, the use of philosophy as a gnosiological/epistemological method for Christian theology eclipsed for almost one millennium. Philosophy reemerged in the 9th C by men like Photius of Constantinople to be studied as a mode of intellectual development and a path towards developing the human mind and language. Never was philosophy or scholasticism considered as a method for the "development" of Christian theology. This was the understanding that glued together all of Christendom until at most the end of the 11th C.

[@frankdsouza2425]

What a marvellously learned and informative comment. Thank you, Nicholas. Frank