By Alex Fogleman
I’ve been wanting for some time to take a closer look at Gregory of Nyssa’s important but dense little treatise, usually known as The Great Catechetical Oration (although it goes by many other names, too). It is often regarded as a systematic theology, but it is better perhaps to see it as a kind of “handbook” for catechesis—a manual for other catechists and teachers that provides guidelines for refuting various arguments or errors people bring to the faith. It is not, as several scholars have noted (Raymond Winling, BDGN, 546; Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Doctrinal Works, 235), an example of a particular address to catechumens. Rather, it is a handbook for other catechists, which outlines various positions that catechumens may have and the logics by which they can be refuted. “The governing metaphor of the work,” explains Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, “is that of the catechist as therapist, healing errant notions by drawing out salutary beliefs that potential converts already hold” (Doctrinal Works, 235).
While the work itself contains some of Gregory’s most memorable theological articulations (the so-called “ransom theory” of atonement, his variety of universalism), the first line of the treatise in particular is a beautiful call for the importance of catechesis. It’s a somewhat difficult line to translate, so I’ll include the Greek, followed by several translations. (All of this will become clearer later).
Ὁ τῆς κατηχήσεως λόγος ἀναγκαῖος μέν ἐστι τοῖς προεστηκόσι τοῦ μυστηρίου τῆς εὐσεβείας, ὡς ἂν πληθύνοιτο τῇ προσθήκῃ τῶν σωζομένων ἡ ἐκκλεσία, τοῦ κατὰ τὴν διδαχὴν πιστοῦ λόγου τῇ ἀκῇ τῶν ἀπίστων προσαγομένου
The NPNF translation (1893), goes like this:
The presiding ministers of the “mystery of godliness” (1 Tim. 3:16) have need of a system in their instructions, in order that the Church may be replenished by the accession of such as should be saved (cf. Acts 2:47), through the teaching of the word of Faith being brought home to the hearing of unbelievers. (NPNF II/5:473)
Another early translation, by James Herbert Srawley (SPCK, 1917) has this:
Catechetical teaching is necessary for the minister of of the “mystery of godliness,” that the Church may be increased by the addition of those who are being saved, while the “word of faith in accordance with the teaching” (Tit. 1:9) is brought within reach of the hearing of unbelievers. (Srawley, 23)
The translation I’ve most used, by Cyril Richardson in the Library of Christian Classics volume (1954), is similar to Srawley’s:
Religious instruction is an essential duty of the leaders “of the mystery of our religion.” By it the Church is enlarged through the addition of those who are saved, while “the sure word which accords with the [traditional] teaching” comes within the hearing of unbelievers. (Richardson, Christology of the Later Fathers, 268)
Finally, a new translation, by Ignatius Green in St. Vladimir Press’s Popular Patristics Series (a great volume, which includes the English and Greek text), goes like this:
The discourse of catechesis is necessary for those who preside over the “mystery of piety” (1 Tim. 3:16) so that the Church may be increased by the “addition of those being saved” (cf. Acts 2:47), while the “word of faith in accordance with teaching” (Tit. 1:9) is brought to the hearing of unbelievers. (Green, 60)
Once again, I thought of this line as a resounding call for pastors and church leaders to take up the task of catechesis, but I didn’t know if there was much more to it than that.
I was delighted and surprised, then, to come across a rich explication of this opening line in Graham Ward’s recent book, How the Light Gets In (OUP, 2016), the first of a proposed multi-volume work he’s calling an “Engaged Systematics.” In the first few pages, he talks about how credal language shapes our approach to the practice of theology. A certain kind of pedagogy, he says, is conditioned by the church’s dogmatic and liturgical formulations. There is a mode of learning, in other words, that befits the kinds of things Christians proclaim and live through their embeddedness within ecclesial life. The form ought to cohere with the function and content. Moreover, the church invented new genres and forms in order to better match what she taught.
[I]t is . . . important to plot how the Church learnt and continues to learn its language, how it systematized what it learnt and generated new literary genres for the transmission of that learning. Learning, as will become increasingly apparent, is at the very core of this project [Ward’s “engaged systematics”]; a pedagogy lies in the very performance of its discursive practice as it lies also at the very core of a theology’s liturgical practice.
Ward then turns to Gregory’s opening remarks in the Great Catechetical Oration, focusing on the Greek word ἀναγκαῖος (anagkaios), meaning “necessary,” used to modify the the word λόγος (logos), variously translated as “system,” “teaching,” “instruction,” or “discourse” in the translations above. In contrast to the four translations above, he does not think “necessary” (or “essential duty,” in Richardson’s translation) primarily refers to the ministers, or the “presiders over the mystery of piety”). Rather, he supposes, the word “necessary” applies to the word Logos itself. The Logos, he concludes, has a “constraining” effect upon the teaching of catechesis.
It’s a somewhat dense discussion of Greek words and declensions, which is why I included the Greek text and a few translations above. But if you can bear with it, the point he is making is illuminating. I’ll quote it in full:
The ‘Prologue’ to Gregory of Nyssa’s ‘Great Catechetical Oration’ is instructive. He is addressing those teaching the faith to candidates seeking admission to the Church, to those he calls the ‘presiding ministers [proestēkosi] of the mystery of godliness [mustērou tēs eusebeias]’. And he tells them that they ‘have need of a system [logos anagkaios] in their instructions in order that the Church may be replenished by the accession of such as should be saved [an plēthunoito tē prosthēkē tōn sōdzomenōn ē ekklēsia].’ This frequently cited translation [the NPNF] is clumsy, especially the ‘replenished by the accession’ when the Greek is simply ‘the church of those being saved by the assistance’ of the proestēkosi—those who have a ministerial care ‘through the teaching of the word of the Faith [pistou logou] being brought home to the hearing of unbelievers [apistōn]’. But what is interesting is that they translate ‘logos’ (the subject of the sentence) as ‘system’. The anagkaios is a characteristic of the logos. So it is not the ‘presiding ministers’ who ‘have need of’, as the translation here suggests. Rather, it is the logos that ‘constrains’ or ‘compels’ and in that sense is ‘necessary’. The catechesis [katēchēseōs] in the opening clause of the original Greek text is a genitive belonging to the compelling nature of the Logos itself.
So what does all this mean? Fundamentally, that the ‘system’ is not an abstract set of propositions set out by the ministers who preside and to which allegiance is given by those taught. It is, first of all, intrinsic to the word itself as the Logos; the word of faith that teaches. The system is the constraining and necessary logic of the Logos. It is co-relative to both a social and institutional practice (teaching) and an operation (being saved). It is implicated in ‘the mystery of godliness’ or the hidden working of piety. Its aim is salvation through conversion. And it is a teaching belonging to the ‘word of faith’, the Logos who is believed in—Christ who is the way, the truth and the life of that faith.
The kind of teaching that catechesis is, in other words, is ordered to the kind of reality that Jesus Christ is. There is a “logic of the Logos” and a “mystery of piety” that invite careful reflection and attention. As we attend to who Christ is, the means of our catechizing emerges as products of this kind of sustained Christological attention—both from whence it originates and to what it aims. The Logos is not just abstract but the Word of the Father, made manifest in the power of the Spirit.
The ‘system’ is a pedagogy issuing from Christ as the Logos for the divine sanctification of those who accept it. The basis for there being a ‘system’ at all, for Gregory, is explained in Chapter 1 of the same ‘Catechism’: God has His Logos. The logic of the system is then the necessary or compelling effect of the Logos abiding in and as the trinitarian God. The logic is Christological through and through and pneumatological in its operation. It is does not stand as an independent set of connected human prescriptions. It is engaged in a dynamic. If the faith taught is the faith ‘of the Logos’ then the Logos must be revealed in and through the logic of the system. Furthermore, it is from this constraining logic that a ‘method of instruction [tēs didaskalias tropos]’ issues, which Gregory goes on to suggest needs to be adapted to catechumens with different religious backgrounds (Jews, Greeks, Manichees, Gnostics, etc.). The ‘system’ isn’t a system then in the way we have come to use and understand that term. It is flexible and adaptive. (How the Light Gets In, 6-7)
Ward’s argument in this passage, then, is not simply that catechesis is a necessary practice for the “presiders over the mystery of faith.” It’s not something they simply need to do because that’s what good pastors do. Rather, there is something inherent in the logic (the logos) of the Triune God that compels or invites the revelatory explication of and sanctifying participation in the Word. The Word—as the Word of the Father, going out from the person of the Father in his own hypostatic person, while remaining of the same substantial essence—is the necessitating condition of all catechesis.
And what is more, it is not only the activity of the Word going forth from the Father, as Ward explains, but it is also and just as importantly the salvific and sanctifying appropriation of this Word in the lives of believers through the Holy Spirit that makes this mode of teaching fully trinitarian. Ward’s stress here is that theological pedagogy is a dynamic activity of salvation rather than an abstract set of propositions. The teaching is not simply for the sake of teaching, in other words, but is uniquely tied to the enlargement or expansion (πληθύνοιτο) of the church by the “addition of those being saved” (τῇ προσθήκῃ τῶν σωζομένων)—and this is fundamentally an operation of the Holy Spirit. The constraint or necessity of the Word results in a “mode of teaching,” finally, that operates in the dynamic interplay of the salvation occurring within the church. The church’s mode of teaching in catechesis is an extension and participation in the unfolding of the “mystery of piety.”
“The ‘system’ is not an abstract set of propositions set out by the ministers who preside and to which allegiance is given by those taught. It is, first of all, intrinsic to the word itself as the Logos; the word of faith that teaches. The system is the constraining and necessary logic of the Logos. It is co-relative to both a social and institutional practice (teaching) and an operation (being saved). It is implicated in ‘the mystery of godliness’ or the hidden working of piety. Its aim is salvation through conversion. ”