Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus and the Conversion of Neocaesarea

Abstract

Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus concludes with a scene describing how the people of Neocaesarea, while crowding together at a festival in the city’s theatre, bring a plague upon themselves by praying to their ancestral god. The prayer uttered by the citizens is itself a text from Isaiah in the Septuagint, and moreover a verse which Gregory of Nyssa expounds in one of his homilies. Gregory’s exegesis of that verse in the homily reveals the significance of the same verse’s appearance in the Life’s conversion narrative. In the Life, Gregory Thaumaturgus stops the plague, and his behavior evokes a subsequent verse from Isaiah with a soteriological meaning of its own. The account of the conversion of Neocaesarea, a scene which has otherwise puzzled commentators, is thus structured so that its people and Gregory Thaumaturgus together dramatize Isaiah’s prophecy of universal salvation as it was understood in Christian exegesis.