Self-Portrait in Three Colors: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Epistolary Autobiography by Bradley L. Storin, and: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter Collection: The Complete Translation by Bradley L. Storin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Self-Portrait in Three Colors: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Epistolary Autobiography by Bradley L. Storin, and: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter Collection: The Complete Translation by Bradley L. Storin Gabrielle Thomas Bradley L. Storin Self-Portrait in Three Colors: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Epistolary Autobiography Christianity in Late Antiquity 6 Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019 Pp. ix + 276. $95.00. Bradley L. Storin Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter Collection: The Complete Translation Christianity in Late Antiquity 7 Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019 Pp. xiii + 234. $95.00 (hardcover) / $34.95 (softcover). For such a central figure in Christian orthodoxy and late antique Christianity it is somewhat surprising that a complete English translation of the letter collection of Gregory of Nazianzus emerged as recently as 2019, especially since Gregory is the earliest known Greek writer to compile his own letter collection, consisting of at least 240 letters (c. 383–84). And yet this collection of translations is the first of its kind. The companion volume provides a sharp account of how to make sense of Gregory’s letters, guided by the central question: “What authorial identity or identities did Gregory craft in his letter collection?” (EA, 99; throughout the review EA designates Self-Portrait in Three Colors: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Epistolary Autobiography and TCT designates Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter Collection: The Complete Translation). Read together, these books provide a carefully argued response to the question of Gregory’s identity(ies). They provide fresh insight into the man also known to theologians, classicists, and scholars of late antique Christianity as “the Theologian,” as well as into the craft of autobiographical letter-writing in late antiquity. Storin’s volumes are the culmination of over a decade of work, presented as an extensive development of earlier doctoral work. The thesis is persuasive: Gregory’s letter collection serves as a carefully crafted autobiography. This argument is grounded alongside hundreds of lines of autobiographical poetry similar in subject matter. Add to this Gregory’s own admission that his great nephew Nicobulus asked for these letters because the young man’s education involved “rhetoric, literature and epistolary composition” (EA, 29). The companion volume is a sophisticated engagement with the literary construction of identity(ies) around three themes or “colors” which blur into one another, presenting a self-portrait of a “man of eloquence” (Chapter Three), a “father of philosophers” (Chapter Four), and a “Basilist” (Chapter Five). These interwoven identities are, as Storin argues, an attempt by Gregory to restore his reputation and authority, somewhat damaged by the events surrounding his departure from his episcopal see in Constantinople in 381. By attending to Gregory’s rhetoric and the role it plays in “defining him with and against broader political, intellectual and ecclesiastical developments” (EA, 25), Storin’s methodology follows the scholarship of Susanna Elm and Neil McLynn, [End Page 662] which has become foundational over the past two decades. Through positioning Gregory alongside figures such as the classical autobiographer Libanius of Antioch who, like Gregory, speaks of stonings by opponents, sea storms, and bouts of illness, this methodology confirms further Elm’s earlier appraisal of Gregory as a man who “fashioned himself a life that embodied and presented authority, even power” (Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012], 9). This is an important corrective to prior presentations of Gregory as one who is “a sensitive man who entered the arena of world affairs” (Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity [London: Routledge, 1950], 609). The companion volume is crafted as carefully as the letter collection, since before exploring Gregory’s three-color portrait of himself, Storin devotes almost a quarter of the book to analyzing “the Architecture of the Letter Collection” (Chapter Two). He demonstrates the deficiency in what has become the standard numbering by exploring the manuscripts which form six families, dating between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. Unlike the standard ordering, which is based upon ambiguous chronology and does not display the original structure of the collection, the manuscripts show little concern for chronology and instead form a coherence...