Douleur et transfiguration. Une lecture du cheminement spirituel de saint Grégoire de

Nazianze [Sorrow and Transfiguration. A Reading of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus’

spiritual way], Philippe Molac, Les Éditions du Cerf, 2006 (ISBN 2-204-08085-3), 467pp.,

pb. €47.00

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Fulford, B. (2009), Douleur et

transfiguration. Une lecture du cheminement spirituel de saint Grégoire de Nazianze [Pain and

Transfiguration. A Reading of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus' Spiritual Way]– By Philippe Molac. Reviews in

Religion & Theology, 16: 307–310. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9418.2008.00424_6.x, which has been published in

final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9418.2008.00424_6.x/abstract. This article

may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-

Archiving."

Philippe Molac asks whether the story of Christ’s Transfiguration functions as the ‘major

referent’ of Gregory’s thought. He answers that Gregory’s anthropology is structured by a

central creative tension of transfiguration and suffering, sourced in Scripture, configured by

Tabor and Golgotha, and unified in Gregory’s experience. The thesis is as appealing as it is

bold, promising to discover in Gregory a theo-dramatic and vividly christocentric account of

being human as the icon of Christ. The substance is no less impressive in the extensity of

Molac’s engagement with Gregory’s works, which opens with the thematic lines of force

traced by key terms in Gregory’s anthropology.

Attention to εἰκών illumines the connection in Gregory between Christ as the Image of God

and archetype for human beings made in God’s image; the disfiguring of the image through

sin; the rescue of the image by the descent of the archetype in Incarnation; and our

participation in his recreated humanity through baptism, through which we are called to a life

of purification through ascesis. Molac thus establishes a christocentric pattern of analysis,

showing how in Gregory the ascetic life is grounded in Christ. On analysis, φύσις (‘nature’)

points up distinctions between God and creatures and within creation as a differentiated

ordered whole in equilibrium, and the saving purpose of the union of natures in Christ, which,

Molac claims, lies at the centre of Gregory’s anthropological cosmology. Examining νοῦς

(‘intellect’) shows the intellect to be the seat of communication between God and human

beings for Gregory, and this explains the significance of Gregory’s claim that Christ assumed

a human intellect in order to heal it, making possible the purification and illumination of the

saints and their contemplative ascent toward divine truth.

Purification involves the tension between spirit (πνεῦμα) and flesh (σάρχ). Molac proposes

we see Gregory distinguishing between intellect as our capacity of reflection and spirit as

what energises our ascent in the Spirit. Gregory’s theology of baptism as illumination, he

claims, brings us back to the Transfiguration: here ‘man is, we may say, a being becoming

transfigured’ (p. 89). We also hope for a final illumination after death, and so the episode of

the Transfiguration, Molac argues, ‘certainly functions as the mystagogic locus of

[Gregory’s] anthropological dynamic’. This claim seems to rest on a tenuous thread of

inference from baptismal illumination via Molac’s redescription of it as a transfiguration to

the Transfiguration itself as the underlying referent of his anthropology.

By contrast the flesh (σάρχ) is the place of ‘the rupture of divine communication’ (pp. 96-7).

Sin confers the condition of the flesh on the otherwise neutral principle of materiality, the

body, endowing upon it a ‘dramatic dimension’. Similarly, the passions which constitute ‘the

flesh’ are distinct from the senses they disturb. This same flesh Christ bore and cleansed, and

assumed for us as a kenotic act of a veiled unveiling and thus another ‘point of contact with

the theological perspective of the Transfiguration’, Molac claims (pp. 110-12). Building on

these analyses, Molac shows that Gregory’s pairing of ψυχὴ-σῶμα, is not oppositional but

shorthand for human nature as a composite reality. Indeed, he elicits from Gregory a rich and

positive theological aesthetic of the body as the place of revelation of the restored interior

image: an ‘iconic anthropophany’ (150) exemplified by the saints and especially the martyrs.

Molac’s analysis is full of insights, plausible readings of Gregory’s ambigua. It brings a

corrective to lazy characterisations of Gregory as ‘platonic’ and to attempts to capture his

spiritual anthropology in a central theme. Yet Molac’s concentration on key words leads him

away from analysing as wholes passages where Nazianzen sets out his spiritual theology, and

so tends to obscure important features and themes (like that of deification) and connections

(like that between illumination, obscurity, desire and purification in divine pedagogy), and

the narrative shape of his account. Molac rarely contextualises the many quotations he uses,

nor devotes much space to justifying exegetically the (not always obvious) conclusions he

draws from them. At times (p. 29), he seems to treat Gregory’s anthropology as though the

incarnate Christ were determinative of its created character, whereas passages like Or. 38.13

imply that the divine Logos as such is the archetypal Image of human beings. Above all,

Molac fails to demonstrate the significance of the Transfiguration as the major referent for

Gregory’s anthropology.

These same strengths and weaknesses also recur in the second part of the study, where Molac

analyses the uses of Scripture that inform this anthropology. Again he fails to demonstrate the

claim that ‘the story of the Transfiguration of the Lord occupies a privileged place’ amongst

the biblical loci to which Gregory returns (p. 447). Not only are clear references to the story

rare, as Molac concedes (pp. 447-8), but biblical images like those of illumination and ascent

to which he appeals are capable of other, better founded explanations; the latter refer

primarily to Moses’ ascent of Sinai; the former to a range of biblical scenes and images, like

those recalled, for example, in Oration 40.5-6, of which the Transfiguration is only one. Nor

is the Transfiguration obviously central to the logic of the great Christological ‘tapestry’ of

Or. 29.17-20 (p. 265) as ‘the hermeneutical locus of the mystery of the communication of

idioms’ (although the case that it should is suggestive and attractive). The conclusion that in

light of this kind of analysis the Transfiguration ‘holds an essential place’ in Gregory’s

anthropological designs seems therefore unsustained. More significant is the attention given

to Gregory’s use of passages in Wisdom literature to develop and communicate his aretology

and the central theme of ‘measure’, though the claim that Gregory treats Aaron, for example,

as a figure of Wisdom (p. 211) is not compelling.

Molac contends that ‘[i]t is in the thickness of [Gregory’s] experience of life that he unites

that of which he has an intellectual intuition and of which he had plumbed the foundations in

Scripture’ (p. 14), and to this experience, as related in Gregory’s autobiographical poems and

in his letters, that he turns in the final part of the study. They reveal an anxious, goal-

orientated, vulnerable personality of weak constitution, inclined to solitude, yet capable of

courage, and torn between what he sought and the difficulties of achieving his desires. An

emotional individual, slow but sustained in reactions and ruminating over the past, he could

nevertheless show surprising vitality in confronting his responsibilities with determination.

Molac strives effectively to take seriously Gregory’s own reasons for his docility to the

demands of his father or Basil, his flights and his moments of resilience, making sense of

them in terms of Naziazen’s wider character and spiritual theology, both formed deeply by

his experience of near-shipwreck in a storm in his youth, and the example of his mother.

There Gregory learnt the fear of God that grounded a life of progressive self-dispossession

that lay at the heart of an existential struggle: Gregory’s lived experience of the spirit-flesh

tension and the transformation that comes through suffering, whose ground is in Christ’s

kenosis. This tension took form in Gregory’s life from his advocacy of the Truth of the

Trinity. Gregory put his own rhetorical gifts in the service of this truth against pagans,

heretics and divisive, ambitious bishops. Through this experience, Gregory’s concept of

philosophia matured from stressing the training of the will to an emphasis on deprivation: it

is this search for wisdom that finally makes sense of Gregory’s life (pp. 437-8). Hence it

seems questionable to speak of Gregory’s vocation as a contemplative being thwarted, or to

stress the tension between contemplation and practice in his life. For Gregory saw such

philosophia as a response to divine pedagogy. Here Molac brings a helpful corrective to

many readings of Gregory’s life and thought and demonstrates to a degree the potential

Gregory’s theology has to help us make sense of his decisions, and not merely as post-hoc

rationalisations of them. Yet at the same time there is the real risk of hermeneutical naivety,

which Molac does not address sufficiently.

Beyond these questions, Molac appears not to appreciate the dangers of his valorisation of

suffering as a path of transformation (perhaps echoing von Balthasar, who appears several

times in passing here): an emphasis well in excess of what Gregory’s texts seem to warrant.

Nor does he ever demonstrate convincingly the significance of the Transfiguration, which

must raise questions as to the value of translating the work into English. Nor again does

Molac engage significant English-language scholarship on Gregory’s anthropology, spiritual

theology or biography. Yet many good observations and helpful correctives emerge in the

detail of this lengthy rumination on the unity of life and thought in a figure whose

contribution to the Christian tradition is gradually being recognised again.

Ben Fulford,

St John’s College, Nottingham.