Gregory of Nazianzus was an Eastern Church ecclesiastic and theologian who lived from 330 to 389 A.D. A champion of orthodoxy at the Council of Constantinople in 381, he also had an abiding interest in the clergy of his day. The following material is excerpted and adapted from an oration he delivered in 362 that has come to be called In Defense of His Flight to Pontus. The main argument is a defense of Gregory’s ordination to the ministry, an ordination he at first felt was imposed upon him by his father, but later came to embrace wholeheartedly. Much of the letter deals with Gregory’s idea of what pastoral duties entail.
Guiding man, the most variable of creatures, is the art of arts. Pastors have been called the “physicians of souls,” and compared with physicians who treat the body. But as difficult as treatment of the body is, it pales in significance when compared with soul work.
Physicians work with bodies and perishable, failing matter. Ministers work with souls that come from God and partake of heavenly nobility. Place, time, age, and season are the subjects of physicians’ scrutiny. They prescribe medicines and diets, and guard against things injurious. Sometimes they make use of the knife or of severer remedies. But none of these are so hard as diagnosis and cure of our habits, passions, lives, and wills.
The difficulty of treatment
Physical diseases remain basically the same under the watchfulness of the physician. Spiritual disease, on the other hand, puts up crafty opposition hostile to the work of the minister. Human selfishness is a great obstacle to the advance of virtue and acts like armed resistance to ministers eager to help. Indeed, patients actively eschew treatment and struggle against what is in their own spiritual self-interest.
Patients avoid treatment in three ways. First, they hide their sin in the depths of their soul like some festering and malignant disease, as if by escaping the notice of men they could escape the mighty eye of God and justice. Second, they excuse their sin by devising pleas in defense of their shortcomings. Third, they brazenly act out their sin right in front of those who would heal it. What madness! Those whom they ought to love as their benefactors they keep away as if they were their enemies.
Tailoring the treatment
The same medicine is not in every case administered to men’s bodies. A difference is made according to their degree of health or infirmity. So also are souls treated with varying instruction and guidance. Some are led by doctrine, others trained by example. Some need the spur, others the curb. Some are sluggish and hard to rouse to the good and must be stirred up by being smitten with the Word. Others are immoderately fervent in spirit, with impulses difficult to restrain, like thoroughbred colts who run wide of the turning post-to improve them, the Word must have a restraining and checking influence.
Some are benefited by praise, others by blame, both being applied in season. If done at the wrong time or with lack of reason, they injure the patient. Some are set right by encouragement, others by rebuke. Some need to be taken to task in public, but others need to be privately corrected. Many despise private admonitions but are recalled to their senses by the condemnation of a large number of people. Others who would grow reckless under reproof given openly, accept rebuke because it is in secret, and yield obedience in return for sympathy.
Some need to be watched closely, even in the minutest of details. If they are not watched, they become puffed up with the idea of their own wisdom. Of others it is better to take no notice. In some cases we must even be angry, without feeling angry, or treat them with a disdain we do not feel, or manifest despair, though we do not really despair of them. Others we must treat with condescension and lowliness, helping them to conceive a hope of better things. Some we must conquer-by others to be overcome, and to praise or deprecate, in one case wealth and power, in another poverty and failure.
Our treatment does not correspond with virtue and vice. In some cases a particular treatment may be beneficial; in another the same treatment may be harmful. Time, circumstance, and disposition of the patient all determine the treatment to be used.
Impressing the truth
To impress the truth upon a soul when it is still fresh, like wax not yet subjected to the seal, is an easier task than inscribing pious doctrine on top of wrong doctrines and dogmas. It is better to tread a road that is smooth and well trodden than one that is untrodden and rough, or to plough land that has often been cleft and broken up by the plough: but a soul to be written upon should be free from the inscription of harmful doctrine. Otherwise the pious inscriber would have a twofold task: the erasure of the former impressions and the substitution of others that are more excellent.
Some need to be fed with the milk of the most simple and elementary doctrines, for example those who are babes in habits and unable to bear the manly food of the Word. Others require the wisdom that is spoken among the perfect, and the higher and more solid food, since their senses have been sufficiently exercised to discern truth and falsehood. If they were made to drink milk and fed on the vegetable diet of invalids, they would be annoyed.
A word of caution: to undertake the training of others before being sufficiently trained oneself, and to learn, as men say, the potter’s art on a wine-jar, that is, to practice ourselves in piety at the expense of others’ souls, seems to me to be excessive folly or excessive rashness-folly, if we are not even aware of our own ignorance; rashness, if in spite of this knowledge we venture on the task.
Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
