§ 166. GREGORY J^AZIANZEN. 915
combined request of liis friend and his aged father, lie suffered himself indeed to be consecrated to the new office ; but it is y^r-j doubtful whether he ever went to Sasinia.' At all events we soon afterwards find him in his solitude, and then again, in 372, assistant of his father in ISTazianzum. In a remarkable discourse delivered in the presence of his father in 372, he represented to the congregation his peculiar fluctuation between an innate love of the contemplative life of seclusion and the call of the Spirit to ptlblic labor.
"Come to my help," said he to his hearers," "for I am almost torn asunder by my inward longing and by the Spirit. The longing urges me to fliglit, to solitude in the mountains, to quietude of soul and body, to withdrawal of spirit from all sensuous things, and to retirement into myself, that I may commune undisturbed with God, and be wholly penetrated by the rays of His Spirit. . . . But the other, the Spirit, would lead me into the midst of life, to serve the common weal, and by furthering others to further myself, to spread light, and to present to God a people for His possession, a holy
AvTovs Sf KOivbv Tw 060) C^ffai ^icv, A6yovs Te SoCroi roj fji6v<f ao<p^ A6yif). AieffKeScKTTai ■kolvtol, e^piirTai ;(a/ual, Avpat (pipovffi Tai traXaias fAiriSas.
" Talia Athense, et communia studia, Ejusdem texti et mensa; consors vita, Mens una, non duae in ambobus, res mira Graeciae, Datasque dexterffi, mundum ut procul rejiceremus, Deoque simul viveremus, Et literas soli sapienti Verbo dedicaremus. Dissipata haec sunt omnia, et humi projecta, Venti auferunt spes nostras antiquas." Gibbon (ch. xxrii.) quotes this passage with admiration, though with characteristic omission of vss. 4*79-481, which refer to their harmony in relir/ion; and he aptly alludes to a parallel from Shakespeare, who had never read the poems of Gregory Nazianzen, but who gave to similar feelings a similar expression, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, where Helena utters the same pathetic complaint tD her friend Hermia :
" Is all the counsel that we two have shared. The sister's vows," &c. ' Gibbon says : " He solemnly protests, that he never consummated his Bpiritua] marriage with this disgusting bride."
' Orat. xii. 4 ; torn. i. 249 sq. (in Migne's ed. torn. L p. 847).
916 THIED PEEIOD. A.D. 31 J -590.
people, a royal priesthood (Tit. ii. 14 ; 1 Pet. ii. 9), and Hia image again purified in many. For as a whole garden is mora than a plant, and the whole heaven with all its beauties ia more glorious than a star, and the whole body more excellent than one member, so also before God the whole well-instructed church is better than one well-ordered person, and a man must in general look not only on his own things, but also on the things of others. So Christ did, who, though lie might have remained in His own dignity and divine glory, not only humbled Himself to tlie form of a servant, but also, despising all shame, endured the death of the cross, that by His suffering He might blot out sin, and by His death destroy death."
Thus he stood a faithful helper by the side of his venerable and universally beloved father, who reached the age of almost an hundred years, and had exercised the priestly office for forty-five ; and on the death of his father, in 374, he delivered a masterly funeral oration, which Basil attended.* " There is," said he in this discourse, turning to liis still living mother, "only one life, to behold the (divine) life; there is only one death — sin ; for this is the corruption of the soul. But all else, for the sake of which many exert themselves, is a dream which decoys us from the true; it is a treacherous phantom of the soul. When we think so, O my mother, then we shall not boast of life, nor dread death. For whatsoever evil we yet endure, if we press out of it to true life, if we, delivered from every change, from every vortex, from all satiety, from all vassalage to evil, shall there l)e with eternal, no longer changeable things, as small lights circling around the great."
A short time after he had been invested with the vacant bishopric, he retired again, in 375, to his beloved solitude, and this time he went to Seleucia in Isauria, to the vicinity of a church dedicated to St. Thecla.
There the painful iutelligencc reached him of the death of Iiis beloved Basil, a. d. 379. On this occasion he wrote to Basil's brother, Gregory of Nyssa: "Thus also was it reserved for me still in this unhappy life to hear of the death of Basil
' Orat. xviii. 'EwiTa.>pioi fls rhy nartpa, ■rrap'ifrui BaaiKelov (ed. BeneJ. tom. J pp. 330-362 ; in Migue's ed- i. 981 sqq.).