Pastoral imagery in the Apology for His Flight by Gregory of Nazianzus

Abstract

The article analyzes the pastoral imagery in the first text on priesthood of the Christian tradition - Apology for His Flight by Gregory of Nazianzus. A philological analysis of a number of key fragments of this text is carried out. Consideration of or. 2.9. shows that St. Gregory combines allusions to both Plato’s The Republic and a number of poetic texts (Homer, Callimachus, Theocritus). Contextual reading allows us to offer a new interpretation of this paragraph compared to previous studies. It is shown that the author thinks of the position of the priest as one in a series of authorities. Subsequent analysis confirms the initial intuition. In or. 2.3-4 the reader sees that Gregory considers power in the Church in terms of a general ethical worldview, partly Christianized, of course. At the same time, analysis of rare word usage in or. 2.34 shows that the author, remaining within this framework, describes the priest as a new social role that combines elements already existing in the culture with Christian paradigms. Gregory also describes the historical continuity of this role with all the rulers of the Old and New Israel. Thus, the priest as a pastor becomes one with the generals, prophets, teachers, etc. - that is, all those who had a powerful position in society due to their involvement in the history of the salvation of humankind. The final paragraphs of the Apology, in which we find 12 occurrences of the word ποιμήν and its derivatives, show that one of the main goals of this text was to form the image of the priest as a shepherd. The combination of all the studied fragments and contexts shows that with the help of this image the author describes priesthood as one of authority, the unique position of which is set by its soteriological perspective.