The great theologian and the great friend
Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus at Athens
They arrive in Athens as young men, both of them from Cappadocia, both of them brilliant, both of them not yet who they will become. Athens is still the world's greatest university city — pagan, philosophical, saturated in the traditions of Plato and Aristotle — and they have come to learn.
They find each other and the friendship changes both of them.
Gregory of Nazianzus will later write about it in terms that are almost embarrassing in their warmth — the kind of thing that men in later centuries will find too effusive and quietly edit. He describes how they shared everything, how they knew only two streets in Athens — the one to the lecture halls and the one to the church. How they competed not in who could out-argue the other but in who could be more truly good.
Basil is the more practical, more organized, more episcopal of the two. He will build hospitals and govern a diocese and write monastic rules. He has enormous administrative energy alongside the theological depth.
Gregory is more interior, more poetic, more vulnerable. He writes theological poetry that will be sung in the Eastern church for centuries. He is also deeply uncomfortable with public leadership — forced into the pulpit at Constantinople against his will, he will deliver some of the most important sermons of the century and then resign and go home.
They are unlike each other. They need each other. The friendship sustains both of them through the controversies and the exiles and the disappointments that their shared theological project brings.
The Cappadocian theology is not one man's work. It is a friendship's work.
“We seemed to be two bodies with one soul — and if we must not think too much of those who declare that everything is in everything, yet this I maintain, that we were in each other.”
— Gregory of Nazianzus on his friendship with Basil, Oration 43, c. 379 AD
“Iron sharpens iron; So a man sharpens his friend's countenance.”
The greatest theological work of the fourth century was done by a friendship.
This is worth sitting with. We tend to think of theological development as the work of solitary geniuses — great minds alone with their books and their ideas. But the Cappadocian project was built in conversation, tested in argument, sustained through letters across the years when distance separated them.
The ideas were sharpened by the friction of a friend who would push back, who would not simply agree, who loved the person enough to disagree with the position.
Who is the person in your life who sharpens you — not who agrees with you, but who takes your thinking seriously enough to resist it? And are you doing the same for them?