The biography of the theologian

The life and teachings of St. Gregory the Theologian. The book, presented to the attention of readers, is dedicated to the Great Theologian and the most elegant poet of the 4th century to St. Gregory the Theologian, his biography and spiritual heritage. The creations of the Cappadocian father of the Church are still occupied by the central place in the theological science of the Orthodox Church.

The book introduces the reader to the main aspects of Trinitarian theology, the doctrine of prayer and God -seek, monasticism and marriage, priesthood and bishopric, etc. Written in a lively and affordable language, it is addressed to a wide circle of readers. We give an excerpt from the book. In its approach, this book is a rare contribution not only to our theological knowledge of one of the greatest saints of the Orthodox Church, but also in the disclosure of his personality as a person.

Too often, the treatises dedicated to the great theologians leave their spiritual gradual increase in the shadow “by force”, and the reader gives a false impression that they were on wide, powerful wings near the heights of God knowledge. In fact, the path of each of them was complicated: rooted in the questions of their time, associated with the special properties of their spiritual and mental system, it largely depended on the God -given meetings and the search for truth at the twilight of modern philosophical and theological thought.

They did not immediately find answers to questions, born by their own depth experiences and not only supplied to them, like all their contemporaries, in the bowels of the Christian OB-Chinese, but also persistently growing from the vagus of the thoughts and insights of their contemporaries-both their own and “external”. The book of Father Hilarion, with striking clarity, reveals to us the inner path of the saint and gradually clarifying the vision of their truth.

Nowadays, when every believer, like the whole Church, is faced with questions from the depths of church consciousness, as well as posed by the world in his agony, throwing and in his desperate search for answers, accessible and understandable to him - we, believers, must learn to listen to the question of our co -religious, as well as people who stand outside the church experience and praying us to questions that they have the right to pose and have the right to pose and We are obliged to answer creatively and with love.

I hope that many will appreciate the contribution made by Father Hilarion to our understanding of the ways of Orthodox theology through the Scriptures of St. Gregory the Theologian. Along with Vasily the Great and John Chrysostom, he is revered in the Orthodox Church as "the Ecumenical Great Teacher and Saint." In the Byzantine era, that is, for ten centuries from the 5th to the 14th century, Gregory was perceived as “theologian number one”: the term “theologian” itself was identified in Byzantium primarily with its name.

According to the "citation index", the compositions of Gregory were inferior only by the Bible. As well as on biblical books, numerous comments and scholia wrote to the writings of the Theologian, his words were read in the church for worship, his works corresponded by hand and had the most widespread distribution. In the formation of the dogmatic teachings of the Eastern Church, Gregory the Theologian played a decisive role, and many of his works were included in the Golden Fund of Christian Writing.

The life of Gregory coincided in time with the period of revival of the Christian church after three centuries of persecution. After the emperor Konstantin issued the Milan Edict, Christians received legal status in the territory of the Roman Empire. The rapid growth of the church, which began under Constantine, continued under Constance - who indulged in the Arian heresy.

The brief rule of Julian the apostate was marked by an attempt to revive paganism as a state religion, but this attempt was unsuccessful. Julian was the last pagan emperor; His successors Jovian -, Valent - and Feodosia -, like all subsequent Vasiles, were Christians. Feodosia was the emperor who restored Orthodoxy after fifty years of Arian Troubles and approved Gregory as the Archbishop of Constantinople.

Gregory’s life is divided into two parts - before and after entering church ministry. His life before baptism is a continuous chain of success and luck. The life of Gregory after baptism and especially after the Jerely Hirotony, on the contrary, almost completely consists of disappointments and disasters. The church “career” of Gregory was extremely unhappy: he was ordained a non -existent department, served in a foreign diocese and, as having ascended the patriarchal throne, was shortly shifted.

In the guise of Gregory, which he looms from his own works, there are features that can push the reader who is accustomed to find out about saints only from life literature.

When meeting with autobiographical works, Gregory may seem that he was not devoid of pride, resentment, vindictiveness and other human weaknesses, poorly linked to the Christian moral ideal. However, we are deeply convinced that the human qualities of Gregory do not at all detract from his dignity as a saint and teacher of the Church.Each saint was a man, and the testimony of the saint about himself is especially precious to us, thanks to which we are not in contact with an icon -painted way, but with a living person.

The greatness of Gregory is revealed not so much of the external circumstances of his life as from his inner experience, which is captured on the pages of his works. Despite the stormy life full of trials, anxieties and external shocks, he knew how to maintain a living inner connection with God, had a deep mystical experience. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest theologians that the Christian Church had ever known.

About Gregory as a church figure, spiritual writer, theologian, philosopher and mysticism, it will be discussed in our book, the present, third, the publication of the book is corrected and supplemented by the first two publications. Chapter 1 is supplemented by information about Cappadocia and a section on the literary heritage of Gregory; In chapter 2, several quotes were added from the saint’s poem “About himself and about bishops”; Chapter 3 was replenished with a section on the theme of the descent of Christ in Hell.

Otherwise, the book, written in the year, has not undergone significant changes.