Matthew Lootens: A Preface to Gregory of Nyssa's Contra Eunomium? Gregory's Letter 29

The fourth century witnessed the growth of Christian epistolography as theologians and bishops increasingly took up the practice of letter writing. Although Gregory of Nyssa is more known for his polemical and exegetical writings than for his letters, about thirty letters from his hand do survive. One of these is particularly important for understanding his other writings: Letter 29 was dispatched to his brother Peter and sought advice on the publication schedule of Gregory’s most important polemical work, the Contra Eunomium. Manuscript evidence shows that this letter and Peter’s response (Letter 30) were regularly appended to the beginning of the Contra Eunomium in medieval manuscripts. For Byzantine scribes and readers, these letters evidently functioned as a kind of preface that provided information about the stages and methods of composition, as well as Gregory’s purpose for the book. For modern readers of the Contra Eunomium, these letters—appended as they are to the only full English translation—continue to serve this purpose.

     This short paper provides a detailed and focused re-examination of the relationship between this brief correspondence and the Contra Eunomium. In particular it seeks to move beyond viewing the letters as simple introductory material by drawing upon recent scholarship on the function of letter-writing in late antiquity (an aspect that has been largely ignored by the limited scholarship on these two letters), in order to explore new ways of reading this material and to reveal new aspects and rhetorical strategies of Gregory’s involvement in the Eunomian controversy. The paper will first briefly establish a theoretical framework for interpreting the function of fourth-century Christian epistolography, and second, it will explore in detail Letters 29 and 30. The final part of the paper will argue that Gregory uses epistolography and the rhetoric of inheritance contained in these letters to legitimate his new standing in the eastern church and within his own family after Basil’s death.