Constantin-Ionut Mihai: The Pagan Gregory and Origen: Polemics and Apologetics in the School of Caesarea

According to his own testimony, the author of the Oratio Panegyrica in Origenem – traditionally identified with Gregory Thaumaturgus – was born of pagan parents and was educated in rhetoric, Latin language and Roman law. Around 233 AD, he joined Origen’s school in Caesarea, where he studied Greek philosophy and Christian theology. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I intend to examine what exactly the young Gregory knew about Christianity at the time he entered Origen’s school. I will argue that Gregory shared some of the prejudices of his pagan contemporaries and made frequent appeal to arguments commonly used in pagan polemics against Christianity. Like other pagan intellectuals of his time, he criticized the simplicity of the style of the Christian scriptures and rejected these as hardly credible or even despicable. The second aim of my paper is to emphasize the apologetic tendencies of the school of Caesarea. As I intend to show, Origen’s activity did not have only didactic, but also apologetic purposes. There is evidence that Origen actually had to face and respond to the criticism raised against Christianity by the young Gregory and by other pagan intellectuals of his time. This can be demonstrated through a careful analysis of passages in the Oratio Panegyrica, in which Gregory describes at length Origen’s apologetic techniques and strategies. In light of this, the Oratio itself could be interpreted as a piece of third-century apologetic literature.

Maria Cecilia Holt: Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus: Punctuating Conversion and Idolatry in Early Seventeenth Century Philippines

This paper explores the interpretation  and imitation of Patristic sources by Spanish missionaries to early colonial Philippines—especially Jesuits in the early seventeenth century who were confronted with indigenous religious practice. It shall be argued that in through their reading of Patristic sources, they were more accommodating of indigenous religious practices than is generally supposed, and that the conversion of indigenous shamans was negotiated in a creative and open spirit. This emerged from the close analysis of the Jesuit use of a patristic source and Quintilian’s theories of rhetoric, with special attention paid to typography and punctuation. It should or be entirely surprising that accommodation and exemption should be enacted through the use of parentheses (thus).
Indeed my short communication shall show that the third century St. Gregory Wonderworker’s successful accommodation of a pagan temple (where demons were worshipped) into a place where a Christian might spend the night was represented visually by the lunulae or parenthetical marks  had in turn been converted by the Jesuit Pedro Chirino (á imitatio of S. Gregory Taumaturgo) into lodgings for the Wonderworker’s name in early seventeenth century colonial Philippines to indicate to the reader whose example the Jesuit has been imitating.


These simple strokes of punctuation in the Jesuit Relations provide a modest but revelatory view of the use of patristic sources by Jesuits in the early modern period and of Jesuit accommodation not simply as “safe space” but as a locus of argument.

Francesco Celia: Gregory Thaumaturgus: a reassessment of his traditional figure

For centuries scholars have considered Gregory Thaumaturgus as the pupil of Origen, the author of the Oratio panegyrica and the prodigious bishop of Neocaesarea to whom Gregory of Nyssa dedicated the De Vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi. This identification was further confirmed by Eusebius's Historia Ecclesiastica, which includes these biographical pieces of information and provides us with the first external testimony on Gregory. In 1977 Pierre Nautin raised serious doubts regarding this portrayal. His main argument was that Eusebius had arbitrarily merged together three different persons and that both the ascription of the Oratio and the later testimonies on Gregory should be deemed as erroneous because they all took over Eusebius's mistake. Notwithstanding the contrary reply of Henri Crouzel (1979), Gregory's traditional figure has been considered an open question by several scholars (e.g. Clausi - Milazzo 2002).
However, little attention has been paid to the information furnished by Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome and Socrates of Constantinople. In this paper I will argue that Gregory Thaumaturgus's traditional figure should still be considered trustworthy. My main hypothesis is that none of these authors actually depended on Eusebius's Historia. Jerome and Socrates rely on two lost works of Pamphilus, which preceded the Historia Ecclesiastica-his catalogue of the library of Caesarea, which was included by Eusebius in the third book of the Vita Pamphili, and one of the lost books of the Apologia pro Origene. It was ostensibly Pamphilus to have supplied Eusebius with the earliest traditional account of the figure of Gregory Thaumaturgus.