Book Note | Self-Portrait in Three Colors: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Epistolary Autobiography

Bradley Storin. Self-Portrait in Three Colors: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Epistolary Autobiography. University of California Press, 2019.

and

Bradley Storin, trans. Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter Collection: The Complete Translation. University of California Press, 2019.

Whenever someone refers to Augustine’s Confessions as the first autobiography, I cannot resist a correction. It is not even the first Christian autobiography. Twenty years before Augustine’s labors at self-reflection, Gregory of Nazianzus composed a deliciously histrionic narrative poem most often known by its Latin title, De vita sua. Even when one accounts for the massive canonical inertia enjoyed by a work like Augustine’s, there have been far too few champions of Gregory’s achievement in the history of literary self-presentation. Bradley Storin’s monograph Self-Portrait in Three Colors: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Epistolary Autobiography is thus a welcome contribution.

In his work, Storin demonstrates that Gregory of Nazianzius’ arrangement of his own letters into a coherent collection contributed to an expansive project of literary self-fashioning in the aftermath of his downfall at the Council of Constantinople in 381, a project epitomized by the poem De vita sua. Lucidly written and convincingly argued, Self-Portrait in Three Colors draws on the granular details of philology and prosopography, a perceptive awareness of the history of the field, and sensitive readings of the works themselves to show the shrewd hand of Gregory as self-editor and thus autobiographer. Equally valuable is its companion volume Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter Collection: The Complete Translation, which offers an accessible and energetic English translation of the letters. This volume is arranged not according to the chronological order standardized by modern scholarship, but a thematic ordering reflected in the manuscripts, which Storin shows to be close to the arrangement of Gregory’s original collection. This attractive little book is perfect for classroom use.

Self-Portrait in Three Colors may be divided into two parts. In the first part, Chapters 1 and 2, Storin lays out his argument for the original context, arrangement, and purpose of Gregory’s letter collection, beginning with the notable fact that Gregory is the first Greek author known to have arranged such a collection himself. Storin argues that Gregory’s collection, ostensibly addressed to his great nephew Nicobulus, should be situated within a larger project of literary self-fashioning which Gregory initiated after returning to his native Cappadocia. In this period of his career Gregory painted himself as a man of letters and an honest, long-suffering philosopher, making a stark contrast between his own character and distinctions and the impious ambition of the clergy who had ejected him from his position of prominence in Constantinople. Gregory also portrayed himself as the closest friend of Basil the Great, the late and much beloved bishop of Caesarea, whose name and legacy carried unequaled weight in the Cappadocian context where Gregory now found himself. These three qualities—literary eloquence, philosophy, and friendship with Basil—form the ‘three colors’ of Storin’s title. To form his self-portrait, Gregory organized his letter collection into two basic clusters: one which highlighted his relationship to Basil, and another which portrayed Gregory as a model of eloquence and a friend to great men (including Nicobulus’s teachers).

In these first two chapters Storin also introduces the reader to the story of how Gregory’s self-presentation, calibrated to the specific context of the Cappadocian elite in the 380s, came to be accepted largely uncritically by historians and biographers from late antiquity to the present day. This wild success of Gregory’s self-portrayal is even more notable for the fact that scholars in recent centuries have completely rearranged the order in which his letters were read. Beginning with the earliest printed editions of Gregory’s letters, Storin shows how successive generations of scholars continually rearranged the collection, transforming a more thematic ordering found in the manuscripts to one based on date of composition. This modern arrangement, reflected in the standard numbering of the letters used by scholars, obscures the original context for which Gregory edited the collection. In chapter 2 and its abundance of tables and figures, Storin restores something approaching the original ordering of the letters as a series of “dossiers” connected to various individuals and their networks. Those so inclined could likely spend a pleasant afternoon with Storin’s chapter in one hand and the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire in the other.

I am particularly attracted to the way Storin’s “new” arrangement of the letters encourages us to encounter forms of biography and history which are not structured by dating and chronology. By showing that the chronological ordering of Gregory’s letter collection is not a universal or ‘obvious’ way of approaching them, but a product of a particular scholarly practice with its own lineage, aims, and interests, Storin argues that the letter collection is best understood as a kind of biography not governed by the ordering of years: an idealized portrait of friendship, rhetoric, and philosophy. In somewhat paradoxical fashion, Storin can offer readers this “non-chronological” way of reading the letters because of his careful attention to the very particular moment in time when they were first gathered and disseminated. In other words, by dating the collection Storin “un-dates” the letters, giving readers a better perspective on the collection as a late antique compilation, intended to portray a personality, rather than the neutral chronicle of life and times which modern scholars and their chronological projects have imagined it to be. Indeed, the modern chronological project has been charmed by Gregory’s own arts, as Storin shows: this idea of letters as a limpid window into the writer’s life and times is itself a late antique commonplace crucial to Gregory’s self-presentation. When critical reflection recognizes this idea as part of the letters’ own self-presentation, it frees them to be read not as a mélange of historical data points, but as a coherent portrait of a man of who was Basil’s friend, Gregory the philosopher and orator. This achievement is of course made concrete in Storin’s translation of the letters, which presents the letters quite literally out of chronological order in service of a different order, that of Gregory’s thematic arrangement.

The second half of Storin’s monograph, Chapters 3-5, takes up each of the titular ‘three colors’ in turn, dedicating a chapter each to Gregory’s editorial construction of himself as a paragon of eloquence, a perfect philosopher, and Basil the Great’s dearest friend. In these chapters Storin proceeds by contextualizing each of these ‘colors’ within the broader cultural world of late antiquity, before proceeding with a series of readings from the letters themselves. Although each of these chapters is strong and useful, I would draw the readers’ attention to the final chapter on Gregory’s friendship with Basil, which illuminates how Gregory portrays himself as the close friend and confidant. Storin also explores how Gregory subtly downplays contemporaries who might be rival claimants to Basil’s legacy: Basil’s brother Gregory of Nyssa, his protégé Amphilochius of Iconium, and his successor Helladius. These readings exemplify Storin’s sensitivity to both the rhetoric of Gregory’s letters and the complex and interlocking personal histories of their addressees.

Storin’s work, both monograph and translation, marks another excellent entry in the UC Press Christianity in Late Antiquity series. Taken together, these volumes will prove valuable not only to scholars of Gregory or ancient epistolography, but all those interested in the interdependent constructions of rhetoric, philosophy, and the self in late antiquity.

Charles “Austin” Rivera is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Huntingdon College and a Ph.D. Candidate at Yale University. You can follow him on Twitter.