Caesarius of Nazianzus

Origins and family

Caesarius belonged to one of the most remarkable Christian families of the fourth century, in which parents and all three children are numbered among the saints. His father, Gregory the Elder, a convert from the Hypsistarian sect, was bishop of Nazianzus in Cappadocia; his mother, the righteous Nonna (commemorated August 5), had brought her husband to the faith and raised her children in fervent piety. Caesarius was the second son: his elder brother was Gregory the Theologian, the great hierarch, theologian, and archbishop of Constantinople, and his sister was Gorgonia, the model of the married Christian woman. The two brothers were educated together in their early years and were close through life, though their paths diverged — Gregory to the Church and the contemplative life, Caesarius to the world of science and public service.

The physician of Alexandria and the court

Caesarius went for his higher studies to Alexandria, then the great university of the Greek East and the foremost school of medicine, where he mastered geometry, astronomy, and arithmetic, but excelled above all in medicine, surpassing (in his brother's proud account) all his fellow-students and even his teachers. Declining the honours pressed on him to remain in Alexandria, he came instead to Constantinople, where his skill quickly made him the most sought-after physician of the capital. He was offered a seat in the Senate and public office, and was appointed a physician of the imperial court, first under the emperor Constantius II. His success was complete — wealth, rank, and the friendship of the great — and it is precisely the danger of such success to the soul that his brother's oration turns into its theme.

Under Julian the Apostate

The severest trial of his life came under Julian the Apostate (361–363), who, setting out to restore paganism, prized the learned Christians of his court and sought to draw them back to the old gods. Julian, who valued Caesarius's learning, made repeated and flattering efforts to win him over. Caesarius remained at his post but refused to apostatise, openly professing himself a Christian before the emperor and answering (as the tradition, following Gregory, records) that he would sooner lose all than his faith. His continuing presence at the apostate's court nonetheless caused his father and his brother deep anxiety, and Gregory the Theologian wrote urging him to withdraw, unwilling that his brother should serve where Christ was denied. Caesarius did in time leave Julian's service; and after Julian's death in 363 he returned, under the Christian emperors that followed (Jovian, then Valentinian and Valens), to public life, rising to be quaestor — the treasurer or financial administrator — of the province of Bithynia.

The earthquake, baptism, and repose

The turning of his heart wholly to God came through a brush with death. About the year 368 a violent earthquake destroyed the city of Nicaea in Bithynia, where Caesarius was serving; he was all but miraculously preserved, escaping with his life from beneath the ruins that killed many around him. He read the deliverance as a summons. Like many of his age who deferred baptism until later life, Caesarius had remained a catechumen; now he received holy baptism, resolved to give up office and wealth and to devote what remained of his life to God — and made a will leaving his goods to the poor. But the resolve was barely formed when he died, still a young man, unmarried and childless, about the year 369.

His brother Gregory the Theologian delivered the funeral oration over him (Oration 7), one of the earliest and most admired of Christian funeral discourses, in which he praised Caesarius's learning, his constancy under Julian, and his final conversion of life, and consoled their aged parents — a discourse that is at once our fullest source for Caesarius and a small masterpiece of the Christian meeting of grief with the hope of the resurrection. (Gregory was afterward much troubled by the plundering of his brother's estate by servants and false creditors, so that the charity Caesarius had willed was hard to fulfil — a detail that survives in Gregory's letters.)