Nonna

Family and marriage

Nonna was a Cappadocian, born of Christian parents named Philtatios and Gorgonia, who raised her in the faith; she was thus a Christian of the third generation, at a time when that was still rare. Through her sister she was the aunt of Amphilochius of Iconium, the friend of Basil the Great and a Father of the Church in his own right — the family was already a nursery of bishops.

She married Gregory the Elder, a landowner of substance in the district of Arianzus near Nazianzus in Cappadocia. He was not a Christian. He belonged to the sect of the Hypsistarians — the "worshippers of the Most High" — a curious syncretism, described by his own son, which honoured a single supreme God and kept certain Jewish observances, the sabbath and the food laws, while rejecting circumcision, and at the same time venerated fire and lamps after the manner of the Persians. It was a religion of half-lights: neither pagan nor Jewish nor Christian, and, in Gregory the Theologian's phrase, made up of the two worst elements of each.

The conversion of her husband

Nonna would not accept it. Her son records that she made her husband's conversion the whole business of her life, and that she pursued it by every means at once: by argument and by silence, by reproach and by flattery, by fasting, by nights of prayer and tears, and above all by the sheer unanswerable spectacle of a Christian life lived beside him. She used, he says, every kind of persuasion, and would not be worn down.

The change, when it came, came in a dream. Gregory the Elder saw himself singing the words of a psalm he had never learned — I was glad when they said unto me, we will go into the house of the Lord (Ps. 121:1 LXX) — and woke with the verse and the gladness still on him. He went to the church. He was catechised and baptised; the tradition places his baptism in 325, at the hands of Leontius of Caesarea, who was then on his way to the council at Nicaea. He was afterwards ordained presbyter and then consecrated bishop of Nazianzus, a see he governed for some forty-five years until his death early in 374, at nearly a hundred years of age. Nonna, for her part, was made a deaconess of the church — the office of the older Christian women, charged with the care of the women of the congregation, the preparation of catechumens and the works of mercy.

It is a plain sequence, and it is worth stating baldly: the bishop of Nazianzus, the father of the Theologian, one of the fathers present in spirit at the Nicene settlement, was a Hypsistarian pagan whom his wife prayed into the Church.

Mother of saints

Nonna had asked God for a son and vowed him before his birth, as Hannah vowed Samuel; Gregory the Theologian records the vow himself, and records too that she carried him to the altar as a child and put the Scriptures into his hands. Her three children are all saints of the Church:

• Gorgonia (feast February 23), the eldest, a married laywoman of extraordinary charity and self-discipline, who reposed about 372 and whose funeral oration by her brother is one of the finest things he wrote;
• Gregory the Theologian (born c. 329; feasts January 25 and, among the Three Hierarchs, January 30), archbishop of Constantinople, president of the Second Ecumenical Council, and the only man besides the Evangelist John whom the Church has named "the Theologian";
• Caesarius (feast March 9), the physician of the imperial court at Constantinople, who kept his faith under Julian the Apostate and died in 368 or 369.

Nonna outlived them all but Gregory. She buried her daughter, then her son Caesarius, then her husband; and the son who remained wrote afterwards that grief never made her cry out against God, and that she never let a sound of mourning escape her before the Eucharist was offered.

Her manner of life

Gregory's portrait of his mother is exact and, for a fourth-century woman, unusually personal. She was, he says, of a piety that had no calculation in it: she gave away her substance so freely that her husband had to restrain her, and she would gladly, in her son's hyperbole, have sold herself and her children into slavery to feed the poor. She never spoke in the church, and never turned her back on the holy table. She never spat on the pavement of a church, never took the hand of a pagan woman in greeting, never ate at a pagan feast, never looked on at the public games. She kept the fasts, watched the nights in psalmody, and reverenced the priesthood in her husband as though she had had no part in making it. Her son, who knew what rhetoric was, insists that he is not exaggerating.

She was also, and this is the note that runs through all of it, relentless. The same persistence that won her husband's baptism she applied to everything: to the poor, to her children's souls, to her own body, and at last to her own death, which she is said to have asked for and been granted.

Her repose

Gregory the Elder died early in 374. Nonna survived him by only a few months. On the fifth of August of that year, being about a hundred years old, she came to the church as she always did, took her place at the holy table, and while she was praying there she gave up her spirit — dying, as her son puts it, in the very posture of her life. She was buried beside her husband at Nazianzus.

Gregory wrote a great many funeral epigrams upon her — a whole cluster of them survives in the eighth book of the Greek Anthology — and returns to her again in Oration 18, the funeral oration on his father, which is in practice as much about the mother as about the bishop. She is, in consequence, one of the best-attested laywomen of the patristic age: what the Church knows of her, it knows from a first-rate witness who lived in the house.