November 17th

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Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus
Bishop, Confessor

The Wonder Worker

(† 270)

Patron against floods, earthquakes, and in desperate cases

Saint Gregory was born in the Pont, of distinguished parents who were still engaged in the superstitions of paganism. He lost his father at the age of fourteen, and began to reflect on the folly of idolatry's fables. He recognized the unity of God and was becoming disposed to accept the truths of Christianity. His father had destined him for the legal profession, in which the art of oratory is very necessary, and in this pursuit he was succeeding very well, having learned Latin. He was counseled to apply himself to Roman law.

Gregory and his brother Athenodorus, later to be a bishop like himself, had a sister living in Palestine at Caesarea. Not far from that city was a school of law, and in Caesarea itself, another which the famous Origen had opened in the year 231 and in which he was teaching philosophy. The two brothers heard Origen there, and that master discovered in them a remarkable capacity for knowledge, and more important still, rare dispositions for virtue. He strove to inspire love for truth in them and an ardent desire to attain greater knowledge and the possession of the Supreme Good; and the two brothers soon put aside their intentions to study law. Gregory studied also in Alexandria for three years, after a persecution drove his master, Origen, from Palestine, but returned there with the famous exegete in 238. He was then baptized, and in the presence of a large audience delivered a speech in which he testified to his gratitude towards his teacher, praising his methods, and thanking God for so excellent a professor.

When he returned to his native city of Neocaesarea in the Pont, his friends urged him to seek high positions, but Gregory desired to retire into solitude and devote himself to prayer. For a time he did so, often changing his habitation, because the archbishop of the region desired to make him Bishop of Neocaesarea. Eventually he was obliged to consent. That city was very prosperous, and the inhabitants were corrupted by paganism. Saint Gregory, with Christian zeal and charity, and with the aid of the gift of miracles which he had received, began to attempt every means to bring them to the light of Christ. As he lay awake one night an elderly man entered his room, and pointed to a Lady of superhuman beauty who accompanied him, radiant with heavenly light. This elderly man was Saint John the Evangelist, and the Lady of Light was the Mother of God. She told Saint John to give Gregory the instruction he desired; thereupon he gave Saint Gregory a creed which contained in all its plenitude the doctrine of the Trinity. Saint Gregory consigned it to writing, directed all his preaching by it, and handed it down to his successors. This creed later preserved his flock from the Arian heresy.

He converted a pagan priest one day, when the latter requested a miracle, and a very large rock moved to another location at his command. The pagan priest abandoned all things to follow Christ afterwards. One day the bishop planted his staff beside the river which passed alongside the city and often ravaged it by floods. He commanded it never again to pass the limit marked by his staff, and in the time of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote of his miracles nearly a hundred years later, it had never done so. The bishop settled a conflict which was about to cause bloodshed between two brothers, when he prayed all night beside the lake whose possession they were disputing. It dried up and the miracle ended the difficulty.

When the persecution of Decius began in 250, the bishop counseled his faithful to depart and not expose themselves to trials perhaps too severe for their faith; and none fell into apostasy. He himself retired to a desert, and when he was pursued was not seen by the soldiers. On a second attempt they found him praying with his companion, the converted pagan priest, now a deacon; they had mistaken them the first time for trees. The captain of the soldiers was convinced this had been a miracle, and became a Christian to join him. Some of his Christians were captured, among them Saint Troadus the martyr, who merited the grace of dying for the Faith. The persecution ended at the death of the emperor in 251.

It is believed that Saint Gregory died in the year 270, on the 17th of November. Before his death he asked how many pagans still remained in the city, and was told there were only seventeen. He thanked God for the graces He had bestowed on the population, for when he arrived, there had been only seventeen Christians.

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November 17 – St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Bishop and Confessor
Taken from The Liturgical Year by Dom Prosper Gueranger (1841-1875)

Moses retired into the desert: instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, mighty in his words and in his deeds. Gregory, adorned with the best gifts of birth and nature, brilliant in rhetoric, rich in every science, hid himself from men in the flower of his youth, and hastened to offer to God in solitude the holocaust best pleasing to the Lord. Each was the hope of his race; yet each turned away to lose himself in the contemplation of heavenly mysteries. Meanwhile, the yoke of Pharaoh lay heavy upon Israel; meanwhile, souls were perishing, whom one of Gregory’s burning words might have snatched from the empire of idolatry: was not such flight, then, desertion?

Is it for man to proclaim himself a savior, when Jesus did not arrogate that title to himself? And when evil was rife all around, did the Carpenter of Nazareth do wrong to remain in the shade for thirty years previous to his short period of ministry? O ye teachers of our excited, fevered times, who dream of a new hierarchy among the virtues, and understand divine charity far otherwise than did our fathers: not those are of the race of Israel’s saviors whose ideas concerning social good differ from those of the world’s Redeemer.

Gregory, like Moses, was of that blessed race. His friends and enemies agreed in saying that he resembled the Hebrew legislator in the excellence of his virtue, and in the splendor of the prodigies wrought by his word. Both were actuated by the desire of knowing God, and manifesting him to the men they were called to lead: the fulness of doctrine is the gift most necessary to the guides of the people, and their want of it the greatest penury. I am who am was the answer to Moses’ enquiry; and this sublime formula, confided to him from the midst of the burning bush, authenticated the mission which called him forth from the desert. When Gregory was commanded by God to go out in to the world, the blessed Virgin, of whom the burning bush was a figure, appeared before his dazzled eyes in the dark night when he was praying for light. And St. John, following the Mother of God, let fall from his lips this other formula completing the former for the disciples of the Law of love:

“One only God, Father of the living Word, of that substantial and mighty Wisdom who is the eternal expression of himself; the perfect principle of the only and perfect Son begotten by him. One only Lord, sole-begotten of the Only one; God of God, efficacious Word, Wisdom embracing and containing the world, creative power of all creation, true Son of a true Father. One only Holy Spirit, holding of God his divine existence, revealed to men by the Son of whom he is the perfect likeness, life and life-giving, holy and imparting holiness. The perfect Trinity, immutable, inseparable in glory, in eternity, in dominion.”

This was the message our Saint was to communicate to his country, the creed that was to bear his name in the Church. By his faith in the most holy Trinity he was to remove mountains, and set limits to the waves, to drive out Satan, and eradicate infidelity from Pontus. When, towards the year 240, Gregory, then bishop, was on his way to Neocæsarea, he saw on all sides the temples of idols, and stopped for the night at a famous sanctuary. In the morning all the gods had taken to flight and refused to come back; but the Saint gave to the priest of the oracle a note thus worded: Gregory to Satan: return. A more bitter defeat awaited the demons; forced to stay their precipitate retreat, they were compelled to witness the ruin of their empire over the souls they had abused. The priest was the first to give himself up to the Bishop, and became his deacon; and soon upon the ruins of the temples everywhere overthrown arose the Church of Christ, the only God.

Happy was that Church, so firmly founded that heresy was powerless against it in the following century, when so many others bowed before the storm of Arianism. On the testimony of St. Basil, the successors of St. Gregory, themselves eminent men, were as an adornment of precious stones, a crown of stars, to the Church of Neocæsarea. Now all these illustrious Pontiffs, says he considered it an honor to keep up the memory of their great predecessor; they would never suffer that any act, word, or movement other than his, in performing the sacred rites, should prevail over the traditions he had left.

When Clement XII, as we have seen, established in the entire Church the feast of St. Gertrude the Great, he at first decreed that it should be kept on this day, on which it is still celebrated by the Order of St. Benedict. But as the 17th of November had been for long centuries assigned to St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, it seemed unfitting, said Benedict XIV that he who moved mountains should himself be moved from his place by the holy virgin. Accordingly in 1739, the year following its institution, the feast of St. Gertrude was fixed on the fifteenth of this month (moved back a day in 1931 following the canonization of Albert the Great).

Let us read the brief account of the great Thaumaturgus given in the holy Liturgy.

Gregory, bishop of Neocæsarea in Pontus, was illustrious for his holiness and learning, but still more for his miracles, which were so startling and so numerous that he was called the Thaumaturgus; and, according to St. Basil, he was considered comparable to Moses, the Prophets, and the Apostles. By his prayer he removed a mountain, which was an obstacle to the building of a church. He also dried up a lake which was a cause of dissension between brothers. The river Lycus, which was inundating and devastating the fields, he restrained by fixing in the bank his stick which immediately grew into a green tree, and served as a limit which the river henceforth never overpassed.

He frequently expelled the devils from idols and from men’s bodies, and worked many other miracles, by means of which he led multitudes to the faith of Christ. He also foretold future events by the spirit of prophecy. When he was dying, he asked how many infidels remained in the city of Neocæsarea; and on being informed that there were only seventeen, he gave thanks to God, and said: When I was made bishop, there were but seventeen believers. He wrote several works, by which, as well as by his miracles, he adorned the Church of God.

O holy Pontiff, thy faith, removing mountains and commanding the waves, was a justification of our Lord’s promise. Teach us in our turn to do honor to the Gospel, by never doubting of our Lord’s word and of the help he promises us against Satan, whom the Church points out to us today as the proud mountain that is to be cast into the sea; and also against the overflowing tide of our passions, and the enticements of the world, of which thy writings teach us the vanity. After the victory let us not forget that the succor came to us from heaven; preserve us from ingratitude, which thou didst so detest. We still possess the touching eulogy dictated by thy gratitude towards the illustrious master, to whose teachings, under God, thou didst owe the glorious strength and splendor of thy faith. Here is a precious and practical lesson for all: while praising divine Providence in the man who was his predestined instrument in thy regard, thou didst not forget the homage due to the Angel of God, who had preserved thee from falling into the abyss, during the darkness of infidelity in which thy first years were spent; that heavenly Guardian who, ever watchful in his active, enlightened, persevering devotedness, supplies for our insufficiencies, nourishes and instructs us, leads us by the hand, and secretly arranges for our souls those blessed circumstances and occasions, which transform our life and secure eternal happiness.

How can we sinful creatures sufficiently thank the Author of all good, the infinite Being who gives to man both the holy Angels and the visible intermediaries of divine grace on earth? But let us take courage, for we have as our Head his own Son, his Word who saved our souls, and who rules the universe. He alone, and that without effort, can render to his Father unceasing, eternal thanksgiving, for himself and for us all, without risk of not knowing or of forgetting the least subject of gratitude, without fear of any imperfection in the manner or the magnitude of his praise. To him, then, to the divine Word, we commit as thou didst, O Gregory, the care of perfecting the expression of our gratitude for the unspeakable kindness of our heavenly Father; for the Word is to us, as to thee, the only channel of piety, gratitude, and love. May he give us in these days pastors who will imitate thy works; and may he raise up again the ancient churches of the East, which once received such light from thee!