The Consecration of a Sister and Fashioning of a Christian Matron:

Gregory of Nazianzen's Oration on Gorgonia

Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent, Brown

The fourth-century Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nazianzus uses epideictic oratory to commemorate the lives of his sister Gorgonia and his mother Nonna. While his speech contains personal anecdotes and biographical allusions to these women, I will show that he transforms their lives to create a new idealized type: the ascetic Christian matron. Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of religious specialists and the power embedded in their consecratory acts provides a framework within which historians of Early Christianity can interpret Gregory's praise of the women in his family. In my study, I will refer to several of Gregory's texts, yet I will build my argument primarily upon Gregory's funeral oration for his sister Gorgonia. I will show how Gregory uses the structure of Greek funerary discourse to consecrate a place for upper class married women in the late-antique social hierarchy of Neo-Nicene Christian Cappadocia. Gregory uses the genre of rhetoric to turn his sister into a paradigm for married Christian women to follow. I will demonstrate how Gregory's funerary discourse reveals his economic interest in claiming the Christian family for the Church. I will enumerate the benefits that aristocratic women like Gorgonia provide for the Church through structuring my argument in Bourdieu's theory of the division of religious labor. I will conclude by arguing that Gregory's oration is exceptional as an example of a celibate priest's elevation of the married life. While Gregory still extols virginity over marriage as a superior way of becoming holy, his own words, if we can trust them, promise married women the same benefits of salvation that a celibate could achieve. In this way, his oration on Gorgonia reveals his invention of a place for wealthy matrons to rank among the holy ascetics and saints.

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