‘the Cappadocians’is a scholarly convention originating in the nineteenth
century), they are celebrated as the models of true rhetoric. This was part of a
flourishing or renaissance of interest in rhetoric, in the power of words. The
Feast of the Three Hierarchs was conceived as a feast of oratory/rhetoric, of
words. The Three Hierarchs exemplify a true rhetoric, not only one of style but
also of content; they found human words capable of expressing the Word of
God, and embodied it in their own lives. Rhetoric was understood by the
Byzantines to be a sacred art, part of the sacred cosmos of man. They even
called rhetoric aμυστήριον, a mystery or even a‘sacrament’: we are to be its
celebrants,finding words for the Word, conveying the Word of God in and
through the words of human beings.^23 To be able to use words in such a
manner that they convey not only our own thoughts but also the Word of
God, and to allow that Word to transform our understanding and through this
our whole being, all this requires a very disciplined mind and a particularly
formed person. The Byzantines believed that attaining this goal required a
completepaideia, a comprehensive education and formation.
This importance of words, and in this case literature, and especially the
Scriptures, takes us back to the point with which we began: the difference
between the Gospel of John and the Synoptics. In the Synoptics, the disciples
don’t understand who Christ is until, after the Passion, when the Scriptures are
open and the bread broken, they come to recognize the Lord as the one whose
Passion is spoken of by the Scriptures and encounter him in the breaking of
bread. And, as we noted, this is where the Gospel of John, the‘theologian’,
begins:‘Behold the Lamb of God!’declares the Baptist at the beginning of the
narrative (John 1:29), followed by Philip telling Nathanael‘we have found the
one spoken of by Moses and the prophets’(John 1:45). The‘veil’is lifted from
the text (cf. 2 Cor. 3:12–4:4), and the meaning is now revealed. And, by
beginning with this, John is able to see that Christ wasn’t simply put to
death (as in the Synoptics, where the disciples ran in fear), but, as the exalted
Lord from the beginning, he went voluntarily to his death, with the beloved
disciple remaining at the foot of the cross.
And, likewise, it is in seeing ourselves and the world in this light that we
avoid becoming subject to the forces of blind fate, or the necessity and
absurdity of our suffering and death, and are able to give our ownfiat:‘Let
it be!’This scriptural dimension of our encounter with Christ requires of us a
knowledge of the working of letters, requires that we, as Gregory put it, learn
the principles of inquiry and contemplation, to search beneath the letters, to
find the meaning, to search beneath our experience of suffering, tofind in it a
paideia. This education softens us, making us malleable clay in the hands of
God, who fashions, from our mud, livingflesh with a heart offlesh rather than
(^23) Cf. George L. Kustas,Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric, Analecta Vlatadon 17 (Thessaloniki:
Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, 1973).
30 John Behr