The Orthodox Church celebrates the Council of Ecumenical teachers and Saints Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzin) and John Chrysostom. Universal – having significance as teachers for all times and peoples. They played an exceptional role in shaping dogma, worship and church life in general.
They all came from aristocratic families who were distinguished by Christian piety and sought to give their children the best education. For example, Basil the Great studied with the best teachers of Caesarea of Cappadocia and Constantinople, and to complete his studies he went to the intellectual capital of antiquity, Athens, where he met Gregory the Theologian.
The closest friendship that had been established between them remained for the rest of their lives. Grigory and Vasily spent their teenage years together and later supported each other. For Zlatoust, who was almost 20 years younger than them, the first two were practically a living legend and the subject of the deepest honor and respect. John refers many times to the judgments of "the most blessed, the most excellent Basil and Gregory" and sets them as an example to follow.
What they had in common was a kind of civilizational, cultural and historical mission that they had to fulfill in the history of the Church. The time of state persecution has passed, it was necessary to introduce Christianity and enlighten public, state and cultural life with it, to convey the truth about God using the achievements of secular philosophy.
Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian (as well as Gregory of Nyssa) are also called the Great Cappadocians, since they were originally from Cappadocia, an area of Asia Minor that was part of the Eastern Roman Empire and then inhabited by Greeks. Cappadocia now belongs to Turkey. The main contribution of the Great Cappadocians to theology is the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Gregory the Theologian said in the 22nd word "About the World" that we teach "to worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, one in Three Deity and Power, without preferring One and not belittling the Other... without dissecting a single greatness with the innovation of names."
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The background of the holiday is as follows. Under the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, there was a long debate in Constantinople about which of these Church fathers should be considered the first and main one. One part of the people praised Basil the Great (memory of January 14), another considered Gregory the Theologian as such (memory of February 7, January), and the third – St. John Chrysostom (memory of November 26). But according to church tradition, in 1084, Metropolitan John of Evkhait appeared in a dream together with three saints and ordered to establish a common day of celebration of their memory.
The life of all three saints was full of worries and trials. Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian fought for the Church and church unity with the Arians, sometimes experiencing deprivation and oppression. John Chrysostom, who was born almost 20 years later, when he became Archbishop of Constantinople, was unfairly accused of far–fetched sins for his truthful and honest sermons, removed from the pulpit, persecuted and was eventually sent into distant exile to the very edge of the empire - to the remote Pythiunt on the eastern shore of the Black Sea (Pitsunda, now in Abkhazia). When he was already an exhausted old man, dying on the road, his last words in life were nevertheless – "thank God for everything!". In short, the life of each of these universal teachers could even serve as the subject of more than one novel.
All three saints, with all their scholarship and deep knowledge of the sciences, put the main thing above all else – the comprehension of what leads to salvation and life in accordance with the Divine Commandments. Of course, this is a common Orthodox attitude, which was shared by other teachers of the Church, and which formed the Orthodoxy (the correct glorification of God) as we know it to this day. However, it was expressed perhaps most vividly by the three saints, and not least because they did not deny the positive role of scientific philosophy. It is no coincidence that there are so many of them, and it is precisely on this topic that the great Saint Gregory Palamas, whose theological work finally completed the formation of Orthodox dogma, quotes in his "Triads". Here are three vivid quotes from each of the three universal teachers, which he cites immediately in the first part of his first Triad entitled "Why and for how long is it useful to engage in verbal reasoning and sciences":
Basil the Great, from the Conversation on the seventh psalm: "We have discovered two meanings denoted by the word truth. One is the comprehension of what leads to a blissful life, the other is the correct knowledge about any of the things of this world. The truth that helps salvation lives in the pure heart of a perfect man, who artlessly transmits it to his neighbor; and if we do not know the truth about the earth, about the sea, about the stars and about their movement and speed, then this will not prevent us from receiving the promised bliss in the least."
John Chrysostom, from the "Interpretation of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew": "What the external sages could never see in a dream, fishermen and simpletons declare to us with complete certainty; leaving the earth, they say everything about heaven, bringing us another life and another existence, another freedom, another ministry and another world and changing everything in general is not like Plato, or Zeno, or some other lawmaker, because all such people have directly shown that their souls were inspired by an evil spirit, some kind of ferocious demon hostile to our nature. And these fishermen philosophize with faith about God in a way that none of those could ever have imagined, so the philosophizing of those philosophers was lost and perished, and in fairness: after all, all this was inspired by demons. So, it has disappeared and is despised as the most insignificant of cobwebs, rather as something ridiculous, outrageous, concealing great darkness and obscenity; but this is not our philosophy."
St. Gregory the Theologian: "The first wisdom is a praiseworthy and purified life by God or purified by Him, the Most Pure and Most Luminous, who demands from us only the sacrifice of purification. The first wisdom is to despise wisdom, which is in verbal reasoning, in the twists of speech, in ambiguous and superfluous opposites. I praise that wisdom and the thirst with which the fishermen caught the universe with the nets of the gospel, defeating the abolished wisdom with their perfect and direct word."

The Church celebrates the Council of Ecumenical Teachers
12.02.2024, 06:00