The Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of St. Gregory the Wonderworker on this day. Before the Council of Nicaea (325), the Church did not have the idea of universally binding written law. Christians were guided by authoritative texts written by the Holy Apostles and their disciples. All these Christian fathers “put their money where their mouth was.” Most of them died martyric deaths. In some cases, like that of St. Ignatios, the God-bearer (theophoros; d. 106), their faith became knowledge. Otherwise, how can we explain his fearless behavior in the face of approaching torment? At the end of the 3rd century, Constantinople did not exist. Rome and Alexandria were the major urban centers of the Christian world. Excerpts from the letters of St. Dionysios the Great, Archbishop of Alexandria (d. 265), were used by Christians as short directives (canons). He became the first holy father to be named as an author of canons. St. Gregory the Wonderworker (thaumatourogos; d. c. 270), Bishop of Neo-Caesarea, was a contemporary of St. Dionysios, but in another region of the Roman Empire, Cappadocia (the heartland of the modern-day Republic of Turkey). St. Gregory’s lifetime coincided with what has come to be known as the Crisis of the Third Century. Various generals competed for the imperial throne while Germanic tribes invaded the empire. St. Gregory’s letters, abridged as canons, reflect this time of anarchy. In them, he responds to a question about whether Christian women raped by barbarian raiders should do penance. Following the Lord’s dialectics, St. Gregory points out the “question beyond the question”: were the women sexually complicit, what was their lifestyle? If they were morally blameless, then there is no need for penance. The last of the twelve canons of St. Gregory outlines various classes of penitents. It gives us an idea of the Church in the first millennium when the ethos was more communal. Today, in the “monastic” Church of the second millennium, confession is more “one-on-one” along the lines of interaction between elder and disciple. Source: John A. McGuckin, The Ascent of Christian Law (St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 2012). | 
