He was converted to Christianity by his wife, Nonna, who came of Christian stock, and was. baptized at the time of the opening of the Council of Nicaea by the Bishop of Nazianzus, whom he succeeded in his office in 328 or 329. Nothing positive is known of his attitude in the first generation of the Arian controversy; in the sixties he may be reckoned, with most of the bishops of Asia Minor, among the Homoiousians, but later, with his son and the latter's friend Basil (see Basil the Great), whom he helped to raise to the see of Cæsarea, he accepted the homo ousios. He and his wife had long wished for off spring; and Gregory seems to have been the eldest of the three children who were born to them when they were already advancing in years. The foun dations of his education were laid at Nazianzus; but his higher training in literature and rhetoric he probably received with his brother Caesarius, in the Cappadocian Ca'sarea, where his friendship with Basil began. To pursue his studies he then went to Palestine, to Alexandria, and finally to
Athens, where he seems to have spent some years in close association with Basil. Leaving Athens, probably in 357, and passing through Constanti nople, where his brother had already begun a suc cessful worldly career from which Gregory tried in vain to turn him to the ascetic life, he returned home on account of his duty to his parents, and spent some time there, partly in meditation and partly in the administration of the family property. It was at this time that he seems to have been baptized.
After the return of Basil from his journey through the monastic settlements of Palestine and Egypt, in
358 or 359, Gregory joined him in his retreat on the
River Iris in Pontus. By 360, however, he must bave been once more with his parents. During the next five years he was ordained priest against his own will but at the request of the faithful; after trying to escape the duties of the office, he returned and delivered the orations numbered i. and ii. in his works; after Julian's death (363) he wrote, apparently on Basil's advice, the two invectives directed against Julian (iv. and v.); when court pressure had forced his father to sign a formula which the monks of Nazianzus considered heretical, and they broke off communion with both father and son, he succeeded in reconciling them to their bishop
(oration vi., De pace); when Basil and his monks had fallen out with Eusebius, chosen Bishop of Clesarea in the summer of 362, he took Basil to Pontus with him, and then effected a reconciliation (probably in 365). During the next seven years Gregory assisted his father, cooperated with him in 370 in, procuring the elevation of Basil to the bishopric of Cæsarea, and stood by the side of the new bishop in his struggle with Valens in the beginning of 372.
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