Basil, born in an eminent family to devout orthodox Christian parents at Caesarea in Cappadocia (present Kayseri, Turkey), received his higher education in Constantinople and Athens but, impressed by the ascetic life, had renounced a promising career to become a monk.

Settling as a hermit near Neocaesarea by the Iris River in Pontus, he has founded a monastic community here, where Gregory of Nazianzus, the son of the bishop in that Cappadocian town, joins him.

Gregory had been reluctant to a assume a position of responsibility in the church; he will later explain this stance in his Defense of the Flight to Pontus.

Basil’s younger brother, also named Gregory and known as Gregory of Nyssa, joins him as well.

Basil begins his anti-Arianist trilogy, Against Encomius, in 363.

Gregory, brother to Bishop Basil of Caesarea, is in 371 elected bishop of the Cappadocian town of Nyssa.

Gregory of Nyssa, leader of the orthodox party in controversies over the doctrine of the Trinity, had in 376 been deposed from his bishopric by the Arian party in 376 but restored two years later.

After attending the council at Antioch in 379, he is sent on a special mission to the churches of Arabia (i.e., Transjordan); …

…Gregory’s visit to Jerusalem on this occasion leaves him with a dislike for the increasingly fashionable pilgrimages, an opinion he expresses vigorously in one of his letters.

The Nicene Creed prescribed in 380 is again defined at the beginning of 381 and ecclesiastically sanctioned, as it were, in the summer of this year by a church council summoned to Constantinople by Theodosius, chiefly to confront Arianism.

Meletius of Antioch presides but dies during the Council; Gregory of Nyssa, whose brother Basil had died early in 379, delivers Meletius’s funeral oration.

The Council, attended by more than 150 bishops, all from the Eastern portion of the empire, reaffirms the Nicene Creed, firmly rejecting Arianism, as well as Modalism and Monarchianism.

Apollinarianism, which had been opposed by Basil, together with Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Athanasius because of the doctrine’s implication that Christ was not fully human, is also condemned, as are the Eunomians, as the followers of Eunomius’s extreme brand of Arianism have become known.

In formulating the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the Council defines the position of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity, describing the Holy Spirit as proceeding from God the Father.

It follows Athanasius in affirming the equality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, declaring them separate persons but coequal and of one substance.

The council’s canons establish the authority of the metropolitan bishops over their dioceses and give the bishop of the capital a primacy similar to that of the bishop of Rome.

It also deposes Constantinople’s Arian bishop, Maximus.

Gregory of Nazianzus, who has influenced Jerome during the three years he has spent in Constantinople, plays a leading role at the council, but opposition to his claim to the Maximus’ vacated bishopric makes him decide to return to Nazianzus.

The gathering, considered the second ecumenical council, universally imposes the Nicaean faith: Christianity as preached by Peter is to be the sole official religion of the Roman Empire; orthodoxy is defined as the doctrines proclaimed by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria.

The Council’s new theological formulas persuade most Arians to convert to orthodoxy.

Gregory of Nyssa, a prolific writer, dies in 395, leaving his Great Catechesis, a systematic outline of Christian theology, and a defense of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity in his treatises On the Holy Spirit and Ad Ablabium (or Not Three Gods).

He designed his The Creation of Man, an interpretation of the Bible, to complete his brother Basil's Hexaemeron (Six Days).

In his Life of Moses, Gregory portrays the journey of the Israelites to the Promised Land as an allegory of the soul's progress toward God.

He also wrote such works on asceticism as On Virginity and a biography of his sister, Macrina (who will later be canonized).

Gregory’s mystical commentaries on the Psalms earn him posthumous renown as the father of mysticism.