"Pathetic, and Almost Sublime": Imperial Subjectivity in Gregory of Nazianzus's On His Own Life

Abstract

summary:This article puts forward a new reading of Gregory of Nazianzus's long autobiographical poem On His Own Life (De vita sua). The poorly understood and depreciated aspects of this work—including the classicizing yet relatively exoteric meter, the recriminations against friends and colleagues, the historiographical detail, and the ambivalent assessment of Theodosius—are interpreted in the light of Gregory's distinctive poetics of the self. The querulous yet militant first-person speaker of On His Own Life is analyzed with the aid of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of author-hero architectonics and juxtaposed with the partly analogous autobiographical projects of Libanius and Augustine.