Homilies on
Ecclesiastes

Eight homilies on the opening of Ecclesiastes — from vanity of vanities to a time for every purpose under heaven (1:1–3:13) — preached by Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, around 378–381 AD, and left unfinished there: the eighth homily ends and the remaining nine chapters of the book were never taken up. Gregory reads the Preacher the way he reads everything — as the record of a soul being educated. Ecclesiastes tries each good in turn — wine, houses, gardens, wealth, music, power — confesses each one vanity, and by that confession is weaned from the world of appearances toward the one Good that does not pass. The futility is not the conclusion; it is the curriculum.

The fourth homily is the famous one. Ecclesiastes says I have obtained servants and maidens, and Gregory stops — and delivers what scholars widely hold to be the most thorough condemnation of the institution of slavery that survives from the ancient world: not a plea for kind treatment, but a denial that a being made in the image of God can be bought at all. “If you mention the entire world you discover nothing equivalent to man’s honor.” Fifteen centuries before abolition, the argument was already complete.

It is also, quietly, a book of the negative way: the God toward whom the Preacher’s disillusion drives the soul is the One above every name, approached by letting go. The stream that runs through the Mystical Theology is already flowing here, a century earlier.

Richard McCambly is a Cistercian monk of St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts, who has spent decades translating Gregory of Nyssa and posting the results freely. This translation was published on his Gregory of Nyssa Home Page, which ran from 1995 to about 2012 and has since gone dark; the text survives in the Internet Archive, and is recovered from there. His current site declares that his material “is not subject to copyright.”

It is a working translation, made to be used: plainer and more compressed than the scholarly rendering of Hall and Moriarty (1993, the only other complete English), and keyed throughout to the pages of Jaeger’s critical edition — the faint [J. · ] and [M. · ] markers in the text are McCambly’s own, locating each passage in the critical edition and in Migne. His conventions, in his words: All scriptural and references, brief notes, etc, within the translation are enclosed by brackets; those phrases and sentences enclosed within parentheses are by Gregory of Nyssa as indicated within the critical text.

The Greek itself — about 29,000 words in English — is in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 44, cols. 615–754, and in the critical text his markers point to: Gregorii Nysseni Opera V, ed. Paul Alexander (Brill, 1962).