other · 380 · Constantinople
Gregory of Nazianzus ordained him and took him to Constantinople, where he was by all accounts a devastating controversialist and enjoyed being one. What ended it was not theology: he fell in love with the wife of a court official, was warned in a dream or a vision depending on the teller, and left the city overnight for Jerusalem and then for the Egyptian desert, where he became a disciple of the two Macarii. There he wrote the Praktikos and the Gnostikos and the Kephalaia Gnostika, invented the list of eight evil thoughts that Cassian would carry west and Gregory the Great would turn into the seven deadly sins, and was condemned by name in the sixth century for the Origenism of the last of those books. The year here is a placing: no source dates the ordination, and Sozomen fixes it only by the period of Gregory's administration of the city.
To serve the Nicene bishop of a capital that had been Arian for forty years, as his archdeacon.
A reputation, an affair with a married woman that frightened him out of the city, and a career in the Egyptian desert that made him the first systematic theologian of prayer.