Gregory of Nazianzus’ Five Theological Orations

 

In the fourth century of the Church, an Arian named Eunomius taught that God the Father was the only divine person of the Trinity, denying Christ's divine nature and discontinuing the triune formula in baptism. He also asserted that God's nature can be fully comprehended by the human mind. Macedonius, another leading Arian at the time, believed that Christ was like in essence to the Father, but that the Holy Spirit was a mere creature and servant to the Son. This heresy spread like wildfire, as did the rest of the Arian sects, but fortunately for the Church, several men stood in the breach: Saints Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nazianzus. These three men are considered to be the three great Cappadocian fathers, and together in the fourth century, they defended Church teachings against a multitude of Arian sects.

Gregory of Nazianzus, in particular, fought Arianism to great effect. Scholar Christopher Beely considered him “the most powerful and comprehensive Trinitarian doctrine of his generation.”¹ He gave five Theological Orations in an attempt to challenge these teachings, addressing and emphasizing the incomprehensibility of God's nature and the truth of the mystery of the Trinity, and grappling with each problem inherent in the Arian heresies and specifically in Eunomius’ teachings.

Nazianzus’ first theological oration lays out the principles of proper theological discourse. He begins by condemning those who think that they can know everything about God. “They neglect every path of righteousness, and look only to this one point, namely, which of the propositions submitted to them they shall bind or loose…, and every marketplace must buzz with their talking; and every dinner party be made tedious with silly talk and mind-numbing conversation; and every festival be made unfestive and full of dejection, and every occasion of mourning be consoled by a greater calamity – their questions – and all the women’s apartments accustomed to simplicity be thrown into confusion and be robbed of its flower of modesty by the torrent of their words.”² We see here that Gregory has no problem calling his audience out for their arrogance. He continues, saying that of course, we should not be afraid to speak of Our Lord and sing his praises, but we must not think that we know everything about God or that we can ever fully understand Him; we must always speak of Him with the utmost reverence.

In his second theological oration, he challenges the Eunomian heresy more directly; the belief that God can be fully comprehended by the human mind. “But if any are evil and savage beasts, and altogether incapable of taking in the topics of contemplation and theology, let them not hurtfully and malignantly lurk in their dens among the woods, to catch hold of some teaching or saying by a sudden spring, and to tear the sound words to pieces by their misrepresentations. Instead, let them stand afar off and withdraw from the Mount, or they shall be stoned and crushed and perish miserably in their wickedness.”³ While many attributes of God and his triune nature can be found in scripture, His nature simply cannot be comprehended fully by our mere human minds; for, God is infinite while we and our minds are finite and limited.

Next comes the third theological oration, in which Gregory explains and defends the Dogma of Eternal Generation, explaining that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have each always been. They are timeless, and while the Son comes from the Father, He does not come after Him. “So the begotten one and the one who proceeds are not without beginning with respect to causation. But it is evident that the cause does not necessarily come before its effects, for the sun is not prior to its light. And yet the begotten one and the one who proceeds are in some sense without beginning with respect to time, even though you would scare simple minds with your quibbles; for the sources of time are not subject to time.”⁴ God is timeless, with no beginning nor end; because we are finite creatures living under the laws of a finite world, we cannot comprehend how God in all three persons can exist outside the limitations of our timeline. God’s timelessness is a mystery to our comprehension just as the Trinity is.

In his fourth theological oration, Gregory addresses yet another mystery of our faith: Christ’s dual nature. He establishes a scriptural foundation for this mystery; scripture presses us to say that the Son having become man, is fully human and fully God. Gregory addresses Jesus’s human nature, citing various scripture passages. He recalls Christ’s crucifixion when He asks why his Father has forsaken him. “He was representing us. For we were the ones forsaken and despised before, but now by the sufferings of Him who could not suffer, we were taken up and saved. Similarly, He makes our folly and our transgressions His own…”⁵ Gregory is responding to the belief that if Christ is God, then he could not be fully man. He also addresses Christ’s Divine nature, “He is called ‘Son’ because He is identical with the Father in essence – and not only for this reason, but also because He is from the Father. And He is called Only-Begotten, not because He is the only Son from the Father alone, and nothing but a Son; but also because the manner of His sonship is peculiar to Himself and not shared by bodies.”⁶

Finally, we come to the fifth and final theological oration of Gregory. This oration, unlike the others, specifically addresses the Holy Spirit and his nature. He is much harder to comprehend than the Father and the Son, so difficult that the Sadducees denied his existence altogether. Gregory explains Christ’s existence “What was Adam? A creature of God. What then was Eve? A fragment of the creature. And what was Seth? The begotten of both. Does it then seem to you that the creature, the fragment, and the begotten-of-both are the same thing? Of course not. Are they ‘of the same being? Of course they are ....”⁷ As Alexander Golitzin puts it “He has demonstrated, through the illustration of Eve’s beginning, a mode of origin that is not begetting, but a ‘something else of the One.’”⁸ Even though this example feels slightly bothersome to the palate, the point is yet obvious: we cannot understand what the Holy Spirit is because he is not strictly a “what”; that is, He has no physical form. But similar to how a child is neither his father nor his mother but is of the same being, so the Holy Spirit can exist as neither the Father nor the Son, but be of the same substance. Ultimately, the Holy Spirit is a mystery to us too, and cannot be explained fully do that we can understand completely.

One might not think in modern times that anything of value could be found in the works of a fourth-century theologian fighting an ancient heresy. On the contrary, his words are crucially important even in today's culture. Our culture is full of anti-intellectuals and agnostics who claim that all opinions are equally true, and nothing can be wrong and therefore nothing needs to be corrected; each individual can think what they want and with impunity because their opinion is "their truth." Gregory's words counter this attitude; he preaches humility and reverence, teaching that we cannot understand everything, nor should we expect that of ourselves or anyone else. We can know certain truths and stand by them, but we cannot claim to comprehend the incomprehensible. We must listen to God's revelations and abide by the Church's teachings because they are his way of guiding us in what we cannot comprehend. God is full of mysteries, from the Trinity to Christ's dual nature to Transubstantiation and many more. These are and shall always remain mysteries to our finite human minds. God is ever expansive, existing beyond the realms of space and time and well beyond the capacity of any human mind. In humility, we must trust in God, as Gregory of Nazianzus did.


¹ Beeley, Christopher A., Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press (2013), 319.

² Saint Gregory of Nazianzus. The Five Theological Orations. Translated by Stephen Reynolds. Estate of Stephen Reynolds (2011), 2.

³ Theological Orations, 14.

⁴ Theological Orations, 48.

⁵ Theological Orations, 76.

⁶ Theological Orations, 97.

⁷ Theological Orations, 105.

⁸ Golitzin, Alexander Bp., “Adam, Eve, and Seth: Pneumatological Reflections on an Unusual Image in Gregory of Nazianzus’s ‘Fifth Theological Oration.’” Anglican Theological Review 83 (2001) (3): 537–46.