Orations 27–28: Purification and the Incomprehensible God

The first two of St. Gregory’s Five Theological Orations, preached at Constantinople in 380. Oration 27 opens by refusing theology to the unprepared — it is not for the chattering crowd but for the purified soul, and not on every occasion. Oration 28 then sets out the foundational principle that God, though truly revealed, is in His essence incomprehensible — dramatized through the image of Moses ascending Sinai and seeing only the “back parts” of God. This file treats their Constantinopolitan setting against the Eunomians and the substance of these two orations.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Setting: Constantinople, 380

When Gregory arrived in Constantinople around 379, the imperial capital had been in Arian hands for some four decades. The Nicene faithful were a beleaguered minority without a church of their own; the great basilicas were held by the Homoian (“Arian”) party, and the air of the city was thick with theological dispute carried on by every class of person in every public place. Gregory gathered the Nicene remnant in a private house that he turned into a chapel, naming it the Anastasia — “Resurrection” — in hope of the resurrection of the true faith in the city (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 7). From this small and unglamorous room, in the late summer and autumn of 380, he delivered the five discourses that would crown his life’s work.

His chief opponents were the Eunomians (also called Anomoeans or Neo-Arians), the radical wing of the Arian movement led by Eunomius of Cyzicus. Where the older Arianism had said the Son was “unlike” or only loosely “like” the Father, Eunomius pressed a confident rationalism: he held that the divine essence could be known and even defined, that its defining property was being “unbegotten” (agennetos), and that therefore the Son, who is begotten, must be of a different and inferior essence — not truly God. Against this twofold error — both the subordination of the Son and the rationalist presumption that the divine essence lies open to human definition — Gregory built the Theological Orations (Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2; Williams and Wickham, PPS 23, introduction).

Oration 27: Who May Speak of God

The first oration is a polemic not against a doctrine but against a temper — the Eunomian habit of endless, public, undisciplined theological disputation. Gregory opens by setting strict conditions on who may “philosophize about God,” and when, and before whom:

“Not to every one, my friends, does it belong to philosophize about God; not to every one; the Subject is not so cheap and low” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.3; trans. NPNF II/7).

Theology, he insists, belongs only to those who are spiritually fit for it — “those who have been examined, and are passed masters in meditation, and who have been previously purified in soul and body, or at the very least are being purified” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.3; trans. NPNF II/7). And it must be pursued at the right times and on worthy occasions, not flung about as idle entertainment. With biting irony Gregory describes a city in which the loftiest mysteries had become tavern-talk — discussed “after the races, or the theatre, or a concert, or a dinner,” until “every marketplace must buzz with their talking; and every dinner party be worried to death with silly talk and boredom” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.2; trans. NPNF II/7).

The point is not to silence theology but to restore its reverence. For Gregory, purification is the prerequisite of true knowledge of God: the eye must be cleansed before it can bear the light, and the disordered soul that has not first been healed will only distort what it tries to grasp. This is the methodological heart of his whole Trinitarian theology — that the knowledge of God is inseparable from the purification of the knower, and that theologia in the strict sense is a fruit of holiness, not merely of cleverness (Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1; Williams and Wickham, PPS 23, introduction). The Eunomian error is thus diagnosed at the root: it is the presumption of an impure mind that thinks the depths of God lie open to its analysis.

Oration 28: The Incomprehensible God

Having established who may speak of God, the second oration turns to what can and cannot be known of Him — and its answer is a sustained confession of the divine incomprehensibility. Against Eunomius’ claim to define the divine essence, Gregory insists that while God’s existence is evident from creation, His nature is utterly beyond the reach of created mind and speech:

“It is difficult to conceive God, but to define Him in words is an impossibility” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.4; trans. NPNF II/7).

He presses the point even further, reversing the expected order: “in my opinion it is impossible to express Him, and yet more impossible to conceive Him” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.4; trans. NPNF II/7) — for whatever the mind manages to conceive, language cannot capture, and even the mind’s conceiving falls infinitely short of what God is.

Gregory dramatizes this ascent and its limit through the figure of Moses on Sinai. He casts himself as a second Moses climbing the mountain into the cloud, pressing into the darkness in which God dwells, only to find that the summit of contemplation yields not comprehension but a glimpse of God’s effects, His “back parts,” never His face or essence:

“I was running to lay hold on God, and thus I went up into the Mount, and drew aside the curtain of the Cloud, and entered away from matter and material things… And then when I looked up, I scarce saw the back parts of God” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.3; trans. NPNF II/7).

The Sinai image (drawn from Exodus 33:18–23) becomes Gregory’s emblem of all theological knowing: the contemplative may ascend by purification into the very cloud of God’s presence, yet what is seen there is God as turned toward creation — His glory, His works, the “back parts” by which He may be known — never the unapproachable essence itself. Gregory then surveys the whole created order, from the structure of the human body to the heavens and the angels, to show that even these lesser things outrun our understanding; how much more, then, their Maker (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.5–31; Williams and Wickham, PPS 23, introduction). The incomprehensibility of God is not a counsel of despair but the proper humility of genuine theology — the safeguard against the Eunomian conceit, and the necessary frame for everything Gregory will go on to say about the Son and the Spirit. We truly know God, but we know Him as the One who infinitely exceeds our knowing.

See Also

References

  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 27: The First Theological Oration (Against the Eunomians). Translated by C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF II/7.
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 28: The Second Theological Oration (On the Doctrine of God). Translated in NPNF II/7.
  • Williams, Frederick, and Lionel Wickham, trans. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: On God and Christ — The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius. Popular Patristics Series 23. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.
  • Beeley, Christopher A. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.