Orations 29–31: The Son and the Holy Spirit

The last three of St. Gregory’s Five Theological Orations, in which the apophatic foundation laid in Orations 27–28 issues in the positive confession of the Trinity. Orations 29–30 defend the full divinity of the Son: the Eunomian argument from “unbegotten” is dismantled, and the subordinationist proof-texts are sorted by Gregory’s rule of dividing what belongs to the Godhead from what belongs to the Incarnation. Oration 31 then argues openly for the divinity of the Holy Spirit — saying plainly what Basil had circled — and frames the whole question as one of progressive revelation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Orations 29–30: The Son

The third and fourth orations form a single sustained defense of the Son’s full and eternal deity against the Eunomians. Gregory’s task is twofold: to defeat the central Eunomian argument drawn from the term “unbegotten,” and to disarm the Eunomian proof-texts — the “lowly” scriptural passages that seem to make the Son inferior to the Father.

The Agennetos Argument Answered

Eunomius had built his whole system on a single word. The defining property of God, he held, is being “unbegotten” (agennetos); since the Son is “begotten,” the Son cannot share the divine essence and is therefore a creature. Gregory answers by exposing a confusion at the heart of the argument: it treats a term of relation and origin as though it named the essence. “Begotten” and “unbegotten,” he argues, tell us how a thing stands toward its source, not what its nature is — and a difference in mode of origin is no difference of essence at all (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.10–12; Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2).

Decisively, Gregory points out that “Father” itself is a relational name, not an essential one:

“Father is not a name either of an essence or of an action… But it is the name of the Relation in which the Father stands to the Son, and the Son to the Father” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.16; trans. NPNF II/7).

The names Father, Son, and Unbegotten/Begotten therefore mark the eternal relations of origin within the one Godhead — the ways the Persons are distinguished from one another — and say nothing against their common and equal essence. Since a true son shares by nature the nature of his father, the Son’s being begotten establishes precisely His consubstantiality, not His inferiority. The Eunomian inference collapses once the categories of relation and essence are kept distinct.

The “Lowly” Texts and the Rule of Division

In Oration 30 Gregory turns to the arsenal of subordinationist proof-texts: “The Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28), “My God and your God” (Jn 20:17), the Son’s professed ignorance of the day and hour (Mk 13:32), and “The Lord created me a beginning of His ways” (Prov 8:22, as the Arians read it of the Word). He answers them all with a single hermeneutical key — the rule that the scriptural statements about Christ must be sorted according to whether they speak of His eternal Godhead or of the humanity He assumed in the Incarnation:

“Whatever we find joined with a cause we are to refer to the Manhood, but all that is absolute and unoriginate we are to reckon to the account of His Godhead” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.15; trans. NPNF II/7).

By this rule the “lowly” texts cease to be evidence of an inferior divine nature and become testimony to the reality of the Incarnation. “The Father is greater” is true of the Son as man; as God He is the Father’s equal. “My God” is spoken from the assumed humanity — “how could there be a God of Him Who is properly God?” The ignorance of the hour is referred reverently to the manhood, not the Godhead. And the “creation” of Proverbs 8:22 belongs to the incarnate economy, where alone there is a “cause,” for the Word’s eternal generation has no external cause (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.2–15; Williams and Wickham, PPS 23, introduction). This principle of partitive exegesis — dividing the texts between the two natures of the one Christ — became a permanent possession of Orthodox Christology, anticipating the two-natures language that Chalcedon would ratify in 451.

Oration 31: The Holy Spirit

The fifth oration completes the Trinity by confessing the full divinity of the Holy Spirit against the Pneumatomachoi (“Spirit-fighters”), who granted the deity of the Son but ranked the Spirit among the creatures. Here Gregory is most himself, and most daring — for he says plainly what his friend Basil had deliberately left unsaid.

Spoken Plainly Where Basil Was Reserved

In his own On the Holy Spirit (375), Basil had defended the Spirit’s full equality of honor and nature by every indirect means — but had pointedly never written the flat sentence “the Holy Spirit is God,” nor called Him homoousios, judging the times not yet ripe for the bluntest terms (see St. Basil: On the Holy Spirit). Gregory himself, in his funeral oration for Basil, defended that silence as a deliberate economy (oikonomia) — a prudent management of the truth lest Basil be driven from his see and the whole cause be lost over a single word (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.68–69; trans. NPNF II/7). But Gregory’s own patience had a limit, and in Oration 31, preached at Constantinople after Basil’s death, he crossed the line his friend had drawn:

“What then? Is the Spirit God? Most certainly. Well then, is He Consubstantial? Yes, if He is God” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.10; trans. NPNF II/7).

The contrast with Basil’s reserve is exact and deliberate, and the tradition has preserved it as a difference of temperament and timing between the two friends rather than of faith: Basil safeguarded the substance and conceded the syllable for a season; Gregory, judging the hour to have come, named the Spirit God and consubstantial outright (Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 3; and the discussion in de-spiritu-sancto.md). The bulk of the oration then argues the case from Scripture, from the Spirit’s divine operations, and from His place in baptism — the same lines of argument Basil had laid down, now carried through to their explicit conclusion.

Progressive Revelation (Or. 31.26)

Gregory anticipates the obvious objection — if the Spirit is God, why does Scripture not proclaim it as openly as it proclaims the Father? — with his celebrated doctrine of the gradual unfolding of revelation. God, he argues, reveals Himself by stages, accommodating each disclosure to the capacity of the age to receive it:

“The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly, and the Son more obscurely. The New manifested the Son, and suggested the Deity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit Himself dwells among us, and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of Himself” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.26; trans. NPNF II/7).

Revelation thus advances by “additions of light,” from the Father in the Old Covenant, to the Son in the New, to the Spirit who now “dwells among us” in the Church and supplies the clearer knowledge of Himself. The explicit confession of the Spirit’s deity is, on this account, not an innovation but the ripe fruit of a revelation always tending toward it — the next, proper stage of the Light of the Trinity shining on those made ready to receive it (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.26–27; Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 3). The argument both justified the Church’s new explicitness and gave the Orthodox tradition one of its most enduring accounts of how doctrine can develop without changing — a deepening apprehension of a truth given whole from the beginning.

The pneumatology Gregory argued so openly was vindicated within the year: the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, over which Gregory himself briefly presided, condemned the Pneumatomachoi and confessed the Spirit as “worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son” (Council of Constantinople I, 381, Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed).

References

Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 29: The Third Theological Oration (On the Son). Translated by C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF II/7.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 30: The Fourth Theological Oration (On the Son). Translated in NPNF II/7.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 31: The Fifth Theological Oration (On the Holy Spirit). Translated in NPNF II/7.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil. 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.
Council of Constantinople I (381). Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.