The Resignation

The bitter close of St. Gregory the Theologian’s Constantinopolitan episcopate: the challenge to his transfer from one see to another, urged by the Egyptian and Macedonian bishops on the basis of Canon 15 of Nicaea; the great farewell oration (Or. 42), his last public self-defence and exposition of the faith; the resignation and return to Nazianzus and the family estate at Arianzus; and the unflinching way Gregory told the whole story himself in the autobiographical poem De vita sua — together with the council’s lasting debt to him despite his wounded exit.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Challenge to His Transfer

No sooner had Gregory taken up the presidency of the council of 381 (see The Anastasia and the Council) than his own position came under attack. When a body of bishops from Egypt and Macedonia arrived at the council late, they objected that Gregory had no right to the see of Constantinople, because he had been translated there from another bishopric — he had earlier been consecrated bishop of Sasima (and had served at Nazianzus). The translation of a bishop from one see to another was, they argued, forbidden by the canons of the Council of Nicaea.

The canon invoked is Canon 15 of Nicaea (325), which prohibits the removal of a bishop, presbyter, or deacon from one city to another (Council of Nicaea I, Canon 15; cf. The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings). The objection was, on its face, canonical; in substance it was political. Gregory’s opponents resented his irenic attitude toward the defeated Arians — they read his charity as lukewarmness — and the Antiochene succession dispute had already set the factions of the council against one another (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 7; Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Gregory of Nazianzus”). The man who had been enthroned by the emperor a few months earlier now found his title declared void by a canon four generations old.

Jonah Overboard

Gregory, by temperament averse to strife and worn down by ill health, did not fight to keep the see. He chose instead to remove the occasion of the storm by removing himself — casting himself overboard, as he put it, like the prophet Jonah, so that the ship might ride out the tempest (cf. Jonah 1:12; the motif recurs in De vita sua and is noted in Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, introduction). He went to the emperor and asked to be released from the see. Theodosius, anxious to keep the peace of a council already fracturing, accepted the resignation. Gregory was succeeded by Nectarius, a senator and catechumen not yet even baptized, who was hurried through baptism and consecration to take the throne the theologian had vacated (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Gregory of Nazianzus”; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 7).

The Farewell Oration (Or. 42)

Before he left, Gregory delivered to the assembled bishops his Oration 42, the Last Farewell — at once a defence of his ministry, a final exposition of the Trinitarian faith, and a leave-taking of the city and church he had served. It is among the most moving pieces of patristic oratory, the valediction of an aged and exhausted man who had given the council its theology and received, in return, the questioning of his right to stand among them.

The oration ends with a litany of farewells, addressed in turn to the chapel, the cathedral, the clergy, and the Trinity itself:

“Farewell, my Anastasia, whose name is redolent of piety: for you have raised up for us the doctrine which was in contempt… Farewell, grand and renowned temple, our new inheritance, whose greatness is now due to the Word… Farewell, O Trinity, my meditation and my glory. May You be preserved by those who are here, and preserve them, my people — for mine you are, even if I am ordered elsewhere; and may You be glorified and praised by them.” (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 42 [The Last Farewell] 26–27; trans. NPNF II/7)

In the same oration Gregory rehearses his stewardship of the Nicene cause — how he had found the faith “in contempt” and leaves it triumphant — and defends, with dignity rather than rancour, the integrity of a ministry now being set aside. He frames his whole tenure as the gathering of a scattered flock and the resurrection of a buried faith, and surrenders it not to his accusers but to the Trinity he had spent his life confessing.

Earlier in the oration Gregory turns to the assembled bishops with a barely veiled critique of the ambition and contentiousness he had seen at close quarters. He had come, he reminds them, not seeking the throne but driven to it; he had governed not by intrigue but by the word of truth; and if his irenic treatment of the defeated heretics had been called weakness, he would answer that the gospel is gentleness, not the love of victory. The oration is thus simultaneously a leave-taking and an indictment — a portrait of the episcopate as Gregory had found it, drawn by a man with nothing left to lose. Modern scholars read Orations 42 and 43 together as a kind of programmatic self-presentation, Gregory’s bid to fix his own legacy in the memory of the Constantinopolitan elite before he withdrew from public life (cf. the studies of Orations 42–43 and the Constantinopolitan elites; McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 7).

The Canonical Question and Its Afterlife

The appeal to Canon 15 of Nicaea raises a question the tradition has weighed ever since: was Gregory’s tenure at Constantinople canonically irregular? The canon’s letter did forbid translation, and Gregory had indeed been consecrated for another see. Yet the practice of the fourth century was already more flexible than the canon’s strict wording, and translations for the good of the Church were tolerated where the canonical objection was not pressed (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 7). The decisive fact is that the objection was pressed — selectively, by a faction with motives well beyond canonical scruple. Gregory’s opponents reached for the canon because it was to hand, not because they were guardians of canonical order; the same bishops were untroubled by far graver irregularities in their own party. Gregory understood this perfectly, and his decision to step aside rather than contest the point was not an admission that his title was void but a judgment that the see was not worth the cost of the fight. The Church, for its part, never treated his episcopate as illegitimate; it venerates him as a sainted bishop of Constantinople and “the Theologian,” and reads the canonical objection of 381 as the pretext it was.

Return to Nazianzus and Arianzus

Released from Constantinople, Gregory returned to his native region of Cappadocia. He administered the church of Nazianzus for a time — reluctantly, and only until a permanent bishop could be found — then withdrew to the family estate at Arianzus, where he spent his last years in the ascetic stillness he had sought all his life. He died there around 390. The final period produced a large body of verse: alongside the great autobiographical poem, roughly a hundred shorter poems, dogmatic and moral pieces, epitaphs, and epigrams, through which the wounds of Constantinople were transmuted into one of the earliest and most searching bodies of Christian self-examination (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Gregory of Nazianzus”; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, introduction). The retirement he had been denied for thirty years became, at the end, the condition of some of his most personal writing.

How He Told It Himself: De vita sua

Gregory did not let others write the story of his fall. In the autobiographical poem De vita sua (On His Own Life), a work of nearly two thousand iambic lines, he set down his own account of the Constantinopolitan years — the call, the Anastasia, the betrayal by Maximus, the brief glory under Theodosius, and the bitter resignation — with a candour rare in any age. He does not spare himself, and he does not spare the bishops whose intrigues drove him out; his portrait of the episcopal politics of the council is famously caustic. The poem is at once an apologia, a lament, and a confession, and it is the principal first-person source for the events of 379–381 (Gregory, De vita sua; trans. White, Autobiographical Poems, and Meehan, Three Poems; on its character see Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, and McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 7). Through it, the humiliations of Constantinople became, paradoxically, one of his enduring gifts to the Church — a model of how a churchman may tell the truth about ecclesiastical power, including the power that broke him.

The Council’s Debt

The exit was bitter, but the debt was real. The Creed completed at Constantinople in 381 — the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed recited at every Orthodox Liturgy — enshrines the very theology Gregory had preached from the Anastasia: one Godhead in three coequal persons, the Father as source, the Holy Spirit fully divine and “worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son” (Council of Constantinople I, 381; see The Holy Trinity and The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The council that questioned his right to its presidency could not have framed its faith without his theology. He left the throne; the doctrine stayed. In the Church’s memory it is not Nectarius but Gregory who is “the Theologian,” and the council of 381 is, in its dogmatic substance, his (see The Trinity Perfected).

The deeper irony is one the tradition has never tired of drawing. The man whose words shaped the Creed of the universal Church could not hold a single bishopric for a full year; the politics that defeated him in 381 are forgotten except as the dark frame around his theology, while the theology endures undimmed in the worship of the whole Orthodox world. Gregory himself seems to have grasped the paradox. In his retirement he wrote not as a defeated bishop but as a free man, and the De vita sua reads less as the complaint of a victim than as the testimony of one who had learned, at great cost, that the authority of the Church’s teachers does not finally rest on the chairs they occupy. The Church received his resignation as a loss to the see of Constantinople and a gift to the ages: it lost a patriarch and kept a Theologian.

References

Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus). Oration 42: The Last Farewell. 381. Trans. NPNF II/7.
Gregory the Theologian. De vita sua (On His Own Life; Poem II.1.11). Trans. in Carolinne White, Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems, Cambridge Medieval Classics 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Denis Molaise Meehan, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: Three Poems, Fathers of the Church 75 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987).
Council of Nicaea I (325), Canon 15. In The Rudder (Pedalion), trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957.
Council of Constantinople I (381). Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and canons.
McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
Daley, Brian E. Gregory of Nazianzus. The Early Church Fathers. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
“St. Gregory of Nazianzus.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7. New York: Robert Appleton, 1910 (used to locate the sequence of the resignation and the succession of Nectarius; cross-checked against McGuckin and Daley).