05 — Orations and Rhetoric
The oratorical corpus of St. Gregory the Theologian: the forty-four (or forty-five) surviving orations in which the rhetoric of the Second Sophistic was bent wholesale into the service of doxology. This section pairs the festal orations that shaped Orthodox liturgy — Nativity, Theophany, Pascha — with the full oratorical range, from the genre-defining funeral encomium on St. Basil to the bitter invectives against the emperor Julian, handled honestly per the Methodology.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
Gregory was trained at the schools of Caesarea, Alexandria, and above all Athens in the late-antique discipline of rhetoric. What sets him apart is not that he abandoned that training but that he conscripted it: the periodic sentence, the antithesis, the built climax all reappear in his preaching, aimed now not at a law court but at the contemplation of the Trinity. The Byzantine Church received the result as the very model of theological eloquence, and the hymnographers of the eighth century mined it directly for their festal canons.
This section treats two faces of the corpus. The first is the festal preaching — Orations 38, 39, 40, and 45 — whose phrases passed nearly verbatim into the Nativity, Theophany, and Paschal services still sung today, and Oration 43, the funeral oration for Basil that is the genre’s masterpiece and the chief contemporary witness to his life. The second is the wider range: the panegyrics on Athanasius and Cyprian, the funeral orations for Gregory’s family, the invectives against Julian whose problems the Methodology requires be named, and what survives and how the Byzantine world received it.
A note on method: orations are cited by number and (where verified) by PG volume, anchored to NPNF II/7 and the festal translations of Harrison (PPS 36). Liturgical debts are traced to the canon texts as annotated by Archimandrite Ephrem Lash.
Files in this Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Festal Orations | The festal preaching that shaped the liturgy: Or. 38 (Nativity — “Christ is born, glorify him!” and its passage into the Nativity canon); Or. 39–40 (Theophany and baptism); Or. 45 (Pascha and its debt in John of Damascus’s Paschal canon); Or. 43 (the funeral oration on Basil); and rhetoric turned to doxology. |
| Invective and Praise | The full oratorical range: the invectives against Julian (Or. 4–5) and their problems; the panegyrics (Athanasius, Or. 21; Cyprian, Or. 24, with the conflation issue); the family funeral orations (Caesarius, Or. 7; Gorgonia, Or. 8); and what survives, with its Byzantine reception. |
See Also
- 06 — Poetry and Letters — the verse and the correspondence, the rest of the literary corpus
- St. Basil the Great: Letters and Church Politics — the friend eulogized in Oration 43
- St. John of Damascus: The Paschal Canon — the hymnody that drew on Gregory’s festal orations (parallel will exist)
References
- Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations. Translated by C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF II/7.
- Gregory of Nazianzus. Festal Orations. Translated by Nonna Verna Harrison. Popular Patristics Series 36. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
- Gregory of Nazianzus. Funeral Orations. Translated by Leo P. McCauley et al. Fathers of the Church 22. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1953.
- McGuckin, John Anthony. 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: Routledge, 2006.