The Festal Orations

The festal preaching of St. Gregory the Theologian and its passage into the liturgy: Oration 38 on the Nativity, whose opening became the first words of the Nativity canon; Orations 39–40 on Theophany and baptism; Oration 45 on Pascha, whose phrases the eighth-century hymnographers wove into the Paschal canon; and Oration 43, the funeral oration on Basil that is the masterpiece of the genre. Here the rhetoric of the Second Sophistic, trained for the law court and the civic festival, is turned wholesale into doxology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Rhetoric in the Service of Theology

Gregory had the finest rhetorical education available in the fourth century — Caesarea in Cappadocia, then Caesarea in Palestine, then Alexandria, and finally some ten years at Athens, where his fellow student and lifelong friend was Basil and where the two of them, by Gregory’s later account, knew “only two roads,” the one to the church and the one to the schools (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.21; trans. NPNF II/7). What he absorbed there was the whole apparatus of the so-called Second Sophistic: the periodic sentence built to a climax, the balanced antithesis, the encomium and the invective and the funeral oration as fixed forms with fixed expectations. Gregory never repudiated this training. He conscripted it. In the festal orations the techniques are unmistakable, but the object has changed: the period now mounts not toward a forensic point but toward the contemplation of the Trinity, the antithesis now sets the divine against the human in the single person of the incarnate Word, and the encomium praises not a benefactor but the God who became man. The Byzantine Church received this fusion as the model of how Christian eloquence ought to sound, and it is no accident that the title ho Theologos, “the Theologian,” was conferred on Gregory in large part on the strength of this preaching.

Oration 38: The Nativity

Oration 38, On the Theophany, or Birthday of Christ, was delivered at Constantinople around Christmas of 380, during the few turbulent years when Gregory led the small Nicene community of the capital (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 38, headnote; trans. NPNF II/7; cf. Harrison, Festal Orations, PPS 36, introduction). It opens with one of the most famous sentences in all of Greek Christian literature:

“Christ is born, glorify Him! Christ from heaven, go to meet Him! Christ on earth, be exalted! Sing to the Lord, all the earth, and, that I may join both in one word, let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad, for Him who is of heaven and then of earth.” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 38.1; trans. NPNF II/7)

The body of the oration is a compact dogmatic treatise on the Incarnation cast as festal celebration: Gregory works through the names and natures of God, the fall and the divine response, and the paradox of the Word who “is born, but He had been begotten,” who “comes forth from the Virgin” yet remains what He was (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 38.2, 13; trans. NPNF II/7). Much of the same material recurs almost verbatim in Oration 45 on Pascha, the two sharing a long common section — a sign of how Gregory reused and refined his own best passages.

Tracing the Nativity Canon’s Irmos

The opening line did not stay on the page. In the eighth century the hymnographer St. Cosmas of Maiuma, foster-brother and companion of St. John of Damascus, composed the canon sung at the Nativity, and he took Gregory’s words as the very first words of the first ode. The irmos of Ode 1 of the Nativity canon reads:

“Christ is born; glorify Him! Christ comes from heaven; go to meet Him! Christ is on earth; be exalted! Sing to the Lord, all the earth!”

The borrowing is direct and acknowledged in the tradition itself: Orthodox liturgical commentary identifies the canon’s opening as taken “from a Nativity sermon by St. Gregory the Theologian” (Bishop Alexander Mileant, The Divine Services of the Nativity of Christ; cf. the obitel-minsk catalogue note that “many of their irmoi draw directly from the words of St. Gregory the Theologian on Nativity and Pascha”). It is from this same sentence, transmitted through the canon, that the Orthodox Christmas greeting “Christ is born! Glorify Him!” descends. The attribution of the canon proper to Cosmas of Maiuma rather than to John of Damascus is the standard one; both men, raised together at the monastery of St. Sabas, drew on Gregory’s festal corpus, and the two Nativity canons sung at the vigil are assigned to them respectively in the liturgical books.

Orations 39 and 40: Theophany and Baptism

Orations 39 and 40 form a pair delivered at Constantinople in early January 381, for the feast of the Lights (ta Phota) — the Theophany, which in the fourth century still embraced both the manifestation of Christ at His baptism and the broader celebration of the divine self-disclosure. Oration 39, On the Holy Lights, treats the feast itself: Gregory distinguishes the pagan and the Christian uses of light, expounds the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, and gives one of his most quoted Trinitarian formulations, the procession of the believer’s vision from one to three and the resting of contemplation in the three as one (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 39; trans. NPNF II/7; cf. Harrison, PPS 36). Oration 40, On Holy Baptism, is the longest of the festal set and is in effect a catechetical treatise on the sacrament: its varieties (Moses, John, Christ, the baptism of blood in martyrdom, the baptism of tears in repentance), its effects, the danger of presuming on a deathbed baptism, and the obligations it lays on the baptized. It became a standard Byzantine source on the theology of baptism, read alongside the festal preaching as doctrine and as exhortation at once.

Oration 45: Pascha and the Paschal Canon

Oration 45, the Second Oration on Easter, is the festal oration with the deepest liturgical afterlife. Gregory delivered the first Paschal oration (Oration 1) at his ordination in 362; Oration 45, much longer and largely overlapping in its central section with Oration 38, belongs to the later 380s, after his withdrawal from Constantinople (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45, headnote; trans. NPNF II/7). It is a sustained meditation on the Passover fulfilled in Christ, working from the lamb of Exodus to the Lamb of God and rising to a final ecstatic apostrophe to Pascha itself.

John of Damascus’s Debt

The Paschal canon of St. John of Damascus — the canon of canons, sung at the Paschal vigil — is built throughout on Gregory’s two Easter orations. Annotated against the canon text, the debts are specific and traceable (Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, annotated Paschal Canon):

The celebrated opening of Ode 1, “The day of Resurrection! Let us be radiant, O peoples!”, paraphrases Gregory’s first short Easter sermon (Oration 1, PG 35:396–401), which also supplies the doxastikon of the Paschal stichera.
Ode 3’s “Yesterday I was buried with You, O Christ; today I rise with You as You arise” and “Yesterday I was crucified with You” paraphrase Gregory’s first Paschal sermon (PG 37:397), itself founded on Romans 8:17.
Ode 4 opens with “Let the God-inspired prophet Avvakoum keep the divine watch with us,” a close paraphrase of the opening of Gregory’s Oration 45 (PG 36:624); the troparion “As a yearling lamb” likewise draws on Oration 45 (PG 36:641, with Psalm 64:12 LXX).
Ode 9’s “O great and most sacred Pascha, Christ!” takes up the final section of Gregory’s Paschal homily (Oration 45, PG 36:664).

The relationship is thus not a matter of vague influence but of phrase-by-phrase reception: John of Damascus and Cosmas of Maiuma read Gregory’s festal orations as the Church’s authoritative festal language and recast that language into the meters of the canon, where it is sung still. The parallel treatment of the canon from the hymnographer’s side will be found in the Paschal canon.

Oration 43: The Funeral Oration on Basil

Oration 43, the funeral oration On the Great St. Basil, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, was composed around 381–382, some years after Basil’s death on January 1, 379, and delivered at a memorial in Caesarea (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43; trans. NPNF II/7). It is the masterpiece of the genre and the single richest contemporary portrait of Basil that survives — already serving elsewhere in this repository as the chief witness to Basil’s life, his stand before the prefect Modestus, his strategic reticence on the divinity of the Spirit, and the Basiliada charitable foundation. Formally it is a Greek funeral encomium of the most accomplished kind: it praises Basil’s ancestry, education, asceticism, episcopal courage, and works of mercy, building each through the rhetorical commonplaces of the form. Yet it is also a deeply personal document, shadowed by the wound of the Sasima affair — the wretched little see to which Basil had consecrated Gregory in the course of an ecclesiastical-political maneuver — and the oration’s capacity to hold both genuine grief and unhealed grievance is one of its more remarkable features. The famous Athens passage, in which the two friends “knew only two roads,” the church and the schools, comes from this oration (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.21; trans. NPNF II/7), as does the account of the Modestus confrontation (Oration 43.48–51). That a funeral oration of such art could double as sober historical testimony is precisely Gregory’s achievement: the rhetoric serves, rather than replaces, the truth of the man.

Rhetoric Turned to Doxology

What unites these orations is a single conviction worked out in practice: that the highest end of eloquence is praise of God. Gregory took an inheritance built for persuasion in human affairs and turned it toward the one object that, on his own account, finally exceeds speech — the Trinity, which can be glimpsed but not circumscribed, “no sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40.41; trans. NPNF II/7). The festal orations are where that conviction is most public and most consequential, because through the canons of Cosmas and John of Damascus they ceased to be the eloquence of one man and became the words the whole Church sings.

References

Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations (38, 39, 40, 43, 45). Translated by C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF II/7.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Festal Orations (38, 39, 40, 41, 45). Translated by Nonna Verna Harrison. Popular Patristics Series 36. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
Lash, Archimandrite Ephrem. The Canon of Pascha of St. John of Damascus, annotated translation (PG references to Gregory’s Orations 1 and 45, and to PG 35–37).
Mileant, Bishop Alexander. The Divine Services of the Nativity of Christ. (Identifies the Nativity canon’s opening as from a Nativity sermon of St. Gregory the Theologian.)
“Cosmas of Maiuma and John of Damascus: Brothers, Friends, and Hymnographers of the Orthodox Church.” Obitel-Minsk catalogue blog, 2024. (On the hymnographers’ use of Gregory’s Nativity and Pascha orations.)
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.