Invective and Praise

The full oratorical range of St. Gregory the Theologian beyond the festal preaching: the two invectives against the emperor Julian (Or. 4–5), whose context and historical problems are named honestly; the panegyrics on Athanasius (Or. 21) and Cyprian (Or. 24, with its conflation of two saints); the funeral orations for his own family — Caesarius (Or. 7) and Gorgonia (Or. 8), among the earliest Christian funeral encomia for a layman and a laywoman; and the question of what survives of the corpus and how the Byzantine world received it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Invectives Against Julian (Orations 4–5)

The two Invectives Against Julian are the most problematic pieces in Gregory’s corpus, and the Methodology requires that the problems be stated rather than buried. They were composed shortly after the death of the emperor Julian the Apostate on his Persian campaign in 363 — Julian, who had been a fellow student of Gregory and Basil at Athens, and who as emperor sought to roll back the Christianization of the empire, most pointedly by his edict barring Christians from teaching the classical curriculum. Oration 4 is the first and longer invective, attacking Julian’s apostasy, his policy, and his person; Oration 5 responds to Julian’s death and his subsequent pagan apotheosis (Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 4–5; trans. C. W. King, Julian the Emperor, 1888; cf. NPNF II/7, which does not include them in full).

The honest difficulties are these. First, the orations were in all likelihood never delivered publicly; they are literary compositions, written invectives in the rhetorical form of the psogos (the formal denunciation that is the mirror-image of the encomium). Second, their tone is one of sustained and unmeasured hostility — Quasten’s Patrology judged that the anger is so total that “their historical value is almost zero,” an assessment many scholars now regard as an overstatement but which registers a real problem: as a source for Julian’s reign the invectives are evidence of Gregory’s rhetoric far more than of Julian’s deeds. Third, there are internal inconsistencies — Gregory praises Julian’s appointments at one point and condemns them at another — and his handling of events such as the abortive rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple cannot be reconciled in detail with the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The right way to read Orations 4–5 is therefore as masterful specimens of the invective genre and as a window onto the Christian reaction to the apostate emperor, not as dispassionate history. To treat their characterization of Julian as fact would be to mistake the form.

The Panegyrics

Alongside invective stands its opposite, the panegyric or encomium of praise.

Oration 21, On Athanasius the Great, was delivered at Constantinople in 380, on or near the saint’s commemoration. It is a celebration of the great Alexandrian champion of Nicaea — Gregory praises Athanasius’s defense of the homoousion, his sufferings and exiles, and his pastoral moderation, presenting him as the pillar of orthodoxy against Arianism and as a model bishop (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 21; trans. NPNF II/7). The oration is one of the most important early witnesses to Athanasius’s posthumous stature and a key text in the formation of his reputation as the standard-bearer of the Nicene faith.

Oration 24, On Cyprian, delivered at Constantinople in 379/380 for the feast of a saint Cyprian, carries a well-known historical problem that the sources oblige us to flag. Gregory praises St. Cyprian, the bishop and martyr of Carthage (†258), the great Latin Father — but he tells the saint’s story using the legendary material of an entirely different figure, Cyprian of Antioch, the converted magician of the romance of Cyprian and Justina. Gregory has, in effect, conflated the historical bishop of Carthage with the legendary Antiochene sorcerer, narrating the life of the one under the name of the other (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 24; cf. the Oxford Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, E00886, which documents the conflation). The conflation is a fact about the oration, not a defect to be smoothed over: it shows how fluid hagiographical identities could be even in a writer of Gregory’s learning, and it is exactly the kind of provenance matter the Methodology treats as a topic rather than an embarrassment.

The Family Funeral Orations

Some of Gregory’s most affecting orations are the funeral encomia for members of his own family, and two of these are of particular historical interest.

Oration 7, On His Brother Caesarius, eulogizes Gregory’s younger brother, a distinguished physician who had served at the imperial court and who died around 368/369. Gregory praises Caesarius’s learning and his refusal to apostatize under Julian, and he turns the occasion toward a meditation on the resurrection and the brevity of human life. It is one of the earliest fully developed Christian funeral orations and a model of how the classical funeral form could be Christianized (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 7; trans. McCauley, FOTC 22).

Oration 8, On His Sister Gorgonia, is the more remarkable of the two for the history of the genre. Delivered for his sister, a married laywoman, mother, and pious householder who died around 370, it is among the earliest — and is frequently described as the first — Christian funeral oration composed for a laywoman, praising her not for ascetic withdrawal but for the sanctity of an ordinary married Christian life (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 8; trans. McCauley, FOTC 22). Gregory calls her, in the tradition’s memory of the oration, the paragon of women, and frames her domestic virtue, her charity, and her quiet courage as a genuine path of holiness. The claim that Oration 8 is the first such encomium for a laywoman should be stated as the scholarly characterization it is rather than as a documented certainty, but the oration’s significance for the Christianization of the funeral encomium, and for the recognition of lay sanctity, is not in doubt. Together with Oration 18 on his father (the bishop of Nazianzus) and Oration 43 on Basil, these family orations established the Christian funeral oration as a major literary and theological form.

What Survives, and the Byzantine Reception

The surviving oratorical corpus numbers forty-four orations (sometimes counted as forty-five, depending on whether closely related pieces are reckoned separately), preserved as a stable collection through the Byzantine manuscript tradition (Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations; cf. McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus). This collection includes the five Theological Orations (27–31) that earned Gregory his title, the festal orations, the panegyrics and invectives, the funeral orations, and a range of occasional and pastoral pieces.

The reception of this corpus in the Byzantine world was extraordinary. The orations were copied, illuminated, excerpted, set as school texts, and commented on for a millennium; the lavishly illustrated Paris Gregory (Bibliothèque nationale, gr. 510), produced in Constantinople in the late ninth century, is one monument among many to the cult of his text. The scale of that copying underlies a striking scholarly claim: the Belgian Byzantinist Jacques Noret, in a much-cited 1983 study, characterized Gregory as “l’auteur le plus cité après la Bible” in Byzantine ecclesiastical literature — the most-cited author after the Bible itself (J. Noret, “Grégoire de Nazianze, l’auteur le plus cité, après la Bible, dans la littérature ecclésiastique byzantine,” in II. Symposium Nazianzenum, ed. J. Mossay, Paderborn, 1983). The claim is properly attributed to Noret rather than asserted as an unsourced commonplace, but it captures a real and measurable fact about the manuscript record: after Scripture, no Christian author was reproduced and quarried by the Byzantines more than Gregory the Theologian. The festal orations entered the hymnody; the Theological Orations governed the doctrine; and the whole corpus became, for the Greek East, the very pattern of how a Christian should write.

See Also

• The Festal Orations — the liturgical orations and the funeral oration on Basil (Oration 43)
• 06 — Poetry and Letters — the rest of the literary corpus
• St. Athanasius: Legacy and Reception — the saint praised in Oration 21
• St. Basil the Great: Legacy and the Three Hierarchs — the family and friendship behind Oration 43

References

• Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations (7, 8, 18, 21, 24). Translated in NPNF II/7 and (for the funeral orations) in Funeral Orations, trans. Leo P. McCauley et al., Fathers of the Church 22, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1953.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations 4–5: Against Julian. Translated by C. W. King in Julian the Emperor (1888).
• Quasten, Johannes. Patrology, vol. 3. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960. (On the historical value of the invectives.)
• “E00886: Gregory of Nazianzus composes his Oration 24 … using a version of the hagiographical legend of Kyprianos and Ioustina.” The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, University of Oxford. (On the Cyprian conflation.)
• Noret, Jacques. “Grégoire de Nazianze, l’auteur le plus cité, après la Bible, dans la littérature ecclésiastique byzantine.” In II. Symposium Nazianzenum, edited by Justin Mossay. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1983.
• 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.