Oration 2: The Pastoral Theology of the Flight to Pontus

St. Gregory the Theologian’s Oration 2 — the Apologeticus de Fuga, his defense of his flight to Pontus after being ordained priest against his will at Christmas 361 — is the first systematic theology of the pastoral office in Christian literature. Composed around 362 to justify both his flight and his return, it defines the care of souls as “the art of arts and science of sciences,” develops the priest as a physician of souls, and dwells on the awful weight of handling holy doctrine. It is the direct ancestor of Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood and Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Occasion: Ordination, Flight, and Return

Gregory was ordained priest by his own father — the elder Gregory, bishop of Nazianzus — on Christmas Day 361, against his expressed will and in front of the congregation, in what amounted to a forced ordination of the kind common in the fourth century, when the most reluctant were thought the most worthy (McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography, ch. 2). Gregory experienced it as an act of “tyranny” over his freedom and his vocation to the contemplative life. Stung almost to madness, as the older accounts put it, he fled to Pontus and to his friend Basil, reaching him about Epiphany 362 (NPNF II/7, “Prolegomena”; Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 1).

The flight was short. The sense of duty reasserted itself, and Gregory returned to his father’s side before Easter 362, delivering on Easter Day his very first oration (Oration 1) before a congregation whose thinness registered the people’s displeasure at his conduct (NPNF II/7, “Prolegomena”). Oration 2 is the great defense composed in the aftermath: an extended apologia that explains why a man might flee the priesthood out of reverence rather than contempt, and in the course of that explanation, lays out the whole nature and burden of the office. The personal crisis became the occasion for the first treatise on pastoral care.

It is worth being precise about what Gregory was fleeing. He insists from the outset that he did not despise the office or shrink from its labor — he protests, on the contrary, his “yearning” for it and his sense of its dignity — but that he fled the responsibility for souls in a man not yet purified to bear it (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.9–10; trans. NPNF II/7). The reverence and the flight are two faces of one estimate: the office is so great that only a fool would seize it lightly and only a coward of a different kind would refuse it for good. Gregory threads the needle by fleeing first and returning second, and Oration 2 exists to justify both halves of that movement — the flight as the reflex of awe, the return as the answer of obedience. The literary form of the oration mirrors the logic of the life: it begins in self-defense and ends in self-offering.

“The Art of Arts and Science of Sciences”

The heart of the oration is its estimate of the magnitude of the pastoral task. Gregory grounds his flight not in fear of labor but in awe of an office whose difficulty he judges to exceed every other human undertaking. The famous sentence comes at section 16:

“the guiding of man, the most variable and manifold of creatures, seems to me in very deed to be the art of arts and science of sciences.” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.16; trans. NPNF II/7)

The phrase — ars artium, scientia scientiarum in its later Latin form — became a commonplace of Christian pastoral literature, passing almost verbatim into Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule (Demacopoulos, introduction to The Book of Pastoral Rule, PPS 34). Its force lies in the claim it makes about the subject matter: the human soul is the most variable of all created things, and the man who would direct it must master an art more delicate than medicine, more exact than any science, because its material resists the practitioner and its stakes are eternal.

The Physician of Souls

The dominant image of the oration is medical. Gregory develops at length the analogy between the priest and the physician, and presses it to the conclusion that the cure of souls is harder and weightier than the cure of bodies. The pastor’s task is

“the diagnosis and cure of our habits, passions, lives, wills, and whatever else is within us, by banishing from our compound nature everything brutal and fierce, and introducing and establishing in their stead what is gentle and dear to God” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.18; trans. NPNF II/7).

And he draws the comparison out explicitly:

“our office as physicians far exceeds in toilsomeness, and consequently in worth, that which is confined to the body” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.21; trans. NPNF II/7).

The physician of bodies works on a visible, single nature with visible instruments; the physician of souls must treat what is hidden, infinitely various, and free — a patient who can resist, deceive, and refuse his own healing. Gregory works through the discrimination this demands: the same remedy does not suit all, and the pastor must adapt his treatment to each soul as a doctor adapts to each constitution. This insistence on the individuation of pastoral care — that souls must be governed not by a single rule but by discernment of each one’s condition — is the kernel that Gregory the Great would expand into the long central section of the Pastoral Rule on how to admonish different classes of hearers in opposite ways (Demacopoulos, Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church, ch. on Nazianzen).

Gregory presses the medical analogy into its harder corners. The pastor, like the physician, must sometimes use what is bitter — rebuke, discipline, the withholding of consolation — and must judge not only what medicine to apply but in what measure and at what moment, since the same word that heals one soul may crush another and harden a third (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.18–22, 28–34; trans. NPNF II/7). And unlike the physician of bodies, the physician of souls cannot compel his patient: the will he must heal is free, and free wills can refuse the cure, so that the pastor’s success depends on a persuasion that respects the very freedom it seeks to redirect. This is why Gregory ranks the cure of souls above all other arts — not merely because its subject is nobler but because its method is more constrained: the soul-physician must achieve, by gentleness and discernment alone, what the body-physician may achieve by force. The whole of the later Eastern literature of spiritual fatherhood, in which the elder heals by discernment of each disciple’s hidden condition, draws on this Nazianzen template (Demacopoulos, Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church, ch. on Nazianzen).

The Weight of Handling Doctrine

For Gregory, the gravest part of the office is theological. To be a priest is to handle and to teach the doctrine of God, and that, for a man as conscious as Gregory of the danger of speaking wrongly about the divine, is the most fearful charge of all. The pastor must purify himself before he can purify others, must be illumined before he can illumine, must draw near to God before he can lead others near (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.71, 91; trans. NPNF II/7). The theology of the office is thus inseparable from Gregory’s whole insistence that the knowledge of God requires purification — the theme that runs through the Theological Orations (Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God, ch. 2). The priest who teaches the faith carelessly does not merely err; he wounds the souls entrusted to him and answers for them. The reverent flight, on this logic, is not the opposite of the office but the measure of how seriously its holder takes it.

Gregory is acutely aware, too, of the dangers that beset the man who teaches: the temptation to flatter rather than correct, to court reputation, to handle the deep things of God for the applause of hearers. He dwells on the wounds an unworthy or unprepared teacher inflicts and on the contemporary spectacle of men “who have but yesterday been initiated” rushing to instruct others, presuming to “theologize” without the long discipline of purification the task demands (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2.47–49, 69; trans. NPNF II/7). This passage, with its warning against premature and undisciplined speech about God, is the seed of the principle Gregory would make famous in Oration 27: that not everyone may speak of God, nor at every time, nor before every audience, but only those purified, and on the right occasion, and to those able to receive it (Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, ch. 2). The pastoral theology of Oration 2 and the theological method of the Theological Orations are thus a single conviction worked out in two registers — that the knowledge and the teaching of God are reserved to the purified, and that the office which presumes to hand on that knowledge is therefore the most perilous of all human callings.

The Lineage: Chrysostom and Gregory the Great

Oration 2 stands at the head of a documented tradition. Its closest Greek descendant is St. John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood (De Sacerdotio, c. 390), which takes up the very same starting point — a young man’s flight from ordination, defended at length — and unfolds it into a six-book treatise on the office. Chrysostom’s debt to Gregory is recognized in the scholarship: Gregory’s Oration 2 is the closest Greek companion and the acknowledged predecessor of Chrysostom’s treatise, the two together forming the foundational Eastern reflection on the priesthood (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 4; Quasten, Patrology III, 462). Both works share the paradoxical logic that to flee the altar can be an act of reverence toward it, and both move from personal apologia to a systematic vision of what ordination demands (see On the Priesthood).

The lineage runs west as well. St. Gregory the Great’s Liber Regulae Pastoralis (the Pastoral Rule, c. 590) — the manual of pastoral care for the entire Latin Middle Ages — opens with the very maxim Gregory of Nazianzus coined, that the government of souls is the art of arts, and builds its central books on the Nazianzen principle that souls must be governed individually, each according to its condition (Demacopoulos, introduction and translation, The Book of Pastoral Rule, PPS 34). Through this triple inheritance — Nazianzen to Chrysostom in the East, Nazianzen to Gregory the Great in the West — Oration 2 became the source from which the Church’s whole later understanding of the pastoral office flows.

See Also

References

  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 2: In Defence of His Flight to Pontus, and His Return, After His Ordination to the Priesthood, with an Exposition of the Character of the Priestly Office (esp. §§16, 18, 21, 71, 91). Trans. C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1894.
  • McGuckin, John Anthony. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, ch. 2.
  • Daley, Brian E. Gregory of Nazianzus. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2006, ch. 1.
  • Beeley, Christopher A. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, ch. 2.
  • Chrysostom, John. On the Priesthood, Books I–VI. Trans. W. R. W. Stephens, NPNF I/9.
  • Gregory the Great. The Book of Pastoral Rule (Liber Regulae Pastoralis). Trans. and introd. George E. Demacopoulos. Popular Patristics Series 34. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2007.
  • Demacopoulos, George E. Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, ch. 4.
  • Quasten, Johannes. Patrology, vol. 3. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960, pp. 460–462.