“The Theologian”: The Title and the Cult

Gregory of Nazianzus is one of only three figures the Orthodox Church names “the Theologian” — alongside St. John the Evangelist and St. Symeon the New Theologian — and the only one of the Cappadocians to bear it. This file examines what theologia meant in the Orthodox sense, where the title is first attested (the Address to Marcian appended to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, probably by Theodoret of Cyrrhus, against the looser claim that “Chalcedon conferred” it), and how the name lives in the Church’s calendar and worship: his feast on January 25, his place in the Three Holy Hierarchs on January 30, the translation of his relics in 950, and their return from Rome in 2004.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Three Who Bear the Name

In the whole tradition of the Orthodox Church, the unqualified title ho Theologos — “the Theologian” — has been given to only three persons. The first is St. John the Evangelist, “John the Theologian,” whose Gospel opens with the Logos and who is, in the iconographic tradition, the eagle who looks into the divine darkness. The second is St. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Gregory the Theologian,” the Cappadocian bishop and poet whose Five Theological Orations gave the fourth-century Church its classic confession of the Trinity. The third, and chronologically last, is St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), the Byzantine mystic of the vision of the divine light, whose very surname — “the New Theologian” — is constructed against the two who came before him (the comparison is developed in the parallel collection at ../../st-symeon-the-new-theologian/09-legacy-and-reception/ — parallel will exist).

The threefold list is itself a piece of theology. It is not a ranking of cleverness or of literary output — Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa wrote more dogmatic prose than Gregory of Nazianzus, and neither is “the Theologian.” The name marks something else: that these three, in the Church’s judgment, spoke from the vision of God and not merely about God. To understand why Gregory alone of the Cappadocians received it, one has to understand what the word meant.

Theologia as the Vision of God

In the Orthodox sense, theologia is not, in the first place, an academic discipline or a system of propositions. It is the knowledge and confession of the Holy Trinity that arises from purification and illumination — the contemplation of God as He gives Himself to be known. Evagrius of Pontus, Gregory’s near contemporary, gave the tradition its lapidary formula: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian” (Evagrius, On Prayer 60). Theologia in this register is the highest reach of the spiritual life, the contemplation of the Trinity itself, distinguished from oikonomia (the study of God’s saving acts in history) and standing above even physikē theōria, the contemplation of creatures (cf. St. Maximus the Confessor: The Logoi of Creation, where theologia crowns the ascent).

Gregory’s own orations enact exactly this. The first of the Theological Orations (Or. 27) opens not with an argument but with a discipline: theology is not for everyone, nor at every time, nor before every audience; it is “for those who have been tested and have passed beyond contemplation,” who have first been purified in soul and body (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.3 [PG 36:13–16]; trans. Williams and Wickham, PPS 23). The second (Or. 28) climbs Sinai with Moses into the divine darkness and confesses that what we apprehend is not God’s essence but “the things around Him” (ta peri auton) — the back parts, not the face (Or. 28.3 [PG 36:29]; trans. PPS 23). It is this fusion of dogmatic precision with the language of ascent and vision — the theologian as one who has stood in the cloud — that the title Theologos honors. Gregory was named “the Theologian” because the Church recognized in his Theological Orations the authentic voice of the contemplation of the Trinity, set down with unmatched art.

The Attestation: Chalcedon 451 and the Address to Marcian

It is repeated almost universally that Gregory “received the title of the Theologian at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.” The statement is true in substance but has been sharpened by recent scholarship, and the honest disposition matters for a methodology that distinguishes what is documented from what is loosely transmitted (see METHODOLOGY.md §3).

The title ho theologos does appear in connection with the Council of Chalcedon (451) — but not in a concilial decree solemnly conferring it. It is found in the Address to Marcian (the Prosphonēsis or “Oration to the Emperor Marcian”), a document appended to the acts of the council after it had closed, and in the florilegium (the collection of patristic proof-texts) attached there. There Gregory is cited under the epithet ho theologos. The most careful recent study argues that this Address and its florilegium are most plausibly the work of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who applied the title to Gregory as part of a deliberate rhetorical strategy: setting up a roll of Christian “theologians” — Moses, John, the prophets, Gregory — as the Church’s answer to the pagan “theologians” Homer and Orpheus (I. Langworthy, “Theodoret’s Theologian: Assessing the Origin and Significance of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Title,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History). As that study puts it, “no ceremony attends this attestation in an anonymous document appended to the minutes of the council after it had closed”; the Greek manuscript tradition preserves tou theologou where the Latin version omits it.

The upshot is precise. The standard “Chalcedon 451” claim is, in the words of the scholarship, technically accurate but misleading: the conciliar minutes proper contain no act conferring the title; what they carry, in an appended text probably from Theodoret, is the earliest firm attestation of Gregory being called “the Theologian.” This is the methodology’s disposition: the title is securely attested from the mid-fifth century, in the Chalcedonian dossier, probably by Theodoret of Cyrrhus — and the popular shorthand “conferred by Chalcedon” should be read as “first firmly attested in the Chalcedonian materials,” not as a formal conciliar grant. What is beyond dispute is that within a generation or two of Gregory’s death the Greek Church had settled on the name, and that by the Byzantine liturgical and iconographic tradition he is “Gregory the Theologian” without further qualification — the name under which the Church has known him ever since.

His Feast: January 25

Gregory’s principal feast falls on January 25, where the Orthodox calendar commemorates “our father among the saints Gregory the Theologian, Archbishop of Constantinople.” In the Byzantine month of January the three great hierarchs cluster: Basil the Great on the 1st, Gregory on the 25th, and the Translation of the relics of John Chrysostom on the 27th — three feasts that the later common feast of the Three Hierarchs would draw together (Synaxarion; OrthodoxWiki, “Gregory the Theologian”). The hymnography of January 25 names him precisely for the title: the troparion hails “the pastoral pipe of thy theology” that “overcame the trumpets of the orators,” fixing the memory of the rhetorician who turned his art wholly to the confession of the Trinity (festal hymnography for January 25, Greek Orthodox tradition).

The Three Hierarchs: January 30

The most distinctive liturgical monument to Gregory’s stature is a feast he shares: the Synaxis of the Three Holy Hierarchs and Ecumenical Teachers — Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom — kept on January 30. As the Synaxaria transmit it, the feast arose from a quarrel. During the eleventh century, in Constantinople, a partisan dispute broke out over which of the three great hierarchs was the greatest: one faction exalted Basil for the depth of his doctrine, a second John Chrysostom for his eloquence, a third Gregory the Theologian for the sublimity of his theological orations. The partisans called themselves Basilians, Joannites, and Gregorians. The tradition relates that the three saints then appeared together to St. John Mauropous, Metropolitan of Euchaïta, declaring that they were equal before God — “There are no divisions among us, and no opposition to one another” — and bidding him institute a single joint feast. Mauropous appointed January 30, the month already holding the separate feasts of all three (Basil on the 1st, Gregory on the 25th, Chrysostom on the 27th), and composed the service (Synaxarion; OrthodoxWiki, “Three Holy Hierarchs”).

Historians treat the Mauropous vision as a pious origin-narrative not independently corroborated, while accepting that a common January 30 feast was instituted around 1100, under Alexios I Komnenos (Alexandra Nikiforova, “The Origins of the Veneration of the Three Holy Hierarchs and Their Feast,” orthochristian.com). The point for Gregory is exact: his partisans, the Gregorians, were one of the three named factions, and the feast was the Church’s refusal to rank him against Basil and Chrysostom — making their equality, not their precedence, the object of celebration. The fuller account is given in the parallel files (Basil; Chrysostom). In the modern Greek world January 30 is also kept as the feast of Greek letters and education — a patronage in which Gregory, the supreme rhetorician of the three, has a particular share.

The Relics: The 950 Translation and the 2004 Return

Gregory died around 390 at Nazianzus, where he was first buried. The Synaxaria record a translation of his relics to Constantinople under Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (reigned 913–959), placed in the Church of the Holy Apostles, the imperial mausoleum-church of the capital; the Orthodox commemoration of this transfer is kept on January 19, and the tradition dates the event to 950 (Orthodox Church in America, “The Transfer of the Relics of Saint Gregory the Theologian,” oca.org). There the relics rested for two and a half centuries — until the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade (1204), when the Latin sack of Constantinople carried away a great part of the city’s relics to the West. Gregory’s relics were taken to Rome; in the sixteenth century, with the building of the new St. Peter’s, Pope Gregory XIII (d. 1585) had them placed at a side altar in the basilica.

There they remained until our own time. On November 27, 2004, in a service of thanksgiving at St. Peter’s, Pope John Paul II returned the relics of St. Gregory the Theologian together with those of St. John Chrysostom to the Ecumenical Patriarchate; Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I personally accompanied them to Constantinople, where they were enshrined in the patriarchal Cathedral of St. George in the Phanar (Vatican, “Return of the Relics of Sts Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom, 27 November 2004,” vatican.va; Orthodox Church in America, oca.org). The Roman side noted that the relics had reached Rome in the aftermath of 1204; the return — a gesture of reconciliation eight centuries after the sack — restored to the city of his episcopate the bones of the bishop who had presided over the council that crowned the Nicene faith. That Gregory’s relics traveled with Chrysostom’s, and were returned together, is itself a quiet echo of the January 30 feast that binds the two hierarchs.

His Liturgical Afterlife: The Orations in the Canons

Gregory’s most pervasive presence in Orthodox worship is not a Liturgy under his name — unlike Basil and Chrysostom, he gave the rite no anaphora — but the deep imprint of his festal orations on the hymnography of the great feasts. The opening words of his oration on Pascha, “It is the Day of Resurrection, let us be radiant for the feast,” and of his Nativity oration, “Christ is born, give glory! Christ comes from heaven, go to meet Him!” (Or. 38.1 [PG 36:312]; trans. Harrison, PPS 36), were taken up by the Byzantine hymnographers — above all by St. John of Damascus in the Paschal and Nativity canons — so that the Church’s Paschal Canon opens with Gregory’s own exhortation and the Nativity Canon with his summons (the dependence of the festal canons on Gregory’s orations is standard; see Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, on the festal orations, and Harrison’s introduction, PPS 36). When the Orthodox Christian sings the canon of Pascha or of the Nativity, the words are in large part Gregory’s, lifted from the pulpit into the choir. The Festal Orations themselves — on Theophany, Pentecost, New Sunday, and the rest — remain appointed reading in the festal cycle. The Theologian’s afterlife in the Church is thus less a matter of his name attached to a service than of his voice woven into the Church’s song at the very summits of the liturgical year.

References

Gregory of Nazianzus, The Five Theological Orations (Orations 27–31), trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham, On God and Christ, Popular Patristics Series 23 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002). [PG 36].
Gregory of Nazianzus, Festal Orations, trans. Nonna Verna Harrison, Popular Patristics Series 36 (SVS Press, 2008) — for Or. 38 (“Christ is born…”) and the festal corpus. [PG 36].
Evagrius of Pontus, Chapters on Prayer 60 (“If you are a theologian, you will pray truly…”), in The Philokalia / trans. Bamberger, Cistercian Studies.
Langworthy, I. “Theodoret’s Theologian: Assessing the Origin and Significance of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Title.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge University Press) — for the Address to Marcian, the Chalcedonian florilegium, and the Theodoret attribution; the qualification of the “Chalcedon 451” claim.
“Gregory the Theologian,” OrthodoxWiki; Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Gregory the Theologian” (January 25) and “The Transfer of the Relics of Saint Gregory the Theologian” (January 19; the 950 translation under Constantine VII to the Church of the Holy Apostles), oca.org.
“Three Holy Hierarchs,” OrthodoxWiki (the Synaxarion account of the eleventh-century dispute and the vision of John Mauropous of Euchaïta); Alexandra Nikiforova, “The Origins of the Veneration of the Three Holy Hierarchs and Their Feast,” orthochristian.com (common feast under Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1100).
Vatican, “Return of the Relics of Sts Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom, 27 November 2004” (vatican.va); John Paul II, Letter to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I on the return of the relics, 27 November 2004; Orthodox Church in America, “Return of Relics of Saints John Chrysostom and Gregory the Theologian,” oca.org.
Daley, Brian E. Gregory of Nazianzus. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2006 (on the festal orations and their liturgical afterlife).