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1 Nazianzus and the Eastern Empire, 330–361 “I have been beaten, and I recognize my defeat: I have surrendered to the Lord and have come to supplicate him” (Gr. Naz. Or. 2.1).1 With these words Gregory the Younger of Nazianzus begins his second oration, delivered probably on Easter 363 and circulated soon thereafter. This oration represents the earliest systematic treatment of the Christian priesthood propagated by a member of the Greek-speaking Roman elite.2 Gregory’s treatise on the nature of Christian leadership had a profound and lasting impact, for example on John Chrysostom, another member of that elite and bishop of Constantinople. Chrysostom’s work on the priesthood, based on Gregory’s, then influenced another bishop in an imperial residence, Ambrose of Milan, through whom it gained purchase in the West. Rufinus’s Latin translation of Gregory’s oration influenced Western writers directly, including Augustine and Jerome, who had heard Gregory speak in Constantinople, as well as Paulinus of Nola and Julian of Eclanum. Gregory the Great’s work on the priesthood also reflects his acquaintance with Gregory of Nazianzus’s, gained either during the former’s stay in Constantinople or through Rufinus’s translation. In sum, Gregory’s Oration 2, 17 1. Ἥττημαι καὶ τὴν ἧτταν ὁμολογῶ· ὑπετάγην τῷ Κυρίῳ καὶ ἱκέτευσα αὐτόν (Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 1–3, ed. and trans. Bernardi). This oration is best known under the somewhat misleading title Apology for His Flight, a later addition of the manuscripts: Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 1–3, ed. and trans. Bernardi, 84 n. 1. 2. Gr. Naz. Epp. 7 and 8. Mossay, “Date,” suggests 364. I am following Gautier, Retraite, 292–317. McGuckin, St. Gregory, 101–2, dates the ordination itself to Christmas 361, and Or. 2 to Easter; Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 1–3, ed. and trans. Bernardi, 11–17. For a detailed discussion, see below, Chapter 5. On the Priesthood, became immensely influential in the East and permeated the Western tradition. But in 363 this was all in the future.3 When Gregory spoke the opening words (or words very similar to those he chose to preserve for posterity), he had just returned to his ancestral city of Nazianzus from a sojourn at Annesi, a small village in Pontus where the family of his friend Basil, later bishop of Caesarea, owned an estate.4 Ostensibly, his departure and return are the key themes of the second oration. Given its length, however—117 chapters—we can surmise that Gregory’s reasons for leaving and coming back were complex. Indeed, they range from his own affairs to those of the oikoumenē of the Romans and to the very cosmos and its genesis. All these reasons, personal, local, and the global and cosmic, were seamlessly intertwined in Oration 2, the principal focus of Part II of this book. But not only in Oration 2. Gregory in all his writings from the early 360s—that is, his first six orations—formed a densely woven tapestry that included the same elements, from the personal to the cosmological. These orations were composed like an instrument with many different strings (to use his own intertextual metaphor), each one activated at appropriate moments but all sounding together in harmony as a comprehensive whole. As such these six orations contain the nucleus of Gregory’s interpretation of the nature of the divine ; its relation to the sensible, material world; and the consequences of that relation for humans seeking to guide others toward the divine. In these orations Gregory delineates which persons had been divinely entrusted to lead mankind and how they ought to comport themselves to approach the divine so that they could lead others to it. In short, these orations are the foundational work that made Gregory “the Theologian.” Gregory formulated most of these concepts in Nazianzus, and they were in the first instance intended for a local audience. But Nazianzus was not an island. Gregory ’s thoughts and positions engaged some of the most intense debates then gripping men of the Greek-speaking elites of the Eastern Roman Empire and reverberating among their Western contemporaries. These debates revolved around the nature of the divine and its interaction with the material world and humanity, crystallized in the way in which the divine was thought to speak to humans. How the divine and these interactions were understood affected the qualities considered nec18 Part one 3. John Chrysostom, Sur le sacerdoce, ed. and trans. Malingrey. John Chrysostom’s treatise was one of the models for Ambrose’s De...

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