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ORATION 17

ORATION 17 To the frightened citizens of Nazianzus and the irate prefect.1 am pained in my bowels, my bowels, and the sensitive powers of my heart are in great commotion.2 So says Jeremiah , the most compassionate of the prophets, in one of his heartfelt protests against Israel’s disobedience and estrangement from God’s tender mercy. He is using the word “bowels” in a figurative sense to indicate his soul. This is an image that I find in numerous passages of Scripture, either with reference to what is hidden and invisible (concealment applies equally to both soul and belly) or to the capacity to retain and digest the nourishment of reason: reason is to the soul what food is to the body. “Sensitive powers” presumably refers to the thoughts and stirrings of the soul, especially those that result from sense perception and tear into the just man, firing him up and rousing in him impulses that thanks to the ardor of the Spirit he cannot at all control; for the expression “to be in great commotion” suggests a kind of urgency streaked with anger. If, however, one understands these sensitive powers in a physical sense as well, he will not be off the mark. Our eyes and ears are not limited to registering distress upon seeing or hearing something bad; thanks to our sense of compassion they also desire to hear and to see good things as well. But, whatever the interpretation, the just man is pained and in great commotion and does not accept Israel’s misfortunes with resignation, whether one takes these to 1. PG 35.964B–81A. The reference to Gregory’s father in section 12 provides the terminus ante quem of this sermon, which has traditionally been assigned to late 373 or early 374 at the latest. Although Or. 17 has been linked to the natural disasters that afflicted Nazianzus in 372 and form the subject of Or. 16 (PG 35.963B–81A), the internal evidence does not allow the precise identification of the circumstances that prompted this sermon. 2. Jer 4.19 LXX. 85 mean material misfortunes, what is physically visible, or spiritual ones, that is, what is spiritually sensed. For the same prophet asks for a fountain of tears and yearns for a wayfarers’ lodging place3 and embraces the wilderness to pour out his massive grief and somehow ease his inner wound by lamenting for Israel in solitude . 2. Some time earlier the divine David himself expresses the same sentiment in his distress over his personal troubles: O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest.4 He asks for the wings of a dove either because they are lighter and swifter, qualities that every just man has, or else because they foreshadow the Spirit, by which alone we escape disaster, in order to flee as far as he can from the troubles that beset him. Then he gives himself hope, the balm for human difficulties. I waited, he declares , for God that should deliver me from distress of spirit and from tempest.5 We see him doing the same thing on another occasion too: he administers the remedy for his affliction at once and by his actions as well as his words provides us with a fine example of fortitude in the face of adversity. My soul, he says, refused to be comforted.6 Do you detect here words of frustration and despair? You are not afraid, are you, that David is past curing? What is that you say? You have yet to hear a kind word? You despair of receiving any consolation? There is no one to heal you? No word, no friend, no relative, no one to give advice and share your misery, no one to tell you his life story, no one to talk about calamities from long ago, no one to compare your present circumstances with those of so many others who survived even worse? Is everything in ruins? vanished? razed to the ground? all hope lost? Are we simply to lie down and wait for the end? This is the predicament of the great David, David, for whom in tribulation God makes room7 and who with his help resists the shadow of death8 that envelops him. What, then, is to become of me, the small, the weak, the lowly, his spiritual inferior? If David does not know which way to turn, who then can be...