Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzen (review)

In the years since Gregory of Nyssa was rediscovered and rehabilitated by Jean Daniélou he has become the quintessential Cappadocian, but traditionally he did not enjoy this status. It is Gregory of Nazianzus whom the Eastern Church called "the theologian" (giving him the same honor as John the Evangelist), and in the great European dogmatic histories of the late 19th century it is Gregory the theologian who is offered as the Greek counterpoint to the Latin Augustine. Much of Gregory's reputation and influence as a theologian is due to the Orations that are the subject of this new English translation and commentary.

Like the other two Cappadocians, Gregory was intensely concerned with refuting the anti-Nicene theology of Eunomius; unlike the other Cappadocians, Gregory of Nazianzus never wrote a Contra Eunomium. Instead, he delivered a series of sermons, probably in Constantinople around 380, not to respond to a written text by Eunomius (as Basil and his brother did), but in response to the polemically-motivated speeches by Eunomians that faced him in the public places of the city, from the butcher shop to the imperial court. The fact that the Orations are themselves speeches remains a source of their power, but it has also served as an obstacle to their interpretation and appropriation by scholars. The oral structure of the works, coupled with their heavy use of the rhetorical techniques of the era, has made the polemical context and doctrinal content of the orations seem diffuse and obscure. The ornateness of the original Greek has been further burdened in modern translations by a sort of ecclessiastical English. By contrast, the English of Wickham and Williams emphasizes clarity and even simplicity (cf. Or. 28.9 by Wickham and Williams and by Browne and Swallow). Perhaps the translation could have been more technical (like the Apostle/Gersh Aristotle series), so that, e.g., "power" did not translate both dynamis and exousia, but at least in this edition we know that what opaqueness is left in a passage is Gregory's own.

The differences between this translation and commentary and the recent Sources Chrétiennes edition are striking, particularly in the manuscript paleography and, especially, in the discovery of scriptural allusions. Norris' technique of identifying Gregory's scriptural allusions through notes at the foot of each page of the translation, while identifying philosophical allusions in the body of the commentary has the effect of emphasizing the scriptural foundations of Gregory's theology even while acknowledging Gregory's debt to pagan paideia. If every commentary is itself a story about the text at hand, then this story opens with the role of Hellenic rhetoric and paideia but finds the central drama in scriptural exegesis. It is this story which Norris summarizes in the subtitle (taken from Gregory's own words), faith gives fullness to reason.

Gregory was by training and habit a rhetor, very much a mirror of his age, making his reasoning seem artificial to the contemporary eye. Thus, few works so evidently benefit from a sense of their context as the Orations. Norris gives a vivid account of how the Orations functioned as polemical pieces. One of his accomplishments is to make clear Gregory's debt to traditional rhetorical strategies, as well as the polemical role of that rhetoric. Norris' scholarship allows the reader to understand how Gregory uses his training in the then universal art and science of rhetoric to discover and promote his understanding of God, and to oppose the Eunomian and Macedonian understandings. It was evident at the last International Conference on Patristics that the scope and depth of Norris' commentary has already given it the status of a watershed event in Cappadocian studies, yet happily the effect of this specialist treatment is to open the text up for a wider audience.

If there is a weakness in the commentary, it is an understating of Gregory's pressing need...