Theological Orations
Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 27–31
Gregory of Nazianzus
Five sermons, preached in a borrowed room, by a man who kept trying to go home.
- Catch rate
- 55 / 255
- Base research
- 180
- Stat total
- 278
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Five sermons. That is all this is, and it is enough to have settled how the church talks about God.
Preached in a converted room in Constantinople to a congregation small enough to fit in it, in a city where every church belonged to the other side — and inside two years the creed had his vocabulary in it.
A strong Greek tradition, quoted so relentlessly by everyone after him that the text is checkable against a thousand borrowings.
The church gave Gregory a title it has handed out almost never — "the Theologian" — and these five sermons are why. They are in every anthology of the fathers there is, so he usually takes the floor first.
Cited for this book
He hated the job, said so constantly, and resigned in the middle of the council he had been brought in to win. He also complained that you could not buy bread in Constantinople without the baker explaining the Son’s relation to the Father — which is the best surviving evidence of how far this argument had got into ordinary life.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What Is Not Assumed | Christology | Argument | 84 | 95% | 5 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 9 | A Name of God | Theology Proper | Argument | 40 | 100% | 15 |
| 16 | Rule of Faith | Christology | Argument | 55 | 100% | 15 |
| 20 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 24 | Without Beginning | Theology Proper | Argument | 70 | 100% | 10 |
| 28 | Brighter Than Light | Theology Proper | Argument | 68 | 100% | 10 |
| 36 | Word Made Flesh | Christology | Argument | 70 | 100% | 6 |
Read it: The Back Parts of God
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Koine Greek.
“It is difficult to conceive God but to define Him in words is an impossibility.”
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.4, the Second Theological Oration (trans. Browne & Swallow, NPNF² 7, public domain, lightly modernized).
“But in my opinion it is impossible to express Him, and yet more impossible to conceive Him.”
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.4 — the sentence immediately after the one above (trans. Browne & Swallow, NPNF² 7, public domain).
“And then when I looked up, I scarce saw the back parts of God; although I was sheltered by the Rock, the Word that was made flesh for us.”
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.3 (trans. Browne & Swallow, NPNF² 7, public domain, lightly modernized); cf. Exodus 33:23.
“If He is to be worshipped, surely He is an Object of adoration, and if an Object of adoration He must be God; the one is linked to the other, a truly golden and saving chain.”
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.28, the Fifth Theological Oration, on the Holy Spirit (trans. Browne & Swallow, NPNF² 7, public domain).
“For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.”
Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101, to Cledonius (trans. Browne & Swallow, NPNF² 7, public domain).
Five sermons, preached in Constantinople in 380 in a private house, because the Nicene party in that city was small enough to fit in one.
Watch the two sentences from 28.4 in order. The first is the concession every philosopher would grant. The second takes it back the other way and makes it worse: the trouble is not that God is hard to say, it is that He is harder still to think.
Which is not scepticism. Gregory spends the next four orations saying a great deal — he is fencing the ground before he walks on it.
Epistle 101 travelled with the Orations in the manuscripts, so it is not a separate book; it is the last page of this one. And it is the sentence the whole Christological argument runs on.