Gregory Nazianen’s Use of Scripture in Defence of the Deity of the Spirit

Abstract

Gregory Nazianzen's defence of the deity of the Spirit was most fully expressed in two orations which he gave in Constantinople during his brief sojourn there from AD 379 to AD 381. He was summoned to Constantinople in 379 by the orthodox remnant adhering to the Creed of Nicaea. The churches of the capital had been in the hands of the Arians for several decades, but the accession of an orthodox emperor, Theodosius, heralded the eclipse of Arianism, and Gregory left his retirement by the sea and hurried to Constantinople where he established the Nicene congregation in the aptly named private chapel of the Resurrection, the Anastasia. It was there at Pentecost, 379 that he delivered his oration On Pentecost (now numbered Oration 41), 1 and there too that he delivered, probably the following Spring in 380, his celebrated Five Theological Orations on the Trinity. The fifth of these, On the Spirit (now numbered Oration 31), 2 possibly delivered at Pentecost, 380, is the most complete statement of his pneumatology. 3 It will be helpful first, before examining the Fifth Theological Oration and particularly its use of Scripture in defending the Spirit's deity, to place Gregory's contribution in the context of the debate on the Spirit and to summarize as ___________________________ 1 Oration 41, J.P. Migne, Patrologiae Graecae (hereafter PG) XXXVI, 427-52. Eng. trans. by C.G. Browne and J.E. Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, VII, 378-85. 2 Oration 31, PG XXXVI, 133-72; Eng. trans. NPNF, VII, 318-28, and in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. E.R. Hardy and C. Richardson (Library of Christian Classics) 194-214. 3 Paul Gallay, La vie de Saint Grégoire de Nazianze (Lyons and Paris: Vitte, 1943) 137 ff., dated the Five Theological Orations in Autumn of 380. J.M. Szymusiak, 'Pour une chronologie des discours de S. Grégoire de Nazianze', Vig. Chr., 20 (1966) 183-9, dated them during Lent, 380, with the fifth at Pentecost.