A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

shine upon more illustrious souls.’ During Jesus’ time on earth there had simply
been too much for the disciples to take in, and the Godhead of the Spirit was
retained until they were able to absorb it. Gregory brought the oration to a close
with a meditation on the difficulty of expressing the nature of the Divine through
analogies such as water flowing in a stream from a spring or light emanating
from the sun. None is adequate, and Gregory resolved to take the Spirit as his
guide ‘as I strike out a path through this world’.
The overwhelming impression one receives from these orations is the
difficulty of saying anything of certainty about the nature of the Godhead, a
difficulty Gregory fully acknowledges. The problems are fairly laid out in the
orations, but the proposed solutions are often incomplete or fail to convince. The
most important legacy of the Theological Orations is as a high-quality
exploration of a theological problem that seems essentially insoluble. However
much one may fail to be convinced by some of Gregory’s arguments, one has to
admit that this is a rhetorical and theological exposition of the very highest
standard. Yet Gregory’s exposition would never have reached that standard if he
had not been pressurised by some very gifted opponents, who felt as strongly
about their beliefs as he did. It would be exceptional today to find a public
audience as alive to the nuances of theological debate and ready to argue such
complex issues with confidence. It is therefore unfortunate that on occasions
Gregory denigrates his opponents as somehow unworthy. This was certainly a
common rhetorical device and was used in a much more extreme way by
Athanasius (and, as will be seen, by Ambrose in Milan), but it lowered the tone
of the debate. It was the problem that was intractable, not those trying to solve it,
many of whom worked through to their own formulations with sincerity and
intensive study. In fact, the Theological Orations provide one of the best
arguments for the preservation of open debate in theology. And yet just as this
great debate was going on, an imperial edict threatened to bring it all to an
abrupt end. If one has to choose one swansong for the end of the Greek
philosophical tradition, Gregory’s Theological Orations are as good as any.
Before Theodosius arrived in Constantinople, Gregory suffered a major setback.
Like many men and women of great intelligence and learning, he seems to have
been naïve in his personal relationships. His adulation of Maximus, the visiting
philosopher from Alexandria, bordered on the unbalanced. In a sermon delivered
in the late summer, Gregory praised Maximus as a pillar of the Nicene faith, ‘the
best of the best; the noblest of the noble’. He appears to have been totally