Oration 43: Funeral Oration on Basil the Great

Oration 43 is the funeral oration Gregory of Nazianzus delivered in Caesarea in Cappadocia for his friend Basil, bishop of that city, who had died on 1 January 379. Gregory, in poor health, had been unable to attend the burial, and the speech came years late, after his own brief and painful tenure in Constantinople and his withdrawal from the capital following the council of 381. It is the longest of his surviving orations and the fullest ancient account of Basil's life, and it was composed by the one person who had known him from their student days in Athens through the quarrels and reconciliations of their shared episcopal careers.

The form is the classical encomium, and Gregory follows it deliberately: ancestry, upbringing, education, deeds, death. Within that frame he does three things. He tells the story, giving us Basil's grandparents hiding in the Pontic forests during persecution, the schooling in Caesarea and Constantinople, the Athenian years in which the two young men, Gregory says, knew only two roads, one to the churches and one to the lecture halls. He then narrates Basil's career as a sequence of trials: the ascetic retreat in Pontus, the strained relationship with his predecessor Eusebius, the famine in which Basil sold his inheritance to feed the hungry, the building of the hospice outside Caesarea, the confrontation with the prefect Modestus and the emperor Valens, and the defense of the Holy Spirit's divinity against the Arian party. Gregory does not suppress his own grievance over Basil's appointing him to the obscure see of Sasima; he raises it and then declines to let it stand against the dead. Finally he measures Basil against the patriarchs, prophets and apostles in a long comparative sequence, and closes by addressing him directly, asking that Basil watch over the Church from where he now stands. The portrait is of a man whose words were thunder because his life was lightning.

The oration has mattered for several reasons at once. It is the primary source for Basil's biography and for the history of Cappadocian Christianity in the 360s and 370s. It shows a Christian bishop taking the most prestigious literary form of the pagan schools and filling it with martyrs, monks and theological controversy, and in doing so it became a template for Byzantine saints' lives and for Christian funeral oratory for centuries. It is also one of the great documents of friendship in the ancient world, written by a man who loved his subject, had been wounded by him, and chose to praise him anyway.

Who should read this: anyone studying the Cappadocian fathers, the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies, or the Christian transformation of classical rhetoric; pastors and teachers who want to see how a life can be preached; and anyone who has had to speak at the funeral of a difficult friend. It is not a quick read, and its rhetorical conventions will try the patience of readers who want a plain narrative or a doctrinal treatise rather than a eulogy that is also an argument.