Oration 21: On the Great Athanasius

Oration 21 is a panegyric that Gregory of Nazianzus delivered in Constantinople in honor of Athanasius of Alexandria, who had died in 373. Gregory was then shepherding the small Nicene congregation that met in the house-church he called the Anastasia, in a capital whose major churches were held by Arian clergy and whose emperor, Theodosius, had not yet arrived to enforce the Nicene settlement. Preaching on the memory of the bishop who had become the emblem of Nicene resistance was therefore a deliberate act: it placed Gregory's embattled flock in continuity with the man who had outlasted four emperors and five exiles, and it offered that flock a picture of what a bishop should be at the very moment Gregory himself was being tested in the role.

Gregory opens with the line that governs the whole oration: in praising Athanasius, he says, he will be praising virtue itself, because to tell the man's life is to tell the story of virtue in action. He takes the classical encomium and bends it to Christian ends, passing quickly over birth and lineage to dwell on formation, character, and trial. Athanasius is presented as one who united what the Church tends to divide: the contemplative discipline of the desert and the active governance of a great see, the simplicity of the monk and the learning of the theologian. Gregory narrates the intrusions of Gregory and George of Cappadocia into Alexandria, the violence done to churches and clergy, and Athanasius's flight to the monks of Egypt, whom he calls a philosophical community that sheltered the truth. The centerpiece is Athanasius's work of reconciliation after his return under Julian, when the Council of Alexandria in 362 recognized that those who confessed one hypostasis and those who confessed three could mean the same orthodox thing in different words. Gregory presents this as the mark of true theological greatness: the ability to see through terminology to substance and to make peace without surrendering doctrine. He closes by addressing Athanasius directly, asking him to look down from heaven on the Church he defended and to intercede for its peace.

The oration has endured because it fixed the image of Athanasius that the later Church inherited, and because it is one of the clearest statements of Gregory's ideal of the bishop as a theologian whose authority rests on holiness rather than position. It also preserves the memory of the 362 settlement as a model of ecclesial discernment. Modern readers meet it as a document of how the Nicene party told its own story, and as an example of Christian rhetoric at its most assured.

Who should read this: those studying the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies, the history of Christian preaching, or the formation of the ideal of the pastor-theologian; readers seeking a biography of Athanasius will find rhetoric rather than chronicle, and should not expect a neutral account.