Oration 39: On the Holy Lights

Oration 39, On the Holy Lights, is the sermon Gregory of Nazianzus preached in Constantinople on 6 January 381, the feast of the Lights, when the Eastern church commemorated the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. It belongs to a sequence of festal orations: Oration 38 for the Nativity, this one for the Lights, and Oration 40, On Baptism, delivered the following day. Gregory had come to the capital in 379 to shepherd a small Nicene congregation in a city dominated by Arian and Eunomian bishops; by this feast he had been installed by Theodosius in the city's great churches, and the council that would reaffirm Nicaea was only months away. The sermon is therefore both a festival homily and a public statement of the faith he intended the capital to receive.

Gregory opens by setting the Christian mystery against the Greek mysteries. He runs through the rites of Eleusis, the Phrygian cults, the stories of Zeus and Dionysus, and dismisses them as shadows that darken rather than illumine; the true initiation is the one celebrated today, and it requires purification before it can be approached. From purification he turns to doctrine. Those who would speak of God must first be cleansed, and then he speaks: of a single Godhead confessed as Father, Son and Spirit, the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding, three without division and one without confusion. He insists that the Spirit is truly God, a point many in his audience resisted. He then narrates the baptism itself. Christ needed no cleansing but went down into the water to sanctify it and to bury the old Adam, John shrank from the task until he understood it, the heavens opened, the Spirit came down in bodily form, and the Father's voice bore witness. Gregory presses the pattern onto his hearers: Christ is baptized, so let us go down with him in order that we may rise with him. In a later section he distinguishes five baptisms, that of Moses in the cloud and sea, that of John unto repentance, that of Jesus in the Spirit, the baptism of blood in martyrdom, and the baptism of tears, the slow washing of repentance after one has fallen. This last provokes a sharp attack on the Novatians, who denied that grave sin after baptism could be forgiven; Gregory calls their rigor a new Pharisaism and urges that no one be driven from repentance. He closes by calling the unbaptized to the font and all present to become light with the Light.

The oration has endured because it binds together what later ages tended to separate: Trinitarian confession, the liturgical feast, and the moral life of the baptized. Its lines on descending with Christ to rise with him entered the hymnody of the Theophany feast, and its treatment of repentance as a second baptism shaped Eastern penitential theology. It also shows a master rhetorician using every tool of his pagan education against pagan religion while refusing to abandon the tools themselves.

Who should read this: those preparing for or reflecting on baptism, preachers seeking a model of festival preaching that teaches doctrine without ceasing to exhort, and readers of Trinitarian theology who want to see the Nicene faith proclaimed before a congregation rather than argued in a treatise. It is not for readers wanting a systematic account of baptism or a gentle introduction to Gregory; its polemics against Greek cults and against the Novatians assume a fourth-century audience and will need some context to land.