Oration 42: The Last Farewell

Oratio XLII, known in the Latin tradition as Supremum vale and in Greek as the Syntaktērios, is Gregory of Nazianzus's farewell to the church of Constantinople and to the bishops gathered there in 381 for the council later counted as the second ecumenical. Gregory had come to the capital in 379 to shepherd a small Nicene remnant worshipping in a private house he named the Anastasia; after Theodosius entered the city in 380 the great churches passed to the Nicenes and Gregory was installed as bishop. The council that followed turned against him. The bishops quarrelled over the succession at Antioch, and late-arriving Egyptian bishops challenged the legality of his transfer from the see of Sasima. Rather than fight, Gregory resigned, and this oration is the speech of his departure.

The work is an apologia disguised as a leave-taking. Gregory sets out what he found on arrival, a scattered and persecuted flock, and what he leaves behind, a congregation and a city restored to the confession of the Trinity. He insists that he sought neither the throne nor its revenues and that his one labour was to keep the faith whole against those who diminished the Son or the Spirit, and he restates that faith in compact form as the inheritance he hands over. The second half turns on the bishops themselves. He rebukes their appetite for sees, their factions and their readiness to treat the church as a prize to be contested, and he asks to be thrown overboard like Jonah so that the storm may cease. The oration closes with a sequence of farewells, to the Anastasia, to the cathedral, to the Holy Apostles, to the city, to the clergy and people, to East and West, and finally to the Trinity, each addressed as a living presence he must leave.

Supremum vale has endured because it shows a theologian at the height of his authority choosing to walk away from power rather than hold it by intrigue, and because its portrait of episcopal politics has lost none of its sting. It is also an early and influential example of the bishop's self-defence as a literary form, and it displays the rhetorical art that made Gregory the model for Byzantine preaching. Readers of the Theological Orations will find here the pastoral and personal cost of the doctrine those orations defend.

Who should read this: pastors and church leaders facing conflict, resignation or the loss of a position they believed they were called to, and students of the fourth-century councils who want to hear a participant's voice rather than a canon. It is not a systematic treatment of the Trinity and should not be read as one; anyone wanting Gregory's doctrine in ordered form should begin with Orations 27 through 31 and come to this afterward.