Orations 4–5: Invectives against Julian

Gregory of Nazianzus composed his two Orations against Julian in the months following the emperor's death on the Persian frontier in June 363. The manuscripts call them stēliteutikoi, speeches of public denunciation, and they are invectives rather than homilies: polished literary pamphlets meant to circulate and to fix for posterity the memory of a man Gregory had known personally. The two had been students together in Athens in the 350s, and Gregory's brother Caesarius had served as a physician at Julian's court until Gregory pressed him to leave. Julian's reign had been brief, but his edict of June 362 barring Christians from teaching classical literature, his restoration of pagian sacrifice, and his attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem temple had convinced Gregory that a new and subtler kind of persecution had begun. The orations are his answer, written once the danger had passed and the emperor could no longer reply.

The first oration sets out the charge. Gregory argues that Julian was more dangerous than Diocletian precisely because he refused to make martyrs; he persecuted by exclusion, mockery, and the withholding of honors, aiming to deprive the Church of its educated voice rather than its blood. The heart of the argument is the defense of Christian access to Greek learning. Julian had claimed that Hellenic language and letters belonged to those who worshipped the Hellenic gods. Gregory replies that the word Hellenism names two different things, a tongue and a religion, and that Julian has fraudulently fused them; the inheritance of eloquence and reason is common property, and no emperor can fence it off. The second oration narrates the end: the failed Persian campaign, the fatal wound, the collapse of the temple project, and the public rejoicing that followed. Gregory reads these events as judgment, and he closes with a withering portrait of Julian's bearing and gestures as he remembered them from Athens, claiming to have foreseen then what the empire would later suffer.

The orations did much to establish the image of Julian the Apostate that governed Christian memory for centuries, and they remain a primary witness to how fourth-century Christians understood the relationship between their faith and classical culture. Gregory's insistence that paideia cannot be the possession of one religion is one of the most consequential arguments of the period, voiced by a man who was himself among the most accomplished rhetoricians of his generation. The works also show the bitterness and triumphalism that could accompany the Church's recovery of imperial favor, and modern readers will find the tone unsparing.

Who should read this: students of late antique Christianity, of the Julianic controversy, and of the long argument over whether Christians may claim the classical inheritance as their own. Readers who come to Gregory for the contemplative theology of the Theological Orations or the tenderness of his funeral orations should know that these are polemics of a very different temper, and they are not devotional reading.