On God and Christ, The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius Quotes

“Discussion of theology is not for everyone, I tell you, not for everyone-it is no such inexpensive or effortless pursuit. Nor, I would add, is it for every occasion, or every audience; neither are all its aspects open to inquiry. It must be reserved for certain occasions, for certain audiences, and certain limits must be observed. It is not for all people, but only for those who have been tested and have found a sound footing in study, and, more importantly, have undergone, or at the very least are undergoing purification of body and soul. For one who is not pure to lay hold of pure things is dangerous, just as it is for weak eyes to look at the sun's brightness. What is the right time? Whenever we are free from the mire and noise without, and our commanding faculty is not confused by illusory, wandering images, leading us, as it were, to mix fine script with ugly scrawling, or sweet-smelling scent with slime. We need actually "to be still" in order to know God, and when we receive the opportunity, "to judge uprightly" in theology. Who should listen to discussions of theology? Those for whom it is a serious undertaking, not just another subject like any other for entertaining small-talk, after the races, the theater, songs, food, and sex: for there are people who count chatter on theology and clever deployment of arguments as one of their amusements. What aspects of theology should be investigated, and to what limit? Only aspects within our grasp, and only to the limit of the experience and capacity of our audience. Just as excess of sound or food injures the hearing or general health, or, if you prefer, as loads that are too heavy injure those who carry them, or as excessive rain harms the soil, we too must guard against the danger that the toughness, so to speak, of our discourses may so oppress and overtax our hearers as actually to impair the powers they had before.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ, The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius: St. Gregory of Nazianzus

“when it comes to God, you attach an awe-inspiring solemnity to him, a transcendence of every substance and nature. What constitutes the unique nature of God’s deity, so to say, you ascribe to the Father but then rob the Son of it and make him subordinate. You give the Son a second level in quality and worship. Even if you endow him with the syllables which make up the word “similar,” you in fact truncate his Godhead, and make a mischievous transition from an homonymity maintaining equality to one connecting unequals.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“So when did these last two originate? They transcend “whenness,” but if I must give a naive answer—when the Father did. When was that? There has not been a “when” when the Father has not been in existence. This, then, is true of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Put another question and I will answer it. Since when has the Son been begotten? Since as long as the Father has not been begotten.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“What was Adam? Something molded by God.31 What was Eve? A portion of that molded creation.32 Seth? He was the offspring of the pair.33 Are they not, in your view, the same thing—the molded creation, the portion, and the offspring? Yes, of course they are. Were they consubstantial? Yes, of course they were. It is agreed, then, that things with a different individual being can be of the same substance.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Whoever does not accept Holy Mary as the Mother of God has no relation with the Godhead.6 Whoever says that he was channeled, as it were, through the Virgin but not formed within her divinely and humanly (“divinely” because without a husband, “humanly” because by law of conception) is likewise godless.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“resolved to keep close to the more truly religious view and rest content with some few words, taking the Spirit as my guide and, in his company and in partnership with him, safeguarding to the end the genuine illumination I had received from him, as I strike out a path through this world. To the best of my powers I will persuade all men to worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the single Godhead and power, because to him belong all glory, honor, and might for ever and ever.149 Amen.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Men who speak and teach thus, who use the expression “another Comforter”137 with almost the meaning “an additional God,” men who are conscious that blasphemy against him is uniquely unpardonable,138 who so frighteningly placarded the guilty Ananias and Sapphira, when they lied to the Spirit, as “liars to God not to man”139—are those men, in your opinion, preaching that the Holy Spirit is God or that he is something else? You must be literally impenetrable, utterly unspiritual, if you feel any hesitancy here or need any further instruction.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Is there any significant function belonging to God, which the Spirit does not perform? Is there any title belonging to God, which cannot apply to him, except “ingenerate” and “begotten”? The Father and the Son, after all, continue to have their personalities; there must be no confusion with the Godhead, which brings all other things into harmonious order.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Thus do I stand, thus may I stand, and those I love as well, on these issues, able to worship the Father as God, the Son as God, the Holy Spirit as God—“three personalities, one Godhead undivided in glory, honor, substance, and sovereignty,” as one inspired saint of recent times wisely expressed it.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“For this reason, he acts like a schoolmaster or doctor, taking away some ancestral customs, allowing others. He yields on some trifles which make for happiness, just as physicians do with the sick to get the medicine taken along with the sweeter ingredients artfully blended in.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“It belongs to despotic power to use force; it is a mark of God’s reasonableness that the issue should be ours. God thought it wrong to do men good against their will but right to benefit those with a mind to it.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“One plus one makes two, and two resolves into one plus one? Yes, of course. So if things added together are consubstantial and things separated are of different substances, what will happen according to you? The same things will have to be both consubstantial and of different substances.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Yes, you have relieved yourself of trouble with a single word. Yet you gain a poor kind of victory—it is rather like people hanging themselves because they are afraid of death.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“The “gods” and (as they themselves style them) “demons” worshipped by the pagans have no need of us to accuse them. They stand convicted by their own theologians of being affected by evil emotions, of being quarrelsome, of being brimful of mischief in all its varieties.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Do not truncate the single and equally august nature at any point. Because whichever of the Trinity you destroy, you will have destroyed the whole—or rather, you will have been banished from the whole. It is better to have a meager idea of the union than to venture on total blasphemy.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“What does this amount to? people will say. There cannot be two things, one an offspring and the other something else, coming from the single source. Why not? Were not Eve and Seth of the same Adam? Whose else? Were they both offspring? Certainly not. Why?—because one was a portion of Adam, the other an offspring. Yet they had a mutual identity—they were both human beings, nobody can gainsay that.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“We say there is no deficiency—God lacks nothing. It is their difference in, so to say, “manifestation” or mutual relationship, which has caused the difference in names. The Son does not fall short in some particular of being Father. Sonship is no defect, yet that does not mean he is Father.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“If there was a “when” when the Father did not exist, there was a “when” when the Son did not exist. If there was a “when” when the Son did not exist, there was a “when” when the Holy Spirit did not exist. If one existed from the beginning,11 so did all three. If you cast one down, I make bold to tell you not to exalt the other two. What use is incomplete deity? Or rather what is deity if it is incomplete?”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Of course there is something especially difficult in the doctrine of the Spirit. It is not just that men exhausted by discussions of the Son are more eager to take on the Spirit—they must have something to blaspheme or life would be unlivable—but also that we become worn out by the quantity of issues.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“None is good”97 are a reply to the lawyer who was testing him and had borne witness to his goodness as man. Consummate goodness, he meant, belongs to God alone, though the word “good” can be applied to man.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“He says what the Father’s will is: that every believer in the Son should be saved and should obtain resurrection or re-instatement at the last.89 Is this the Father’s will, but not the Son’s at all? Is he unwilling to be preached about or believed in? Who would credit that idea, when the statement that the word which is heard is not the Son’s bu the Father’s90 has the same force? Though I have often looked into the matter, I cannot understand how a common property could belong to only one thing. Nor, I think, can anyone else.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“This is how I take the statement that the Son does whatever is effected by the Father, in the same way.78 It is not a question of similarity between their creatures, but of having equal authority over their creation.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“He whom presently you scorn was once transcendent, over even you. He who is presently human was incomposite. He remained what he was; what he was not, he assumed. No “because” is required for his existence in the beginning,54 for what could account for the existence of God?”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“perfection does not result from additions. It was never the case that he was without his Word, that he was not Father, that he was not true, or that he was without wisdom and power, or that he lacked life, splendor, or goodness.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“I should have felt some awe myself at your dilemma, had it been necessary to accept one of the alternatives and impossible to avoid them by stating a third, and truer possibility. My expert friends, it is this: “Father” designates neither the substance nor the activity, but the relationship, the manner of being, which holds good between the Father and the”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“God’s begetting ought to have the tribute of our reverent silence. The important point is for you to learn that he has been begotten. As to the way it happens, we shall not concede that even angels, much less you, know that. Shall I tell you the way? It is a way known only to the begetting Father and the begotten Son. Anything beyod this fact is hidden by a cloud and escapes your dull vision.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Atheism with its lack of a governing principle involves disorder. Polytheism, with a plurality of such principles, involves faction and hence the absence of a governing principle, and this involves disorder again. Both lead to an identical result—lack of order, which, in turn, leads to disintegration, disorder being the prelude to disintegration.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“The purpose of this is to make you recognize God at least from the benefits you receive, and more conscious of your position if you lack them.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“commend the man, non-Christian though he was,62 who asked: “What set these elements in motion and leads their ceaseless, unimpeded flow?” It was surely their designer, who implants in all things reason whereby the universe is conducted and carried along. And who is their designer? Surely he who made them and brought them into existence. Great power like this cannot be ascribed to chance. Supposing chance created them, what gave them order? Granting this possibility too, if you like, to chance, what preserves and guards them in the conditions of their first constitution? Chance again, or something else? Clearly something beyond chance. What can this “something” be if not God? Thus God-derived reason, bound up, connected, with the whole of nature, man’s most ancient law, has led us up from things of sight to God.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“No, I wanted to make plain the point my sermon began with, which was this: the incomprehensibility of deity to the human mind and its totally unimaginable grandeur.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius