Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 12.1–18.13

I opened my mouth and drew in the Spirit; and I give all that is mine, and myself, to the Spirit: action and word, inaction and silence. Only let him hold me, lead me, and move my hand, mind, and tongue toward what is fitting and what he wills, and draw me back again from what is fitting and better to avoid. I am a divine instrument, a rational instrument, an instrument tuned and struck by that good craftsman, the Spirit. Yesterday did he work silence? I practised philosophy by not speaking. Today does he strike my mind? I will sound forth the word and practise philosophy by speaking. I am neither so talkative as to want to speak when I am being moved to silence, nor so silent and unlearned as to set a guard on my lips in the time for speech; but I both shut and open my door to the Mind, and the Word, and the Spirit, the one connatural Godhead. [2] I will speak, then, since I am bidden to; and I will speak to this good shepherd and to you, the holy flock, what seems to me best for me to say and for you to hear today. Why did you need a fellow shepherd? For the discourse will begin from you, dear and honoured head of mine, worthy of that Aaron down whom flows that princely and priestly ointment to the beard and the garment. Why is it that, though you are still able to support and guide many by the hand, and indeed do guide them in the strength of the Spirit, you put a staff and a prop under your spiritual works? Is it because you know and hear that even after that great Aaron, Eleazar and Ithamar, Aaron’s sons, were anointed? (For I willingly pass over Nadab and Abihu, for fear of an ill omen.) And Moses, while still living, appoints Joshua in his place as lawgiver and general for those hastening to the land of promise. As for Aaron and Hur supporting the hands of Moses on the mountain, so that Amalek might be defeated by the cross, foreshadowed and typified from afar, I think I shall willingly pass that over as not very fitting or appropriate to us; for Moses chose them not as fellow lawgivers but as helpers in prayer and props for weary hands.

But what is it that ails you? What is weary? The body? I am ready to support it; indeed I have supported it, and have been supported, like Jacob of old, by fatherly blessings. But the spirit? Who is stronger and more fervent, even now, especially as the things of the flesh sink and give way, like whatever blocks, opposes, and hinders the brightness of light? For as a rule these two war against each other and are set against each other: the body thrives when the soul is weary, and the soul flourishes and looks upward when pleasures subside and wither along with the body. But I have admired in you, besides, your old-fashioned nobility: that you did not fear even this, which very much belongs to present times, that the Spirit might be thought a pretext on your part, and that we might seem to many to take these things in a fleshly way while pretending to do so spiritually. For the many have made the office seem a great and lordly thing, offering wonderful enjoyment, even if one presides over and leads a flock still smaller than this one and bringing more hardship than pleasure. That, then, comes from your simplicity or your love for your children, by which you neither admit anything wicked yourself nor readily suspect it of others (for what is hard to move toward evil is slow to suspect evil). But it is for me to speak briefly a second time to this people, whether yours or mine as well. [4] We are tyrannized by the old age of a father and, if I may say so, by the goodness of a friend. Help me, whoever is able, and give a hand to one who is pressed and torn between longing and the Spirit. The one urges mountains and deserts, quiet of soul and body, and the mind withdrawing into itself and drawing back from the senses, so as to converse purely with God and be lit up by the rays of the Spirit, with nothing earthly and turbid mixed in or interfering with the divine light, until we come to the source of the radiances here below, and come to rest from longing … the mirrors … The other wills to bring me into the open, to bear fruit for the common good, and to be helped by this, by helping one another; to proclaim the illumination, and to bring to God a people for his own possession, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, his image cleansed in more people. For it is better and greater, as a garden is better than one plant, and the whole heaven with its beauties than one star, and a body than one member, so also to God a whole Church set in order is better than one person who does right; and one must look not to one’s own interest only, but also to that of others. For so did Christ: though he could remain in his own honour and deity, he not only emptied himself to the form of a servant, but also endured the cross, despising the shame, so that by his own sufferings he might consume sin and kill death by death. Those are the fictions of longing; these the teachings of the Spirit. Being between longing and the Spirit, and not knowing which to choose, I will not give the greater share to either; but what I think I have found best and safest I will share with you too, so that you may approve it with me and help me in the decision.

It seemed to me best and least dangerous to take a middle course between longing and timidity, and to give part to desire and part to the Spirit. This would happen if I neither fled the ministry altogether, so as to set aside the grace (for that is dangerous), nor took up a burden greater than my strength (for it is heavy); the one befits someone else’s person, the other someone else’s strength, or rather both are madness. It belongs to piety and safety alike to measure the ministry by my strength; and as with food, to take what is within one’s strength and to send away what is beyond it; for in this way health comes to the body, and safety to the soul, by moderation in both. Therefore I now accept to share the care with my good father, like a fledgling, not useless, flying close beside a great and high-flying eagle; but after this I will give my wing to the Spirit, to carry it where he wills and as he wills; and no one will force me, nor shall I be drawn elsewhere, if I take counsel with him. For it is sweet to inherit a father’s labours, and the more familiar flock is sweeter than a strange and foreign one; I would add that it is also more precious to God, unless affection deceives me and habit steals my perception. Yet nothing is more useful than to rule the willing willingly, nor safer; since our law does not lead by force or by compulsion, but willingly. Force would not hold together any other rule either, since what is held by force tends to seize its freedom when it gets the chance; but ours, which is not rule but tutelage, preserves above all what is voluntary. For the mystery of piety belongs to those who are willing, not to those who are tyrannized. [6] … you have granted a great thing …

Man of God, faithful servant, steward of the mysteries of God, and man of desires of the Spirit (for so Scripture calls those who have advanced and are lofty and above visible things): I call you also God to Pharaoh, that is, to every Egyptian and hostile power; pillar and ground of the Church; will of the Lord; a luminary in the world, holding forth the word of life; prop of faith; and lodging of the Spirit. But why should I count up all the titles which virtue has made for you, each form of it claiming and bringing you a different one?

But tell me, where do you come from? What is your business? And what favour do you come to bring us? For I know that you are moved in everything with God and by God, and for the benefit of those who receive you. Have you come to visit us, or to seek the shepherd, or to look over the flock? Us you find no longer existing, but for the most part departed with him, and chafing at the place of affliction; and especially now, when we have lost our skilled helmsman, the lamp of our life, toward whom we steered our course, watching him signal salvation to us like a beacon from above. He has departed with everything good, and with all the good order of pastoral care which he gathered over a long time, full of days and of wisdom together, and crowned, if I may use Solomon’s words, with the old age that is a crown of boasting. The flock is bewildered and cast down, and you see how full it is of discouragement and dejection: no longer resting in a place of green pasture, nor nourished by the water of rest, but seeking cliffs, deserts, and pits, over which it will be scattered and destroyed; doubting whether it will ever find another wise shepherd, quite convinced that it will not find such a one, and content with one who is not much worse.

Since there are three things, as I said, that make your presence necessary, and all equally (ourselves, the shepherd, the flock), come, according to the spirit of service in you, give each what is fitting, and dispense your words with judgment, so that we may admire you all the more for your wisdom. How will you dispense them? By praising him with the praise his virtue deserves, not only to lay a pure discourse on the pure man as a funeral tribute, but also to set his life and counsel before others as a pattern of piety. And by speaking to us briefly, as a philosopher, about life and death, the union and separation of body and soul, and the two worlds, the present one which does not stand, and the intelligible one which abides; and by persuading us to despise the one, which is deceitful, disorderly, and uneven, carrying and carried up and down as on waves, and to attach ourselves to the other, which is firm, stable, godlike, always the same, and free from all disturbance and confusion. For so those who have departed before us would grieve us less; indeed they might even give us pleasure, if your discourse, leading us away from here, set us on high, hid the present unpleasantness in what is to come, and persuaded us that we too are hastening to a good Master, that home is better than sojourning; that what a calm harbour is to sailors, departure and removal thither is to those storm-tossed here; or that, as those who have finished a long journey before others are more at ease and less weary than those still on the road and toiling, so those who have reached the lodging there are better off and in a more tolerable state than those still cutting their way along the crooked and precipitous road of this life.

So you will comfort us. And the flock, how? First, by promising your own oversight and leadership, under whose wings all may well rest, and whose voice we thirst for more than those exhausted by thirst long for the purest spring. Second, by persuading them that not even now has the good Shepherd left us, he who lays down his life for the sheep; but he is present, shepherds and guides, knows his own and is known by his own; not seen bodily, but present spiritually, fighting for the flock against the wolves, and allowing no one who climbs over the fold like a robber and plotter to drag away and steal, by a strange voice, souls well led by the truth. And I am persuaded that our father does so now more by his intercession than formerly by his teaching, inasmuch as he draws nearer to God, having shaken off his bodily fetters and been freed from the mud that clouds the mind, and conversing naked with the naked, with the first and purest Mind, being counted worthy of the rank and boldness of an angel, if it is not rash to say so. These things you yourself will set out and treat philosophically better than I could show, by the power of word and of spirit. But lest the discourse fall far short of his worth through ignorance of his excellences, I will sketch and outline briefly his praise, from what I myself know of the departed, and hand it to you, the fine painter of such things, so that you may finish exactly the beauty of his virtue and deliver it to the ears and minds of all.

He, then (to leave aside homeland, family, bodily excellence, outward distinction, and the other things men pride themselves on, as the laws of encomium allow, and to begin from what is first and most proper to us), was the shoot of a root not praiseworthy nor well suited to piety (for I am not ashamed of the beginning, since I take confidence in the end), not planted in the house of God, but very strange and unusual, a blend of two utterly opposed things, Greek error and legal marvel-mongering; avoiding parts of each, it was composed of parts of each. For, rejecting the idols and sacrifices of the one, they honour fire and lamps; revering the Sabbath of the other and a certain pettiness about foods, they hold circumcision in dishonour. Hypsistarians is the name of these humble folk, and the Almighty alone, so they say, is to be worshipped by them. Such being his double nature in impiety, from what did he become what? I do not know whether I shall praise more the grace that called him or his own choice. At any rate, he so cleansed the eye of his mind of the rheum that lay on it, and ran to the truth with such speed, that he endured to be deprived for a time of his mother and his property for the sake of the Father above and the true inheritance, and bore this dishonour more easily than others bear the highest honours. This I wonder at less, though it is very wonderful. Why? Because this distinction he shares with many others; all must come inside the great net of God and be caught by the words of the fishermen, even if some are taken by the gospel earlier and others later. But what most moves me to admire in him, I must tell.

He was ours even before he was within our fold, for his way of life made him one of us. For as many of our own are not with us, whose life estranges them from the common body, so many of those outside are on our side, who anticipate the faith by their character and lack only the name while having the reality. Of these was my father: a foreign branch, but inclining toward us by his life. In self-control he was so outstanding that he was at once most lovable and most modest, two things hard to combine. Of his justice what greater and more conspicuous sign could there be than this: having held a position second to none in civic life, he did not increase his property by a single drachma, though he saw others laying Briarean hands on public funds and swelling with ill-gotten gains (for so I call unjust wealth)? Of his prudence these too are no small signs, but the discourse as it proceeds will show more. As a reward for these, I think, he obtained the faith. How (for so great a thing does not deserve to be passed over in silence), I will now set forth. [7] “A valiant woman, who shall find?” I have heard the divine Scripture say; and that she is a gift from God, and that a good marriage is joined by the Lord. Those outside think the same, if indeed it is their saying that “a man wins no prize better than a good wife, and none worse than the opposite.” But no one can be named who was more fortunate in this than he. For I think that if anyone, from the ends of the earth and from every race of men, had sought to make the best marriage, he could not have found a better or more harmonious one than this. For the best of men and of women so came together into one that their marriage was a union of virtue no less than of bodies; for though they surpassed all others, they could not surpass each other, because their virtue was equally balanced and equally honoured.

To Adam, the helper given to correspond to him (since it was good that the man should not be alone) became an enemy instead of a fellow worker, not a yoke-fellow but an opponent, beguiling her husband through pleasure and estranging him through the tree of knowledge from the tree of life. But to him the woman given by God became not only a fellow worker (that is less wonderful) but even a leader, drawing him by deed and word to the highest things: judging it best in other matters to be ruled by her husband according to the law of marriage, but not ashamed in piety to offer herself even as his teacher. For this she deserves admiration, but he deserves more admiration for yielding willingly. For she is the one who, while other women vie with one another and pride themselves on beauty, both natural and artificial, knew one beauty, that of the soul, and the preserving or cleansing, as far as possible, of the divine image; and threw away painted and artificial adornments to the women of the stage. She knew one true nobility, piety, and knowing where we have come from and where we shall arrive; one wealth secure and inviolable, to give away one’s wealth to God and to the poor, and especially to relatives who had fallen on hard times. To these, she thought, giving only enough for need brought not a release from misfortune but a reminder of it, while doing good more generously brought secure honour and the most complete consolation. And while some women excel in managing a household and others in piety (for it is hard to attain both), she surpassed all of them in both, by excelling in each and by being the only one to unite the two. She increased the household by her care and forethought, according to Solomon’s definitions and rules for the valiant woman, as if she did not know piety; and she was so devoted to God and divine things as if she were far removed from housekeeping; neither was harmed by the other, but she strengthened both through each other.

What time or place for prayer escaped her? This was her first movement of the whole day. Or rather, who hoped so surely to have what she asked at the very moment of asking? Who so revered the hand and face of priests, or honoured every form of the philosophic life? Who wore down her flesh more by fasts and vigils, or stood like a pillar in psalmody night and day? Who admired virginity more, though she herself accepted the bond of marriage? Who was a better protector of orphans and widows? Who so relieved the misfortunes of mourners? These things are small, perhaps, and perhaps even despised by some because they are not easily attainable by most (for what cannot be attained is not even believed, because of envy); but they are highly honoured by me, because they were inventions of faith and undertakings of spiritual fervour. Such as this: her voice was never heard in the sacred assemblies or places except for the necessary responses of the liturgy.

And if it was once a great thing for the altar that no iron was lifted up on it, nor any chisel seen or heard (for a deeper reason: everything consecrated to God must be natural and unwrought), how is it not also great on her part that holy things were honoured in silence; that she never turned her back on the venerable table, nor spat on the divine floor; that she never grasped the hand nor kissed the lips of a pagan woman, however modest otherwise and however closely related; nor shared salt, I do not say willingly but even under compulsion, with those who came from the profane and impure table; nor ever brought herself to pass by or look at a polluted house, against the law of conscience; nor defiled her ears with pagan tales or theatrical songs, nor the tongue that received and uttered divine things (for nothing unholy befits holy things); and, more wonderful than these, that she never gave way to bodily grief so far, though she was exceptionally moved even by the sufferings of strangers, that a cry of lament broke from her before the thanksgiving, or a tear fell from an eye mystically sealed, or mourning dress remained when a festival day had come, though many sorrows often befell her. For she held that a God-loving soul must subordinate everything human to the divine. [11] I pass over things more secret than these, of which God is witness, and the faithful maidservants in whom she confided such things. What concerns me perhaps does not even deserve mention, since I have proved unworthy of what was hoped; but this too was a great undertaking on her part, that she promised me to God even before my birth, not fearing the future, and dedicated me as soon as I was born. It is God’s doing that she did not altogether fail in her prayer, and that her fair offering was not rejected. Of these things some were already present, others were yet to come, growing by gradual additions. And as the sun, most pleasant when it strikes with its morning rays, is hotter and brighter with its midday ones, so she too, who from the beginning showed no small signs of piety, shone out more brightly in her last light. Then, at any rate, he who had brought her into his house had in her no small goad to piety at home. She came from above and from her ancestors God-loving and Christ-loving, and had received the inheritance of virtue as her father’s lot; not grafted, as he was, from the wild olive into the good olive. She could not bear to be unequally yoked, because of the abundance of her faith; this alone she could not endure with philosophic patience, though in other things she was the most enduring and courageous of women: to be united to God only by half, because of the estrangement of the part of herself joined to her, and that the union of the spirit was not added to the bodily union. And therefore she fell down before God night and day, asking from him the salvation of her head with many fasts and tears; and she applied herself to her husband diligently and won him over in many ways, by reproaches, admonitions, attentions, estrangements, and most of all by her own character and her fervour in devotion, by which a soul is most bent and softened, being willingly forced toward virtue. And the drop of water, always striking, was to hollow the rock and in time accomplish what was striven for, as what follows shows. [12] She asked and hoped for these things, boiling with faith rather than with youth. For no one was so confident about present things as she was about things hoped for, having learned God’s generosity by experience. For him, his reason too worked together toward salvation, gradually accepting the treatment; and a vision in dreams also worked together, by which God often benefits a soul worthy of being saved. What was the vision? Here is the sweetest part of the story for me. He seemed to sing (something he had never done before, though his wife often begged and entreated him) this part of the divine David: “I was glad when they said to me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.” The psalmody was strange to him, and with it longing entered in. And when she who had obtained her prayer heard it, she seized the moment, interpreting the vision as the sweetest of things if it were joined with its reality, showing by her joy the greatness of the benefit, and hastening his salvation, lest anything intervening should hinder the call and undo what was striven for. And as it happened that at that time several bishops were hastening to Nicaea to stand against the madness of Arius (the evil had just sprung up and was dividing the Godhead), he gives himself to God and to the heralds of the truth, confesses his longing, and asks from them the common salvation; among them was the great Leontius, then head of our metropolis. And the marvel that grace accomplished here too I would greatly wrong grace to pass over in silence; and there are not a few witnesses of it. The teachers of exactness fell into a spiritual error, grace foreshadowed the future, and a form of priesthood was mingled with the catechesis. O involuntary initiation! For, bending his knee, he was so formed by the words of the catechesis that many of those present prophesied the future, not only the more lofty in understanding but also the humbler, persuaded by no faint signs of what would be.

A short interval, and marvel is joined to marvel. I will entrust the account to the ears of the faithful, for to profane souls nothing good is credible. He comes to the regeneration through water and the Spirit, by which we confess to God the forming and perfecting of the man according to Christ, and the transfer and refashioning of the earthly into spirit; and he comes with warm desire and bright hope, having purified himself beforehand for the washing as far as he could, and sanctified himself in soul and body far more than those who were to receive the tablets from Moses. For their purification extended only to their clothing, a slight restriction of the belly, and a temporary continence; but for him the whole life in between was a preparation for the illumination, a purification before the purification, securing the gift, so that perfection might be entrusted to purity, and the good might run no risk in a disposition that presumed upon grace. And as he came up out of the water, light flashed around him, and a glory worthy of the disposition with which he approached the gift of faith. It was evident to some of the others as well, who at the time kept the marvel to themselves in silence, not daring to speak of it (for each thought the sight was his alone), but shortly afterward shared it with one another; but to the baptizer and initiator it was so clear and plain that he could not even keep the mystery to himself, but burst out publicly that he was anointing his own successor by the Spirit. [14] … is surrounded with light, recognizes the one he was persecuting, is entrusted with the great ministry, and fills every ear and mind with the gospel.