Funeral Oration on Pulcheria

Contents

1. 863Gregory, speaking in Constantinople on the anniversary of an earthquake in a neighboring city, turns to the city's present grief at the death of the emperor's young daughter.
2. 865As the greater pain masks the lesser, the death of the young princess, a dove and an unopened flower, outweighs the memory of the earthquake; Gregory describes the grief of the emperor and empress.
3. 867Gregory describes the vast crowd and the funeral procession, then turns to consolation: Paul forbids hopeless grief, and Christ said that the kingdom belongs to children.
4. 869The dead child has exchanged an earthly kingdom for the heavenly one, escaped the ills of old age and the passions of life, and has nothing to fear at the judgment.
5. 871Scripture's saints counted life in the flesh a misfortune, and Abraham offered Isaac readily because he knew death leads to something better; Sarah too must have understood this.
6. 873Gregory imagines the lament Sarah would have made had she not known that death begins a diviner life, then turns to Job, whose ten children were killed together at a banquet.
7. 875Job did not mourn wildly but blessed God who gives and takes; because souls endure, his ten lost children were not replaced twofold like his possessions, and death serves to purify human nature from evil.
8. 877Death dissolves the human vessel so that the evil in it may drain away and resurrection restore our nature to its first state; so Christians, whose hope is Christ, must not grieve without hope.