I 166. GREGORY NAZIANZEN. 919
them, and that Gregory would probably be distasteful to tliera as a bold preacher of righteousness. This deeply wounded him. He was soon disgusted, too, with the operations of party passions in the council, and resigned with the following remarkable declaration :
"Whatever this assembly may hereafter determine concerning me, I would fain raise your mind beforehand to some thing far higher j__I pray you now, be one, and join yourselves in love ! Must we always be only derided as infallible, and be animated only by one thing, the spirit of strife? Give each other the hand fraternally. But I will be a second Jonah. I will give myself for the salvation of our ship (the church), though I am innocent of the storm. Let the lot fall upon me, and cast me into the sea. A hospitable fish of the deep will receive me. This shall be the beginning of your harmony. I reluctantly ascended the episcopal chair, and gladly I now come down. Even my weak body advises me this. One debt only have I to pay : death ; this I owe to God. But, O my Trinity ! for Thy sake only am I sad. Shalt Thou have an able man, bold and zealous to vindicate Thee? Farewell, and remember my labors and my pains."
In the celebrated valedictory which he delivered before the assembled bishops, he gives account of his administration; depicts the former humiliation and the present triumph of the Nicene faith in Constantinople, and his own part in this great change, for which he begs repose as his only reward ; exhorts his hearers to harmony and love ; and then takes leave of Constantinople and in particular of his beloved church, with this address :
" And now, farewell, my Anastasia, who bearest a so holy name ; thou hast exalted again our faith, which once was despised ; thou, our common field of victory, thou new Shiloh, w^iere we first established again the ark of the covenant, after it had been carried about for forty years on our wandering in the wilderness."
The ugh this voluntary resignation of so high a post proceeded in part from sensitiveness and irritation, it is still an honorable testimony to the character of Gregory in tontras*
020 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
with the many clergy of his time who shrank from no ii.triguei and by-ways to get ])ossession of such dignities. lie left Constantinople in June, 381, and spent the remaining years of Ids life mostly in solitude on his paternal estate of Arianzus in tho vicinity of Nazianzum, in religious exei-cises and literary ]>ur Buits. Yet he continued to operate through numerous epistles upon the affairs of the churctli, and took active interest in the welfare and sufferings of the men around him. The nearer death approached, the more he endeavored to prepare himself for it by contemplation and rigid ascetic practice, that he "might be, and might more and more become, in truth a pure mirror of God and of divine things; might already in hope enjoy the treasures of the future world ; might walk with the angels ; might already forsake the earth, while yet walking upon it; and might be transported into higher regions by the Spirit." In his poems he describes himself, living solitary in the clefts of the rocks among the beasts, going about without shoes, content with one rough garment, and sleeping upon the ground covered with a sack. He died in 31)0 or 891 ; the jiartieular circumstances of his death being now unknown. His bones were afterwards brought to Constantinople; and they are now shown at Rome and Venice.
Among the works of Gregory stand pre-eminent his five Theological Orations in defence of the ISTicene doctrine against the Eunomians and Macedonians, which he delivered in Constantinople, and which won for him the honorary title of the Theologian (in the narrower sense, i. e., vindicator of the deity of the Logos).' His other orations (forty -five in all) are devoted to the memory of distinguished martyrs, friends, and kindred, to the ecclesiastical festivals, and to public events or his own fortunes. Two of them are bitter attacks on Julian after his death.' They are not founded on particular texts, and have no strictly logical order and connection.
' Hence called also A0701 ^toKoyiKoi, Orationes thcologicre. They arc Orat. xxrii.-xxxi. in the Bened. ed. torn. i. pp. 487-577 (in Migne, torn. ii. 9 sqq.), »u4 In the Bibliotheca Patrum Gi-aec. dogmatica of Tliilo, vol. ii. pp. 30('i-537.
' Invcctivae, Orat. iv. et v. in the Beucd. ed. torn. i. 73-17G (in Migne's cd. torn, i. pp. 631-722). His horror of Julian misled hiiu even to eulogize the Ari/iu cmp« ror Conslantius, to whom his brother was physician.