St. Gregory Nazianzen's Oration on the Nativity of Christ

Gregory opens with a series of paradoxes that define the mystery he is celebrating: Christ is "of heaven" yet "on earth," "from the beginning" yet "the Last," born "of a Virgin" yet truly "in the flesh." The parallelism is deliberate—this is not a transformation of divinity into humanity, nor a mere appearance of the divine in human guise, but the one Christ existing in both realms simultaneously. The Virgin birth underscores genuine human nativity while signaling that the initiative comes entirely from above.

The cosmic response Gregory demands—heaven rejoicing, earth glad, the whole creation singing—reveals what is at stake. The command to "rejoice with trembling and with joy" captures the existential weight: trembling "because of your sins" (the Holy One's proximity exposes human unworthiness), yet joy "because of your hope" (this same proximity is salvation). That matrons should "live as Virgins, that ye may be Mothers of Christ" suggests the Incarnation is not merely a historical event but an ongoing reality—Christ is to be formed in believers.

The rhetorical questions closing the passage ("Who doth not worship Him That is from the beginning? Who doth not glorify Him That is the Last?") imply that indifference is now inexcusable. The eternal God has made Himself accessible in flesh. The only fitting response is adoration.

Gregory weaves together Exodus typology, Pauline language, and prophetic fulfillment to interpret the Nativity as cosmic transition. The darkness-to-light imagery recalls both creation ("Light is made") and Israel's deliverance (Egypt's darkness, the pillar of fire), suggesting that Christ's birth inaugurates a new exodus and a new creation simultaneously. The old dispensation does not merely continue—it gives way. Letter yields to Spirit, shadow to Truth, the mysterious Melchizedek (priest without recorded genealogy) to Christ, who is "without Mother" in His eternal divine generation and "without Father" in His temporal human birth.

The phrase "the laws of nature are upset" is crucial. Gregory does not mean chaos but renewal—nature's ordinary course is interrupted because something greater is breaking through. "The world above must be filled" hints at the patristic understanding that humanity was created to complete the heavenly ranks; the Incarnation reopens this destiny.

The Isaiah quotation ("unto us a Child is born") receives a striking gloss: the "Government upon His shoulder" is the Cross itself. Salvation and sovereignty are inseparable from sacrifice. Gregory then offers his central formula: "He Who is not carnal is Incarnate; the Son of God becomes the Son of Man." This is not mixture or confusion but genuine assumption—the non-carnal one takes on flesh without ceasing to be what He was. The citation of Hebrews 13:8 ("the Same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever") anchors the paradox: the one born in time is eternally unchanging.

The closing challenge to Jews, Greeks, and heretics is not triumphalism but confidence rooted in eschatology. The Incarnation will be vindicated—if not by the Ascension, then by the final judgment. History moves toward a reckoning that will silence all objections.

Gregory pauses to clarify the feast's dual naming: Theophany (manifestation of God) and Birthday (the nativity itself). These are not two feasts but two perspectives on one reality—God is manifested to humanity precisely through birth. The distinction matters: "Theophany" emphasizes what is revealed (divinity made accessible), while "Birthday" emphasizes the means of revelation (genuine human nativity).

The theological core lies in Gregory's contrast between Being and Becoming. Christ is "Being, and eternally Being, of the Eternal Being"—language reaching toward the ineffable divine nature, "above cause and word." The striking phrase "there was no word before The Word" affirms the Son's co-eternity with the Father; the Logos is not a secondary emanation but belongs to the eternal divine life itself.

Yet this same eternal one undergoes Becoming "for our sakes." Gregory's purpose clause is precise: "that He Who gives us our being might also give us our Well-being." Creation gave existence; Incarnation gives flourishing. But Gregory immediately corrects himself—"or rather might restore us"—because humanity no longer stands at original innocence. We have "by wickedness fallen from wellbeing." The Incarnation is thus not merely gift but remedy, not simply elevation but restoration.

The logic is participatory: only the source of being can restore being. A creature might assist or instruct, but the repair of human nature requires its Author to enter it, assume it, and heal it from within.

Gregory now states the festival's meaning with precision: "the Coming of God to Man, that we might go forth... or rather that we might go back to God." The self-correction is significant. Salvation is not merely progress toward a distant goal but return to an origin—humanity recovering what was lost, the prodigal coming home. The Pauline language of "putting off the old man" and "putting on the New" (Colossians 3:9-10) frames this as genuine transformation, not mere legal reckoning.

The participatory logic intensifies: we are "born with Christ and crucified with Him and buried with Him and rising with Him." Each stage of Christ's work becomes a stage in the believer's life. This is not imitation from a distance but incorporation into His very pattern—what later Orthodox theology would call the exchange: He undergoes what is ours that we might share what is His.

Gregory names this "the beautiful conversion" and unfolds its logic through reversal: as the painful (fall) succeeded the blissful (Eden), so the blissful must emerge from the painful (redemption through Cross). The quotation from Romans 5:20 ("where sin abounded Grace did much more abound") grounds the hope: grace exceeds the wound it heals. The parallel between Adam's taste and Christ's Passion makes the disproportion vivid—if a single act of eating brought condemnation, how much more does the entire self-offering of the incarnate God bring justification?

The closing contrasts define authentic celebration: not heathen but godly, not worldly but above the world, not ours but the Master's, not weakness but healing, not creation but re-creation. The Nativity is not merely Christ's birthday; it is humanity's new beginning.

Gregory turns from theology to ethics, and his rhetoric becomes biting. The festival's meaning must shape its celebration—yet pagan customs still clung to Christian holy days in fourth-century Cappadocia. His catalogue of sensory indulgences (eye, ear, nose, taste, touch) is not prudishness but diagnosis: these are "roads so prone to evil and entrances for sin." The body's senses, good in themselves, become portals for vice when made ends rather than means.

The critique of luxury is unsparing. Fine clothing "belies the beauty of nature" and does "despite unto the image of God"—strong language suggesting that excessive adornment obscures the true human dignity given in creation. The phrase "precious dung" for delicacies hauled from sea and land is deliberately shocking; Gregory refuses to let his congregation aestheticize their excess. "Every superfluity is intemperance, and all which is beyond absolute need"—this is not mere ascetical advice but a definition.

The sharpest edge comes last: "and this while others are hungry and in want, who are made of the same clay and in the same manner." Extravagance is not a private indulgence but an injustice. Those feasting share common origin with those starving; the Incarnation—God taking on our shared clay—makes indifference to the poor a theological contradiction. If Christ became flesh, then flesh matters, and the flesh of the destitute cannot be ignored while celebrating the feast of His birth.

Gregory's asceticism is thus not world-denying but world-ordering: creation is good, but disordered desire profanes both the creature and the feast.

Gregory contrasts Christian celebration with pagan festivity, and the distinction is theological before it is moral. Greek gods "rejoice in the reek of sacrifices"—they are fed by worship, dependent on human offerings, gratified by sensory indulgence. Their devotees thus "worship with their belly," mirroring in their feasts the appetites of their deities. The consistency is damning: evil gods produce evil worship.

But Christians adore "the Word"—the Logos who needs nothing, who gives rather than receives, who is honored not by smoke and fat but by understanding. Gregory's pivot is subtle: "if we must in some way have luxury, let us seek it in word." The desire for richness is not abolished but redirected. Feasting on Scripture and divine teaching satisfies the same human longing that pagan festivals exploited, but orders it toward truth. The luxury becomes "akin to Him Who hath called us together"—celebration shaped by its object.

Gregory then assumes the role of host, offering his congregation a different banquet: the story of the feast itself. His self-deprecation ("a foreigner," "a rustic," "one who is poor and homeless") may partly reflect his actual situation—he was from Nazianzus, not Constantinople, and had accepted the capital's pulpit reluctantly—but it also performs the inversion the Incarnation demands. The humble feeds the eminent; the poor serves the wealthy. The bishop mirrors Christ, who though rich became poor, and the sermon becomes itself a feast where abundance flows from apparent lack.

Gregory pivots from the festival to its foundation: who is this God made manifest in the manger? The answer begins with divine eternity. "Was" and "will be" belong to creatures caught in time's flow; God simply "is." The Exodus self-naming—"he who is"—becomes the key. God does not possess being as one attribute among others; He holds "everything together in himself," without beginning or ending, "a kind of boundless and limitless sea of being."

Yet this Being surpasses comprehension. We sketch God "in a very indistinct and mediocre way," not from His essence but "from things around him"—His works, His effects, the traces He leaves. We gather impressions into a composite image, but it "flees before it is grasped and escapes before it is understood." The lightning metaphor is precise: illumination comes, but too swift to hold. Even the purified mind receives only a flash.

Gregory finds purpose in this elusiveness. What can be grasped draws us forward; what remains ungraspable awakens wonder, and wonder intensifies desire, and desire purifies, and purification renders us "deiform"—godlike. The progression is not intellectual merely but transformative. Theology is ascent.

The climax arrives with acknowledged boldness: "God is united with gods, and he is thus known." The infinite God who exceeds all conception nonetheless converses with the purified "as with those close to him." Knowledge becomes communion, and communion becomes union. Gregory suggests a mysterious reciprocity: we know God "perhaps as much as he already knows those who are known to him." The Incarnation—this God entering flesh—is what makes such intimacy possible. The boundless One has made Himself graspable in Christ, that we who grasp might be drawn into His boundlessness.

Gregory traces how the mind names the unnameable. Confronting infinity, we lack footing—there is no platform from which to survey the boundless. So we work from "phenomena," from what we encounter, and name God by negation: looking upward into depths without origin, we call Him "Unoriginate"; looking forward into depths without terminus, we call Him "Undying and Imperishable"; considering the whole, we call Him "Eternal." These names are true but confessional—they mark the boundaries of our comprehension, not the boundaries of God.

The distinction between time and eternity is carefully drawn. Eternity is not endless time but a different mode altogether: "neither time nor part of time; for it cannot be measured." Yet Gregory offers an analogy: what the sun-measured course of days is to us, eternity is to the Everlasting—"a sort of time-like movement and interval co-extensive with their existence." The analogy limps (as all must), but it gestures toward the mystery: God's life is not static but inexhaustibly full.

Gregory then reins himself in—his subject is Incarnation, not the doctrine of God as such—yet he cannot leave theology behind without a Trinitarian clarification. "When I say God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." The boundaries are precise: neither more than three (pagan polytheism, "a mob of gods") nor fewer (Jewish unitarianism that collapses the Persons to preserve Monarchia). Both errors converge in the same failure to receive revelation as given.

The Seraphim's thrice-holy cry (Isaiah 6) becomes the scriptural anchor: three "Holys" yet one "Lord and God." The Incarnation Gregory celebrates is not the arrival of a lesser deity or an emanation but the coming in flesh of one who shares the Holy of Holies, hidden even from angels, praised in Trinitarian fullness.

Gregory probes behind creation to its motive. God's eternal self-contemplation—the inner life of the Trinity—is complete, lacking nothing. Yet Goodness by nature overflows; it "must be poured out and go forth beyond Itself to multiply the objects of Its beneficence." Creation is not necessity but superabundance, the generosity of One who needs no recipients yet delights to give. This is "essential to the highest Goodness"—not that God required completion, but that perfect love is inherently diffusive.

The angels come first, "conceived" by the Father, "fulfilled by His Word," and "perfected by His Spirit." Gregory's Trinitarian grammar governs cosmology: creation is the joint work of the Three. The angels are "secondary Splendours," ministers of the "Primary Splendour," receiving and reflecting light from its source. Their nature Gregory describes with hesitation—"intelligent Spirits," "immaterial Fire," or "some other nature approaching this"—acknowledging the limits of human categories applied to heavenly beings.

Gregory wishes he could declare angels incapable of evil, fixed in goodness by their proximity to God. But he cannot. Lucifer—named for splendor, now called Darkness—stands as the counter-witness. Pride accomplished what nature alone could not: movement away from the Good. The "apostate hosts" followed, becoming "creators of evil by their revolt against good and our inciters." Evil has no independent origin; it is parasitic, a turning from light by those made for light.

This angelic prehistory frames the Incarnation. Humanity enters a cosmos already marked by rebellion. The Word who "fulfilled" the angels' creation will descend to rescue creatures caught in the wreckage of angelic pride.

From angels Gregory descends to cosmos. The "second world"—material, visible, compounded of earth and sky—follows the first as a distinct act of creative will. Gregory admires both its parts ("the fair form of every part") and their integration ("the harmony and the unison of the whole"). Creation is not chaos organized but symphony composed, "tending to the perfect completion of the world as a Unit." The aesthetic language is deliberate: beauty reveals wisdom, and cosmic order discloses its Orderer.

But the deeper point is theological. God creates not only "a Nature akin to Himself"—the intellectual, angelic realm—but also "one altogether alien to Himself." Matter, sense-perception, bodies without soul or motion: these stand at maximal distance from incorporeal Deity. Yet they exist by the same Word, willed into being by the same Goodness. Gregory implies that creation's range displays divine freedom. God is not limited to producing what resembles Him; He can call forth the utterly unlike and nonetheless pronounce it good.

This sets the stage for the Incarnation's scandal. If matter were evil or merely tolerated, the Word's assumption of flesh would be degradation. But if the material world is genuinely God's creation—"admirable," "worthy of admiration"—then its Creator may enter it without contradiction. The same hand that formed earth and sky, animals and bodies, now takes a body for Himself.

Gregory anticipates impatient listeners: "What has all this to do with us? Talk to us about the Festival." He promises arrival at the manger, but defends his route. The Incarnation cannot be understood apart from creation; the Word made flesh is the Word through whom all was made. Love and logic alike compel the longer path.

Gregory arrives at humanity, and his language becomes dense with paradox. Mind and sense—angelic intellect and material creation—had remained "within their own boundaries," each praising the Creator in its own mode. But the "whole riches of Goodness" were not yet displayed. Something was missing: a creature who united both realms, "a single living being out of both."

So God "fashions Man." The verb is deliberate, echoing Genesis 2: body taken from existing matter, but breath "taken from Himself"—an intelligent soul, the Image of God. Gregory calls humanity "a sort of second world," a microcosm containing in one nature what the universe spreads across many. The titles accumulate: "great in littleness," "a new Angel," "a mingled worshipper," "King of all upon earth, but subject to the King above." Each phrase holds contraries in tension: earthly and heavenly, temporal and immortal, visible and intellectual, spirit and flesh.

The purpose is twofold. Spirit was given "that he might continue to live and praise his Benefactor"; flesh "that he might suffer, and by suffering be put in remembrance, and corrected if he became proud." Vulnerability is pedagogical. The body teaches humility, anchoring the soul against the pride that ruined Lucifer.

But Gregory presses further. Humanity is "a living creature trained here, and then moved elsewhere"—earth is preparation, not destination. The culmination is theosis: "deified by its inclination to God." This is not metaphor but goal. The "Light of Truth" partially received now will become full vision, and we shall "both see and experience the Splendour of God." The Incarnation fulfills this design: God descends into the creature made for ascent, "Who made us, and will remake us again after a loftier fashion."

Gregory recounts the fall with exegetical care and pastoral sensitivity. Paradise—"whatever the Paradise may have been," he adds, wisely declining to over-specify—was the setting for a test of freedom. Free will was not accidental but essential to the gift: "in order that God might belong to him as the result of his choice." Love coerced is not love. The creature made for theosis must choose the ascent.

The forbidden tree receives subtle interpretation. Gregory rejects any notion that knowledge itself was evil or that God begrudged humanity. The Tree of Knowledge was "Contemplation"—good in itself, but dangerous for the immature. Solid food harms infants; deep mysteries overwhelm the unprepared. The prohibition was not permanent but pedagogical, guarding against premature grasping. Sin lay not in the desire to know but in the refusal to wait, the insistence on seizing what would have been given.

Gregory does not distance himself from the fall: "alas for my weakness! (for that of my first father was mine)." The catastrophe is not ancient history but inherited condition. Adam's forgetting is ours; his yielding, ours; his banishment, ours.

The "coats of skins" become, in Gregory's reading, "the coarser flesh, both mortal and contradictory"—not the body as originally made but the body now subject to death, passion, and decay. Yet even here mercy operates. Death itself is gift: "the cutting off of sin, in order that evil may not be immortal." The punishment prevents endless corruption. God's severity serves His kindness, and the fall, though catastrophic, does not escape providence. The stage is set for a rescue that will not merely restore but surpass the original design.

Gregory surveys salvation history as divine pedagogy intensifying toward crisis. The litany of remedies—"word, law, prophets, benefits, threats, plagues, waters, fires, wars"—catalogs God's persistent interventions, each calibrated to the disease but none sufficient to cure it. The symptoms worsened: "mutual slaughters, adulteries, perjuries, unnatural crimes," and finally idolatry, "the transfer of worship from the Creator to the Creatures." The root malady—misplaced worship—demanded more than prophetic correction or legal restraint. "As these required a greater aid, so also they obtained a greater."

The aid is the Word Himself. Gregory's titles cascade: "before all worlds, the Invisible, the Incomprehensible, the Bodiless, Beginning of Beginning, the Light of Light, the Source of Life and Immortality, the Image of the Archetypal Beauty, the immovable Seal, the unchangeable Image, the Father's Definition and Word." This is not a lesser emanation or angelic messenger but the one through whom all was made. And He "came to His own Image"—humanity, fashioned in His likeness—"and took on Him flesh for the sake of our flesh, and mingled Himself with an intelligent soul for my soul's sake, purifying like by like."

The logic is therapeutic and participatory. The Word assumes what we are in order to heal what we have become. Body is united to body, soul to soul, "in all points except sin." Gregory emphasizes the Virgin's preparation—"purified by the Holy Ghost"—honoring both childbearing and virginity. The result: "One Person in two Natures, Flesh and Spirit, of which the latter deified the former." The Chalcedonian grammar is anticipated: no confusion, no separation, but genuine union accomplishing genuine transformation.

The paradoxes multiply: "the Self-Existent comes into being, the Uncreate is created, That which cannot be contained is contained." Gregory notes the mediating role of Christ's human soul, bridging infinite Deity and finite flesh. The Word's self-emptying is not loss but strategy: "He Who gives riches becomes poor... that I may assume the richness of His Godhead. He that is full empties Himself... that I may have a share in His Fulness."

The final comparison seals the argument. Creation was God imparting "the better Nature" to creatures; Incarnation is God partaking of "the worse." The second gift exceeds the first. We received the divine image and failed to keep it; now God enters our failure to "both save the image and make the flesh immortal." The Incarnation is not repair merely but surpassing—"more godlike," "loftier"—because the physician has entered the disease itself to destroy it from within.

Gregory turns polemical, confronting those who find the Incarnation beneath God's dignity. His targets are "cavillers," "bitter reasoners," "detractors"—likely Arians and Eunomians who argued that the Word's humiliation proved His inferiority to the Father. Gregory's counter is not defensive but offensive: the objection itself reveals spiritual blindness. To "turn this benefit into a reproach" is to mistake the physician's descent for degradation.

The parables of Luke 15 structure the argument. The Good Shepherd seeks the strayed sheep "upon the mountains and the hills, on which thou wast then sacrificing"—a sharp aside, linking pagan hilltop altars to the wandering that required rescue. Finding the sheep, He carries it on shoulders that also bore "the Wood of the Cross." The lost coin is "the Royal Image covered up by passions"—humanity defaced but not destroyed, still bearing the King's stamp, worth the search. Gregory adds that angels share the joy of recovery, having also shared "the secret of the Incarnation." Heaven does not despise earth's restoration; it celebrates.

The foot-washing answers the charge directly: "humiliation is the best road to exaltation." Christ bends low not despite His divinity but as its expression. The logic is remedial: "for the soul that was bent to the ground He humbles Himself, that He may raise up with Himself the soul that was tottering to a fall." Descent enables ascent; self-emptying creates room for filling.

Gregory closes with two images. Blame the physician for stooping over wounds? Blame the rescuer for climbing into a ditch? The Incarnation is not divine diminishment but divine competence—God doing what only God can do, entering the wreckage to extract the perishing. Those who call this shameful have understood neither the disease nor the cure.

Gregory addresses the hermeneutical error beneath Christological heresy: selective reading. Scripture says Christ "was sent"—but as man, for "He was of a twofold Nature." The human experiences are real: weariness, hunger, thirst, agony, tears. These belong to "the nature of a corporeal being" genuinely assumed. When "sent" applies to Him as God, Gregory explains, it denotes the Father's good pleasure, not subordination. Christ refers all to the Father "that He may honour the Eternal Principle, and because He will not be taken to be an antagonistic God"—not from deficiency but from Trinitarian love.

The doubled predicates of Scripture demand both-and reading. He "was betrayed" and "gave Himself up"; He "was raised by the Father" and "raised Himself"; He "was taken up" and "went up." The passive voice honors the Father's will; the active affirms the Son's own power. Both are true. To seize only the humiliating texts while ignoring the exalting ones is not exegesis but agenda.

Gregory names the twin errors precisely: confounding the Persons (Sabellianism) or dividing the natures (Arianism and its heirs). "The former ought to have distinguished, and the latter to have united Him; the one in number, the other in Godhead." Christ is one in Person, distinct from the Father; He is one in Godhead, not severed from divinity.

The rhetoric turns sharp. Those who stumble at Christ's flesh repeat the Jews' error; those who deny His divinity fall below the demons, who at least recognized what drove them out. Gregory's hyperbole stings: better to be a demoniac than to enjoy health and reason while refusing what demons confessed. The Incarnation exposes hearts; how one reads the two natures reveals what one worships.

Gregory surveys the arc of Christ's ministry, from Jordan to Ascension, and finds in each episode a double movement: what Christ undergoes and what that accomplishes for us. The baptism is paradigmatic: Jesus "submits to be purified" though He needs no purification—"for indeed He had no need of purification Who taketh away the sin of the world." His descent into the Jordan sanctifies the waters themselves. The sinless One enters the sinner's ritual, and the ritual is transformed.

The catalogue accelerates: temptation and victory, angelic service, healings, raisings, exorcisms, miraculous feedings, walking on water. Gregory interrupts himself with pastoral anguish—"O that He would give life to you who are dead because of your heresy"—the polemicist remembering that opponents too need the resurrection he proclaims.

The Passion receives compressed but precise expression. Christ is "betrayed and crucified, and crucifying with Himself my sin"—the Cross destroys what it bears. He is "offered as a Lamb, and offering as a Priest"—victim and celebrant coincide, fulfilling and transcending all prior sacrifice. He is "as a Man buried in the grave, and as God rising again"—the two natures distinguished in their operations yet inseparable in the one Person who dies and rises.

The conclusion reframes everything: "Why what a multitude of high festivals there are in each of the mysteries of the Christ." Every event is a feast because every event effects salvation. But Gregory insists on unity of purpose: "all of which have one completion, namely, my perfection and return to the first condition of Adam." The Incarnation is not isolated marvel but the hinge of a comprehensive restoration. What Adam lost, Christ recovers—and more, as earlier noted, for the second gift surpasses the first.

Gregory shifts from exposition to exhortation, summoning his congregation into the narrative itself. "Accept His Conception, and leap before Him"—as John leapt in Elizabeth's womb, as David danced before the Ark. The Incarnation is not doctrine to be observed but mystery to be entered. Each detail of the Nativity becomes a point of contact: the enrollment that registered Christ in Caesar's census writes believers in heaven; the birth that bound God in swaddling clothes looses us from the chains of our fallen birth; "little Bethlehem" becomes the gate back to Paradise.

The manger receives startling interpretation. Through it, "thou, being without sense, wast fed by the Word." The image is eucharistic and pedagogical: the irrational creature finds nourishment at the trough where the Logos lies. Gregory invokes Isaiah's rebuke—"the ox knows its owner, and the ass its master's crib" (Isaiah 1:3)—and applies it pastorally. If you are among the clean, those who "chew the cud of the word," approach as one fit for sacrifice. If still unclean, still Gentile, then "run with the Star, and bear thy Gifts with the Magi."

The gifts themselves are theological: gold for a King, frankincense for God, myrrh for "One Who is dead for thee." Kingship, divinity, and salvific death are confessed in the offering. Gregory then widens the celebration beyond the congregation: "With Shepherds glorify Him; with Angels join in chorus; with Archangels sing hymns." Heaven and earth share the festival because both realms are reconciled in the Child. The angels who announced the birth now rejoice with those who receive it, "because they love men, and they love God." The Incarnation unites what sin had divided—not only God and humanity, but the whole cosmos in common praise.

Gregory concludes with a startling instruction: even the massacre of the innocents belongs to the mystery. "Or rather you must venerate this too"—the slaughtered children become "the Sacrifice of the same age as Christ, slain before the Offering of the New Victim." Their deaths, however horrific, are caught up into the redemptive pattern; they are martyrs before the Martyrdom, witnesses before they could speak.

The flight into Egypt becomes paradigm: "joyfully become a companion of His exile." To follow Christ means sharing His displacement, His rejection, His vulnerability. Gregory then extends the pattern across the whole gospel: "Travel without fault through every stage and faculty of the Life of Christ." The Incarnation is not merely event to celebrate but path to walk. Be purified, be circumcised—strip away what veils the soul. Teach in the Temple, drive out the traders—let truth displace commerce in the heart. Accept stoning, silence before mockers, scourging, gall, vinegar, thorns, the purple robe of derision, the reed scepter of false homage.

The climax is participation in the Passion itself: "be crucified with Him, and share His Death and Burial gladly." Gregory echoes Paul's baptismal theology (Romans 6), but presses it into lived experience. Death with Christ is not ritual only but vocation—the daily crucifixion of self that opens into resurrection, glorification, and reign.

The oration ends where it must: the Triune God "set forth as clearly before you as the chains of our flesh allow." The Incarnation does not abolish mystery but makes it accessible. In Jesus Christ, the Trinity is beheld—not exhaustively, for flesh remains flesh, but truly. Doxology follows: "to Whom be the glory for ever." Theology returns to worship, and the festival achieves its purpose.