Knowing God Without Control: Gregory of Nazianzus’ Critique of Theurgy

The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus stand among the most luminous and demanding works of early Christian theology. Delivered in Constantinople during a period of intense doctrinal conflict, these orations are not abstract treatises written at leisure, but living speeches forged in controversy, pastoral urgency, and prayerful reflection. Gregory speaks as both theologian and bishop, addressing a divided Church while insisting that true knowledge of God must be approached with reverence, discipline, and humility.

At the heart of these orations lies Gregory’s defense of Nicene faith against Arian and Eunomian claims, especially concerning the divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Yet his purpose is not merely to refute error. He seeks to teach his hearers how theology itself should be done: who may speak of God, under what conditions, and with what inner disposition. For Gregory, theology is not a matter of verbal cleverness or philosophical dominance, but of purification, worship, and fidelity to the mystery that surpasses human comprehension.

Gregory insists on the transcendence of God while simultaneously affirming God’s self-disclosure in Christ. He holds together two truths that are often torn apart: that God is ultimately beyond human language, and that God has truly entered human history. This tension shapes his method. Scriptural language must be read carefully, distinctions must be honored, and silence must accompany speech. Where human reason reaches its limit, faith does not collapse but bows.

The orations also reveal Gregory’s distinctive theological temperament. He is precise without being arid, poetic without being vague, polemical without losing a sense of awe. His arguments unfold through a careful weaving of Scripture, philosophical reasoning, and rhetorical power, always subordinated to the confession of the Triune God. The result is theology that is at once intellectually rigorous and spiritually demanding.

Read today, the Five Theological Orations remain a summons rather than a relic. They call readers to recover a sense of theology as a sacred task, one that requires moral seriousness, contemplative depth, and restraint before mystery. Gregory does not offer easy answers; he offers a way of standing before God that refuses both presumption and despair.

Gregory opens his theological orations by declaring war on “cleverness.” Not on intelligence, but on the kind of cleverness that turns theology into performance; speech admired for polish, arguments built for victory, and “knowledge” worn as a badge of superiority. He calls this posture hubris and, with Paul, names it profane empty talk: word-battles that produce nothing useful. The point is crucial: before Gregory argues about the Trinity, he insists that God cannot be approached through mastery. When speech becomes a technique of control, it stops being theology and becomes desecration.

When Gregory mocks those who “worship the ear and the tongue; and now, as I see, even the hand; when it comes to our discourses,” he is exposing a subtle idolatry. The ear is worshipped when theology becomes something to be consumed for its rhetorical pleasure; the tongue when verbal brilliance and clever refutation are treated as marks of spiritual authority; and the hand when applause, party-signals, and public alignment turn doctrine into a social performance. What should have been an act of reverent listening before God has become a spectacle. Theology is no longer prayerful speech about God, but an arena for display, competition, and status.

What emerges from Gregory’s critique is not simply a rejection of incorrect beliefs, but a far deeper rejection of procedural religion itself. His concern is not limited to what is said about God, but how God is approached. Gregory repeatedly targets the impulse to turn theology into a system of operations; whether verbal, conceptual, or performative; by which divine truth is extracted, managed, or displayed. This is why he attacks cleverness, spectacle, and verbal acrobatics: they reveal a mindset that treats the holy as something to be worked rather than received.

For Gregory, the coming of Christ decisively alters the conditions of knowing God. Knowledge of God is no longer achieved through ascent, technical mastery, or ritual or intellectual display. God is known because God has first descended; freely, graciously, and without compulsion. The logic of revelation displaces the logic of control. Any attempt to secure access to God through technique, whether through elaborate ritual or rhetorical brilliance, misunderstands the nature of Christian knowledge at its root.

This is why Gregory’s language becomes so severe when theology begins to resemble performance. The moment speech about God is shaped by the desire to impress, to dominate, or to elicit applause, it ceases to be an act of reverence. Theology, in that moment, is no longer something done before God, but something done to God; reducing divine mystery to an object of manipulation. Such speech may be clever, but it is spiritually empty, because it reverses the proper direction of divine–human relation.

Seen in this light, theurgy is not merely rejected as a mistaken practice; it becomes conceptually incoherent within a Christian frame. Theurgy presupposes that divine presence or power can be activated through correct operations. Gregory’s theology presupposes the opposite: that God cannot be activated, only received; cannot be compelled, only worshipped. Once God has revealed Himself in Christ, any system that treats divine access as a function of technique; no matter how refined; collapses under its own assumptions.

This is why Gregory fears that when theology becomes performance or technique, the Christian mystery itself is reduced to a trick; handled, displayed, and applauded, but no longer worshipped.

Gregory of Nazianzus insists that speaking about God is not a universal right, nor a casual activity. Theology, he argues, is not for everyone, not at all times, not for every audience, and not without measure. This is not elitism, but reverence. Knowledge of God cannot be treated as cheap or readily available to anyone with verbal confidence or argumentative skill. It requires purification of life, inner stillness, and a mind freed from distraction and turbulence.

For Gregory, the primary qualification for theology is not technique or cleverness, but transformation. God is not known through verbal mastery, ritual operation, or intellectual display, but through a receptive posture shaped by humility and moral formation. Even then, theological speech must be restrained by the listener’s capacity, lest divine mystery be mishandled.

Instead of clever arguments, he lists the ordinary, hidden practices of Christian life: hospitality, care for the poor, chastity, fasting, prayer, psalmody, tears, vigilance over the senses, restraint of anger, humility of speech. These are not “advanced techniques” for accessing God. They are signs of a life slowly being re-ordered around God. Gregory’s point is simple but devastating: if theology is not emerging from this kind of life, it has already gone wrong; no matter how orthodox or impressive it sounds.

This is where the question of theurgy becomes unavoidable after Christ. Theurgy assumes that divine access can be secured by doing the right things in the right way. Gregory’s vision cuts beneath that assumption. In Christianity, God is not reached by activation, technique, or mastery; whether ritual or rhetorical. God is known by reception. Grace is not triggered; it is given. The moment we treat theology as something we operate; rather than something we are slowly conformed to; we turn mystery into mechanism.

Once God becomes something we can handle, deploy, or demonstrate, theology stops being worship and starts becoming a performance. And in that moment, even the most sacred language becomes hollow; handled, admired, and applauded, but no longer received as holy.

Gregory of Nazianzus does something very deliberate he lines up every impressive spiritual option on offer and lets them all speak; only to show that they share the same hidden flaw.

He invites the whole ancient world into the room. The Orphic mysteries with their secret rites. The Pythagorean habit of saying “Αὐτὸς ἔφα”; “the Master said it,” therefore it must be true. Plato’s Ideas and the spiritual ladder of ascent: reincarnation, cycles of souls, recollection, and the belief that one climbs toward God through beauty, desire, and bodies. Epicurus appears with atheism, atoms, and pleasure as the final good. Aristotle follows with a reduced, technical providence and merely human explanations of the soul. The Stoics arrive with moral severity and pride; the Cynics with shamelessness and public performance. Then comes the religious marketplace itself: idols, sacrifices, demons (both “good” and harmful), divination, theurgies, soul-manipulations; every promise of access, power, or insight.

Gregory is not simply listing errors to score points. He is exposing a pattern. All of these approaches, however different they look, assume the same thing: that the divine can be reached, activated, or managed by the right method. Whether through ritual, philosophy, ascetic technique, or intellectual mastery, God becomes something we approach as a skilled operator rather than a worshipper.

This is where idolatry becomes much more than bowing before statues. For Gregory, idolatry is not only believing the wrong thing about God; it is adopting the wrong posture. A statue, an image, a charm, or a rite is dangerous not merely because it is material, but because it offers something controllable. It gives the worshipper a point of leverage: something you can point to, carry, perform, repeat, or display. Even when people claim they are aiming “beyond” the object, the object can still function as a spiritual device; something that puts initiative in human hands.

Gregory’s insight is that this logic does not stop with obvious pagan idols. It simply becomes more refined. A philosophical system can become an idol. A theological method can become an idol. A spiritual ladder, a secret insight, or a clever argument can function exactly like a statue; solidifying God into something the mind can handle, divide, climb, or explain. In that sense, idols can be carved from marble or constructed from concepts.

At this point, Gregory makes an important clarification. He is not telling Christians to stop thinking. In fact, he explicitly allows wide-ranging inquiry: reflection on the cosmos, matter, the soul, rational beings, resurrection, judgment, recompense, and even the sufferings of Christ. These are not forbidden topics. But they are not meant to become spiritual performances or competitive displays. Thinking serves worship; it does not replace it.

This is why Gregory can say that some errors in speculative questions are “not dangerous.” Missing the mark on certain intellectual matters is survivable. What is not survivable is turning theology itself into a technique. Once knowledge of God becomes something we do rather than something we receive, the direction of religion reverses. Instead of being shaped by God, we attempt to manage God.

Seen this way, statue-veneration and theurgy are symptoms of the same problem. They allow religion to function while leaving the worshipper in control. Gregory’s warning is that once the holy becomes manageable; handled, displayed, activated, or applauded; it is no longer worshipped. The mystery remains visible, but it has been emptied of its power.

For Gregory, Christian faith points in the opposite direction. God is not reached by ladders, rites, or clever systems. God is encountered in Christ, and therefore only received, never operated. Any path that turns divine encounter into a method; no matter how ancient, sophisticated, or beautiful; quietly steps off the narrow way.

The Second Theological Oration of Gregory of Nazianzus does not begin with doctrines about God. It begins with a warning.

Before Gregory speaks about the Trinity, the Son, or the divine nature, he stops to ask a more basic question: Who is actually fit to speak about God at all? His concern is not intellectual ability but spiritual condition. Theology, for Gregory, is not a public performance, a debating arena, or a technique for acquiring insight. It is a dangerous act if undertaken lightly, and a holy one only when approached with reverence.

This oration lays down the rule that governs everything that follows: God is not mastered by argument, ritual, or enthusiasm. God is known only by those who have been made capable of receiving Him. The Second Oration is therefore not about adding information, but about purifying the theologian.

“That Light May Be Apprehended by Light”

Gregory insists that theology must wait until the soul is ready. He describes the theologian as someone who has first been cleansed; not perfectly, but as far as humanly possible. Only such a person can receive divine light without distorting it. As he famously puts it, light must be apprehended by light. God is not seized by force or reached by technique; He is recognized by resemblance.

This is why Gregory refuses theology done in agitation or spectacle. When the soul is scattered by ambition, rivalry, or noise, theology becomes barren. Words may be spoken, arguments may be clever, but nothing takes root. He compares this to sowing seed among thorns or casting it onto unprepared ground. The problem is not the seed; it is the soil.

Only when the inner turbulence has settled; when the soul is no longer pulled by wealth, status, applause, or curiosity; can theology begin. Even then, Gregory insists that Scripture must shape the ground itself, impressing and reforming the soul before any divine discourse is attempted.

What emerges here is a profoundly Christian boundary. Theology is not a method for reaching God, and it is not one path among many. It follows purification; it does not replace it. Any attempt to speak of God without this preparation turns theology into noise, display, or control.

Gregory’s theology is not only about “how high” God is. It is also about how dangerous it is to confuse the Creator with the created; especially when the unseen world is involved.

He begins by insisting that God cannot be contained by any mind: not the mind of the ignorant, not even the mind of the devout, not even; very likely; the minds of the higher intelligences. Created beings can know truly, but only by measure; they can be illuminated, but they do not become the Light itself.

And that mistake is exactly what lies underneath theurgy.

Theurgy, in its classical pagan sense, is not simply “belief in spirits.” It is the attempt to work the divine realm; through names, rites, formulas, manipulations, sacred objects, invocations; so that spiritual powers can be harnessed, directed, or compelled. It promises access without purification, power without repentance, and “results” without obedience. Even when it speaks reverently about “the divine,” it subtly recasts the holy as a system you can operate.

Gregory’s mountain imagery is a direct refusal of that approach.

He says: if you would ascend toward God, there are conditions. Not because God is stingy, but because God is God. One does not stroll into the cloud as if it were a human workshop. Some can come nearer, some must stand farther away, and some; those unfit for such vision; must not approach at all. This is not elitism; it is a spiritual law: the divine cannot be safely handled like an object.

So when Gregory warns about the “beasts” at the mountain; predatory, unteachable, raging, devouring; he is not only talking about crude unbelievers. He is describing a posture of soul: the person who rushes at theology to seize a “doctrine or saying,” not to be healed but to tear things apart. That posture is disturbingly close to the theurgic instinct: take sacred words as weapons, take mysteries as instruments, take power as the goal.

From here, the relevance to paganism becomes obvious.

Gregory can catalogue the spiritual marketplace of his world; Orphic rites, Pythagorean boasts, Platonic cycles, Stoic pride, and the whole mixed bag of daemon-talk, ritual techniques, and cosmic speculation; and then say, in effect: throw it away. Not because every non-Christian thinker is stupid, but because these systems so easily train the mind to treat ultimate reality as something “available” to method, and therefore vulnerable to the will.

In Gregory’s view, that is the turning point where “religion” becomes a refined form of idolatry.

Idolatry is not only bowing before a statue. It is any act; whether physical or mental; that places created things (images, concepts, spirits, powers) in the position that belongs only to the uncreated God. A person can commit idolatry with the hands, but also with the imagination: by forming a “god” that fits inside the mind, a god that is graspable, manageable, and therefore usable. Gregory’s insistence that God is not comprehended; indeed that “to think is harder than to say”; is not philosophical decoration. It is a safeguard against turning God into a product of our spiritual appetites.

This brings us to angels, an area where many Christians feel an unease that is well founded. Scripture affirms that angels are real; created beings who serve God and carry out His will; but it does not permit prayer to them. Angels are messengers, not mediators; servants, not sources of grace. They act only at God’s command and are never addressed as spiritual agents in their own right. The moment angels are invoked, petitioned, or expected to respond, the posture shifts from Christian worship to something else entirely. Christianity prays to God alone. Angels, if they act, do so because God sends them; not because human beings ask.

Gregory supplies those boundaries with unusual clarity:

1. God is not one power among others. God is not the “top being” in a hierarchy of beings. God is the uncreated source of all being. Everything else; saints, angels, principalities, powers; is creaturely. To treat angels as alternate access points to “the divine” is to fall back into the pagan ladder of intermediaries.

2. You cannot approach the holy by technique. Gregory’s mountain is not climbed by incantation. The route upward is purification, humility, and obedience. That is why the “narrow way” is narrow: it is not a set of spiritual shortcuts; it is a cruciform path. Theurgy offers many “ways” precisely because it treats the spiritual realm like terrain to be navigated for benefit. Gregory insists that true ascent is not navigation but transformation.

3. Asking angels is not the same as using angels.The theurgic mind treats spirits as instruments. The Christian mind treats angels as servants of God, never servants of our will. So the dividing line is intention and theology: do we ask God for help and acknowledge His rule, or do we try to activate a spiritual mechanism?

4. Prayer does not equal worship. In historic Christian practice, to “pray” can mean to request or to ask. But worship; in the strict sense of adoration offered to God; is not given to angels. The danger is not the mere existence of angelic devotion, but the drift whereby reverence becomes reliance, reliance becomes obsession, and obsession becomes a functional replacement for God.

5. Discernment matters because not every “spirit” is holy. Pagan theurgy frequently blends talk of gods, daimones, “beneficent spirits,” and cosmic forces. Gregory’s world knew how easily spiritual curiosity becomes spiritual vulnerability. His warning about “beasts” and devouring things translates cleanly into a Christian warning: the unseen realm is not a playground, and spiritual experimentation is not neutral.

Seen this way, Gregory doesn’t abolish angels; he reorders them.

He would allow what is ordered to God: angels as messengers, guardians, ministers; creatures who serve the divine will and are recognized as such. But he would reject anything that smells like the older pagan pattern: spirits as alternate pathways, rituals as leverage, sacred words as controls, and religious practice as a way to secure spiritual power without the narrow path of holiness.

At this point, it may help to pause. Much of what follows is not about condemning particular devotions or questioning sincere faith, but about recovering a sense of scale; the difference between nearness and mastery, reverence and use. Before asking whether certain practices are right or wrong, it is worth asking a more basic question: what posture does Christian prayer assume toward God at all? It is here that Gregory’s imagery becomes especially clarifying, not because it simplifies the issue, but because it restores the gravity of approaching what was never meant to be handled lightly.

Intercession and Theurgy: Gregory’s Line in the Sand

What Gregory of Nazianzus is guarding is not a technical distinction but a spiritual posture. Throughout the Second Theological Oration, he returns obsessively to one question: how is God approached at all? And his answer is deliberately unsettling. God is not approached by enthusiasm, not by intelligence, not by ritual exactness, and certainly not by spiritual daring. God is approached, if at all, by purification, restraint, and permission.

Gregory’s mountain imagery is decisive here. The mountain is holy not because it is dramatic, but because it is dangerous. Nearness is not neutral. To move upward without being summoned is not courage but presumption. This is why Gregory insists that some may stand close, some must remain far off, some may only hear the voice, and some must not approach at all. Theology itself is governed by this order. Speech about God, prayer toward God, even thought about God must respect the asymmetry between the divine and the human.

Intercession belongs within this asymmetry. It does not attempt to cross the distance; it acknowledges it. To intercede is not to reach upward by force, but to remain where one has been placed and ask from there. Intercession accepts delay, silence, refusal, and obscurity. It assumes that God owes nothing, that divine action is never automatic, and that even holiness does not grant leverage.

Theurgy, by contrast, collapses this distance. It does not deny God outright; it domesticates God. It treats the divine as responsive to the right handling, the right intermediaries, the right procedures. The problem with theurgy is not merely that it borrows pagan forms, but that it misunderstands revelation itself. After Christ, God is not hidden behind techniques. God has given himself freely. Any attempt to force access after that gift is not a deeper reverence but a refusal to receive.

This is where Gregory becomes especially relevant to modern Christian practices that blur the line between reverence and use. He does not deny angels, saints, or heavenly hierarchies. But he is adamant that none of these function as alternate access points to divine power. Angels are not spiritual mechanisms. Saints are not leverage. Once prayer shifts from asking to activating, from worship to efficacy, the posture has already changed; even if the language remains orthodox.

Gregory’s warning is not aimed at devotion itself but at impatience with creaturely limits. He repeatedly mocks the desire to “handle” divine things too quickly, to speak before being purified, to ascend before being called. In his imagery, those who rush the mountain are not condemned for curiosity but for irreverence. They treat what must be received as something to be seized.

The decisive question, then, is not who is being prayed to, but how. Is the prayer still faithful if nothing happens? Does it still make sense if there is no sign, no response, no result? If so, Gregory would recognize it as prayer. If not; if the practice depends on effects, outcomes, or spiritual efficiency; then the logic has already shifted toward theurgical thinking, even within a Christian frame.

For Gregory, Christian prayer does not climb. It waits. It does not manage heaven. It stands where it is told. And it never forgets that the cloud descends by grace, not by skill.

Gregory’s Final Warning: Why God Cannot Be Handled

Across the Five Theological Orations, Gregory’s argument presses toward a single, unsettling conclusion: God is not available to religious technique. He does not merely reject false doctrine; he dismantles the very instinct to approach God by method, hierarchy, or ritual mastery. Again and again, Gregory insists that the danger facing theology is not ignorance, but confidence; the confidence that divine things can be grasped, summoned, or safely managed.

This is why he opens by insisting that theology belongs only to the purified and the still, “that light may be apprehended by light,” and not to those who rush forward armed with clever speech or religious enthusiasm. Speech about God, he warns, must not be “sown among thorns,” nor undertaken while the soul is agitated, ambitious, or externally driven. Theology is not something we perform before God; it is something we receive from Him; or not at all.

Even the highest intelligences do not comprehend God’s essence; they know Him only insofar as they are illumined. Proximity does not equal access. Order does not equal power. Angels are not spiritual mechanisms through which humans may ascend. They stand where they stand by grace alone, not by office, and certainly not as instruments at human disposal. Any religious practice that treats angelic beings as operative channels rather than fellow servants has already crossed a line Gregory refuses to cross.

His rejection of ritual mastery is clearest when he addresses the desire to define or circumscribe God. Gregory repeatedly insists that God is not grasped by the mind, not contained by concepts, not pictured by images, and not stabilized by symbols. To imagine that correct performance; whether verbal, mental, or ceremonial; secures divine presence is, for Gregory, simply another form of idolatry. Anything that gives the mind the illusion of control becomes a false god, even if it wears Christian language.

At one point, Gregory presses the point with devastating clarity: to speak of what God is remains impossible; even to conceive Him is more impossible still. God may be known that He is; but never what He is. Knowledge of God does not culminate in possession, but in reverent restraint. The moment theology becomes confident, definitional, or productive; when it promises results; it ceases to be worship.

This is why Gregory’s theology leaves no room for theurgy in any Christian sense. Theurgy depends on the belief that divine power can be activated through correct action, sacred names, ritual sequences, or intermediary beings. Gregory denies every premise on which such a system depends. God is not approached by ascent, not engaged by technique, not compelled by purity itself, and not mediated by spiritual hierarchies functioning as ladders. Revelation descends; it is never climbed toward.

In Gregory’s vision, Christian faith stands or falls on this distinction: either God gives Himself, or He is not known at all. Anything else; however reverent it appears; reduces the divine mystery to something handled, displayed, or applauded. And once that happens, Gregory suggests, the Church has not merely misunderstood God; it has replaced Him.

This is the quiet severity of Gregory of Nazianzus: not a ban on devotion, but a refusal to let devotion become control; a refusal to turn mystery into a technique. Theology, for Gregory, remains what it must always be; fearful, receptive, and silent before the cloud.

If Gregory presses this argument so firmly with respect to angels, the implications do not stop there. They extend; unavoidably; to any claim that a human office can function as a standing intermediary between God and the faithful.

For Gregory, even angels do not mediate God by rank or proximity. They do not “stand closer” in a way that grants them authority over access to God. Order does not confer power; nearness itself does not bridge the infinite difference between Creator and creature. If this is true of angels; beings Gregory explicitly describes as purer, more luminous, and more elevated than humanity; then the logic is decisive: no created being can function as a stable channel of divine presence or authority.

This is where Gregory’s theology quietly destabilizes later claims about ecclesial mediation. If divine knowledge is never held but only received; if ascent is always bounded by purification and humility; if even the highest intelligences do not “administer” God; then the idea of a single human office acting as a permanent vicar or representative of Christ on earth becomes theologically strained.

Gregory’s Christology leaves little room for substitution. Christ is not absent such that He requires a standing replacement. The Son is not mediated through layers of authority; He is present through participation in His life. Gregory insists that what unites humanity to God is not office, hierarchy, or juridical succession, but conformity to Christ through purification and illumination. Authority in the Church, where it exists, is pedagogical and pastoral; not ontological. It does not grant access to God; it points away from itself.

From this perspective, the question is not whether the Church needs order; Gregory assumes it does; but whether order can ever become representative in the strong sense.

To claim that any human figure stands in place of Christ risks reintroducing precisely what Gregory labors to exclude: a controllable point of access to the divine. What begins as guardianship easily becomes mediation; what begins as service can become substitution.

Seen this way, Gregory’s resistance to theurgy and ritualism is not accidental. Any system; ritual, angelic, or institutional; that implies God can be approached through managed channels undermines the very mystery it claims to protect. The danger is not reverence, but replacement: replacing living participation in Christ with reliance on structures that promise security, clarity, or proximity.

Gregory would likely regard such confidence as spiritually perilous. His theology leaves the Church with authority that teaches, guards, and suffers; but not authority that stands between God and the soul. The narrow way, as Gregory frames it, is not narrowed by hierarchy but by humility. God is encountered not through intermediaries who hold Him, but through purification that leaves us able to receive Him.

In this light, Gregory’s vision poses a quiet but searching question for every age of the Church: at what point does guidance become mediation, and mediation become control? And once that line is crossed, has theology ceased to be worship and become something else entirely?

Anticipating the Objection: “But Authority Is Not Theurgy”

A Catholic reader might object at this point: Gregory is attacking ritualism and speculative excess, not ecclesial authority. The bishop of Rome does not replace Christ; he serves Christ. Office is not theurgy, and mediation is not control.

Gregory would agree with part of this; and then press the question further.

He is not opposed to order, teaching, or pastoral oversight. What he refuses, relentlessly, is the conversion of any created role into a stable site of divine access. His concern is not whether authority exists, but how it is imagined. Does it point beyond itself, or does it quietly become a locus of security, certainty, or proximity to God?

Gregory’s own language is decisive here. He insists that even angels; beings of higher purity and illumination; do not “contain” God, do not administer divine presence, and do not possess a standing knowledge of the divine essence. They know God only insofar as they are illumined, and that illumination is always derivative and incomplete. Nearness does not confer mediation. Rank does not confer comprehension. If this is true of angels, Gregory’s logic leaves no room for a human office that stands in place of Christ in anything more than a pedagogical or pastoral sense.

The key distinction Gregory draws is between guidance and substitution. Teachers guide. Shepherds guard. But Christ is not absent such that He requires a functional replacement. Christ is actively present, and it is precisely this presence that makes the idea of a standing vicar theologically precarious. To act for Christ in His absence is one thing; to act in His place while He is present risks collapsing participation into representation.

Gregory’s mountain imagery makes this plain. No one; not Aaron, not the elders, not even Moses; possesses the summit. Some draw nearer, some remain below, but the cloud is never owned. Authority does not grant entry into the divine darkness; purification does. And purification is not conferred by office, but by transformation. Gregory never treats holiness as transferable, delegable, or inheritable by succession. It is always personal, always fragile, always received.

This is why Gregory’s critique of theurgy matters here. Theurgy is not merely about spells or pagan rites; it is about any structure that reassures the soul it has a reliable handle on God. The danger is subtle. One need not claim to command God to fall into it; only to imply that God is more surely present here than there, more accessible through this channel than that silence.

Gregory’s theology resists this instinct at every turn. God is not closer to us because of rank, title, or institutional continuity. God is closer only insofar as He gives Himself, and He gives Himself freely, not predictably. The moment any office, however venerable, becomes a guarantor of divine proximity, Gregory’s warning applies: theology has slipped from reverence into management.

The objection, then, does not fail because it affirms authority, but because it underestimates Gregory’s severity. For him, the issue is not abuse of power, but misunderstanding of God. Any claim; angelic, ritual, or institutional; that stabilizes access to God risks undoing the very mystery it seeks to protect.

Gregory leaves the Church (called out assembly) with authority, yes but an authority that trembles, teaches, and steps aside. It does not stand between Christ and the soul. It does not function as a channel of presence. It bears witness and then withdraws.

And that, for Gregory, is the narrow way.

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