3. Headings and Divisions
of the universe accessible to many, making the world established by God in true wisdom known to those who are led, by means of his understanding, to contemplation' (Ep. Pet. 1). To capture both the sense of form/constitution as well as forming or fashioning, I have chosen the word 'formation'. As such, the title
I propose for this work is: On the Human Image of God, that is, A Contemplation on the Formation of the Human Being.
3. Headings and Divisions Variations regarding an introductory letter and a list of headings also occur in the manuscript tradition of other works of Gregory.⁵⁷ In his edition of the De
Virginitate (written between 371 and 378), J. P. Cavarnos, principally on the basis of the 12th-century manuscript Ω (Escorialensis Ω III 14), in which the text is not divided into chapters and which lacks the introductory letter and list of headings, hypothesized two different editions of the work from the hand of Gregory himself: the first being simply the treatise itself and the second that of the treatise together with the cover letter and list of headings.⁵⁸ Given the fact that both Ω and another 12thor 13th-century manuscript, S (Vat. grec 1907), have an alternative opening to chapter 1, and that S, which has the epistolary preface and list of headings, also has an apparently redundant heading after the list and before the title of chapter 1, Cavarnos sees in this heading the original title of the work and characterizes its opening section as being rather 'youthfully enthusiastic' and even polemical, having in view Basil of Ancyra, while the second edition, with its more general prefatory letter, tones down this aspect.
However, as Michel Aubineau points out, the process could equally well have been the reverse: that the Letter to Peter and its list of headings was dropped at some point, perhaps as an adaptation for reading in a monastic context.⁵⁹ Given the importance of such letters in antiquity, as a seal of authenticity, it is much more likely, Aubineau argues, that it belonged to the first edition of the work.
Moreover, as the epistolary preface to Cavarnos' 'second edition' refers to Basil as living and a bishop, it cannot have come from a much later date than a postulated earlier edition.⁶⁰ As such, Aubineau argues that it is more plausible to hold that the ⁵⁷ In his edition of De anima et resurrectione (cf. GNO 3.3, CXLI–CXLIV and 125–36), Spira provides an appendix giving the 96 argumenta (125–36), which he attributes to the 'bibliothekarische
Tradition', noting also that only three mss (dating from the 11th to 14th centuries) have placed the argumenta numbers in the margins of the text (CXLI).
⁵⁸ See J. P. Cavarnos' introduction to his edition of De Virg. in GNO 8.1, Opera Ascetica (Leiden:
Brill, 1986), 238–40.
⁵⁹ M. Aubineau, ed. De Virg., SC 119 (Paris: Cerf, 1966), 229–35.
⁶⁰ Following Jaeger (Two Rediscovered Works), Aubineau also points to the idea that the 'Great
Letter' of Macarius was a reworking of Gregory's De instituto Christiano, a position that has been abandoned since Reinhart Staats, Gregor von Nyssa und die Messalianer: Die Frage der Priorität zweier altkirchlicher Schriften, PTS 8 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968).
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introductory letter is original to the work, written in 371 at the urging of his brother, newly made a bishop and responsible for the ascetics living in Pontus and Cappadocia; then, as the work was recopied in this monastic milieu, various modifications were introduced, resulting in a 'second edition', independent of Gregory himself, and then at a later point (but before the Syriac translation was made in the 6th century) summaries were formulated, often based upon elements within the text, and written in the margins as a guide for the reader, and only later were these utilized to divide the treatise itself up into 'chapters'.⁶¹
Another interesting point of comparison is Gregory's Contra Eunomium, the first two books of which were written in 17 days in 380 and the third between 381 and 383. As Matthieu Cassin has pointed out, while each book opens with an exordium, the editions of the work, including the ground-breaking edition of Jaeger, do not include any general prefatory letter: the work is presented as opening with a list of the headings of the three books, despite the fact that '[a]lmost all the manuscripts put the two letters just before the list of headings or before the first book Contra Eunomium'.⁶² However, in this case it seems that, although these two letters survive independently of the Contra Eunomium in a single manuscript, they were only included in the manuscripts of the Contra
Eunomium, as a preface, as late as the 11th century.⁶³ Moreover, these letters, from Gregory to Peter (Ep. 29) and Peter's reply (Ep. 30), are highly specific:
Gregory wrote to his brother asking his advice about the wisdom of releasing his work against Eunomius to a general readership (Ep. 29.2–6). This letter is clearly not meant as a general preface to the work itself, although as Cassin notes, it has many fascinating things to say about how Gregory understood his own work.
Moreover, building upon the work of J. A. Röder, Cassin argues that the headings of the first book go back to Gregory himself and their positioning within the treatise as chapter divisions goes back to at least the 6th century.⁶⁴ So, in this case, we have an example of a work by Gregory that does not include a general prefatory address or letter, but does have a list of headings, going back to Gregory himself, prefacing the work, which are then positioned within the treatise itself as headings
⁶¹ Aubineau, ed. De Virg., 235–8.
⁶² Matthieu Cassin, 'Text and Context: The Importance of Scholarly Reading: Gregory of Nyssa,
"Contra Eunomium"', in Scot Douglass and Morwenna Ludlow, Reading the Church Fathers (London:
T&T Clark, 2011), 109–31, 161–5, at 113.
⁶³ Cf. G. Pasquali, Gregorii Nysseni Epistulae, GNO 8.2, 2nd edn. (Leiden: Brill, 1998), IX, and Anna
M. Silvas, Gregory of Nyssa: The Letters. Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Suppl. VC 83
(Leiden: Brill, 2007), 206–10.
⁶⁴ For the headings going back to Gregory himself see J. A. Röder, Gregor von Nyssa, Contre
Eunomium I, 1–146, eingeleitet, übersetzt und kommentiert, Patrologia 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter
Lang, 1993), 73–4; for further analysis of the chapter divisions of Contra Eunomium see Matthieu
Cassin, L'écriture de la polémique à la fin du IV e siècle: Gregoire de Nysse, Contra Eunome III (PhD thesis; Paris: Sorbonne, 2009), vol. 1, 135–7 and 'Contra Eunome III: une introduction', in Johan
Leemans and Matthieu Cassin, eds., Gregory of Nyssa: Contra Eunomium III. An English Translation with Commentary and Supporting Studies, Suppl. VC 124 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 3–33, esp. 12–18.
a few centuries later. It should also be noted that there are other works of Gregory that include an introduction addressed to a person, but they do not include lists of headings.⁶⁵ Returning to our treatise, we have seen that two manuscripts do not contain the Letter to Peter: the 9th–10th-century Vat. grec 413 and the 14th-century Vienna,
ÖNB theol. graec. 168, the former having a list of headings, the latter lacking also the list. However, as the treatise presented in both is divided into chapters (the former with 31, the latter with 30), if we (safely) assume that an initial list of headings predates their inclusion within the text of the treatise itself as chapter headings, we can infer that the prototype for Vienna, ÖNB theol. graec. 168 would originally also have had a list of headings. In the case of the two other manuscripts that do not have the list of headings, both do, nevertheless, indicate a list: Vat. grec
2053 has the words, set in an ornate box, σύνταξις κεφαλαίων λ immediately after the Letter to Peter and before chapter 1, and BL Royal 16 D I includes the Letter to Peter which concludes with the words announcing such a list of headings. We can thus conclude that a list of headings following the Letter to Peter belonged to their prototypes but was omitted by their scribes for whatever reason.
If we accept Aubineau's point about the importance in antiquity of a cover letter as a 'seal of authenticity', and that the absence of the Letter to Peter or a list of headings in the manuscripts noted above is the result of their falling out or failing to be copied, then we can also conclude that the Letter to Peter was intended as the original preface to the treatise, as it indeed states. Moreover, the fact that we have no examples of the treatise not divided into chapters, would suggest that not only was the letter original and integral to the treatise, but so too was the list of headings. Aubineau, on the basis of earlier studies of chapter divisions and headings, assumed that the development of this phenomenon was later than
Gregory himself. However, that earlier authors did indeed preface their work with an introduction (usually in the form of a letter) followed by a list of headings is evidenced by several texts from the 1st to 2nd centuries , as we will see later.
Lists of headings are also found in manuscripts of earlier Patristic works, though not in connection with an introductory address by the author himself; the nearest comparable example we have might be Origen's Preface to his On First Principles, where he outlines the topics he will treat and which he does thereafter follow.⁶⁶
⁶⁵ Cf. To Peter, a 'man of God', Hex. (early 379 ) and Inscr. (c.376–8 ), and to Olympias, Cant.
(post 391 ).
⁶⁶ For Irenaeus, see the introductions to the SC vols (for Haer. 1, SC 263, 30–41; for Haer. 2, SC 293,
51–80; for Haer. 3, SC 210, 47–8; for Haer. 4, SC 100, 42–3, 186–91). Many of Eusebius's works also include such lists: Praep. ev., Dem. ev., Marc., Eccl. theol., Mens., and Eccl. hist.; for the latter see Eduard
Schwartz, GCS 9.3 (1909), chap. 4, 'Überschriften und Kephalaia', pp. CXLVII–CLII. For Eusebius's canon tables for the Gospels, see Matthew R. Crawford, The Eusebian Canon Tables: Ordering Textual
Knowledge in Late Antiquity, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) and Jeremiah Coogan,
Eusebius the Evangelist OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). For chapters in Origen, see
John Behr, Origen: On First Principles, OECT (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxxvi–xxxviii.
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It is thus not impossible, and indeed quite likely, that Gregory himself appended to his introductory letter a list of topics that he discussed in the treatise.
In all our Greek and Latin manuscripts of the treatise, including Ms Bodl. 238 which differs from every other manuscript in the headings it gives, the headings given in the list correspond to the headings given in the treatise itself, where almost invariably they have a number. However, in the earliest manuscript we have, Vat. sir. 106, 41r–74v, dating to around 700 , we have a very different pattern.⁶⁷ Here, following the Letter to Peter, we have a list of 31 headings preceded by the word rš' (certainly translating κεφάλαιος) and the number (41v–
42r); these correspond somewhat to those of the Greek text.⁶⁸ Following this list, the title of the treatise is restated and chapter 1 then begins (on 42r, right column), without any numeration or heading. What we have as chapter 2 in the Greek and Latin manuscript traditions begins (on 43r, left column) with no break, heading, enlarged capital or other manner of signifying a transition, but as a direct continuation of chapter 1. Chapter 3, however, is marked by the words
'chapter three' (on 44r right column), but with no repetition of the heading given in the list or any other heading. Over the course of the rest of the treatise, only 18 other 'chapters' are out marked in the same way (missing are: 4, 6, 7, 8, 9,
17, 24, 25, 27–31). That the manuscript has the word 'chapter' and 'number' within the body of the treatise would seem to indicate that, while accepting that the list of headings was composed by Gregory himself, concluding his letter to his brother, they were not used by Gregory as dividing marks within the treatise itself.
It is also likely that numbers were added to the list at the point when scribes began to identify points in the treatise correlating to the topics listed earlier. Either the scribe of Vat. sir. 106 was careless in transcribing each of these numbered headings or perhaps this manuscript might even mark a stage at which the points of correlation had not yet been fully established. Once these numbers were in the text, it is but a small step to repeat the words given in the list at the beginning, but now as 'headings' within the treatise itself.
Whatever the actual history behind this development is, one point should be clearly borne in mind: these κεφαλαία are not 'chapters' in the modern sense and the headings are not chapter titles. The earliest examples we have of such lists are those of Scribonius Largus, Columella, Pliny the Elder, and Aulus Gellius, and each of them introduces the list with an explanatory note, thereby indicating the ⁶⁷ The manuscript is available online at the Digital Vatican Library (https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_
Vat.sir.106, accessed 3 June 2021): 41r Title and Ep. to Peter; 41v–42r list of headings; 42v restated title;
42v–74r text; 74r explicit. Cf. S. E. Assemanus and J. S. Assemanus, Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae:
Codicum manuscriptorum catalogus, in tres partes distributus (Rome: 1759; reprinted Paris: Libraire
Orientale et Américaine, 1926), Partis primae, tomus tertius, 42–3.
⁶⁸ The first three headings of the list are: 1, 'Concerning the making of the world and the correct account of those things prior to the creation of the human being'; 2, 'Concerning what creatures were created following the human being', clearly thinking of Gen. 2 rather than 1; 3, 'Concerning the fact that the substance and formation [twqn'] of the human being was better than all creatures'.
relative novelty of the undertaking and also its purpose. Pliny concludes the letter to Titus prefacing his Natural History by stating that 'I have appended to this letter what is contained in each of the books' (quid singulis contineretur libris huic epistulae subiunxi), so that the recipient and others 'will not need to read right through them either, but only look for the particular point that each of them wants and will know where to find it. This Valerius Soranus did before me, in our literature, in the books he entitled ἐποπτίδων.'⁶⁹ The primary purpose of these lists, then, is indexical, enabling the locating of specific material and the sequence of topics treated rather than being indicative of the structure of the treatment.⁷⁰ In reverse, however, the list enables the segmentation of the text, so that it can be viewed as a series of separate, discrete even, topics, a process which continues with the headings being transcribed into the text itself as chapter titles: as Dames notes, commenting on Pliny's work, 'a trajectory seems dimly evident, in which a table becomes chapterized, finding its way into the text itself and thus becoming a kind of segmentation rather than an index'.⁷¹
Gregory, however, introduces his list by stating a different purpose:
For the sake of clarity, I think it well to set out the treatise [τὸν λόγον] for you by headings [ἐπὶκεφαλαίων], that you may be able to know in brief the force of each of the arguments [τῶν καθέκαστον ἐπιχειρημάτων . . . τὴν δύναμιν] of the whole work [πάσης τῆς πραγματείας].
(Ep. Pet. 3) The language here echoes that of Porphyry's account of his editorial work on Plotinus' Enneads, when he states that for all the books except On Beauty he has composed not only τὰκεφάλαια, translated in Gerson's edition as 'key-point summaries' but also the ἐπιχειρήματα, 'lines of argument'.⁷² The 'headings' given by Gregory are clearly not meant as a table of contents which would enable the reader to jump to a discrete topic within a segmented or 'chapterized' text.
Neither do they function to indicate of the structure of the treatise as a whole; with a few exceptions, when integrated into the body of the text they do not neatly correspond to a division within the text, as might be indicated by a summary of what has been discussed or the announcement of a new topic, with a reflection on how it fits into the structure of the treatise as a whole. Rather, Gregory says, the ⁶⁹ Pliny, Nat. His. Pref. 33; ed. and trans. H. Rackham, LCL (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1967). Cf. Riggsby, 'Guides to the Wor(l)d', 90–1, for the other statements. See also Aude Doody, Pliny's
Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
92–131.
⁷⁰ Cf. Howley, 'Tables of Contents', 68; Dames, 'Chapter Heads', 154–7.
⁷¹ Dames, 'Chapter Heads', 157, italics original.
⁷² Porphyry, Vita Plot. 26; ed. Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer, Oxford Classical Texts
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., Plotinus: The Enneads (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018). On Porphyry's editorial work in arranging the text, see Jeremiah
Coogan, 'Transforming Textuality'.
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purpose of these 'headings' is that the reader might know 'the force of each argument'.
As such, the items in the list provided by Gregory take on a variety of forms, beyond the usual 'about' (περὶ) or 'that' (ὅτι) statements. Some are introduced with 'why' (διὰτί), others are designated as 'an examination' (ἐξέτασις), and others again are addressed to particular interlocutors and their own claims
(πρὸς τοὺς λέγοντας). Nicholas Dames draws attention to a similar phenomenon in the Discourses of Epictetus, as edited by his disciple Arrian, and in particular the way in which Arrian has applied Epictetus' understanding of 'preconceptions' to the headings he introduces. As Dames puts it, Arrian's headings 'seem in fact to be a series of experiments on the relation between title and unity, or initial perception and later understanding. . . . Arrian's seemingly inapposite heads could be thought of as provoking a constant testing or evaluation.'⁷³ Gregory, who at a key moment in his treatise tells us that he is writing in the form of an exercise for the reader (De hom. 15), seems to be doing the same with some of his headings. For instance, the heading for De hom. 18 asserts 'That our irrational passions have their startingpoint from kinship with the irrational nature'. However, as he makes clear in the ensuing discussion, while irrational passions are indeed occasioned from such kinship, the real problem is not the shared animality but 'the evil husbandry of the intellect' (De hom. 18.4).
Two particular headings, however, deserve closer attention. Chapter 16 has the only heading beginning with the word θεωρία—'A contemplation of the divine word which says, "Let us make the human being in accordance with our image and likeness"; in which is examined what the definition of the image is, and how the passible and mortal is liken to the blessed and impassible, and how the male and female are in the image, these not being in the Prototype.' The words 'in which it is examined . . .' are clearly a summary of what follows, suggesting that the previous words have more status as an actual 'title', marking a θεωρία.⁷⁴ And then again, the heading for chapter 30 is also designated as a θεωρία: 'A brief, more medical contemplation regarding the formation of our body'.
Chapter 16 clearly constitutes a new beginning in Gregory's treatise: he explicitly announces a new beginning: 'Let us now take up again [ἐπαναλάβωμεν πάλιν] the divine saying, "Let us make the human being in accordance with our image and likeness".' It is possible that this heading might indicate a structure of the treatise similar to that of De Vita Moysis (written mid-380s to c.392) which (at least in one manuscript) has a twofold title (περὶἀρετῆς ἤτοι εἰς τὸν βίον
Μωϋσέως) and consists of two λόγοι, the second of which is described as a ⁷³ Dames, 'Chapter Heads', 159–60.
⁷⁴ A similar consideration might explain how chapter 12 came to be divided into two in those manuscripts that have 31 chapters, for those manuscripts which do so, also divide the heading of chapter 12 as well, with what now becomes chapter 13 beginning with the word θεώρημα.
θεωρία.⁷⁵ Towards the end of that Preface, Gregory describes his task as being twofold: 'Let Moses then be proposed as our example in life, first going through his life as we have learned it from the divine Scripture, then we shall seek out the meaning corresponding to the history, useful as providing suggestions for virtue, through which we will come to know the perfect life for human beings.'⁷⁶ The pattern of narrative followed by contemplation, however, does not really adequately describe the distinction between De hom. 1–15 and 16 onwards.
An alternative model is Plato's Timaeus. The proposed subject of Timaeus' great speech is 'to speak beginning from the coming-to-be of the world and end with the nature of human beings'.⁷⁷ This is, of course, directly the theme of Gregory's own work. Moreover, the two chapters, 16 and 30, of Gregory's treatise designated as θεωρίαι correspond, as we will see more fully in the following chapters, to the major divisions within Timaeus' speech. The first part of Timaeus' speech gives an account of 'the things crafted by Intellect' (Tim. 47e7), though with several detours and anticipations of points made later; the first 15 chapters of Gregory's treatise gives a beautiful description of the cosmos and the human being as the image of God, again with various detours. Halfway through his speech, Timaeus proposes to 'go back once again to the beginning and start my inquiry from there', to consider further dimensions, 'necessity' and 'the straying cause', which were not directly treated, though intimated, in the first part of his speech (Tim. 47e3–48b2); in a similar way Gregory, in De hom. 16, explicitly returns to his own starting point, Genesis 1:27, to consider thereafter further dimensions implicit in that scriptural verse not directly treated, though also intimated, in De hom. 1–15, ones moreover which play upon the errant ways of human beings. The third part of Timaeus' speech, in which he says he will bring together the first two parts and so put a 'head' on his account (Tim. 69a8–b2), is an extensive psychophysical account of the human being; likewise Gregory's final lengthy chapter (De hom. 30), offers a medical account of the formation and actual coming into being of the human being. The structural parallels with the Timaeus seem certain. Within a year or two of writing On the Human Image, Gregory wrote On the Soul and Resurrection, which is clearly modelled on Plato's Phaedo; it
⁷⁵ Edited by H. Musurillo, GNO 7.1 (Leiden: Brill, 1991). Two of the manuscripts used indicate in their titles that it was addressed to either Peter or Olympias. For the heading of the second part of the treatise, two of the five manuscripts noted in the edition use the word θεωρία: θεωρία τῆς ἐκτεθείσης ἱστορίας and θεωρία εἰς τὸν τοῦΜωϋσέως βίον. Musurillo settles for simply: θεωρία. The other three manuscripts at this point have headings describing what follows as the second λόγος on virtue.
⁷⁶ Vit. Mos. pp. 6.25–7.3. It should be noted that Musurillo's edition does not mark out the opening paragraphs as a 'preface'; the critical apparatus indicates that it is preserved in various manuscripts as addressed to Olympias or Peter; most titles noted there have a similar twofold pattern to the one given above.
⁷⁷ Plato, Timaeus, 27a5–6; ed. J. Burnet, Oxford Classical Texts, Platonis Opera 4 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1902); trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), occasionally modified.
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is likely, then, that in On the Human Image of God, Gregory had his eye towards the Timaeus.
We will turn to Gregory's treatise itself in Chapter 3. For now, I would simply note that although I have retained the headings for the different parts of the work, it should be borne in mind that these are not 'chapter titles' for discrete topics. But before we turn to Gregory's On the Human Image of God, we should explore the philosophical and theological background he inherited and built upon, for although he presents this work to Peter as the completion of Basil's Hexaemeron, it is, as we will see, far more complex.