2. The Human Image of God (1–15)
Returning to the Letter to Peter, Gregory concludes by giving a further note regarding how he sees his task:
. . . it is also proper to fit together, from scriptural guidance and from that discovered by reasoning, the things concerning the human being that seem to be opposed (as what is now seen pertaining to nature by a kind of necessary sequence is not the same as those that occurred from the beginning) so that our whole subject may be consistent with itself in train of thought and order, with things seemingly contrary being brought together to one and the same end, and with the divine power finding a hope for things beyond hope and a means of accomplishing things unworkable.
(Ep. Pet. 3) That which needs fitting together are not Scripture and reason, but rather, using both of these resources, to try to explain those things about the human being that seem to be opposed, that is, the scriptural affirmation that God created the human in his image and likeness, and what we presently and empirically see. Guided by both Scripture and reason, Gregory hopes to provide an account that brings both of these truths to one and the same end, so that what seems impossible is brought into reality.
2. The Human Image of God (1–15) Gregory opens his treatise by quoting Gen. 2:4, 'This is the book of the genesis of heaven and earth', and devotes a few paragraphs to describing a very dynamic picture of the world. Everything that appears, he says, was completed and each separate being had withdrawn to its own place, the heaven above, encompassing all things, and the heavy bodies drawn downwards, with the earth and water taking middle place and holding each other back, 'while the divine art and power was implanted in the nature of things as a sort of bond and stability for the things that came to be, guiding the universe by a twofold activity, for by rest and motion it devised the genesis of the things that were not and the continuance of things that are', driving the celestial sphere in a circle, like a wheel around an axle, so that 'the circling substance by its rapid motion compresses the solid body of the earth in a circle' (De hom. 1.1). Moses' words that the heaven and earth were made 'in the beginning' thus indicate that they are 'a kind of beginning of the whole machine',
'so that all things appearing in the creation are the offspring of rest and motion, brought to genesis in accordance with the divine will' (De hom. 1.2). Moreover, things that come into being, lying between the opposites of heaven and earth, mediate between the two and so have a 'twofold quality'. Air imitates the perpetual motion and subtlety of the fiery substance, yet it is not alien to solid substance; it is
'a kind of borderland in the opposition between activities, in itself at once mixing
and dividing things distinct by nature' (De hom. 1.2). The same also goes for liquid which, as heavy, is borne downwards, yet has a fluid and mobile activity, so that 'things most extremely opposite in nature combine with one another, being united by those mediating between them' (De hom. 1.3). Indeed, as Gregory puts it, he says more accurately, 'the very nature of contrary things is not entirely unmixed with the properties of the other, so that, I think, everything that appears in the world mutually converges and the creation, though found in properties of contrary things, coheres with itself ' (De hom. 1.4). What we will shortly see in Gregory's understanding of the human being, as a combination of opposites, is thus writ large in the structure of the cosmos as a whole.
Gregory develops his cosmology at greater length in the Hexaemeron composed shortly after this treatise.⁸ There, after arguing that matter is nothing other than properties combined together (Hex. 7; a point also elaborated in De hom. 24),
Gregory notes that Aquila had translated the opening two words of Genesis as 'in summary' (ἐν κεφαλαίῳ), which, he says, has the same meaning as 'in the archē' but with a different nuance, since both equally indicate 'everything all at once' [τὸἀθρόον]; for in the word
'summary' there is the connotation of everything coming into being collectively, while instantaneity and absence of spacing [ἀδιάστατον] are evoked by the 'archē'. For archē is alien from any idea of spacing; as a point is the archē of a line, and the atom [the archē] of mass, so is what is instantaneous [the archē] of temporal spacing. So the simultaneous foundation of beings [ἡοὖν ἀθρόα τῶν ὄντων . . . καταβολὴ], through the indescribable power of God is called by Moses either 'archē' or 'summary'; it is from that origin that everything is said to have been composed.
(Hex. 8–9) This being 'the archē of the cosmogony' [ἡἀρχὴτῆς κοσμογονίας] implies, for Gregory, that God 'laid down [κατεβάλετο] the starting points and the causes and the potentialities of all things, collectively and instantaneously, and that in the initial impulse of his will the essence of each of the beings came together concurrently', that is, heaven, ether, stars, fire, air, sea, earth, animals, and plants
(Hex. 9; he notably doesn't here mention the human being). Everything being seen by his power of foreknowledge, for 'he knows everything before it comes into being' (Sus. (Θ) 42), and with his power and wisdom as the foundation, 'a certain necessary order follows on, according to a certain sequence, with a view to bringing to completion each part of the world' (Hex. 9). Gregory returns to the idea of an instantaneous creation combined with the ordered sequence of their
⁸ Ed. Hubertus R. Drobner, GNO 4.1 (Leiden: Brill, 2009); ET Robin Orton, FC Shorter Works 1
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), modified occasionally.
appearance later in the work, when discussing the lights created after the third day. He phrases the same point slightly differently this time: everything was constituted simultaneously, in the plenitude of creation, by God's initial will [παντὸς ἀθρόως τοῦκατὰτὴν κτίσιν πληρώματος ἐν τῷπρώτῳτοῦθεοῦ θελήματι συστάντος], [and] the ordered series that necessarily arose, in consequence of the wisdom that is found within everything that exists, brought each of the elements into its manifestation [ἀνάδειξιν] as a consequence of the divine commands. Moses indicated the totality [τὸπᾶν] when he summarized it in an inclusive expression referring to the first subsistence of the sense-perceptible creation [τῇπρώτῃτῆς αἰσθητικῆς κτίσεως ὑποστάσει], saying 'In the archē God created the heaven and the earth'. Saying, therefore, that God created the plenitude of beings [τὸοὖν πλήρωμα τῶν ὄντων], he indicates in his account that the manifestation [ἀνάδειξιν] of each existing thing happened in a naturally ordered series.
(Hex. 64) This interplay between a simultaneous creation and its gradual manifestation, and also the idea of the former constituting a 'plenitude', are themes of great importance in On the Human Image of God.
Returning to the first chapter of On the Human Image of God, with the heaven and earth being 'finished' (Gen. 2:1), and all things having 'arrived at their end',
Gregory rhapsodizes about the beauty of the world, but concludes by noting that 'there was no one to share it' (De hom. 1.5), for 'the human being had not yet occupied its place in the world of beings' (De hom. 2.1). The Maker having prepared the world as a royal lodging for a king, with all the preparations,
'presents [ἀναδείκνυσιν] the human being to the world', to behold the wonders in it and by his enjoyment know the Benefactor (De hom. 2.1). Alternatively,
Gregory continues, the world is like a banquet prepared by a munificent host, into which God 'introduces [εἰσάγει] the human being' (De hom. 2.2). The verbs that Gregory uses here are striking, and important for what comes later: he does not speak here of the 'creation' or 'making' of the human being, but of the human as being 'presented', 'introduced', and 'occupying' its place, just as he had spoken in the Hexaemeron of the 'manifestation' of particular things in their proper order and sequence.
As 'the work' of the human being is 'not the acquisition of things absent but the enjoyment of things present', Gregory continues, God 'establishes for him a twofold point origin for his formation [διπλᾶς αὐτῷτῆς κατασκευῆς τὰς ἀφορμὰς καταβάλλεται], blending the divine with the earthy, so that by means of both he may, congenitally and appropriately, have enjoyment of each, enjoying
God by means of the more divine nature and the good things of the earth by the sense akin to them' (De hom. 2.2). In Chapter 3, Gregory further praises the dignity of the human being as the only act of creation preceded by divine counsel,
and in that 'what he will be is foreshadowed by the Artist through the writing of the account [διὰτῆς τοῦλόγου γραφῆς], and what kind of being it is fitting he should be, and to what archetype he should bear a likeness, and for what purpose he shall come into being, and, having come to be, what activity, and what he shall rule'—all this is sketched out in Gen. 1:26, before the human comes into being (De hom. 3.1). Only in the case of the human being 'does the Maker drawn near with circumspection', preparing the material beforehand, likening his form to an archetypal beauty, and 'setting before him the goal for which he will come to be'
(De hom. 3.2: προθέντα τὸν σκοπὸν οὗχάριν γενήσεται). The human being is not simply made, but has a task set before him.
This goal, Gregory continues in the following two chapters, is the exercise of royalty, imaging the King of all. It is striking that for Gregory, while the human being is a 'vessel fit for the exercise of royalty', with the 'superior advantages' of having a self-governing soul, 'swayed autocratically by its own will', and a body whose 'very form' is 'adapted for royalty' (De hom. 4), the human is in the image not because of these, but through the exercise of virtue that they enable. The human being is to be 'a living image, sharing with the Archetype in both rank and name', clothed in virtue, instead of a purple raiment, leaning upon immortality instead of a sceptre, and adorned with the crown of righteousness instead of a royal diadem (De hom. 4). While the divine beauty does not reside in a particular shape or form, the Maker of all, as one painting a portrait, 'by the addition of virtues, as it were with colours, shows in us his own sovereignty . . . purity, freedom from passion, blessedness, estrangement from all evil . . . with such lustres did the Craftsman of his own image mark our nature' (De hom. 5.1). There are, indeed, certain other characteristics of divine beauty in which the image shares a likeness: for as 'the divinity is intellect and word' (νοῦς καὶλόγος), so also we can see in ourselves 'word and mind' (τὸν λόγον καὶτὴν διάνοιαν), an imitation (μίμημα) of the very Intellect and Word. Moreover, as 'God is love' (1 John 4:7, 8), if this is absent 'the whole stamp of the image is transformed' (De hom. 5.2). For Gregory it is emphatically in the free exercise of virtue that the human being manifests their existence as the image of God. Gregory concludes his discussion about the image by arguing that the fact that the human being is made as the image of God should not be taken, in reverse, to imply that the divine acts in a similar way to human beings, that is, through different faculties. Even in the case of humans, Gregory points out, this is misleading, for in fact 'there is one faculty, the implanted intellect itself, which passes through each of the organs of sense and grasps the beings beyond' (De hom. 6.1). Finally, he argues, that the human being is made in the image also disproves the 'Anomoean' teaching about the unlikeness of the different natures of Father and Son, for it is impossible for a single image to resemble two different archetypes.
In the following chapters, Gregory turns his attention to the form of the body, arguing that its very weakness renders the human being suitable for royal rule, but
one which is exercised through the cooperation, rather than domination, of his subjects (De hom. 7), that its upright form, looking upwards to the heavens rather than down towards the ground, is a mark of royal dignity (De hom. 8.1), and that 'the ministry of the hands is a particular property of the rational nature' (De hom. 8.2).
However, pulling himself up short, in terms which echo Timaeus (Tim. 34b10–35a1, where after discussing the body, Timaeus reminds himself that he should really treat the soul first), Gregory comments 'before discussing this point, however, let us consider the subject passed over, for the subject of the order of the things that came to be almost escaped us' (De hom. 8.3; the discussion about hands is deferred until De hom. 8.8). What catches his attention now is the sequence narrated by Moses: first the plants sprouting up from the earth, then the irrational animals, and only after that the human being. By this order, Gregory suggests, 'Moses reveals a certain doctrine about hidden things and secretly delivers the philosophy concerning the soul' which is 'that the vital and animating power is contemplated in three divisions': the first, simply the faculty of growth and nutrition, which is called 'the vegetative', for it is seen in plants; the second includes also, in addition to the faculty of growth and nutrition, the ability to regulate sense-perception, such as we find in irrational animals; while 'the perfect embodied life is seen in the rational, I mean the human, nature, which is both nourished and endowed with sense-perception and partakes of reason and is ordered by intellect' (De hom. 8.4). Thus Moses, having introduced inanimate matter, proceeds to speak of animate beings, beginning with plants, and then animals with sense-perception, and finally the human being, with 'nature advancing in a certain way sequentially to perfection'. In Gregory's estimation Paul does the same in his threefold distinction between body, soul, and spirit
(De hom. 8.5; Thess. 5:23), or carnal, animated, and spiritual (De hom. 8.6; 1 Cor. 3:3,
2:14–15). Gregory's conclusion from all this is that 'reasonably, nature makes an ascent, as it were by steps, I mean the various properties of life, from the lower to the perfect' (De hom. 8.7). Having spoken about the development or evolution of the soul, Gregory then returns to the discussion about hands, pointing out that it is because humans have hands that their mouths can be fashioned for speaking words, as befits a 'rational animal', rather than for grazing grass or tearing meat (De hom. 8.8).
Gregory's emphasis on the body continues in the following chapters. Since God, he says, has bestowed upon our moulded figure [τῷπλάσματι ἡμῶν] a certain godlike grace, by implanting in the image [ἐνθεὶς τῇεἰκόνι] the likeness of his own good gifts, for this reason he gave, of his munificence, the other good gifts to human nature; yet it is not strictly right to say that he 'gave' [δέδωκεν] of intellect and practical wisdom [νοῦδὲκαὶφρονήσεως], but that he 'gave a share' [μετέδωκε] of them, adding to the image the proper adornment of his own nature [τὸν ἴδιον αὐτοῦτῆς φύσεως κόσμον ἐπιβαλὼν τῇεἰκόνι].
(De hom. 9.1)
It is striking that here, for Gregory, intellect and practical wisdom are not the locus of the image of God in the human being: it is 'that which is moulded' (the πλάσμα, an allusion to Gen. 2:7) that is the image. It is into this image that God implants the likeness of his own good gifts, which in turn merit the further gifts, or rather not a gift of but a share in intellect and reason, adding to the image the distinctive adornment of the divine nature itself. But even this inestimable share would remain ineffectual without the body, for as Gregory immediately continues:
'since the intellect is a thing intelligible and incorporeal, its grace would have been incommunicable and isolated, without its movement being made manifest by some contrivance', that is, this 'instrumental formation' that, like the vocal organs struck by a plectrum, indicates by the sound it produces 'the movement within'
(De hom. 9.1). And so, 'since the intellect produces the music of reason by means of this instrumental construction within us, we have become rational [λογικοὶ γεγόναμεν]', which would not have happened had our mouths been shaped in such a way as to supply the needs of the body rather than being 'well-adapted for the service of reason' (De hom. 10.1). It is, then, the body in its very structure, and its weakness, that enables human beings to 'become rational', manifesting the divine gifts in which they share, a point which is picked up dramatically at the end of the treatise.
The activity of this bodily instrument is also 'twofold', allowing the intellect to express itself and communicate its movements, but also allowing for all the impressions which flow in to the 'inner receptacle' through the senses, as entrances into a city, while the intellect 'distinguishing and examining each of the things that enters, stores them in their proper departments of knowledge'
(De hom. 10.3–4). In its own nature, the intellect must, therefore be something other than the senses (De hom. 11.1), but is itself incomprehensible: '"Who has known the intellect of the Lord?" asks the apostle; and I ask further, who has understood his own intellect?' (De hom. 11.2). But this should not be surprising, he adds, for made in the image of God, it lacks nothing that is perceived in the archetype, so that if one of the aspects perceived in the divine nature is incomprehensibility, this too will be found in the image (De hom. 11.3–4).
Gregory returns to the subject of the soul, especially the rational soul, in chapters 14–15. But before that he sets out on a long discussion about the location of the intellect, whether it should be thought of as residing in a particular part of the body, such as the heart or the brain. His examination of the matter leads him to consider those occasions where 'the calculating faculty is blunted in its natural activity by some bodily accident' (De hom. 12.3), or when the membranes around the side are diseased, so producing 'frenzy' (De hom. 12.4), or, less dramatically, in moments of 'gladness and laughter', where parts of the body are relaxed, producing involuntary movements (De hom. 12.5), or, later on, what happens in sleep, yawning, and the phenomenon of dreams (De hom. 13). Placed discretely within this extensive excursus (note De hom. 14.1: 'we have wandered far from our
subject'), Gregory introduces a discordant element into this first part of his treatise, which has otherwise been devoted to a wholly positive description of the human being. His conclusion regarding the placement of the intellect is that it is not spatially located in one part of the body, but rather that the intellect 'passing throughout the instrument and touching each of the parts in a manner appropriate to its intellectual activities, according to its nature', effects its proper movement on such parts. In those parts, on the other hand, 'too weak to accept the movement of its art it remains ineffective and inactive', for as he concludes, 'the intellect is naturally somehow familiar with that which is disposed according to nature, but to be alien from that which is removed from it' (De hom. 12.8). This train of reflection leads Gregory to speak a little about 'the more refined teachings' to be learnt from this (De hom. 12.9). They are:
Since the most beautiful and supreme good of all is the divinity itself, to which incline all things that have the desire [ἔφεσιν] for the beautiful, we therefore say that the intellect, as being in accordance with the image of the most beautiful, as long as it partakes so far as possible in its likeness to the archetype also remains in the beautiful; but if it were in some way to be outside this, it will be stripped bare of the beauty in which it was. And just as we said that the intellect was adorned by the likeness of the archetypal beauty, being formed, as though it were a mirror, by the figure of that which appears in it, so we consider that the nature administered by the intellect possesses something of the intellect in the same proportion and that it is adorned by the beauty issuing from the intellect, such that it becomes, as it were, a mirror of a mirror; by it, the material element of existence, in which nature is contemplated [τὸὑλικὸν τῆς ὑποστάσεως, περὶἣν θεωρεῖται ἡφύσις], is ruled and sustained.
(De hom. 12.9) If this order is preserved, he continues, 'the communication [κοινωνία] of the true beauty extends proportionally [ἀναλόγως] through the whole series, beautifying by the superior that which comes next', but if there is 'an interruption
[διασπασμός] of this beneficial connection', or when the superior element follows the inferior, 'then the unseemliness [τὸἄσχημον] of matter itself is exposed, when it is isolated from nature (for in itself matter is something formless and unwrought [ἄμορφον . . . ἀκατάσκευον]), and by its formlessness is also destroyed the beauty of the nature which was beautified by the intellect; and in this way the transmission of the ugliness of matter reaches back through the nature to the intellect itself, so that the image of God is no longer beheld in the figure of that which was moulded' (De hom. 12.10: ἐν τῷχαρακτῆρι καθορᾶσθαι τοῦπλάσματος). Instead, turning its back on 'the lustrous rays of the good', the intellect receives into itself 'the shapelessness of matter' (De hom. 12.10). This is, for Gregory, 'the genesis of evil', occurring through 'the withdrawal of the good': the intellect, as 'having come to be in accordance with the image of the good', is
able itself to be good, and, as long as it does so, 'the nature sustained by the intellect is like an image of the image', with the material part holding together and regulated by nature; but this will be dissolved and fall apart if it were no longer to be sustained by the intellect, and so be 'severed from its connection to the good' (De hom. 12.11). This does not happen, Gregory adds, 'except when an overturning [ἐπιστροφή] of nature to the opposite state occurs, in which desire [ἐπιθυμία] does not incline towards the good but towards that which is in need of being beautified; for it is absolutely necessary that that being made like to matter, which is destitute of its own form, it should be conformed to it in respect of its unseemliness and absence of beauty' (De hom. 12.12). This account of 'the genesis of evil', however, was only given, Gregory immediately adds, because he was 'following a certain line of argument, since they were introduced by our contemplation of the point before us; for the subject of enquiry was whether the intellectual faculty has its seat in any of the parts within us or extends equally over them all' (De hom. 12.13).
After exploring further, as already noted, the subject of sleep, yawning and dreams (De hom. 13), observing that 'we have wandered far from our subject', he returns to the point that the intellect should not be thought of as residing in a particular part of the body, 'but is equally in touch with the whole, producing its movement according to the nature of the part under its influence' (De hom.
14.1). Recalling that his exposition had discerned 'three different forms regarding the vital faculty'—that is 'the vegetative', the 'sense-perceptive', and 'third, the rational and perfect, pervading the whole faculty'—he emphasizes that these should not be thought of as 'three souls welded together': 'the true and perfect soul is one by nature, the intellectual and immaterial, which mingles with the material nature through the senses' (De hom. 14.2). It is only, he adds, by 'a misuse of language' that, while 'the soul has its perfection in that which is intellectual and rational, everything that is not so may indeed have the homonym of "soul", yet is not really soul but a certain vital energy associated with the appellation of "soul"' (De hom. 15.1–2). But again, he notes, 'the course of our argument has diverged to another point', his concern being to emphasize that 'the intellect is not confined to any one part of us, but is equally in all and through all' (De hom. 15.3). Of the connection between the material and immaterial, Gregory comments:
The communion of the intelligible with the bodily is a conjunction unspeakable and inconceivable, neither being within it (for the incorporeal is not enclosed in a body) nor yet surrounding it from outside (for things incorporeal do not surround [something else]), but the intellect, approaching our nature in some inexplicable and incomprehensible way and coming to touch it, is to be thought of as both in it and around it, neither seated in it nor enfolded within it, but in a way which we cannot speak or think.
(De hom. 15.3)