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40 Pages
Page 24
Yet after admitting that soul and body are born together and attaching such importance to the physical basis' of life and thought, the influence of his master, or else his own uncontrollable idealism, carries him away again in the opposite direction. After reading words in his treatise which Locke might have written we come upon others which are exactly the teaching of Berkeley. There is a passage in the De Animâ et Resurrectione where he deals with the question how an intelligent Being could have created matter, which is neither intelligent or intelligible. But what if matter is only a concourse of qualities, ennoiai, or psila noemata as he elsewhere calls them? Then there would be no difficulty in understanding the manner of creation. But even about this we can say so much, i.e. that not one of those things which we attribute to body is itself body: neither figure, nor colour, nor weight, nor extension, nor quantity, nor any other qualifying notion whatever: but every one of them is a thought: it is the combination of them all into a single whole that constitutes body. Seeing, then, that these several qualifications which complete the particular body are grasped by thought alone, and not by sense, and that the Deity is a thinking being, what trouble can it be to such a thinking agent to produce the thoughts whose mutual combination generate for us the substance of that body? and in the treatise, De Hom. Opif., c. 24, the intelligible phusis is said to produce the intelligible dunameis, and the concourse of these dunameis brings into being the material nature. The body itself, he repeats (contra Fatum, p. 67), is not a real substance; it is a soulless, unsubstantial thing. The only real creation is that of spirits. Even Origen did not go so far as that Matter with him, though it exists by concomitance and not by itself, nevertheless really exists. He avoided a rock upon which Gregory runs; for with Gregory not only matter but created spirit as well vanish in idealism. There remain with him only the nooumena and God.
This transcendent idealism embarrasses him in many ways, and makes his theory of the soul full of inconsistency. (1) He will not say unhesitatingly whether that pure humanity in the beginning created in the image of God had a body or not like ours. Origen at all events says that the eternally pre-existing spirits were invested with a body, even before falling into the sensible world. But Gregory, while denying the pre-existence of souls in the sense of Origen, yet in many of his treatises, especially in the De Hom. Opificio, seems to point to a primitive humanity, a predeterminate number of souls destined to live in the body though they had not yet lived, which goes far beyond Origen's in its ideal character. "When Moses," Gregory says, "speaks of the soul as the image of God, he shows that all that is alien to God must be excluded from our definition of the soul; and a corporal nature is alien to God." He points out that God first made man in His own image,' and after that made them male and female; so that there was a double fashioning of our nature, he te pros to theion homoiomene, he te pros ten diaphoran tauten (i.e. male and female) dieremene. On the other hand, in the Oratio Catechetica, which contains certainly his more dogmatic statement on every point, this ideal and passionless humanity is regarded as still in the future: and it is represented that man's double-nature is actually the very centre of the Divine Councils, and not the result of any mistake or sin; man's soul from the very first was commingled (anakrasis is Gregory's favourite word) with a body, in order that in him, as representing every stage of living things, the whole creation, even in its lowest part, might share in the divine.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/life-works.asp?pg=24
