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40 Pages
Page 25
Man, as the paragon of animals, was necessary, in order that the union might be effected between two otherwise irreconcilable worlds, the intelligible and the sensible. Though, therefore, there was a Fall at last, it was not the occasion of man's receiving a body similar to animals; that body was given him at the very first, and was only preparatory to the Fall, which was foreseen in the Divine Councils and provided for. Both the body and the Fall were necessary in order that the Divine plan might be carried out, and the Divine glory manifested in creation. In this view the "coats of skins" which Gregory inherits from the allegorical treasures of Origen are no longer merely the human body itself, as with Origen, but all the passions, actions, and habits of that body after the Fall, which he sums up in the generic term pathe. If, then, there is to be any reconciliation between this and the former view of his in which the pure unstained humanity, the image of God,' is differentiated by a second act of creation as it were into male and female, we must suppose him to teach that immediately upon the creation in God's image there was added all that in human nature is akin to the merely animal world. In that man was God's image, his will was free, but in that he was created, he was able to fall from his high estate; and God, foreseeing the Fall, at once added the distinction of sex, and with it the other features of the animal which would befit the fall; but with the purpose of raising thereby the whole creation. But two great counter-influences seem always to be acting upon Gregory; the one sympathy with the speculations of Origen, the other a tendency to see even with a modern insight into the closeness of the intercommunion between soul and body. The results of these two influences cannot be altogether reconciled. His ideal and his actual man, each sketched with a skilful and discriminating hand, represent the interval that divides his aspirations from his observations: yet both are present to his mind when he writes about the soul. (2) He does not alter, as Origen does, the traditional belief in the resurrection of the body, and yet his idealism, in spite of his actual and strenuous defence of it in the carefully argued treatise On the Soul and Resurrection, renders it unnecessary, if not impossible. We know that his faith impelled Origen, too, to [31] contend for the resurrection of the flesh: yet it is an almost forced importation into the rest of his system. Our bodies, he teaches, will rise again: but that which will make us the same persons we were before is not the sameness of our bodies (for they will be ethereal, angelic, uncarnal, &c.) but the sameness of a logos within them which never dies (logos tis enkeitai to somati, aph' hou me phtheiromenou egeiretai to soma en aphtharsi& 139;, c. Cels. v. 23). Here we have the logoi spermatikoi; which Gregory objected to as somehow connected in his mind with the infinite plurality of worlds. Yet his own account of the Resurrection of the flesh is nothing but Origenism, mitigated by the suppression of these logoi. With him, too, matter is nothing, it is a negative thing that can make and effect nothing: the soul, the zotike dunamis does everything; it is gifted by him with a sort of ubiquity after death. Nothing can break its sympathetic union with the particles of the body.' It is not a long and difficult study for it to discern in the mass of elements that which is its own from that which is not its own. It watches over its property, as it were, until the Resurrection, when it will clothe itself in them anew [32] .' It is only a change of names: the logos has become this zotike dunamis or psuche, which seems itself, almost unaided, to effect the whole Resurrection. Though he teaches as against Origen that the elements' are the same elements,' the body the same body as before, yet the strange importance both in activity and in substance which he attaches to the psuche even in the disembodied state seems to render a Resurrection of the flesh unnecessary. Here, too, his view of the plan of Redemption is at variance with his idealistic leanings. While Origen regarded the body, as it now is, as part of that vanity' placed upon the creature which was to be laid aside at last, Gregory's view of the design of God in creating man at all absolutely required the Resurrection of the flesh [33] (hos an sunepartheie to thei& 251; to ge& 187;non). Creation was to be saved by man's carrying his created body into a higher world: and this could only be done by a resurrection of the flesh such as the Church had already set forth in her creed.
[31] He does so De Principiis I. praef. 5. C. Cels. II. 77, VIII. 49 sq.
[32] De Anim. et Resurrectione, p. 198, 199, 213 sq.
[33] Oratio Cat. 55 A.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/life-works.asp?pg=25
