St Gregory of Nyssa: Irenaeus

IRENAEUS AGAINST HERESIES: A USER’S GUIDE

ST GREGORY OF NYSSA: WHY HIS SHAME AT OUR EARTHLY CONDITION?

The point of the resurrection, says N.T. Wright, is that the present life is not valueless just because it will die.  God will raise it to new life (original italics) (205).  Wright’s idea seems to be that our earthly endeavours here below can be rather like the five fishes and two loathes that the little boy offered to Jesus in John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand.  At the resurrection, God will take these, and use them – for His own purposes, and in His own way – for the building of that Kingdom which will one day be perfected, when He ‘makes everything new’.  No earthly ‘good thing’, in other words, will be wasted or lost.  Hence, what we do here below can have incalculable value.

Personally, I am entirely won over by this idea.  Like Wright I am repelled by the idea that our present bodily life in all its diverse manifestations is just a kind of support for a ‘soul’ that will one day be transported out of its present bodily condition to enjoy an entirely spiritual bliss somewhere else.  In other words, the things we do in the present – praying, building hospitals, caring for the needy, writing poems, etc. – ‘are just ways of making the present life a little less beastly, until the day when we leave it behind altogether’.

However, is Wright’s (and my own) way of seeing things consistent with the understanding of ‘the last things’ that we find in the early ecclesial tradition?  With this question in mind, I began to read the work of one of the early fathers whose attitude on such matters, I had reason to suspect, has as much likelihood as any of the fathers’, of being consistent with the understanding that Wright is here expounding as the orthodox Christian one.  I speak of a couple of works by the fourth-century Cappadocian, St Gregory of Nyssa, recently much praised in certain circles for his ‘universalism’: On the making of man and On the soul and the resurrection. 

To anticipate on my findings, these works of Gregory did not – disappointingly enough – seem to me to provide any very wholehearted support for Wright’s position.  What struck me instead was a tension in Gregory’s thinking between a ‘Wrightian’ tendency, on the one hand, and a very different, Greek philosophical, tendency – a tension that, to the extent that it was resolved at all, seemed to be resolved in the opposite direction from Wright’s!

But first, some essential background on Gregory of Nyssa’s anthropology which is complex and profound.

For a start, Gregory’s view of the nature of the soul – and of the body – is far removed from any kind of dualism.  The soul is created along with the body, and will one day be resurrected along with it.  Gregory recognizes the transformations undergone by the human being in the course of a lifetime, from babyhood to old age.  The ‘soul’ for him is that whatever it is that unites our timebound existence over the whole of its earthly course – whatever it is that makes the person who they are.  It is simple and non-localizable, and it constitutes that in which the human being is spoken of as the ‘image’ of God.  A rather similar notion presides over his understanding of ‘Man’ in the universal sense.  Man (i.e. humankind) is similarly understood as that whatever it is which that constitutes our species’ identity over the entirety of its mortal course from Adam to the Resurrection, conceived of as pre-existing in the mind of God – as an ‘archetype’.  By contrast, the ‘body’ – both where the individual and the species is concerned – is understood as the time-bound sequential expression of this identity as it unfurls over the years.

Of course, this ‘image’ of God in us has been disfigured by the effects of the fall – to the point that many, then as now, find it hard to credit that ‘Man’ was ever created in God’s image in the first place.  Given that, for Gregory, the human soul remains, for all that, God’s ‘image’, the attempt he makes to define just what in human nature belongs – or does not belong – to the soul/‘image’ has interesting implications for his understanding of the ‘body’ and its relationship to the soul.  This is where things become a lot more complicated. 

For a start, the universal archetype of ‘Man’ – i.e. what, on the level of the human race, was created as God’s ‘image’ – seems to be distinguished in his thinking from ‘Adam’, by which Gregory means the first bodily human, and the universality of bodily humans.  In Adam, the archetype is expressed bodily, and in time.  The bodily aspect of his being, that part which is seen as belonging to ‘Nature’ is summed up, for Gregory, in Adam’s possession of the faculty for biological reproduction in other words, in his being made male and female.  Also, on a psychological level, on his being subject to ‘passions’, notably, ‘anger’ and ‘desire’.  Broadly, Gregory sees this bodily (i.e. temporal and biologically reproductive) declension of the human archetype as NOT the only possible one.  Potentially (or least hypothetically), Man, the divine image, could have been multiplied by some other means, like the angels, for example.  But the bodily form of Adam is a provision made in the expression of the archetype, if not in the archetype itself, for the future likelihood of the fall.  In other words, Adam and Eve have reproductive organs – and all other ‘animal’ characteristics along with them, including propensity to passions – not for any function they might have in Paradise, but as a provision for a future that was only to become actuality at the fall. 

Everything Gregory says about the ‘body’, and by extension, the ‘earthly’ and physical nature of human life and relationships, follows from this.  The bodily form of Adam is not necessarily an evil.  Even passions, like anger and desire, though seen by Gregory as emanating from our earthly nature, are capable, when well-ordered, of benign transformation so our passionate earthly nature will, in its very passionate earthliness, reflect the divine image.  Though Gregory, for some reason, never says as much, we see it in Jesus, who has a body conformed like ours, and emotions such other humans experience.  On the other hand, there is always the risk that our animal nature will prove insubordinate, as it so frequently has done since Eve first lusted after the forbidden fruit.

How, then, does Gregory feel about our ‘earthly’ nature?

Well – there is what we could call a Wrightean strand to his thinking.  This is where Gregory comes over as more sympathetic to the modern Christian.  As already stated, the divine image MAY be expressed through our complex animal/spiritual nature; indeed, here and now, in our current human state, it can ONLY be expressed in this way.  At all events, there is no place in Gregory’s thinking, at least respecting humanity in its present state, for any non-bodily expression of the soul.  Any notion of a human soul existing independently of, or prior to, its bodily expression is summarily dismissed.  Gregory frequently compares the soul to a harmony – a tune played upon a physical, bodily instrument.  His accounts of human physiology and psychology are full of that awed sense that ‘we are marvellously made’.  And where the resurrection and restoration of humanity is concerned, no theologian could be more unequivocally ‘physical’.  The soul persists as a kind of reverberation of its erstwhile physical existence, reassembling, at the last day, those very ‘atoms’ to which it once imparted its distinctive character.  When he is in this Wrightean mood, Gregory sees the restoration of humanity at the Resurrection as a restoration of the garden of Eden, and the first Adam.

On the other hand, there is that other strand.  For when it comes to the definition of the soul/image, Gregory goes to quite enormous lengths to separate out from the soul’s essential nature – ie. what belongs to it qua divine image – those very bodily aspects from which its expression in the hic et nunc is completely indissociable.  Gregory may indeed believe that this strange animal-spiritual hybrid that is Man in the present age constitutes in itself an image of God; all his theological enthusiasm nevertheless fixes itself, not here, but on that disembodied soul which he hopes will, at the last day, emerge out of the chrysalis of our present hybrid nature.  There is a real contradiction here.  Thoughout The making of man there is an insistent identification of the restored humanity with the paradisal condition of the first Adam.  Restored humanity would then be bodily, like the first Adam.  Yet elsewhere in the same text, and predominantly in The soul and the resurrection the restored humanity is identified NOT with Adam, but with the pre-Adamic archetype, which is pure soul devoid of all animality.  The tension between these ultimately incompatible notions of our ultimate destiny results in strangely allegorized interpretations of the garden of Eden, in which the physical nature of Adam’s first nutriment is denied on the basis of parallels with other OT texts in which the notion of nutriment is evidently not literal.

What then can be said of Gregory’s attitude to our hic et nunc earthly existence?  Is it something that, like NT Wright, he believes capable of real intrinsic value?

To get the sense of Gregory’s drift here, there is another aspect of his thinking we must bear in mind.  This is the manner in which the soul of our humanity – our universal archetype – already contains the entirety of all its potential future developments.  In this rests Gregory’s confidence, given the goodness of God, and the ultimately limited nature of all evil, that Man, in his eventual unfolding over time, is destined for good.  It’s not that the Resurrection will suddenly intervene so as to arrest the downward course of human destiny and place it on an upward path.  Rather Gregory’s idea seems to be that Man in his evolution is ultimately bound to place himself on that upward course that will transform him into that archetype that is his in eternity.  And as we have observed, his strange partly animal nature is no absolute obstacle – since, even in his present condition, Man is capable of being God’s image.

In other words, the long detour of God’s ‘image’ via all the vagaries of the timebound animal condition with its necessity of sexual reproduction and its subjection to passion – that long detour that will eventually bring about our restoration to the archetype – is a path that God has established for us and cannot (given the fall) be bypassed.  It is God’s way to bring about his plan for humanity.

Nevertheless, the feeling of Gregory is evidently that this long detour is a necessity imposed on us, rather than something he would value for its own sake.  True, that detour IS necessary, and, as such, it is to be accepted as Gods Will and even welcomed as ultimately bringing about our restoration to the desired state.  But, so far as its intrinsic value or desirability are concerned, the counter-factual of that ‘angelic’ might-have-been is always there to overshadow any more positive evaluation of our present earthly state.  There is a tendency for the hypothetical to become potential, to the extent that the angelic state is equated with the archetype itself; and with the restoration of the archetype, Gregory sees the promise of its eventual actualization.  That we should NOT be like the angels – that humanity might PREFER to remain rooted in the condition in which it has at last come to reflect the divine image – seems, for some reason, inconceivable to Gregory of Nyssa.  He can accept – indeed he encourages his reader to accept – the necessity of our earthly condition: through it, God is presently accomplishing something that will wonderfully bear fruit at the Resurrection.  Nor is there a suggestion that there is any other way in which that ultimate destination can be arrived at.  But there is no sense in which we are encouraged to take pleasure in the journey.  Rather, Gregory’s eyes are fixed firmly on the destination.  And, from his accounts of it, that ultimate angelic condition replaces much of what constitutes the wonder of our bodily expression of God’s image here on earth.  It’s as though, God, having arrived at some artistic representation, through a meticulous and effortful bricolage – think of animals made of ‘lego’, or cities constituted out of lollipop sticks, or creatures built out of ironmongery – replaces that finished product (speaking of all the labour and ingenuity of its production) with the actuality of thing it represents.

In fact, I have a more precise example.  It is difficult to read the account of bodily Resurrection given by On the Making of Man without thinking of that famous exploded hut that Cornelia Parker re-constructed out of its fragments.  The difference is that Gregory wants to replace Parker’s laboriously reconstructed hut with a miraculous restitution of the original.  He has no understanding for our contemporary valuation of process over product!  Hence, passages like the following:

It may be, however, that some one feels shame at the fact that our life, like that of the brutes, is sustained by food, and for this reason deems man unworthy of being supposed to have been framed in the image of God (the modern reader, impressed by Gregory’s account of the wonder’s of Man’s bodily creation, asks himself exasperatedly: ‘Why, Gregory?’  ‘What shame?’); but he may expect that freedom from this function will one day be bestowed upon our nature in the life we look for …  Further, as the resurrection holds forth to us a life equal with the angels, and with the angels there is no food, there is sufficient ground for believing that man, who will live in like fashion with the angels, will be released from such a function.

I greatly admire Gregory’s account of the making of Man; but, ultimately, I am too much of a modern not also to be repelled by it!

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IRENAEUS AGAINST HERESIES: A USER’S GUIDE