The Rational Animal: A Rereading of Gregory of Nyssa's De hominis opificio

Abstract

This article, through a close reading of Gregory of Nyssa's De hominis opificio, challenges the usual synthetic presentation of Gregory of Nyssa's anthropology, particularly his understanding of human sexuality, characteristically built up by combining various elements from different works. Instead of an anthropology articulated in terms of a dual creation, in which sexuality is added as an economic measure "in view of the Fall," we see how Gregory explores the existence of human beings as rational animals, embracing the extremes of creation in their own being, the asexual rational, that which is in the image of God, and the irrational sexual, that which humans share with the animals. These two aspects of human existence enables Gregory to see a potential in creation for ascent, gracing that which is irrational with a rational employment, or descent, assimilating the rational to the irrational.

At some things my treatise will hint; on some it will linger; some it will merely mention. It will try to speak imperceptibly, to exhibit secretly and to demonstrate silently.²

This is perhaps the clearest indication, within early patristic literature, that we are not always told the true thought of a particular author in explicit terms. It is both a warning and an exhortation: to understand a text adequately we must carefully follow the hints that the author provides. This is especially true of Gregory of Nyssa, whose writings, particularly those dealing with sexuality, have been consistently misinterpreted. In examining Gregory's anthropology, I am indebted to the pioneering work done by Mark Hart who, through a careful reading of Gregory of Nyssa's treatise De virginitate, sensitive to Gregory's use of rhetoric and the employment of certain genres or modes, such as tragedy or irony, has shed new light on Gregory's thought on marriage and sexuality.³

Hart's interpretation challenges us to rethink radically what Gregory says on the question of human sexuality. As Hart notes,4 the principal objection to his interpretation of De virginitate is likely to be based upon the notorious passages of De hominis opificio (chs. 16–17, 22), in which Gregory appears to speculate about a double creation and a prelapsarian angelic mode of reproduction. According to the generally accepted "synthetic" presentation of his anthropology, interpreting these passages from De hominis opificio by reference to passages from other texts, Gregory teaches a "dual creation": first, the human being (meaning the whole of humankind) made in the image; and second, the additional distinction of male and female, which has no reference to the divine Archetype, but was added by God in foresight of the Fall. Although this is the order of God's intended creation, its temporal realization occurs in reverse order: for Gregory, unlike Philo and Origen, the human being (or the whole of humankind) created in the image of God (and neither male nor female) pre-exists the actual appearance of humankind as male and female only in the perfection of God's (fore)knowledge and will be finally realized only at the end of time. However, whilst humankind was male and female in Paradise, this sexuality was not operative but latent, "in view of the Fall." Prior to the Fall, human beings would have multiplied as the angels. Human sexuality, this kinship with the mortal, irrational animals, only became operative with the postlapsarian addition of the "garments of skin" (Gen 3.21). These garments of skin, provided by God, are more remedial than punitive in character: they enable human beings to continue in existence in exile from Paradise, alienated from their true nature to an animal environment, and, through the disgust produced by their experience of evil and the mortality of this world, freely to desire to return to God. Moreover, it is through these garments of skin that humankind now reaches the foreordained number appointed by God, and so human sexuality has a significant and meaningful role to play in this fallen world, bringing humankind to its true existence as the image of God. In the final consummation, when the fullness...