On the Making of Man

Contents

Reading pages: 0–7 · 8–11 · 12–13 · 14–17 · 18–22 · 23–27 · 28–29 · 30

1. 0Gregory dedicates the treatise to his brother as an Easter gift, presents it as a supplement to Basil’s work on creation, and sets out its aim of examining everything that concerns man.
2. 1Gregory describes how God bound the world together through rest and motion and through intermediate elements, and how the finished creation stood ready, rich and beautiful, before man appeared.
3. 2Man came last because the king’s palace and banquet had to be prepared first; he was made of divine and earthly elements so that he could enjoy both God and the goods of the earth.
4. 3Unlike the rest of creation, which God made by a bare command, man was made after deliberation, which shows that he is more precious than everything visible.
5. 4Human nature was made for kingship: the soul is free and self-governing, and as God’s living image it is robed not in purple but in virtue, immortality, and righteousness.
6. 5God’s image in man is painted not in colours but in virtues; mind, word, love, and the power to perceive and search out things mirror the divine nature.
7. 6Just as one human mind works through many senses, God is not divided by his many powers; and since the three persons make one image, they cannot be unlike in nature, as the Anomoeans claim.
8. 7Man is born without natural weapons or covering so that he must rule and use the animals, whose gifts, together with his own inventions such as iron, arrows, and sandals, supply what he lacks.
9. 8Man’s upright form and his hands mark his rule; the order of creation (plants, animals, man) teaches the three levels of soul, and the hands free the mouth to serve speech.
10. 9The mind, which God shared with man, needs the body as an instrument; the vocal organs work together like a pipe and a lyre to make thought audible.
11. 10The mind works through the senses: the hands free the mouth for speech, and the senses are like gates through which many kinds of knowledge enter the city of the mind, there to be sorted and stored.
12. 11The mind, which is distinct from the senses, cannot comprehend its own nature; this unknowability is itself a mark of its likeness to the incomprehensible God whose image it is.
13. 12The mind is not housed in the heart or the brain but touches the whole body, as a musician uses an instrument; when the nature turns from the good toward matter, beauty is lost and evil arises.
14. 13Sleep restores the body by alternating with waking; yawning and dreams have physical causes, and ordinary dreams are confused echoes of waking life and bodily states, distinct from the divine revelations given to Joseph and Daniel.
15. 14The mind is not lodged in one part of the body; in the slavish it serves bodily impulses, in the perfect it leads them; and the three levels of life do not mean three souls, for the true soul is one and intellectual.
16. 15Only the rational soul is properly called a soul, as only real bread is bread; and the mind is joined to the whole body in an inexpressible way, neither inside it nor around it.
17. 16Man’s greatness lies not in being a little world but in being made in God’s image, which belongs to the whole of humanity as one; the division into male and female was added afterward, in view of the foreseen fall, and does not belong to the divine archetype.
18. 17Had man not sinned, humanity would have multiplied in some angelic way without marriage, as the resurrection life shows; God, foreseeing the fall, added the animal mode of reproduction.
19. 18The passions came to man through his kinship with the animals; reason can turn them into vices or virtues, and the divine image shows in the virtuous; in the resurrection man will be freed from the need to eat.
20. 19The food of paradise was spiritual: the “every tree” is the Good itself, the tree of life, while the forbidden tree bore a mixed fruit of good and evil that the serpent made attractive.
21. 20The forbidden tree bore a “mixed” fruit: evil disguised as good, attractive to sense but deadly; by tasting it man, God’s image, became like vanity.
22. 21Because evil has a limit while the good is infinite, the ever-moving human nature, having run through evil, must turn back to the good; so the restoration of paradise and the image is to be expected.
23. 22The resurrection waits until the full number of humanity, foreseen by God, has been born; then time will end and all will be changed at once; meanwhile we should prepare by good living, not calculate times.
24. 23Whoever accepts that the world had a beginning must accept its end; just as we believe by faith that God made matter, against those who make matter eternal, we believe he will bring the world to its appointed end.
25. 24Matter can come from the immaterial God because bodies are a concurrence of qualities that are themselves intelligible; faith accepts both creation from nothing and the world’s future transformation.
26. 25The fulfilment of Christ’s predictions (such as the fall of Jerusalem) makes his promise of resurrection credible, and his graded miracles of raising the dead, culminating in Lazarus and his own risen body, demonstrate it.
27. 26Objections from bodies burned or eaten fail, because every element of the dissolved body remains within the world, which God holds in his hand and knows exactly.
28. 27The soul keeps the stamp of its body’s form and recognizes its own elements, so at the resurrection God can easily restore to each his own, as owners sort a mixed herd or scattered quicksilver flows together.
29. 28Gregory rejects both the pre-existence of souls (taught in On First Principles, which leads logically to absurd transmigration) and the view that the soul was created after the body.
30. 29Soul and body come into being together from one beginning: the seed contains the whole human being in potency, and the soul unfolds its powers as the body grows.
31. 30Gregory sketches the body’s structure and physiology (brain, heart, liver, nerves, breathing, digestion) to show that soul and body grow together from one beginning, the soul’s powers appearing as the body is perfected, and ends by calling all to return to the image of God.