σις), a Greek rhetorical concept ‘whereby any philosophical speculation is relevant for a Christian only if it agrees with revelation’.2Hilary of Poitiers gave one of the clearest statements of the dual nature of Christ, and how this can be understood in relation to man. He used the same terminology to refer to man and Christ, and explicitly compares the two natures of Christ to the contrasting spiritual and fleshly aspects of man:
Jesus Christ is both Son of God and Son of Man … The Son of Man is the same person as the Son of God; he who is in the form of God is the same as he who was born as complete man in the form of a servant. Just as, by the nature determined for us by God when man was first created, man is born as a creature of body and soul, so Jesus Christ through his own divine power was man and God, compounded of body and soul. He had in himself the whole reality of manhood, and the whole reality of godhead.1
So far, we have looked at a range of theological and philosophical understandings of humanity, variants on the acceptability of the body as part of the human being, and culturally determined ideas about the relationship between the body of the first and second Adam. Because Christ shares humanity, it is essential to establish whether His humanity was the same as ours and, if not, in what ways it differed. This was one of the main concerns of Patristic writers from the apostolic age onwards. The urgency to determine correct doctrine was accelerated and enabled by the move from the relatively private world of the desert, where details of Christological teaching are not the main focus of monks’ attention, to the arena of public, and ostensibly ecumenical, debate, which was ratified by canons of councils, anathematisations and doctrinal formulae. The drive to define correct doctrine also created the concept of Patristic teachings, as being a body of ideas which ecclesial consensus found orthodox and which could be relied on to shape entire communities in the face of deviant (if alluring) alternatives. It was sufficient for a desert Father to give an individual supplicant a very simple and practical ‘word’ to help them achieve a more ascetic lifestyle; an aspiring ascetic could be told to become alienated from his body, to renounce food and sex and withdraw from his family. Christ was invoked as an example of kenotic humility and obedience, but for the earliest Christians understanding the minutiae of what Christ’s body might be like and how it related to His soul, or His humanity to His divinity, was not yet the key means to being a Christian. The advent of Ecumenical Councils, however, brought into play imperial authority, patronage, foreign relations, issues of canonicity and ecclesiology, and a desire to formulate ‘Christianity’ as more than just ‘not Judaism’. Christianity became something which had definite and clearly defined boundaries, identified by the naming and shaming of teachings which diverged from the mainstream. As it became more public, and more focused on the person of Christ rather than the body of man, ascetic teachings about the body became more complex; after Nicaea, you could only call yourself a Christian if, in addition to praying and fasting, you also understood and accepted certain teachings about the body of Christ outlined in credal statements, which evolved with increasingly sophisticated wording. The first aim of those who drew up such creeds was to affirm Christ as the Son of God, uniquely and indivisibly human as well as divine; the role of Christ within the Trinity followed hard on its heels. Doctrines about the human person as such were not the main focus of the earliest Councils. Diversity became renamed as deviancy and outlawed by the established church.
In moving into the public arena of ecumenical debate, much Patristic thought was formed substantially by reacting against existing ideas, rather than formulating new ones. Patristic writers they used many of the same rhetorical methods as their philosophical forebears, and much of the vocabulary of the Bible. For example, Gregory of Nyssa adapted the concept of ‘use’ (χρσις), a Greek rhetorical concept ‘whereby any philosophical speculation is relevant for a Christian only if it agrees with revelation’.2
It has already been noted that much of what became orthodox doctrine was rejected by the early church as heretical, although in due course, many of the seeds within it were used by catholic writers to establish orthodoxy.3 Furthermore, the doctrine of the flesh as the ‘pivotal point of salvation’ was rooted in scripture, even if it found its most detailed outworking in Patristic debate.4 The essential conservatism and faithfulness of the church meant that, for a concept to be accepted as catholic teaching, it had to demonstrate its scriptural basis. The Ecumenical Councils dealt with many aspects of the dual nature of Christ; among those, our focus here is the mirroring in Christ’s full humanity of a fully integrated human person. Christ’s full humanity is so important to the Fathers that, in polemic addressed to heretics about other issues, the topic recurs frequently. For example, although much of the rhetoric addressed to and against Nestorius focused on the role of the Mother of God in determining His Divine Sonship, it also incidentally emphasised the integration within Christ of a human soul and mind in conjunction with body and flesh. The holistic nature of His humanity is as much of an issue as the point at which He became divine and whether or not it was appropriate to describe a mewling babe at the breast as the Son of God. Arguing about the inextricable union of divinity and humanity only made sense if that humanity was also seen as a holistic entity.
Although desert writers were not primarily concerned with doctrine, some did get involved in the ecumenical debates going on in the wider church. Jacob of Nisibis (d. 338), a Persian who lived as an extreme ascetic, foraging wild plants, chose to travel to Nicaea to participate in the battle against Arianism;5 Ephrem refers to the Manicheans by name. Basil of Caesarea recounts his travels in the deserts of Alexandria and other parts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia:
I marvelled, too, at their endurance in toil; I was amazed at their attention at prayers, their victory over sleep, being overcome by no physical necessity, always preserving lofty and unconquered the resolution of their soul, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, not paying attention to the body nor consenting to waste any thought on it, but, as if living in flesh not one’s own, they showed by their deeds what it is to dwell among those on this earth and what to have their citizenship in heaven.6
This was the man who also took up cudgels against Eunomius, and participated in anathematising Apollinarius. Athanasius combined writing the first desert vita with an early career appearance at the Council of Nicaea. Cyril of Alexandria’s Letter to the Monks of Egypt reads almost as a dry run of his attack on Nestorius. The relationship between desert spirituality and ecumenical debate is neither a one-way street, nor a chronological process; both Clement and Irenaeus pre-date Antony’s retreat into the desert by nearly a century.7 However, there are differences in emphasis and focus between the desert’s concern with the body and flesh of man, and the Christological Councils’ development of this into a determination to define the correct understanding of the flesh of Christ.
Although many of the doctrinal disputes about the person of Christ concerned his relationship to God the Father, or the ways in which humanity and divinity are simultaneously present in him, these matters can only be fully understood if his integrity of his humanity is understood. Hence Arianism and Nestorianism are less of an issue than Apollinarianism, since this was the key heresy concerning the integrity and completeness of Christ’s humanity. Monotheletism is another problematic issue in terms of a holistic Christ, but if we are relating Christ’s humanity to desert discussions about the body, the issue is less the will of man, than his subjugation of flesh and correct use of body. We have already seen much early Christian discussion about the superiority of the soul over the flesh: John Chrysostom distinguishes between ‘the incorporeal essence of the soul and the irrational essence of the body’.8 Gregory of Nazianzus’ Letter to Cledonius is quite blunt about this; the soul is of more value than the body, but it is only by sharing in our flesh, that Christ can participate fully in humanity, and this, by a process of exchange, is how humanity is redeemed:
Everyone who has a spark of sense will acknowledge that flesh is less precious than soul. This is why the passage, ‘The Word was made flesh’, seems to me to be equivalent to that in which it is said that he was made sin, or made a curse for us (2 Cor. 5.21; Gal. 3.13); not that the Lord was transformed into either of those things (how could he be?) But because by taking them upon Himself He took away our sins and bore our iniquities (Is. 53.4–5).9
As well as a body made of flesh, and a soul, Christ also has to have a fully human mind, not a transplanted Divine Logos in place of the human soul/mind. It is Apollinarius’ suggestion that a human mind cannot be found in Christ which is the most contentious part of his teaching. As Gregory of Nazianzus points out, it is because Christ shares the same mind as man that He can be entire man and also God so that He can create anew entire humanity which had fallen through sin. This does not, Gregory explains, detract at all from His participation in the Godhead, because He combines in one person opposite qualities:
passible in His flesh, impassible in His Godhead; circumscribed in the body, uncircumscribed in the Spirit; the selfsame earthly and heavenly, tangible and intangible, comprehensible and incomprehensible.10
In the paradigmatic statement of human–divine reciprocity, it is the integrity of man, mirrored in Christ’s integrity, which is saved. Gregory describes as ‘mindless’ any person who does not recognise the need for Christ to have a mind; if they reject His completeness, they themselves cannot be saved, for they have shown themselves to be not fully human. Gregory is explicit that the united nature of Christ enables full human redemption. For man to be fully redeemed, he (like Christ) must bear the full component parts of his make-up – body, soul and mind:
For what He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved. If only half of Adam had fallen then that which Christ assumes and heals might only be half as well; but if the whole of Adam’s nature fell then it must be united to the whole nature of the Begotten One, and so be saved as a whole. So let them not begrudge our complete salvation, or clothe the Saviour only with bones and nerves and the mere depiction of humanity … if He has a soul and yet is without a mind – then how can He be a man at all, since man is not a mindless animal?11
Clearly Gregory is referring to the idea that even animals can have ‘souls’ in the sense of a living spark (this is not the same as the Spirit, which is Holy); it is having and using a mind which separates men from other living creatures. For Christ not to have a human mind would mean that he was divine and animal, not divine and human. In insisting on Christ’s having a human mind, despite the fact that in humans this is ‘prone to sin and subject to damnation’ Gregory uses as an argument that to separate out the mind as somehow acting alone and not being an integrated part of the person, denies God the power to heal the mind.12
In language clearly prefiguring his accusations against Nestorius, Cyril of Alexandria tells the monks in Egypt that a human mother cannot produce only part of a human being. Because of misconceptions about human biology (discussed in Chapter 4) women were believed only to create the ‘earthly bodies’, nonetheless, he continues: ‘they are said to have given birth to the whole living creature, I mean that of soul and body, and not to have given birth to just a part’. By analogy, he explains, this is exactly what happened with Christ; Mary did not just give birth to ‘part of him’ (Nestorius’ ‘Christotokos’) but to a complete being. In Christ’s case, of course, this ‘completeness’ includes divinity. But it is the completeness which means he ‘became as we are’: ‘the Only Begotten Word was born from the essence of God his Father, but since he took the flesh and made it his very own, he is also called Son of Man, and he became as we are’.13
Likewise, Gregory of Nazianzus argued that there is no more difficulty Christ having ‘two perfect [natures]’ than Gregory in himself having ‘in my single personality … soul, reason, mind, and the Holy Spirit’, because you need to look beyond the material to ‘what is intellectual and incorporeal’.14 Again, the analogy for the indivisibility of the dual nature in Christ is the indivisibility of the human person.
Another argument Gregory of Nazianzus uses to assert the holistic nature of humanity as mirrored in Christ’s integrity is that of man as a microcosm of creation. Oration 45 records how the Logos created man as ‘a single living creature’ (my italics) from two opposite elements, the visible and invisible worlds. He explains how this microcosmic man was created in order to ‘adore God with both aspects of his twofold being’; he thus belongs to both the visible and invisible creations by operating in both his substances as it were. He lives according to the spirit ‘by grace’ and in the flesh ‘that he may be raised on high’. In language highly reminiscent of Christ’s dual nature and purpose, Gregory concludes that both flesh and spirit in man are essential: ‘spirit, that he may continue in existence and glorify his Benefactor, flesh that he may suffer’. The man thus formed is no less than a ‘new Angel, a mingled worshipper’ who shares in both the visible and invisible creation.15
Comparisons between humanity’s integrated entity and the dual nature of Christ are found also in Athanasius, who repeatedly describes man as ‘twofold’ in body and soul, so that ‘reasoning concerning human being’ and ‘thought about their health’ must also be twofold; because man is ‘one human body’, suffering and health are felt equally by body and soul.16
In addition to humans having a fleshly body and an animating soul, to be fully fashioned in the image and likeness of God they must also have the Holy Spirit within them. In Patristic eyes, this is not exactly a component ‘part’ but something which must take up residence if he is to be fully alive; this is the difference between Christians and others. Clement sees the Holy Spirit as something added on to ‘natural man’ as he was created before he acquired faith which added the Spirit to his being.17 Similarly for Irenaeus, the Holy Spirit is an essential aspect of being made in God’s image, but it is not part of him in the same way as other elements of his make-up: ‘There is no “complete” or “perfect” man without the Spirit, but the Spirit is not a “part” of man; just as man does not live without participating in life, yet he does not possess life in his own nature’.18
The flesh of man is what was made ‘in the image of God’; it is only when the Holy Spirit is ‘outpoured’ onto that image that ‘man is rendered spiritual and perfect, and this is the one who was made in the image and likeness of God’.19 Gregory of Nazianzus uses this image; combining Platonic and Hebrew concepts of the creation of man and the engagement of divinity with ‘his image’ he writes:
The soul is a breath of God, and has suffered a mixture
of heavenly and earthly, a light hidden in a cave,
but, all the same, divine and imperishable …
… since then, however,
bodies derive from flesh, and the soul is mixed in imperceptibly,
falling from within into the moulding of dust: he who mixes them
knows how he first breathed in, and fastened his image to earth.20
So, in Patristic terms, being fully human meant having a soul and a body; to be a human made in the image and likeness of God that union of soul and body was further animated by the Holy Spirit. Turning to Christ, His enfleshment as the man Jesus is readily understood from any biblical account of the Incarnation. Only docetics denied the bodily side of Christ. But there was more controversy when it came to how Christ might have a human soul, which was seen as synonymous with the mind. Gregory of Nazianzus takes it for granted that ‘whenever we hear that “the Word was made flesh” we understand that it means man of soul and body’. The assumption by the Word of ‘a body that was endowed with reason and soul’ forms the basis for unity between man and God.21
Cyril’s way of describing this is to explain the taking on flesh, described in ‘the God-inspired scripture’, as meaning ‘he was united to flesh endowed with a rational soul’.22 This insistence on the rationality of the soul distances Christ’s soul (which, like the mind, is rational) from any appetitive or irascible aspects of the soul, according to the Neoplatonic division. This distinction is repeatedly found in Cyril’s invective against Nestorius. It formed part of his argument for insisting on Theotokos; it also adds weight to the belief that Christ’s sharing of humanity was a sharing of an integrated entity. Thus in the Second Letter to Nestorius we read:
the Word, in an ineffable and incomprehensible manner, ineffably united to himself flesh animated with a rational soul, and thus became man and was called Son of Man … the Word ‘becoming flesh’ means nothing else than that ‘he shared in flesh and blood like us’ (Heb. 2.14), and made his very own a body which was ours.23
Patristic Christology is always very concerned to assert the unity of divine and human in Christ; equally important is the unity of the various human characteristics within Christ’s humanity. The recapitulation motif of Irenaeus is predicated on Christ recovering and restoring all that was lost in Adam at the Fall; this ‘all’ must mean a mirroring of the ‘integrity of the human composite’ of the first Adam in ‘the perfection of this image in Christ’.24 Indeed, the very typology expressed by first and second Adam, so dominant in Irenaeus, means that the second Adam must resemble the first in order to save him. This does not just refer to the superficial appearance of man but to the ‘composite’. Cyril’s Third Letter to Nestorius actually uses the orthodox vocabulary of hypostases to compare the dual nature of Christ with the unity of material and non-material substances in man:
We do not divide out the sayings of our Saviour in the Gospels as if to two hypostases or prosopa. The one and only Christ is not twofold even though he is understood as compounded out of different elements in an indivisible unity, just as man is understood as consisting of body and soul and yet is not twofold but rather is one from out of both.25
Although this is addressed to Nestorius, clearly Cyril felt that as well as addressing the role of Mary in the Incarnation (affirming her as Theotokos), the way to explain the indivisibility of substances in Christ was best done by comparing the hypostatic union to the integrity of body and soul in man. Likewise, Gregory of Nazianzus affirms that ‘God and Man are two natures, as also soul and body are’, but this does not mean either two sons or two gods (something of which Nestorius was to be accused of purporting). The Pauline language of the ‘inner man’ and the ‘outer man’ likewise does not mean two separate entities; in Christ, the ‘mixture’ of substances means that ‘God is made man, and man is made God’.26
The Cappadocians in particular insisted on salvation as being achieved through ‘solidarity’ with the humanity of Christ.27 The whole point of Christ’s Incarnation was to redeem like with like; He ‘took on Him flesh for the sake of our flesh, and mingled Himself with an intelligent soul for my soul’s sake, purifying like by like’.28 Through demonstrating His solidarity with the human condition, He invited human solidarity with His nature. This is how deification is conceived.
At the heart of Patristic statements about the salvific work of Christ is the ‘exchange principle’. Whilst Athanasius gives the simplest rendition of this in De Inc. 54 (‘he became human that we might become divine’), we find it also in Gregory of Nyssa’s Antirrheticus 1129 and expressed in a more sophisticated manner by Irenaeus:
For the glory of God is a living man, and the life of man consists in beholding God: for if the manifestation of God through the creation afford life to all living on earth, much more does that revelations of the Father which comes through the Word give life to those who see God.30
This spells out the theological implications of the life-giving Spirit in humans, and their responsibility to respond to the gift of spiritual life through resembling God in glory. The intermingling of humanity with deity is the highest honour as well as the intended telos of human creation. Repeating his insights from the Letter to Cledonius in poetic form, Gregory of Nazianzus emphatically links humanity’s sharing of the image of God with his redemption:
for what has not been assumed does not get saved …
the flesh, then, is both God’s housemate and his icon:
God’s nature mingles with what is akin to it,
and form there has communion also with the flesh.31
We noted at the start of this chapter that much Patristic doctrine is formed in reaction to previous teachings. This was how Patristic authority was established, collating authentic insights which the tradition developed into ‘orthodox’ teachings and rejecting as erroneous aberrant, incomplete or theologically unsound variants. Chronologically, the first source of stimulus to Patristic orthodoxy was Greek philosophy. Although some of the quarrying of Stoic teaching was fruitful (for example, their idea of the universe as a body, which must have influenced the Pauline use of body as Christian community)32 much of the Neoplatonic teaching only fostered negativity about the body, which complicated a reading of Christ’s body as being in solidarity with that of man. Celsus’ Alethes Logo (True Doctrine) objected to his early Christian contemporaries on account of their asceticism; interestingly, he is also the first critic of Christianity to pay much attention to the person of Christ.33 Even the most apparently orthodox of Patristic writers was not immune to taint from Hellenistic dualism; in one of his autobiographical dreams, Gregory of Nazianzus uses the language of fetters and prisons to describe the body’s relationship to the soul, suggesting that after death the two can be united in order to ‘meditate on heavenly topics … life having absorbed the moral and transitory element’.34 This recalls Paul’s anxiety about the ‘body of death’ in Rom. 7.24. Some Christians were aware of the tensions between the secular education they had received and their new faith. Tertullian’s vociferous antipathy to his early indoctrination is rightly famed:
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem; what concord is there between the Academy and the Church? The Christians’ instruction comes from the porch of Solomon who taught that the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with all efforts to produce a mottled Stoic-Platonic-dialectical Christianity! Where is there any likeness between the Christian and the philosopher; between the disciple of Greece and the disciple of heaven; between the man whose object is fame and the man whose object is life; between the talker and the doer; between him who builds up and him who pulls down; between the friend and the foe of error; between one who corrupts the truth and one who restores and teaches it?35
However, the alternatives he offers do not necessarily affirm the fleshliness of Christ’s body, and he lacks Clement’s and Justin’s ability to retrieve from classical thought ideas about the nature of truth and its revelation which can be applied to Christian teachings, in accordance with the criterion of ‘use’ mentioned above with regard to Gregory of Nyssa.
Philosophers who became Christian suffered what has been described as ‘both a discontinuity and a continuity’.36 In order to establish credibility as Christian teachers, they had to integrate biblical teaching and the demands of an increasingly structured church with abstract ideas about justice, right living, moral and spiritual elitism, and the integration of conflicting aspects of the person within society.37 Clement was one of the earliest confessed Christians to use the term askēsis, (qualified by ‘gnostic’ in order to differentiate it from physical exercise) as an aspiration for Christian living.38 He saw askēsis not as an end in itself but a means to an end; like physical gymnastic exercise, it was ‘a toning up of spiritual faculties useful for all grades of Christian but particularly relevant to the less experienced’.39
Clement’s writings combine Christian apologetic and anti-heretical polemic; he saw the logic behind Hellenistic traditions being ‘fulfilled’ in the Christian idea of the Divine Logos incarnate in Christ.40 Much of the groundwork for his thought comes from Philo, especially the concept of the journey to God being effected through an escape from the body.41 His polemic against the Gnostics makes clear that he does not disparage the body as such; rather, he sees the intellectual rational part of the soul – what Gregory of Nazianzus calls ‘the rational soul’ – as being the part of man which is made in the image of God.42 The corollary of this, however, is that all the ‘irrational’ functions of the soul, such as its capacities for passions such as anger and desire, pleasure and anger, are no more than the fleshly spirit which animates all animals, and from which man should distance himself by acquiring the Spirit of God.43 But Clement’s speculation did not lead him into dualism. He saw the body as the soul’s ‘consort and ally’ through which alone humanity achieves full potential.44 He saw ascetic discipline, which he promoted, not as an end in itself but an aid to good living; it was not designed to be punishment. He described the soul of the ‘Gnostic’ (which he glosses as ‘wise man’) as ‘sojourn[ing] in the body’ which it treated with respect, not giving in to any ‘inordinate desires’ and ‘ready to leave its abode if the time of departure should beckon’.45 Living a good life, as we have seen in Chapters 2 and 4, was a concern shared by pagan and Christian wise men. Clement saw this as an important social and moral contribution which philosophy could make to life; to it he added speculation and performance of precepts as aspects of pagan teaching he felt could have value in Christian life.46 Speculation as a tool for Christian living became problematic in a milieu which increasingly sought to combine praxis and theoria as the means to Christian enlightenment. Another challenging part of Clement’s legacy was the promoting of various hierarchies of ascetic achievement, drawn from the Stromateis;47 in the same text he analyses two opposing attitudes to marriage which were developing within Christian circles – both the aggressive rejection of it and the ‘libertine’ polarity.48 Overall, Clement advocates control of the body rather than acceptance of it. Given that he is writing before the ecclesiological insistence on the dual nature of Christ, it is not surprising that man’s physicality is questioned in the light of Christ’s humanity; his asceticism seems polarised into a bid for individual excellence rather than conformity to Christ, and solidarity with his humanity.
In Origen, too, there is a synthesis of Stoic teaching and emergent Christian doctrine, the proportions of which do not always convince the church that he escapes heresy.49 In particular his teaching about the pre-existence of the human soul, and the disembodied spiritualisation of the resurrected body as well as his belief in the possibility of demonic salvation caused both Origen and Origenism to be vilified and anathematised.50 However, much of what was later deemed to be unorthodox in his teaching came not from Hellenistic philosophy but from his engagement with pseudo-Christian Gnostics, and the condemnation of Origenism often bore little relation to Origen himself. It is not feasible to account in detail for his approach to the human body, but we should note that where he discusses issues to do with the soul and the body it is commonly in the context of refuting heresies about the dual nature of Christ, rather than focusing on the nature of man. Thus, in Contra Celsum Origen does not so much see the body as causing sin but as a necessary adjunct to sin, since it is through the body that humans achieve forgiveness and undergo purification.51 The body is the bearer of redemption, and God’s punishment is not a retributive response to a despised materiality but a reformative agent, with the soul making use of the body as outlined in the Timaeus.52 However, he does reiterate the Platonic and Neoplatonic concept of the soul being chained to the body for punishment, providing a precociously early Christian account of anthropological dualism.53 As with Plato, such a prolific writer does not produce a monochrome account of such a complex issue. In his Dialogue with Heraclides, for example, is found an idea more commonly associated with the Cappadocian Fathers: ‘the whole human person would not have been saved unless the Lord had taken upon him the whole human person’.54
As Christianity developed beyond the Apostolic and Apologetic phase to the Patristic era, the insights of the Hebrew Scriptures were increasingly important as a source of authority for formulating doctrine. In terms of how the human person could be understood, and how Christ took on humanity, it is noticeable that the phrase ‘garments of skin’ from Gen 3.21 developed within the orthodox Catholic church as a ‘basic symbol in the patristic interpretation of the fall’.55 As in the Hebrew tradition, there was diversity in how this phrase was interpreted. It clearly meant more than just the human body;56 the purpose of the garments of skin was not to ensure human survival in the original ‘garments of skin’ but to restore the image of God.57 Gregory of Nazianzus explains that the need for a ‘garment of skin’ was temporary and superficial; man before the Fall was immortal and being clothed in a garment of skin was to acquire ‘something put on us from the outside, lending itself for use by the body for a time but not becoming part of its nature’. Since human nature in its pure state was immortal, the ‘garment’ was only temporary attire; ‘therefore from the nature of irrational things mortality was providentially put on a nature which was created for immortality’.58
Similarly, Gregory of Nyssa takes care to gloss what he means by ‘garment of skin’. He saw ‘that dead and ugly garment’ as being made for humanity ‘from irrational skins (when I hear “skins” I interpret it as the form of the irrational nature which we have put on from our association with passion)’; this suggests he sees the garment as being made of flesh, rather than body. If a man removed from himself a ragged tunic, he says, ‘he would no longer see on himself the ugliness of what was discarded’. Casting off the metaphorical ‘irrational skin’ thus enables man to ‘throw off every part of our irrational skin along with the removal of the garment’.59 In other words, as through deification man returns from morality to immortality he no longer needs the ‘garment of skins’ with which he was clothed at the Fall. In Genesis, according to Gregory, the ‘garments’ ‘indicate that the human bodily condition underwent change through the fall, not that man acquired a body through the fall’, a contrast to Origen who believed that man was originally and essentially bodiless.60
Unlike in the earlier writings of the Apostolic and Apologetic period, which are full of Hellenistic echoes, this type of language shows more clearly the influence of Jewish thought and the Scriptures. But, despite using biblical sources and working in conjunction with the evolving Christological doctrines, some of the most ‘orthodox’ of Patristic writers were tainted by association with or infiltration by what were condemned as heretical understandings of the person of Christ. To some extent this was inevitable; compared to their desert forebears they were working on a much broader canvas, on which it was no longer sufficient to hold a solid set of practices about the discipline of the human body. With the advent of the Council of Nicaea and the need, for reasons other than purely theological, to refute emergent and divisive heresies, Patristic writers needed to be aware of what was being written outside the confines of ‘orthodox’ teaching. A couple of examples suffice to illustrate this point and they both concern the reception and interpretation of the ideas of Apollinarius.
Basil the Great, the so-called ‘founder of monasticism’, spent much energy in his later life refuting any suggestion that he had shared the beliefs of Apollinarius. The vigour with which he defends himself may owe something to the consciousness that, along with others of the Cappadocian circle, he expressed semi-Arian views in his earliest writings. He certainly shares some of Apollinarius’ terminology, such as the term ‘commixture’ rather than ‘indwelling’ to describe the union of divine and human.61 Basil first engaged in correspondence with Apollinaris around 373 and subsequently complained of the latter’s ‘fatal fluency’; his correspondent was around fifteen years older than him and probably already a priest while Basil was a student, so Basil appears to be suggesting that as an inexperienced and callow youth he was dazzled by Apollinarius. Basil’s excuses for his awareness of Apollinarius read as thinly veiled excuses made by a man of the establishment in mature life, realising that his former correspondent (and mentor, even) had been found wanting.62 Among other points, he suggests that he had been too busy to read all the works of Apollinarius (so could not be expected to give a full account of them), that he had been very young at the time he read such works, and that he had taken a balanced view of his shortcomings as well as strengths at the time.63 In a letter dated c. 373 or possibly 375, Basil denies even knowing that Apollinarius had been accused.64
Raven, whose quixotic if partisan style makes him the most enjoyable exegete of the issue, goes even further than this in describing Cyril of Alexandria as ‘the Apollinarian’. Writing of Apollinarius, he links Cyril’s expediency to that of Athanasius a few generations before:
He died a heretic; and it was left to Cyril the Alexandrian intriguer, the Apollinarian who was too clever to acknowledge his Master, to bring back his doctrine into the Church by a deft concession in phraseology, a concession not greater than that which Athanasius had made to the New Nicenes.65
Even Tertullian, who protests so loudly about the contribution made by Greek philosophy in understanding Christian teaching, is himself tainted by a form of Montanism, albeit a mild, North African variant of the more damaging movement from Asia Minor.66 As suggested above, the naming and shaming of heretics, the practice of anathematising one’s theological opponents, and the rallying of supporters frequently owed as much to cultural and political expediency as to theological insight. However, certain variant teachings, such as Gnosticism, were universally condemned, even if the polemicists attacking them could not always agree on what they were condemning. Some of their teachings relate very much to the human body and therefore contribute to a discussion of the body of Christ.
An obvious rallying call against the Gnostics was refuting their understanding of Mary’s role in the Incarnation. Zeno had accepted the teaching of Mary’s virginitas in partu as a useful ascetic device, proving the superiority of virginity over marriage.67 Tertullian, however, reacted with polemic against this, accusing Valentinus, Marcion and Apelles among others of seeing not only Jesus’ body but his conception, pregnancy, and birth from a virgin mother as no more than docetism.68 His desire to inject Christological orthodoxy into religious anthropology prompted him to engage with teachings on the body; his On the Resurrection shows an integrated view of the soul and the flesh; the soul being embodied cannot be separate from the flesh, which in turn can do nothing without the soul.69 In his attacks on Valentinus, he drew a distinction between the senses and the intellectual capacity, based not on whether these are seated in the body or the soul, but ‘with the objects of sense-perception, not with the locus of soul and mind or sense and intellect’.70 Much of the refutation of Valentinus comes from Irenaeus, and, given the scope of the Refutation of Knowledge Falsely So Called, many of his arguments against the Gnostics focus on issues to do with the human body and how Christ integrates humanity and divinity. In fact, understanding the place of the flesh (whether human or Christ’s) is a dominant feature of his work.71 Until the Nag Hammadi discoveries in the middle of the last century, Irenaeus’ texts provided the bulk of what we knew about Christian Gnosticism.72 Much of this dealt with cosmological issues which are outside the scope of this book, but his concept of recapitulation of human destiny in the person of Christ is crucial for subsequent Christological debate.73 Furthermore, his Refutation, which was written around 180 CE, is the first extant ‘inventory’ of heresies.74
Irenaeus’ refutation of Valentinian teachings about the creation of man demonstrate both his saturation in scripture and his insistence on the essentially fleshly nature of man; Adv. haer. 5.15.2–4 presents as the Valentinian view of man’s creation that it was from ‘a fluid and diffused matter’,75 rather than the earth which Genesis states as the source of man. Irenaeus uses a profoundly Christological argument to refute this; he sees the healing of the blind man through mud made from spitting on the ground (Mark 8.23) as recalling and representing how man was originally made.76 Christ thus uses the same earthly substance that God used in creating Adam; the miracle shows His Godhead in using the same substance, and indicates that Christ, like God the Father, creates and recreates men from the earth from which Adam was first made. Adv. haer. 5.6.1 states that those made in the image of God have body and soul, whereas those who also have the spirit are in the likeness of God. This very earthly, fleshly mode of healing is, for Irenaeus, idiomatic of Christ’s work. He insists that Christ truly suffered in the flesh, and that in recapitulating Adam, Christ does so in a fully human not docetic way. Christ’s redemption is like for like, flesh for flesh, ‘bringing God down to men through the Spirit, and lifting man up to God through his incarnation’.77 This is not to say that Irenaeus is unambiguously enthusiastic about the flesh. Adv. haer. 5.9 states that ‘flesh and blood do not inherit the Kingdom, but they certainly are inherited’; this is his (negative) interpretation of 1 Cor. 15.50.78 But man must have body and soul; they are a mixture or union which must be enlivened by God by ‘participating in life’, that is the life of the Spirit.79
As we noted in Chapter 11, much of the Cappadocian rhetoric was vented against Eunomius; this issue was largely to do with Arian heresy about the unlikeness of substances in God and Christ. The chronology illustrates how extensive and determined attacks on christological heresies were; around 365, Basil had published his Contra Eunomium, a denunciation of Eunomius’ Apologia, which had been published in 361. Eunomius’ response was a further defence of his own teaching, the Apologia Apologiae, which was published not long before Basil’s death, probably on 1 January 379.80 It was left to his brother Gregory of Nyssa to continue the battle for orthodoxy in his Against Eunomius around 380–81.81 Eunomius replied with his Confession of Faith in 383, and Gregory added his Refutation of the Confession of Faith of Eunomius c. 383.82
The background to the Apollinarian heresy and its refutation has already been explored in Chapter 11; here we note the Cappadocian contribution. A key text is Gregory of Nazianzus’ Letter to Cledonius, who was the priest in interim charge of the church previously led by Nazianzus until he left in order to undertake a spa cure. The letter can therefore be dated from 383–84. Cledonius had written to Gregory to advise him that Apollinarist dissidents had been active in his church.83 As we have seen from the discussion above, in this text and the Second Epistle Against Apollinarius (Epistle 52), which covers some of the same ground, he accuses Apollinarius’ followers of being no better than Manicheans, whose insistence upon an elect leads them to reject the flesh. His refutation here specifically insists upon a united human nature in man to mirror an integrated humanity in Christ; Christ’s manhood must include the higher elements of human nature in unity:
They acknowledge the Manhood to be neither without soul nor without reason nor without mind, nor imperfect, but they bring in the Godhead to supply the soul and reason and mind, as though It had mingled Itself only with His flesh, and not with the other properties belonging to us men.84
Gregory of Nyssa lacks his friend’s clarity of expression so it is much harder to determine the grounds for his refutation; even Meredith who is clearly an enthusiast agrees that his style is ‘more elaborate and less perspicuous than that of his namesake’.85 Raven takes issue with his method; we noted above that he drew on classical rhetoric for his argument. In this extract from a letter against Apollinarius, the many double negatives confuse the statement:
So it is that he was in death, yet not unmastered by death. The compositum is divided, the uncompounded not so. His uncompounded nature (sc. His deity) remains though the composite is split up; and although body and soul are separated from each other, neither is separated from the deity … By the separation (sc. of the soul and body) far from the simple, uncompounded nature (sc. of God) being split up, precisely the opposite occurs, for it makes them one. By his own inner indivisibility, he brings what has been divided into unity.86
Raven questions Gregory’s condemnation on these grounds, pointing out that his tactic is neither fair nor effective:
The Antirrheticus is a very bad book … he takes isolated phrases, sometimes only a few words long, sometimes even questions, treats them as if they were the clauses of a test creed, and then does his best to devise a reply.87
In less polemical work, Gregory’s account of the relationship between the soul and the body are equally complex and not always consistent. In places in the DHO, he distinguishes between the coarse material body of the physical world in which we live, as representing the fallen form of the body, and a “lighter” body which will appear at the Resurrection – but this is still somehow material.88 Elsewhere, Gregory takes the distinction between body and flesh in Heb. 2.14, and concludes that ‘the additions to our nature are of themselves neutral’; in other words, living according to the flesh is, as Paul suggests, a matter of moral choice for the individual.89 The twelfth chapter of the DHO concludes that the body is in the divine image ‘through the soul’.90
Ultimately, whatever the superiority of Apollinarius’ intellect and clarity, Chalcedonian orthodoxy preferred the Cappadocian model; it was not the first nor last time that the Ecumenical Councils conveniently overlooked the flawed reasoning of its favoured Fathers, in the interests of achieving a workable consensus on doctrines concerning the person of Christ.
1 Hilary of Poitiers, De trin. 10.19, in Henry Bettenson, The Later Christian Fathers (Oxford, 1970), p. 51.
2 Lucian Turcescu, Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons (Oxford, 2005), p. 25.
3 Writing of Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides and the Gnostics, Mark Edwards states that ‘each of the names … can be associated with the first expression of a principle which has become an axiom of catholic doctrine’. Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church (Farnham, 2009), p. 12.
4 Cipriano Vagaggini, The Flesh, Instrument of Salvation: A Theology of the Human Body (New York, 1969), p. 127.
5 Susan A. Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley, 1990), p. 12.
6 Ep. 223, Against Eustathius of Sebaste, Sister Agnes Clare Way (trans.), Saint Basil: Letters (2 vols, Washington, 1951), vol. 2, p. 128.
7 John Behr, Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement (Oxford, 2000), p. 17.
8 Homily on Genesis 14.5, cited in Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, 2007), p. 44.
9 Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter to Cledonius, in John McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, 2004), pp. 397–8.
10 Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter to Cledonius, McGuckin, Cyril, p. 391.
11 Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter to Cledonius, McGuckin, Cyril, pp. 393–4.
12 Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter to Cledonius, McGuckin, Cyril, pp. 395–6.
13 Cyril of Alexandria, Letter to the Monks of Egypt, McGuckin, Cyril, p. 251.
14 Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter to Cledonius, McGuckin, Cyril, p. 394.
15 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45 (7–9), PG 36, 632A–636A (trans. Charles G. Browne and James E. Swallow), NPNF vol. 7, p. 425.
16 Athanasius On Sickness and Health (7), cited David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford, 1995), p. 312.
17 Strom. 6.16 134.2. This renders the Spirit ‘part of the constitution of man’ if not an original component part, argues Behr, Asceticism, p. 138.
18 Behr, Asceticism, p. 101.
19 Irenaues, Adv. haer. 5.6.1, Behr, Asceticism, pp. 99–100. Kallistos Ware makes much the same point, with reference to Irenaeus, Fragment 6 in Patrologia Orientalis, 12.738. ‘“My Helper and My Enemy”: The Body in Greek Christianity’, in Sarah Coakley (ed), Religion and the Body (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 90–110, at p. 96.
20 Gregory of Nazianzus, On the Soul, Poem 1.1.8 in PG 37, pp. 446–56, trans. Peter Gilbert, On God and Man – The Theological Poetry of St Gregory Nazianzus (Crestwood, 2001), pp. 62 and 75. The tripartite model of humanity is found in Against Apollinarius, Poem 1.1.10 in PG 37, pp. 464–70: ‘The most great Mind, we know, was fastened into / all the nature of man, consisting of three things, / soul, mind, and the body’s mass.’ Gilbert, On God, p. 81.
21 Gregory of Nazianzus, Scholia on the Incarnation (25), McGuckin, Cyril, p. 318.
22 Cyril of Alexandria’s Letter to the Monks of Egypt in McGuckin, Cyril, p. 249. The same phrase ‘man ensouled with a rational soul’ is used in his Third Letter to Nestorius (ibid., p. 271), and the Scholia on the Incarnation (10) (ibid., p. 302), and in his Catechesis 45 (9), on Easter: ‘The Self-existent comes into Being, the Uncreated is created, That which cannot be contained is contained by the intervention of an intellectual soul mediating between the Deity and the corporeity of the flesh.’ (trans. Charles G. Browne and James E Swallow) NPNF ser. 2, vol. 7, p. 426.
23 The Second Letter of Cyril to Nestorius, McGuckin, Cyril, pp. 263 and 265. See also Cyril’s Letter to the Monks of Egypt: ‘he became flesh, that is was united to flesh endowed with a rational soul, he is also said to have been born of a woman in a fleshly manner’. McGuckin, Cyril, p. 251.
24 Edwards, Catholicity, p. 43.
25 The Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius, McGuckin, Cyril, p. 271.
26 Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter to Cledonius, McGuckin, Cyril, p. 392.
27 I am indebted to Robin Orton for illuminating discussion about this during the summer of 2011, for and sight of his PhD thesis on the subject. Robert M. Orton, ‘Garments of Light, Tunics of Skin and the Body of Christ: St Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrine of the Body’ (PhD thesis, Kings College, University of London, 2009).
28 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45 (9), trans. in NPNF vol. 7, pp. 425–6.
29 GNO 111.1.146.
30 Adv. Haer. 4.20.7, cited Behr, Asceticism, p. 56.
31 Gregory of Nazianzus, Against Apollinarius, Poem 1.1.10 in PG 37, pp. 464–70, Gilbert, On God, pp. 81, 82 and 83.
32 John G. Gager, ‘Body – Symbols and Social Reality: Resurrection, Incarnation and Asceticism in Early Christianity’, Religion, vol. 12 (1982): pp. 345–63, at p. 359.
33 James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World (Philadelphia, 1995), p. 137.
34 Or. 7. 21, PG 35.781C–784A, cited by Patricia Cox Miller, ‘Dreaming the Body: An Aesthetics of Asceticism’, in Asceticism, pp. 281–300, at p. 293.
35 De Praes VII, 9–11, Apol. XLVI. 18, cited Hamilton B. Timothy, The Early Christian Apologists and Greek Philosophy (Assen, 1973), p. 58.
36 The ‘continuity’ is provided by reference to God’s ‘justice and providence’. Ulrich Berner, ‘The Image of the Philosopher in Late Antiquity and in Early Christianity’, in Hans G. Kippenberg, Yme B. Kuiper and Andy F. Sanders (eds), Concepts of Person in Religion and Thought (Berlin, 1990), pp. 125–36, at p. 132.
37 Edwards, Catholicity, p. 56.
38 Bernard McGinn notes this is especially prevalent in the Stromateis. ‘Asceticism and Mysticism in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages’ in Asceticism, pp. 58–74, at p. 61.
39 John A. McGuckin, ‘Christian Asceticism and the Early School of Alexandria’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition (Oxford, 1985), pp. 25–39, at pp. 30–31.
40 David Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (Oxford, 2007), p. 105.
41 Frances Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon (2nd edn, London, 2010), p. 139.
42 Behr, Asceticism, p. 212.
43 Strom. 6.16.136.1 and 135.3, cited Behr, Asceticism, p. 147.
44 Paedagogus 1, 13. This view is strongly supported by Ware, ‘Helper’, p. 97.
45 4.26, ACL 12 (1869) 216. Cited by McGuckin, ‘Christian’, p. 31.
46 See H.B. Timothy, The Early Christian Apologists and Greek Philosophy (Assen, 1973), ch. 4, esp. p. 78. Timothy refers us to Paed. I. VI. 28, 5. 1–3 as to whether Christians should philosophise, and Paed. III, XI, 78, 79. Timothy agrees with Leitzmann that Clement is a philosopher at the start of his career then a Gnostic – but both as a Christian. Ibid., pp. 98–9.
47 Strom. 5.14.141; see also Quis Dives Salvetur 36. McGinn, ‘Asceticism’, p. 60.
48 Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, ‘Asceticism and Anthropology: Enkrateia and “Double Creation” in Early Christianity’, in Asceticism, pp. 127–46, at p. 128.
49 For a succinct account of his anathematising through Ecumenical Councils, see John McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology (Louisville, 2004), pp. 243–6. For a reading of Origen which takes ‘Word’ as text, see Virginia Burrus Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints and Other Abject Subjects (Philadelphia, 2008).
50 Troels Engberg-Pedersen, ‘Stoic Philosophy and the Concept of the Person’, in Christopher Gill (ed.), The Person and the Human Mind: Issues in Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 1990), pp. 109–35,, at pp. 130–31, discusses the Stoic elements in Origen. Hunter, Marriage, p. 155, talks about the issue of the pre-existent soul.
51 J. McGuckin, ‘Christian’, p. 35; and see also C. Blanc, ‘L’attitude d’Origène à l’égard du corps et de la chair’, SP, vol. 17 (1982): pp. 834–50, at p. 843.
52 Contra Celsum, VII, 38, cited Ware, ‘Helper’, p. 97.
53 Regina Ammicht-Quinn, ‘Cult, Culture and Ambivalence: Images and Imagination of the Body in Christian Traditions and Contemporary Lifestyles’, in Barbara Baert, (ed.), Fluid Flesh: The Body, Religion and the Visual Arts (Leuven, 2009), pp. 67–82, at pp. 71 and 72.
54 Cited, Ware, ‘Helper’, p. 3.
55 Kallistos Ware, Foreword to Panayiobis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, trans. Norman Russell (Crestwood, 1987), p. 13.
56 For various patristic references supporting this, see Nellas, Deification, p. 45.
57 Ibid., p. 44. As Nellas puts it, in rather confessional language, ‘Before he dressed himself in the garments of skin man wore a “divinely woven” attire, his psychosomatic dress which had been woven with grace, with the light and glory of God’. Ibid., p. 52.
58 Gregory of Nazianzus, Cat Or. 8, PG 45, 33CD, cited Nellas, Deification, p. 61.
59 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection (10), trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, 1993), p. 114.
60 Peter C. Bouteneff, ‘Essential or Existential: the Problem of the Body in the Anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa’, in H.R. Drobner and A. Viciano (eds), Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Beatitudes (Leiden, 2000), p. 414.
61 Charles E. Raven, Apollinarianism: An Essay on the Christology of the Early Church (Cambridge, 1923), p. 204. Gregory of Nazianzus uses the word ‘mixture’ a lot to describe the relationship of the two natures, as observed in Brian E. Daley, ‘Divine Transcendence and Human Transformation: Gregory of Nyssa’s Anti-Apollinarian Christology’, in Sarah Coakley (ed.), Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford, 2003), pp. 67–78, at p. 67.
62 In Epistle 224, To Genethlius, for example, Basil takes pains to distance himself from his juvenile contact with the older priest. Way, Basil, vol. 2, p. 137.
63 George L. Prestige gives the most detailed and incidentally engaging account of the matter in his Fathers and Heretics (London, 1968), pp. 94–119. He argues in favour of Cappadocian misunderstanding of Apollinarius in the detail of the concept of the Heavenly Man. Ibid., p. 108.
64 Epistle 129, To Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, Way, Basil, vol. 1, p. 266. The issues raised in the letter are mostly to do with the precedence of the persons of the Trinity, rather than issues of the dual nature of Christ.
65 Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 231.
66 McGuckin, Handbook, pp. 324–5, gives the fuller picture.
67 Hunter, Marriage, p. 193.
68 Hunter, Marriage, p. 181. Irenaeus makes the same point, according to Behr, Asceticism, p. 63.
69 De res. Mort. XV.5, according to the translation of Timothy, Early, p. 55.
70 De Anima xviii, passim and xvii.ii, according to Timothy, Early, p. 46.
71 Behr, Asceticism, p. 82.
72 Among these texts we find reference to the resurrection of the flesh which is different to Paul’s view of the matter.
73 A brief overview may be found in McGuckin, Handbook, pp. 184–6.
74 Edwards, Catholicity, p. 42.
75 Behr, Asceticism, p. 38.
76 Ibid., p. 88.
77 Adv. haer. 5.1.1., Behr, Asceticism, p. 62
78 Behr, Asceticism, p. 20. See also Adv. haer. 2.13–14.
79 Ibid., p. 98.
80 Stephen M. Hildebrand argues for a date early in the 360s for Basil’s Ep. 6 and Contra Eunomium. ‘A Reconsideration of the Development of Basil’s Trinitarian Theology: The Dating of Ep. 9 and Contra Eunomium’, VC, vol. 58, no. 4 (Nov. 2004): pp. 393–406.
81 See Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 101–6, on the dating of this. I am indebted to Nathan Howard of the University of Tennessee, Martin, for helpful pointers on this matter, and a copy of his paper ‘An Ascetic’s Reproach: The Vita Macrinae as Invective Against Eunomius’, delivered at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2010. Anthony Meredith’s translation of some of the relevant documents includes some commentary on the chronology of the debate; see his Gregory of Nyssa (London, 1999), pp. 27–8.
82 Turcescu, Gregory, p. 79; see also Anthony Meredith, Gregory of Nyssa (London, 1999), pp. 28–9.
83 McGuckin, Cyril, p. 390, n. 2.
84 Trans. Matthew Steenberg, at http://www.monachos.net/library/Gregory_of_Nazianzus%2C_Second _Epistle_Against_Apollinarius_%28Epistle_52%29 (accessed 4 March 2008).
85 Andrew Meredith, Gregory of Nyssa (London, 1999), p. 47.
86 Against Apollinarius 17 = 154.7 GNO, in Meredith, Gregory p. 52.
87 Raven, Apollinarianism, pp. 262–3. Meredith thinks that the practice of looking at individual phrases is acceptable. Gregory, p. 47.
88 Bouteneff, ‘Essential’, p. 417.
89 Ibid., pp. 413–14.
90 Bouteneff, ‘Essential’, p. 412. An alternative reading of the DHO is offered by John Behr, who sees Gregory as exploring the existence of humans ‘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 animal world’, a reading which allows for ‘ascent’. John Behr, ‘The Rational Animal: A Re-reading of Gregory of Nyssa’s De Homino Opificio’, JECS, vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 1999): pp. 219–47.