The/anthropos - Part 3

Chapter two: Why man appeared last, after the creation

In the last installment, we saw Gregory paint a gorgeous portrait of newly-fashioned creation. The moon, sun, and stars; the sky, sea, and land; the plants, fish, birds, and beasts – how ably he extols their beauty! Maybe we are tempted to deem the scene complete. Man seems almost unnecessary. And, indeed, many today look upon our race as a sort of useless embellishment, a final stroke gone awry. We arrived after countless ages, and in short order made a mess of things. So goes the popular story. Even Scripture puts man last! Is he a mere afterthought?

Gregory anticipates such considerations and intimates a response in the final sentence of the first chapter, as we saw: “[A]ll the wealth of creation by land and sea was ready, and none was there to share it.” Now, in the second chapter, he develops this preliminary answer:

For not as yet had that great and precious thing, man, come into the world of being; it was not to be looked for that the ruler should appear before the subjects of his rule; but when his dominion was prepared, the next step was that the king should be manifested.

Let us start by examining the Nyssen’s characterization of man as “great and precious.” Some have accused the modern Church of exaggerating our nobility. But it would be hard to do such a thing in principle. “You made him a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5). The problem is not that we speak too highly of man, but that the terms of praise are often foreign to the account of our constitution and estate as supplied by divine revelation. (For a survey of the data of revelation on this point, and its traditional reception, see Dignitas Infinita 11-13, and also 18-19.) Human dignity is not a philosophical construct, nor an artifact of positive law. Gregory is far from the discourse of “human rights” familiar since the Enlightenment (a discourse the Church has perhaps too liberally and sentimentally drawn upon of late).

Instead, Gregory’s lofty vision of man is informed by the human vocation as made known by the Spirit. What is this vocation, precisely? Quite simply, man is called to kingship.

Kingship? We citizens of a democratical era are unsettled by the word’s very utterance. Discomfort is justified, maybe: kingship is an ambivalent concept in Scripture, so far as it pertains to civil society (see, e.g., 1 Samuel 8). Yet from the perspective of theological anthropology, and in the cosmic scheme, our royal estate is certain and fitting: “[F]ill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28). It is the teaching of Irenaeus – the student of Polycarp, the student of John – that God not only “made man lord of the earth and all things in it,” but “secretly appointed him lord also of those who were servants in it,” that is, the angels and the archangel who is, or was, their steward (Satan, probably) (Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 11-12). Secretly, because neither man nor angel was quite ready for this arrangement to become public and effective in the first hour. (But the enemy is shrewd, and evidently he suspected our great assignment and acted accordingly . . .)

Anyway, we see that man by nature wears a crown, signaling his presidency and preeminence. In fact, Gregory depicts creation as a sort of palace and treasury to which man is entitled by divine appointment:

[T]he Maker of all had prepared beforehand, as it were, a royal lodging for the future king (and this was the land, and islands, and sea, and the heaven arching like a roof over them), and when all kinds of wealth had been stored in this palace (and by wealth I mean the whole creation, all that is in plants and trees, and all that has sense, and breath, and life; and — if we are to account materials also as wealth— all that for their beauty are reckoned precious in the eyes of men, as gold and silver, and the substances of your jewels which men delight in — having concealed, I say, abundance of all these also in the bosom of the earth as in a royal treasure-house)[.]

We could construe such language in a crude and avaricious way, as if the world and its non-human inhabitants are so many resources to be extracted, collected, and consumed – an interpretation that would widely miss the mark. Rather, Gregory intends to magnify the splendor of creation, which is “fit for a king,” as the saying goes. Moreover, the metaphor he advances has a subtle meaning that we must discover. Man is a king because he resembles and exhibits the true king, God; it follows that the world is a king’s palace because it resembles and exhibits the true king’s palace, heaven. Just as man corresponds to God, so the realm of man corresponds to the realm of God. At least, such similarity is the ideal. “On earth as it is in heaven…” (This relationship, we comment in passing, undergirds the concept of man as the imago Dei, and it serves as the deep foundation of the temple motif that runs through Scripture.)

We must add a further dimension. According to Gregory, man is not simply the world’s ruler, but also its contemplator:

[God] thus manifests man in the world, to be the beholder of some of the wonders therein, and the lord of others; that by his enjoyment he might have knowledge of the Giver, and by the beauty and majesty of the things he saw might trace out that power of the Maker which is beyond speech and language.

Man is meant to study the world and its marvels, that he might obtain some insight into their primal and transcendent Source. This dynamic is entirely Scriptural. “By the greatness of the beauty, and of the creature, the Creator of them may be seen, so as to be known thereby” (Wisdom 13:5), and, “His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20).

Does it confound us that God does not more directly show Himself? “You are a God who hides” (Isaiah 45:15). Why? It almost seems that a veil is necessary, at least initially. It was not right (is not right), perhaps not even possible, that man should immediately enjoy the beatific vision, which is his true end. Thus the doctrine of Irenaeus, inherited by Gregory, that we should be “disciplined beforehand and previously exercised for a reception into that glory which shall afterwards be revealed” (Against Heresies IV, 20, 8).

But we are reluctant to use this image – “veil.” For evidently creation declares God as much as it hides Him. In this respect, the cosmos is similar to the incarnation, since the humble flesh of Christ both reveals and conceals the surpassingly excellent Deity, even as a cloud catches light, displaying its brilliance, while hiding the sun which is its origin (as Thomas says somewhere). There is a luster of divinity in and upon the things that are made. Little surprise that we are fascinated by the world; this is no evil thing. It abounds with wonder and significance, even in its meanest, strangest parts. We are reminded of Aristotle’s famous defense of the study of animals in Historia Animalium:

We therefore must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvelous: and as Heraclitus, when the strangers who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and hesitated to go in, reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, as even in that kitchen divinities were present, so we should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful. Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end are to be found in Nature's works in the highest degree, and the resultant end of her generations and combinations is a form of the beautiful.

We return to man’s twofold role. Is there some intrinsic connection between the offices of king and contemplative? Surely. For by contemplation we obtain wisdom, and by wisdom we order things rightly, so as to realize peace, which is the proper end of authority. So the royal ideal sketched by Moses: “[W]hen [the king] sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law . . . And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life” (Deuteronomy 17:18-19). This sapiential vision of royal rule has its conceptual antecedents in the opening pages of Genesis, where tradition has discerned in Adam a sovereign whose mastery entailed “science” in the real and original sense:

In the state of innocence man would not have had any bodily need of animals—neither for clothing, since then they were naked and not ashamed, there being no inordinate motions of concupiscence—nor for food, since they fed on the trees of paradise—nor to carry him about, his body being strong enough for that purpose. But man needed animals in order to have experimental knowledge of their natures. This is signified by the fact that God led the animals to man, that he might give them names expressive of their respective natures (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, 96, 1, ad. 3).

Hence the role of David and Solomon as Adam figures. In each of their persons we find the fusion of dominion and contemplation, which enabled them to order earthly affairs in harmony with the divine plan (albeit imperfectly). For this reason, they do not simply represent the model sovereign, but the model man. Thus their significance as types of Christ, the ultimate Adam, who possesses all power and wisdom, and mediates between heaven and earth as cosmic priest-king, arranging the latter after the former.

This salutary conjunction is the subject of the first and second psalms, which really form a single piece: the blessed man who meditates on torah is the anointed of the Lord, whom God sets over the nations. We are familiar with the Christological interpretation. But the Christological interpretation contains and assumes a theological-anthropological interpretation, the content of which we have just traced. Indeed, the sapiential construction of kingship, and its implicit mediatorial, i.e., priestly, dimension, and its additional association with divine sonship and universal dominion, is hardly unique to Israel, suggesting the universality of this primordial archetype, planted in the recesses of collective memory, and finally fulfilled in Christ.

As chapter two progresses, Gregory gives yet another explanation for man’s late appearance: divine hospitality. God, he says, delayed Adam’s introduction, that He might first design a place of delight and repose for him.

[A]s a good host does not bring his guest to his house before the preparation of his feast, but, when he has made all due preparation, and decked with their proper adornments his house, his couches, his table, brings his guest home when things suitable for his refreshment are in readiness, in the same manner the rich and munificent entertainer of our nature, when He had decked the habitation with beauties of every kind, and prepared this great and varied banquet, then introduced man, assigning to him as his task not the acquiring of what was not there, but the enjoyment of the things which were there[.]

Here the world is not so much a royal estate prepared for a king as it is a dinner party prepared for a friend. The emphasis is not on man’s dominion over a realm, but his participation in a banquet. When we ponder the world from this vantage, we appreciate the anger vented by Pope Francis at the ecological ruination about us. We are rude guests, abusing a precious invitation. By despoiling creation, we demean the Creator.

Yet it almost perturbs us to envision God playing host to man. Where does Gregory find this bold theme? In Scripture, of course, which repeatedly presents God as laying a supper before His image-bearers: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden’” (Genesis 2:16), and, “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food” (Isaiah 25:6), and, “He took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them” (Luke 22:19). Man is a hylomorphic composite. Thus, it is fitting that God should provide goods suited to the components of his nature, and should by sensible delights draw him to spiritual delights.

[F]or this reason He gives him as foundations the instincts of a twofold organization, blending the Divine with the earthy, that by means of both he may be naturally and properly disposed to each enjoyment, enjoying God by means of his more divine nature, and the good things of earth by the sense that is akin to them.

This reflection takes us back to the last chapter. There Gregory sketched a cosmology that features the conjunction and intermingling of heaven and earth. We now see the purpose of those prefatory remarks. Man himself is the meeting place of things supernal and mundane (hence the fittingness of the incarnation of God as man and not, for instance, angel). He has a “twofold organization,” combining within himself the highest and the lowest: divine dust! Thus he has an affinity for that which is above and that which is below. A remarkably humane conclusion for a person often tarred as a relentless Platonizer. That said, Gregory does impute unequal value to the body and the soul, and to their respective appetites and goods. But basically we have the affirmation of the visible, tangible order.

Gregory does not proffer these conclusions at random. The treatise is advancing toward the discussion of man’s eschatological expectations: above all, the resurrection of the dead and the renovation of the cosmos. As such, it is necessary for the Nyssen to form a positive account of the material realm – although, as we shall see, Gregory anticipates that this “material” will be radically transformed. But we get ahead of ourselves.

To be continued. The next installment will consider the third chapter of the treatise, “That the nature of man is more precious than all the visible creation.”