Gender, Virginity, and Eschatology

St. Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise On Virginity (his earliest work, c. 371) and the anthropology of On the Making of Man together yield one of the most discussed teachings in the Fathers: that sexual differentiation — the division of humanity into male and female — belongs to a second, providential moment of creation, foreseen by God in view of the Fall, and that in the resurrection the human person is restored to a condition in which “there is neither male nor female.” This file lays out the texts, the “double creation” reading and its eschatology, and the substantial modern scholarly debate, handling the question with care and naming the interpreters on each side.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

On Virginity (c. 371)

On Virginity (De virginitate) is Gregory’s earliest treatise, written around 371 while Basil was organizing the ascetic life in Pontus and Cappadocia, and probably at Basil’s prompting. It is, in form, a protreptic — an exhortation to the virginal life — but its deeper subject is the soul’s restoration to its true nature. Famously, Gregory praises virginity from the standpoint of a man who confesses he is himself shut out from it: he is married, and so, he says, can only admire the harbor from the open sea (On Virginity 3; trans. NPNF II/5). The remark is the chief evidence that Gregory was married (to Theosebia; see The Holy Family), though some readers have taken the passage as rhetorical rather than strictly autobiographical.

For Gregory, virginity is not primarily a bodily state but a mode of the soul’s purity and its undivided turning toward God; it is the condition that imitates the incorruption of the divine life and of the resurrection, and it is bound up with apatheia (freedom from the passions) and the recovery of the image of God (On Virginity 12–13). Marriage is not condemned — Gregory’s own family produced its saints from marriage — but it is set within the order of a fallen world subject to death, of which sexual generation is, for Gregory, a sign and a remedy at once.

The Double Creation and the Two Moments of Genesis 1:27

Gregory’s reading turns on the doubled clause of Genesis 1:27: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.” Gregory takes the two halves as marking two distinct things. The first — humanity “in the image of God” — names the true creation of human nature, which (since God is neither male nor female) is itself without sexual division. The second — “male and female” — names a further provision, added to the image and not part of it, by which human nature is fitted for bodily generation (On the Making of Man 16–17 [PG 44:177–92]; trans. NPNF II/5; see On the Making of Man).

Why the addition? Because, Gregory says, God foreknew that humanity would fall from the angelic mode of existence into the realm of death, and so provided in advance a mode of multiplication suited to mortal creatures — the sexual, generative mode that humanity shares with the animals — in place of the angelic mode of increase that humanity would have had, had it not fallen (On the Making of Man 17). On this “double creation” reading, sexual differentiation is real and good as God’s providential provision, but it is secondary: it is not what the image of God is, and it is ordered to the conditions of mortality.

The Eschatological Frame: “Neither Male nor Female”

The eschatology completes the anthropology. If sexual division was added in view of the Fall and death, then in the resurrection — when death is abolished and human nature restored to its true and original condition — that division is transcended. Gregory reads Galatians 3:28 (“there is neither male nor female”) and the dominical saying that in the resurrection they “neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels” (Luke 20:35–36; Matt 22:30) as describing the restored, “angelic” humanity in which the generative differentiation no longer obtains (On the Making of Man 17; On the Soul and the Resurrection [PG 46:148–60]; see The Dialogue with Macrina). The resurrection is not the abolition of the body but the restoration of human nature to the pleroma it was meant to be, freed from the passions and the mortality that the sexual mode of existence served.

This is the structure that makes virginity, for Gregory, eschatological: the virgin anticipates in this life the incorrupt, undivided condition of the age to come.

The Modern Debate

Gregory’s account has become a focal point of modern scholarship — in patristics, in the theology of the body, and in gender theory — and it is genuinely contested at several points. The guide presents the principal readings without adjudicating among them.

[Disputed: how to read Gregory's "double creation" and the status of sexual difference — Sarah Coakley (e.g. *The New Asceticism*, Bloomsbury, 2015; and essays in *Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa*, Blackwell, 2003) reads Gregory as teaching that gendered embodiment is real but eschatologically "labile" and transcended in the angelic resurrection life, and finds in him resources for a non-essentialist theology of desire ordered to God; Verna E. F. Harrison ("Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology," *JTS* 41, 1990) argues that Gregory makes sexual difference secondary to the image but does not denigrate the body, and that the image is held by human nature as such, equally in men and women; John Behr (*Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God*, Oxford, 2023; and "The Rational Animal," *JECS* 7, 1999) cautions against an over-spiritualized "double creation" reading, arguing that Gregory's point is the unity and rationality of the one human being and the priority of the image over the biological, not two literal acts of creation; Johannes Zachhuber (*Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa*, Brill, 1999) situates the doctrine within Gregory's metaphysics of universal human nature; Daniélou read it through the lens of the *epektasis* and the angelic life.]

Two further cautions belong in the text. First, Gregory’s “double creation” is not the heresy of two creators or two acts of fabrication in time; it is a single creative purpose of God read under two aspects — the image and the providential provision for mortality — which is why it never fell under the censure that struck dualist or Origenist constructions (Behr, On the Human Image of God, Oxford, 2023, introduction). Second, Gregory’s view that sexual difference is secondary to the image should not be flattened either into a modern egalitarianism or into a denigration of the body: Gregory affirms the goodness of the body and its resurrection, and affirms that women and men equally bear the divine image — his own theology was learned, by his own account, at the feet of his sister Macrina (see The Life of Macrina).

References

Gregory of Nyssa. On Virginity (De virginitate) [GNO VIII/1; PG 46:317–416]. Translated in NPNF II/5.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio) 16–17 [PG 44:177–92]. Translated in NPNF II/5; and Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God, trans. John Behr, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Coakley, Sarah, ed. Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003; and The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Harrison, Verna E. F. “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology.” Journal of Theological Studies 41 (1990): 441–71.
Behr, John. Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023; and “The Rational Animal: A Rereading of Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1999): 219–47.
Zachhuber, Johannes. Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance. Leiden: Brill, 1999.