On the Making of Man

St. Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio, c. 379) is the first systematic Christian anthropology, written to complete his brother Basil’s unfinished Hexaemeron and dedicated to their brother Peter of Sebaste. Its governing claim is that the dignity of the human being lies not in being a “little cosmos” but in bearing the image of the Creator — an image located in the mind (nous), in the soul’s rationality, and in its freedom of self-determination (autexousion). The treatise also advances Gregory’s much-debated reading of the doubled clause of Genesis 1:27 and his rejection of the pre-existence of souls.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Occasion and Purpose

On the Making of Man was composed around 379, shortly after the death of Basil the Great (1 January 379), as an act of fraternal piety and theological completion. Basil’s Hexaemeron — nine homilies expounding the six days of creation in Genesis 1 — had stopped short of the creation of the human being on the sixth day (see St. Basil the Great). Gregory undertook to supply what his elder brother had left undone, and he says as much in the prefatory letter, addressed to their younger brother Peter, bishop of Sebaste: he offers the work as a gift in place of the lavish presents that custom required, completing “what was wanting” in Basil’s treatment so that the great teacher’s labor should not appear deficient (On the Making of Man, preface; trans. NPNF II/5).

This origin shapes the book’s character. It is not an independent system spun from first principles but a continuation of an exegesis already under way; its subject is given by the biblical text — the creation of man “in the image” on the sixth day — and its method is to read Genesis 1:26–27 with the resources of Scripture, the philosophical psychology of his day, and the medicine and natural science available to a fourth-century bishop. The result, in thirty chapters, became the most influential single work of patristic anthropology, was rendered into Latin (by Dionysius Exiguus and again by Eriugena), and was read throughout the Byzantine and medieval traditions.

The modern editor and translator John Behr retitles the work On the Human Image of God, arguing that the traditional English title “On the Making of Man” obscures Gregory’s real theme — not the fabrication of a creature but the human being considered precisely as the image of God — and offering the first modern critical edition with facing English translation (Behr, Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God, Oxford, 2023).

Man as the Image of God

The heart of the treatise is its account of what it means that the human being is made “according to the image” (kat’ eikona) of God (Genesis 1:26–27). Gregory’s distinctive move is to relocate human dignity. The Greek philosophical tradition had praised man as a microcosm, a “little world” gathering up the elements of the universe; Gregory knows this commonplace and pointedly rejects it as too small a thing. To call man a microcosm, he says, is to honor him with the qualities of gnats and mice, for the cosmos too is made of perishable elements. The true greatness of the human being lies in this, that he is made in the image of the One who made the cosmos — the image of the Creator and not merely a summary of the creation (On the Making of Man 16 [PG 44:177–88]; Behr, On the Human Image of God, 2023).

Where, then, is the image? Gregory locates it in the mind (nous) and in the rational soul — in the intellectual, free, and self-governing character of human nature rather than in the body’s form. Because God is mind and word and love, the image consists in the soul’s rationality (logos), in its capacity for virtue, and above all in its freedom of self-determination (autexousion): the human being, like God, is autexousios, self-ruling and not subject to necessity, and it is this liberty that makes him capable of virtue and so a genuine image of the divine goodness (On the Making of Man 16). The image is conceived as a mirror: the soul is a polished surface made to reflect the beauty of its divine archetype, and it is most truly itself when it turns toward that archetype. When the mirror turns away — toward matter and the passions — it ceases to render the divine likeness and reflects instead the formless and the base. This mirror-language ties the doctrine of the image to the ascetical program of purification that runs through Gregory’s mystical works (see The Life of Moses).

The image is not a possession of any single individual in isolation. Gregory teaches that the whole of human nature — its entire fullness (pleroma), the totality of human beings whom God foreknew — is comprehended in the one act by which God made “man” in His image (On the Making of Man 16, 22). “Man” in Genesis 1:27 names humanity as a universal, and the image belongs to humanity as such; this universalism later carries the weight of his eschatology of universal restoration (see Apokatastasis in Gregory).

The Mind and the Body

Having placed the image in the nous, Gregory must explain how an immaterial, intellectual soul is related to a material body. He refuses to localize the mind in any bodily organ. Against those who would seat the governing faculty in the heart or in the brain, he argues that the mind is not confined to a place but is present throughout the whole body, pervading and using each part as an instrument while itself transcending the bodily and the spatial (On the Making of Man 12 [PG 44:153–64]). The mind’s union with the body is real and intimate — Gregory compares it to a musician and his instrument, or to the way an intelligence works through a tool — yet the mind is not a part of the bodily mixture; it is incorporeal and exceeds comprehension precisely because it images the incomprehensible God (On the Making of Man 11). The senses serve the mind as gateways through which the external world is reported to it, but understanding itself belongs to the intellect, not to the sense organs.

Gregory’s treatment is notable for its engagement with the medicine and physiology of his age. Chapters on the structure of the human frame — the upright posture that frees the hands for the service of reason and speech, the formation of the organs, sleep and dreams, the passions, and the development of the embryo — are not digressions but part of his argument that the body is fittingly made to be the instrument and dwelling of a rational soul (On the Making of Man 7–14, 30). The hand, freed by upright stance from the labor of feeding the mouth, becomes the servant of language; thus even the body’s anatomy is ordered to the rational nature that defines the image.

The Doubled Clause of Genesis 1:27

Gregory’s most influential — and most contested — exegesis concerns 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 reads the two halves as marking two distinct things. The first clause names the creation of human nature “in the image” — and since God is neither male nor female, this image-nature is in itself without sexual division. The second clause, “male and female,” names a further provision: God, foreseeing that humanity would not persevere in the angelic mode of existence but would fall toward mortality, added in advance the differentiation by which human beings might multiply in the bodily, generative manner that humanity shares with the animals — a remedy for the death that the Fall would bring (On the Making of Man 16–17 [PG 44:177–92]). On this reading the image is prior and primary; sexual differentiation is real, providential, and good in its order, but secondary to the image and bound up with the conditions of mortality.

This is the celebrated “double creation” doctrine. It must be handled with care, for it has been read in incompatible ways and has become a focal point of modern scholarship.

[Disputed: how to construe Gregory's "double creation" and the status of sexual difference. The older spiritualizing reading (drawn from Jean Daniélou and others) took chapters 16–17 to describe two successive moments or states of human nature — first a non-sexed, quasi-angelic creation in the image, then the addition of the sexed body in view of the Fall. John Behr (*Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God*, Oxford, 2023; and "The Rational Animal: A Rereading of Gregory of Nyssa's *De hominis opificio*," *JECS* 7, 1999) cautions sharply against reading this as two literal acts or two creations in time, arguing that Gregory's point is the unity and rationality of the single human animal and the priority of the image over the biological, not a two-stage cosmogony. Verna E. F. Harrison ("Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology," *JTS* 41, 1990) holds that Gregory subordinates sexual difference to the image without denigrating the body, the image being borne equally by women and men. Sarah Coakley (*Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa*, Blackwell, 2003) reads the eschatological "lability" of gender as a resource for a theology of desire ordered to God. Johannes Zachhuber (*Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa*, Brill, 1999) situates the whole within Gregory's metaphysics of universal human nature.]

The fuller treatment of sexual difference, virginity, and the eschatological recovery of the undivided human nature belongs to the companion study in this section; the present file establishes only the anthropological frame on which that treatment rests (see Gender, Virginity, and Eschatology).

Against the Pre-existence of Souls

The treatise closes by confronting two errors about the soul’s origin, both associated with the legacy of Origen. Against those who held that souls pre-existed their bodies — created in a prior intelligible world and joined to bodies only later, whether as a fall or as a punishment — and equally against those who imagined the body formed first and the soul infused afterward, Gregory argues that soul and body come into being together. There is one and the same cause of the existence of soul and body; the human being is not a soul that acquires a body nor a body that acquires a soul, but a single nature whose two aspects originate at once, present in potency in the divine will and actualized together at the generation of each individual (On the Making of Man 28–29 [PG 44:229–40]). Gregory names and rejects the “vain opinions” of those who teach the soul’s pre-existence and, with them, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), which he treats as the absurd consequence of detaching the soul from its proper body (On the Making of Man 28).

This refusal of pre-existence is a deliberate correction of Origen, whose influence Gregory otherwise honored, and it sets the Cappadocian anthropology on a firmly creationist footing: the human person is a unity from the first instant of its coming-to-be, and the body is no prison for a fallen intellect but the co-original partner of the soul in the one image-bearing nature. The destiny of that unified nature — its passage through death and its restoration in the resurrection — Gregory develops in dialogue with his sister Macrina (see The Dialogue with Macrina).

Significance

On the Making of Man gave the Eastern tradition a durable grammar for thinking about the human being: dignity grounded in the image rather than in cosmic composition; the image located in mind, reason, and freedom; the soul as a mirror called to reflect its archetype; the unity of soul and body against every dualism; and the whole of human nature comprehended in God’s one creative purpose. The doctrine of the image as the seat of freedom and rationality underwrites the Orthodox understanding of theosis — the human being is made capax Dei, capable of God, precisely as a free and rational image meant to be conformed to its archetype (see Theosis). Through Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus the treatise’s anthropology entered the mainstream of Byzantine theology, and it remains, with Irenaeus and Athanasius, one of the foundational texts of the patristic doctrine of man (see The Church Fathers).

References

Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio) [PG 44:123–256; GNO Supplementum]. Translated in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 5 (NPNF II/5). Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace.
Behr, John, ed. and trans. Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. [First modern critical edition and English translation; retitles the work On the Human Image of God.]
Behr, John. “The Rational Animal: A Rereading of Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, no. 2 (1999): 219–47.
Harrison, Verna E. F. “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology.” Journal of Theological Studies 41 (1990): 441–71.
Coakley, Sarah, ed. Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Zachhuber, Johannes. Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 46. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Daniélou, Jean. Platonisme et théologie mystique: Doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse. Paris: Aubier, 1944.