| As Moses records in his “mystical anthropogeny, “man (male and female) was made in “the image and likeness of God,” that is, to Adam and Eve the genderless God imparted “a certain Godlike grace” wherein they would be able to share in divine Nature (De hom, opif., VIII–IX PG 44 148C–149B). Unlike Philo, St Gregory espoused no theory of androgeny. The words of St Paul, that “in Christ there is neither male nor female” ( Gal. 3:28 ), did not imply for Gregory that the two sexes did not exist in Paradise; nor that in Christ they have disappeared. Rather, as Moses said, “male and female created He them” ( Gen.1:27 ), as the natural attributes of humanity (De hom. opif., XVI PG 44 181CD). The progenitors of the human race possessed “the grace of immortality” (De hom. opif., XVII PG 44 188B), which they will subsequently lose through disobedience. Death was their reward, as God promised. The “image of God” in which Adam (and Eve) was made, will be shattered. Their divided progeny will suffer the same penality because they share the same humanity, the same substance with the fallen Adam. In “the fullness of time,” there will come a second Adam, Christ the Lord, forging a “new creation,” Himself the first of a new race, which bears His Name. He will reunite the “image” and recall the first man to his primitive destiny. The “new creature” will partake of the Second Adam’s immortality (achieved by obedience, even to the death and victory of the Cross), as the “old man” partook of the first Adam’s mortality (the penalty of disobedience, even by consuming the fruit of the tree). Gregory " s Christian view of the first man’s Fall is a major difference between himself and Philo of Alexandria. Whereas Gregory, following the Scriptures, described human choice as the cause of the Fall and the introduction of evil into the creation, Philo, if we may believe N.P. Williams, seems to have adapted the Greek idea of evil (as inseparably bound up with the nature of finite existence) to the Jewish idea of “evil imagination” (yêcer ha-ra), that is, the “passions” as “rooted in the flesh” or “connatural with our race” (Quis rer. |
