A Blending of the Earthly and the Divine

Nyssen explains the reason for God's creation of human beings as material creatures in terms of their relationship with God and with the rest of material creation. God hosts a feast, and humanity comes as God's honored guest. Thus he saw fit to create Adam last, so that he might fully lay out the banquet before his arrival.⁹

Humanity rules over the material creation. The land represents the imperial residence, and the flora and fauna serve as the ruler's wealth and subjects. Through the delights of creation and mankind's enjoyment of them, God intended that human beings 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.”¹⁰ The ineffable and unknowable transcendent God makes himself known in his works, which reflect the divine beauty.

God fashioned humanity as a hybrid mixture of earthly and divine, so that by means of his sensual nature, he might enjoy the earthly creation and, by means of his likeness to God, the divine. Nyssen locates the immaterial divine aspect of human nature in the mind, which, like the immanent but incorporeal Word,¹¹

does not stay confined to a single bodily organ but remains present throughout the body.¹² Yet the rational nature and activities of the mind depend upon the form and function of the body. The upright posture not only signifies humanity's royal dignity rising above the servile posture of the other creatures, but it frees the hands for carrying, which allows the mouth more subtlety for speech in the service of reason.¹³Through the senses, the portals of the mind, the intellect receives and interprets a multidimensional flow of perceptions about the world. These perceptions equip the mind to reason.¹⁴

As God's viceroy over creation, humanity exerts dominion over the earth through the governance of reason. The rule of reason perfects material creation by apprehending the proper ends of all things and ordering them to those purposes. The perfecting sovereignty of reason manifests most clearly for Nyssen in the relationship of the rational human soul and the body. He speaks of the soul as endowed with an autocratic will necessary for its royal commission. Thus the soul bears the image of the Lord of the universe, whose rational dignity appears in those faculties and virtues necessary for the soul's autarchy.

¹⁵

Through the rational faculties, human beings enjoy what Nyssen calls “what is free from necessity” (

).

¹⁶

Non-rational animals remain subject to a kind of necessity, because they can know only the immediate, sensual good of a particular object and therefore can seek only sensual goods. Moreover, because they lack reason, they do not have the capability of self-criticism and, consequently, may pursue the object of their appetite with a reckless abandon that may prove destructive.¹⁷

Human beings, by contrast, have the ability both to apprehend the higher, intelligible goods of God and to criticize themselves about the impulses of their appetitive nature. Therefore, bodily appetites do not wholly determine human actions. The dominion of the rational soul over the body has the effect of infusing the body with the beauty of the divine.¹⁸

The psychosomatic unity of the person proves central to Nyssen's anthropology. Yet in De hominis opificio, he emphasizes the rational soul, which bears the image of God. Although the human soul possesses the faculties of the vegetative soul of plants and animals and the sentient soul of animals, human beings possess not a tripartite but a single trichotomous soul that finds perfection, or completion, in the rational soul.¹⁹

The benevolent hegemony of the mind, invests the body with order, form, and beauty. The logic of this view should imply that in matters of sexuality, the mind controls and orders sexual activity and transforms it from a bestial act of passion to a loftier act of love for one's mate and of obedience to God's command to “be fruitful and multiply.” In other words, given Nyssen's view of the hierarchical relationship of the soul to the body, one might expect a view of sex not radically different from Augustine's. Adam and Eve, Augustine asserts, would have had sexual intercourse, even if God had not expelled them from Paradise. He explains the chief difference between sex in Eden and sex after the fall with the notion that concupiscence would not have tainted intercourse in Paradise, but reason would have controlled it.²⁰ Based on Nyssen's view of humanity as the union of the rational and animal natures, Behr reasons that, because gender remains an essential component of the animal nature—which God intends for humanity to raise up—gender must remain an essential component of human nature as well. Behr concludes unequivocally: “Human beings are not and never were, nor were ever meant to be, solely intellectual beings, as the angels, but they embrace both dimensions of creation, the asexual rational part and the sexual non-rational.”²¹ Yet Nyssen does not present at all this picture of sex and gender in De hominis opificio.

Gender, Sexuality, and the Fall

In chapter 16 of De hominis opificio, Nyssen explores the seemingly contradictory assertion of Gen 1:27—that God made humankind in his own image yet at the same time created male and female (

) alien to his divine nature. For as Paul says in Galatians 3:28, “In Christ … there is neither male nor female.” This paradoxical association of the image of God and something alien to the divine archetype, Nyssen says, teaches a “lofty doctrine”—that humanity represents the “mean,” or midpoint, between the two, created with both the rational, divine nature of God and the non-rational, gendered nature of the beasts.

²²

The wording of Gen 1:27 suggests that the rational, divine nature “precedes” (

) the division of human beings into male and female.

²³

This ordering, however, does not mean that God performed two separate acts of creation. Rather, Moses' words depict the double aspect of human nature: first, the rational, in common with God and the angels, which he does not differentiate according to gender; and second, the corporeal, in common with non-rational beasts, which he so divides. The qualities of the divine image occur thus “prior” only at the level of God's intention.

Nyssen explains that Scripture employs the phrase “image of God” to express God's will that human beings participate in the fullness of God's goodness: “For if the Deity is the fullness of good, and this is His image, then the image finds its resemblance to the Archetype in being filled with all good”²⁴

—by that he means the moral and intellectual virtues, chief among which he includes freedom from necessity, “not in bondage to any natural power.”²⁵ Yet the language of “image” suggests that God made humanity with qualities different from the divine nature: “Now as the image bears in all points the semblance of the archetypal excellence, if it had not a difference in some respect, being absolutely without divergence it would no longer be a likeness, but will in that case manifestly be absolutely identical with the Prototype.”²⁶ The critical difference between human beings and the divine archetype lies in the notion that whereas God constitutes both the source of goodness and eternal duration—goodness therefore inhering in God's immutable nature—human beings, by the fact of their creation from nothing, remain inherently changeable.²⁷The Creator foreknew that the mutability inherent in our created nature, combined with the unconstrained freedom of the human will, would lead to the fall and death. Nyssen thus writes: “perceiving beforehand by His power of foreknowledge what … is the tendency of the motion of man's will—as He saw what would be, He devised for His image the distinction of male and female, which has no reference to the Divine Archetype, but, as we have said, is an approximation to the less rational nature.”²⁸ Thus while God added gender as a part of human nature prior to the fall, the reason for the addition lay in God's anticipation of the fall.²⁹

Behr contends that this passage (16.14) introduces Nyssen's catabatic anthropology, characterized by the overturning (

) of reason's proper governing of creation. This overturning of the created order results from “humankind's appropriation to the more non-rational nature.”

³⁰

Although passion certainly overturned the rule of reason, humanity's failure to follow reason did not give our mode of procreation its bestial character. Rather, Nyssen says, God's fashioning of humanity as male and female, a function of our kinship with the non-rational animals, gave the bestial character to human procreation. One should note, however, that Nyssen does not present the account of God's creation of the double aspect of human nature based on Gen 1:26–27 in neutral terms. Rather, his exegesis grows out of his concern for the discontinuities between the archetypal divine nature and the present state of human nature. He poses a question: “how then is man, this mortal, passible, short-lived being, the image of that nature which is immortal, pure, and everlasting?”³¹

He then introduces his interpretation of Gen 1:27: In articulating the twofold creation of human nature, Scripture “darkly conveys” that we can identify the wretchedness of our present condition with the addition of gender and sexuality—“a thing which is alien from our conceptions of God.”³³

Behr argues that although God foreknew the fall into sin and saw how gender would ensure that the species would not die out once he had imposed the penalty of death, he tied his intention to divide human beings into male and female to our essential kinship with the beasts. Based on Nyssen's claim that angelic procreation would have occurred in paradise had the fall not occurred, Behr says that the angelic mode does not refer to a specifically asexual mode but rather to procreation fully controlled by reason, that faculty which we share with angels.³⁴

Behr makes a reasonable conclusion—that to have kinship with animals entails being marked for gender. But the text does not support it. Rather, while God divided animals into male and female, he would not have gendered human beings had he not foreknown the fall into sin.

Nyssen says explicitly that sexual reproduction constitutes a necessary and fitting mode of procreation for fallen humanity. The fall into sin entails a reorientation of human desire from those lofty intellectual goods proper to human nature to the sensual goods sought by animals. Having foreknown humanity's inability to maintain its focus on the divine goods, Nyssen says, God “formed for our nature that contrivance for increase (

) which befits those who had fallen into sin (

), implanting in mankind, instead of (

) the angelic majesty of nature, that animal and non-rational mode by which they now succeed one another.”

³⁵

One should notice two important points in this brief passage. First, Nyssen speaks of the “animal and non-rational mode” of procreation as befitting those who have fallen into sin. After the fall, human beings oriented themselves toward those sensually appealing goods and so remain driven, like the animals, by the appetites of our non-rational faculties to sensual, material goods. Since the non-rational animals cannot grasp nature's purposes, God ensured the preservation of species by endowing animals with a mode of procreation that provides a powerful, sensually pleasing inducement for reproducing. Thus sexual intercourse represents a fitting mode of reproduction for those who have fallen, because sexual procreation accommodates the sensual orientation of sin.

At the very end of chapter 17, Nyssen explicitly links the bestial mode of procreation to the hypersensuality of sin and identifies it as the cause of our present misery. Commenting on Ps 48:13 (LXX)—“Man being in honour knew it not; … he is compared to the beasts that have no understanding, and made like unto them”—Nyssen explains that the honor, which human beings did not know, resided in the angelic character of their nature, whereas their likeness to cattle lay in their mode of procreation.

Here Nyssen restates his earlier claim that God made humans like the beasts— equipped for sexual procreation—because of their sensual inclinations. But he also asserts that the passions proceeded from this animal mode of generation. His words at the beginning of chapter 18—“ from this beginning all our passions issue as from a spring”—suggest that the “beginning” of passion springs from the “inclination to material things” and that this inclination arises specifically from the animal mode of generation.

The list of impulses that constitute this “beginning” (anger, pleasure, cowardice, boldness, desire of gain, dislike of loss, and the like) do not seem to have anything to do with sexual procreation per se. Yet he makes the point that human beings took “something of their nature (I mean the mode of generation)” and “a share of the other attributes contemplated in that nature.” The passions arise from those impulses that necessarily accompany the animal mode of procreation. He does not consider the impulses in themselves as bad; on the contrary, he regards them as necessary for the survival of the animals. Yet in human beings, the impulses of animals become passions precisely when they receive direction not from reason but from the uncritical drives of the non-rational faculties:

What does Nyssen mean by saying that “all these and the like affections entered man's composition through the animal mode of generation”? One possible reading may assert that all passions represent expressions of the non-rational appetitive aspect of the soul—desire (

), fear, and irascibility, or spirit (

). Therefore, when God gave to human beings the bestial mode of procreation, driven by a desire for sexual pleasure, he necessarily gave them the sensual appetites of the non-rational soul. If Nyssen intends this in fact, then he makes a circular argument: God made humanity male and female and equipped them for a bestial mode of procreation in order to accommodate the sensual hedonism characteristic of fallen humanity; at the same time, God's giving mankind the animal mode of generation from which those passions arise caused the fall into sensual hedonism. This implies that humanity arrives virtually born into a state of fallenness. The last line contains the key point. The love of pleasure—the driving force behind sexual procreation and the impetus for all passions—God gave to humanity along with the capacity for sexual reproduction. The passions arise in human beings because the animal mode of generation exacerbates the soul's sensual orientation, which compromises the intellect's ability to control the non-rational impulses.

Nyssen says clearly that one does not find the fully developed, human passions among the beasts. As Behr notes, the passions—malevolence, envy, deceit, conspiracy, hypocrisy, and the like—result from “the evil husbandry of the mind.”³⁸

These distinctly human sins arise from the mind's voluntary submission to the non-rational impulses. Nyssen writes: The non-rational impulses of the soul corrupt the mind by co-opting reason. When the soul submits to non-rational drives, innately oriented toward the material goods apprehended by the senses, it falls into a state of passion. Thus one exchanges the stamp of the divine nature for a likeness to the non-rational animals, because the soul has ceased to participate in the higher goods of God's nature and therefore has lost its likeness to the divine beauty. When the mind turns to the material goods by the love of pleasure, it no longer mirrors the rational order of God's goodness and so cannot rightly order the body.⁴⁰ Invoking the metaphor of the mirror in De virginitate, Nyssen says that the mind dominated by the passions cannot reflect the divine image any more than a mirror marred by stain can reflect a handsome face.⁴¹For when the love of the sensual directs the mind to the mundane rather than the eternal, the mind does not enjoy contemplative communion with God and so does not bear likeness to God.

While sins grow out of the sensual orientation that begins with the bestial dimension of human nature, this orientation, combined with the imaginative power of the intellect, leads human beings to seek material goods quantitatively and categorically beyond the scope of those goods desired by non-rational animals. “Thus,” Nyssen concludes, “our love of pleasure took its beginning from our being made like to the non-rational creation, and was increased by the transgressions of men, becoming the parent of so many varieties of sins arising from pleasure as we cannot find among the non-rational animals.”⁴²

The present misery of fallen humanity, which stands in discordant juxtaposition with the blessings of the divine image, exceeds the injury caused by the simple desire and irascibility of the beasts.

Nyssen goes on to point out that these same non-rational impulses, the precursors of human passions, become virtues when governed by reason. Desire (

) becomes godly love (

); irascibility (

) becomes courage (

) in the face of temptation.

⁴³

In this way, one raises the lower nature, just as Behr argues. That does not necessarily say, however, that God intended these non-rational impulses for human nature irrespective of the fall. In De anima et resurrectione, Nyssen, speaking through the voice of Macrina, says that the non-rational faculties of the soul—desire (

) and spirit (

)—remain necessary for moral action in the present life but do not, properly speaking, represent components of the soul made in the image of God. Rather, one should view them simply as auxiliary faculties that lie on the soul's margin:

In other words, the intellectual faculties of the soul enable us to participate in and enjoy the blessings of the divine nature, while the non-rational faculties of the soul serve the mundane purpose of acting in the world. When reason controls the non-rational faculties, the resulting moral good can serve the contemplative ends of the soul's ascent to God.

Returning then to Nyssen's explanation of the human mode of reproduction in chapter 17.4—that God “formed for our nature that contrivance for increase which befits those who had fallen into sin …”—we note the second important point in Nyssen's statement that God “implant[ed] in mankind, instead of the angelic majesty of nature, that animal and non-rational mode [of procreation].” Here Nyssen answers the question of how human beings would have procreated, had they not fallen. Had God known that humans would remain turned toward the intelligible goods proper to their nature, he would have equipped the human form with the mechanism that allows for asexual procreation among the angels. Since God foreknew our fall and our sensual orientation akin to the animals, however, he gave humans a mode of procreation like the animals: “God contrived for His work the distinction of male and female.”⁴⁵

Nyssen's significant contrast between the animal mode of procreation and the angelic nature suggests an alternative form of human embodiment. Contrary to Behr's insistence that gender and sexual reproduction remain essential to human nature as the perfect synthesis of the rational and animal natures, Nyssen says explicitly that the structure of the human body could have and would have taken another form had human history been on track for a different destiny. In other words, humanity could represent the union of the rational, divine nature of angels with the sentient, material nature of animals without incorporating into the human body all the functions and capacities of the animals. Nyssen regards this as true in two ways. First, although mankind forms the midpoint between the divine and the animals, God intentionally did not give to human beings the natural powers of speed or covering or strength or “weaponry” (e.g., horns or claws or venom).⁴⁶ Even as human beings obtain food and defend themselves by different means than do animals, so too might they procreate differently. Second, and more importantly, the human body in the resurrection will transform into the angelic nature that God intended from the beginning, while at the same time retain the material composition of the animal-like body. To understand this point, one must examine Nyssen's treatment of the relationship between the angelic nature and the body of the resurrection.

The Angelic Life and the Body of the Resurrection

In his preface to De hominis opificio, Nyssen writes: “For it is necessary to know those things concerning man which came to be—of that which we believe to have come to be, of that which we expect to appear later, and of that which is now seen and leave nothing unexamined.”

⁴⁷

The wording of this passage seems curious; for, Nyssen divides his discussion of human beings into humankind in the past, then in the future, and finally in the present. This grouping of the past and the future together followed by the present shows that Nyssen identifies God's original purpose for humanity in the beginning with humanity's eschatological destiny, in contradistinction from humanity in the present: “Now the resurrection promises us nothing else than the restoration of the fallen to their ancient state; for the grace we look for is a certain return to the first life, bringing back again to Paradise him who was cast out from it.”⁴⁸

His equation of the creation in the beginning with the eschaton echoes Origen's principle of

—the end shall resemble the beginning. For this reason, Nyssen asserts, we can understand God's creative intention for humanity in the beginning by understanding the nature of the resurrection. Nyssen does acknowledge that any eschatological speculation must begin with the caveat that the precise nature of the resurrection body lies outside the scope of our present experience and knowledge. Although he considers Christ's resurrection as paradigmatic of our resurrection—as a bodily resurrection—Paul's metaphors of “the house not made with hands” (2 Cor 5:1–2) and the transformation of the grain (1 Cor 15:42–44) imply the body of the resurrection changes into a form more glorious than our present bodies. Since the resurrection will bring a transformation of the body into something different than the body as we know it now, Nyssen resists making definitive pronouncements about that which necessarily remains “completely hidden and unknown.”

⁴⁹

Nevertheless, while not dogmatic as to the exact nature of the resurrection body, Nyssen does venture some suggestions as to the qualities of the resurrection based on his reading of certain key apocalyptic passages from Scripture.

One of the key apocalyptic texts, Jesus' description of “children of the resurrection” as “equal to the angels” (Luke 20:35–36), becomes paradigmatic for Nyssen's understanding of the resurrection. Thus, he says, “if … the life of those restored is closely related to that of the angels, it is clear that the life before the transgression was a kind of angelic life, and hence also our return to the ancient condition of our life is compared to the angels.”⁵⁰

Nyssen repeatedly speaks of the resurrection as a “restoration” or a “return” to the angelic life.

One should not, however, interpret the language of restoration (

or

) to mean that the resurrection indicates simply a return to Eden. As Brian Daley has observed, the “restoration to our ancient state” does not refer to some prehistorical existence; rather, it means “the actual perfection or ‘fullness’ of the rational creature's possible reality, eternally present in the mind of God,

or goal that pre-exists the human race's historical journey and becomes realized in creatures gradually in time.”

⁵¹

Thus the resurrection brings the fulfillment of the germinally perfect form, or nature, fashioned according to the divine image that God created potentially at the level of his will and foreknowledge before his actual making of Adam.⁵²

The only sense in which the resurrection represents a true restoration of humanity's historical past arises from the notion that God will free the body of the resurrection from the effects of sin. Comparing the resurrection to the cleansing of the leper Naaman the Syrian in the river Jordan, Nyssen says that “the deformity of sickness takes possession of the form [of the body] like some strange mask, and when this is removed by the word, … the form that had been hidden by disease is once more by means of health restored to sight again with its own marks of identity.”⁵³

The form (

) here does not refer to universal human nature but to the distinctive form of each individual preserved in the soul, which orders the body's scattered bits of matter to that form. He makes the critical point that the body restored will resemble the body of Eden only as a pristine material body devoid of the effects of sin.

Nyssen elsewhere identifies aspects of Eden that God will restore in the resurrection—the tree of life, the original grace of the image and dignity of rule—yet he says explicitly that we hope not for those things given to humanity by God for the “necessary uses of life” but rather for the things of a kingdom of ineffable mystery.⁵⁴

As does Origen, Nyssen appeals to Paul's analogy of the grain and body of corruption in 1 Cor 15:42. Even as the plant that emerges from the buried grain produces “the same species … born again as had grown in the beginning,” but in radically glorified appearance, so too humanity of the resurrection reproduces its state in Eden, but changed into something more magnificent.⁵⁵ Thus resurrected humanity will resemble humanity according to the divine image as God willed it in the beginning, free from non-rational impulses given in accommodation of the impending fall. Consequently, the angelic life of the resurrection cannot suit the life of animals, then perfectly governed and ordered by reason, as Behr argues. Rather, for Nyssen, the angelic life of the resurrection means a life oriented not at all to the sensual but to God, whose life-giving power sustains human beings in body and soul.

Nyssen grounds his understanding of the transformation of our earthly bodies into spiritual or angelic bodies upon his ontology of quality. Rather than basing his anthropology on a hylemorphic theory of substance (i.e., prime matter given identity by the imposition of form), Nyssen sees human beings as a collection of intelligible properties or qualities (

).

⁵⁶

This does not say that he abandons the concept of matter. As in his discussion of the incarnation in Antirrheticus adversus Apollinarium 54, Nyssen uses the term

to refer, not just to the matter of the body, but to the whole person, body and soul, which Christ took from Mary's womb.

⁵⁷

This ontology of quality lays the foundation for Nyssen's accounts of the resurrection and of our divinization in this life. As a collection of intelligible qualities, which can change, a human being can, by contemplative participation in God and asceticism, take on the divine qualities or attributes of God. So too in the resurrection, the creative powers of God change the qualities of the body, and the soul whose vision of the divine communicates the divine qualities of purity and incorruptibility to the body sustains it. Since “one grace will shine upon all,” all will transform into homogeneous bodies, which will manifest the virtues and grace of Christ, who shines upon us, and in whom we participate.⁵⁸

This understanding of the communication of qualities by contemplative participation constitutes the central grounds for his conception of the angelic life and thus the life of the resurrection.

At the end of chapter 18, Nyssen appeals to the model of the angelic life to describe the character of the divine image restored in humanity eschatologically. He addresses the imagined objection of someone who “feels shame at the fact that our [present] life, like that of the brutes, is sustained by food, and for this reason deems man unworthy of being supposed to have been framed in the image of God.” Such an objection assumes an incongruity between our shared life with the beasts, in which food sustains us, and the life characteristic of one made in the image of a God, who does not need food. According to the logic of Behr's reading, Nyssen should simply reply: humanity as the midpoint of creation must share with the beasts a nature nourished by food—for that remains essential to the animal nature humanity possesses. Unlike the beasts, however, reason controls humans' appetite for food. Therefore, our shared mode of sustenance should not cause shame. This, however, Nyssen does not reply. To begin with, he does not dismiss the suggestion that we should feel shame at being like the non-rational animals. Rather, he accepts the premise that this form of animal nature represents less than what God originally intended for humanity. In fact, freedom from this aspect of animal nature remains part of our eschatological destiny.

Nyssen's position has clear logic. In the resurrection we shall cease resembling the beasts sustained by food; instead, as creatures bearing the uncompromised image of God, we shall resemble the angels, sustained by the word of God, the object of our eternal adoration and contemplation. Since human beings will derive an immortal existence from their contemplative participation in God's eternal and incorruptible being, no need for the non-rational faculties currently necessary for our survival individually and as a species will arise. Even as we shall have no need for eating or drinking to sustain the human body, neither shall we have a need for sexual reproduction to perpetuate the human race.

Nyssen's suggestion that our contemplative participation in God will sustain us eschatologically reflects his view of the soul's mediatorial role in relation to the body. Earlier in De hominis opificio, he explains that as the soul acts as a mirror that reflects or possesses the qualities of the object of its contemplation, so too the body functions as a “mirror of the mirror” and reflects the qualities of the soul. Thus the mind, when set upon God, conforms to the beauty of God's virtues and transmits that beauty to the body, which it rules.

⁶⁰

Nyssen may well draw on the Plotinian view of the mediatorial role of the soul in giving form to matter. Plotinus explains that Mind, or

, apprehends the unitary beauty of the One as a multiplicity of ideas or forms. When the soul unites with

in contemplation of the One, it communicates the beauty of the One to the material body by imposing form on matter. Thus the soul can rightly govern the body and give it its proper form and beauty, only as long as it actively participates in the One through contemplation.

⁶¹

This may indeed reflect the logic of Nyssen's view of directed participation. When the soul unites with God in contemplation, it receives life and beauty by participating in God, who represents life itself. This divine life transmits in turn to the body.⁶²

In this way the soul's communion with God, not physical nourishment, sustains the body.

This view of angelic humanity of the resurrection appears fully consistent with the account Nyssen gives of the resurrection in another work, De anima et resurrectione, written about the same time as De hominis opificio. The body of the resurrection, he says, will remain the very body that we have possessed in this life, restored with all the elements as well as the form it had during this life.

⁶³

Although Nyssen does not say explicitly, he implies that the bodies of the resurrection will retain the phenotypic features that marked it for gender in this life. In the eschaton, however, when God becomes “all and in all,” we shall use neither the sexual organs nor the organs used for eating and digesting food; no one will need to eat or to drink or to procreate, since our participation in God will sustain our lives. Contrasting this life with that to come, he writes: Following this view to its logical conclusion, he admits that if our direct participation in God sustains our whole being, then we shall not need even those organs (such as heart, liver, brain, lungs, stomach) that constitute “the life-giving cause and power” of the body. Moreover, on the sustained assumption that no marriage will take place in the resurrection, Nyssen observes: “If for the sake of marriage there are parts which pertain to marriage, when marriage no longer exists, we will have no need of those parts.”⁶⁵

Behr construes Nyssen's interpretation of Jesus' statement about marriage and the resurrection to mean that no marital union will occur for the sake of repopulation as a result of death. But this, he says, leaves open the possibility that marriage and sexual union may continue in the resurrection without procreation as its objective.⁶⁶

In this passage, however, Nyssen, far from suggesting that sexual relations will take place governed by reason, states simply that there will be no need of sexual organs. He thereby rules out their use for procreation or any other purpose. Even the non-rational faculties of desire and spirit, on which the soul relies in this life to “lead us to the beautiful,” will have no use, when God becomes “all and in all.”⁶⁷

Rather, we shall rely solely upon the contemplative faculties (

). Then the sheer enjoyment (

) of the God immediately present to the soul will replace our desire (

) for God.

⁶⁸

As the character of our experience of our relationship with God changes in the resurrection, so will the character of our love. In De anima et resurrectione, Nyssen speaks of our present love as

and our love of God in the eschaton as

.

⁶⁹

In whatever way our eschatological love retains some qualities of

, it will become qualitatively different than our erotic longings in the present life.

This understanding of the resurrection as an angelic existence free from the sensual erotic desires and the need for sexual reproduction lies at the foundation of Nyssen's ascetic ideal. He maintains that the Christian life in the present not only anticipates the resurrection in hope but strives to embody the angelic life of the resurrection through asceticism and sexual renunciation. Nyssen takes as the exemplar of the ascetic life—life ordered according to a philosophical regimen which separates the soul from the desires of the body—his elder sister, Macrina, to whom he often refers as simply

, “the virgin.” Impelled by the death of the man to whom her parents had betrothed her, Macrina entered the life of virginity. After the death of her father, Basil the Elder, Macrina persuaded her mother to allow her to convert the family estate at Pontus into a monastic community for female virgins. Through her life of perpetual chastity and the renunciation of childbearing, Nyssen says, Macrina transcended her nature as woman.

⁷⁰

He does not mean by this that she became male. Rather, she reclaimed that pure humanity made in the image of God, free from the accretion of sexuality.⁷¹

Nyssen describes her celibate withdrawal from the desires of the body as “an imitation of the existence of the angels.”⁷²

In fact, his language here reminds one of the view in De hominis opificio that humanity represents the midpoint between the life of rational and non-rational creatures: “their [i.e., the virgins'] existence bordered on both the human and the incorporeal nature…. A nature freed from human cares is more than human, whereas, to appear in the body and to be embraced by form and to live with the senses is to have a nature less than angelic and incorporeal.”⁷³

In other words, Macrina, whose life in the present age was characterized by dependence on food for sustenance and by bodily weakness and suffering, lacked the full blessedness of the angels. At the same time, she had a life “more than human,” because through her virginity she transcended the bodily preoccupations of the present life and proleptically embraced the angelic life of the resurrection.⁷⁴

Here De vita Macrinae appears consistent with De hominis opificio. Gender and sexuality do not constitute essential components of human nature that will continue to play a significant role for us eschatologically; rather, the celibate life enables the Christian to rise above the corporeal distractions of gender and sexuality and so to possess the contemplative life of one endowed with the imago Dei, which, for Nyssen, represents the essence of human nature.⁷⁵