On the Making of Man

On the Making of Man. ———————————— Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, to his brother Peter, the servant of God. If we had to honour with rewards of money those who excel in virtue, the whole world of money, as Solomon says1587,…

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V. That man is a likeness of the Divine sovereignty1599. 1. It is true, indeed, that the Divine beauty is not adorned with any shape or endowment of form, by any beauty of colour, but is contemplated as excellence in…

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for the sake of reason. For if man were destitute of hands, the various parts of his face would certainly have been arranged like those of the quadrupeds, to suit the purpose of his feeding: so that its form would have…

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are unusually widened, some air is drawn in through them into the interior, and thence again expelled by nature through the passage of the mouth, while all the viscera (and especially, as they say, the liver) join in…

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11. So the butler presses the cluster for Pharaoh’s cup: so the baker seemed to carry his baskets; each supposing himself in sleep to be engaged in those services with which he was busied when awake: for the images of…

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9. I think that by these words Holy Scripture conveys to us a great and lofty doctrine; and the doctrine is this. While two natures—the Divine and incorporeal nature, and the irrational life of brutes—are separated from…

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XIX. To those who say that the enjoyment of the good things we look for will again consist in meat and drink, because it is written that by these means man at first lived in Paradise1670. 1.

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the weight of the flesh is no longer heavy, nor does its burden hold them down to earth, but they rise aloft through the air—for, “we shall be caught up,” he tells us, “in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so…

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believed about to die; accomplishing the miracle with a greater act of power in that He did not even approach the place, but sent life from afar off by the force of His command. 9.

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1. For it is perhaps not beyond our present subject to discuss the question which has been raised in the churches touching soul and body.

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besides these, which help, in common with all the others, to subserve the continuance of life, importing by their own means the proper supplies, as the stomach and the lungs, the latter fanning by respiration the fire…

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29. For our purpose was to show that the seminal cause of our constitution is neither a soul without body, nor a body without soul, but that, from animated and living bodies, it is generated at the first as a living and…

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