Perhaps no Greek theologian of the early centuries of the church was more enamored with human freedom and more prone to freedom’s constitutive role in anthropology than Gregory of Nyssa. As has long been noted, freedom and free will (prohairesis or προαίρεσις, along with a constellation of related terms such as αὐτεξούσα, self-governance and εξούσα, authority) play a particularly central role in his theology of the divine image (see, e.g., Oratio catechetica 5, De anima et resurrectione 6, and De mortuis 15). De hominis 4 describes the soul as “without master (ἀδέσποτον),” “self-governing (αὐτεξούσιον),” and “ruled autocratically by its own will (ἰδίοις θελήμασιν αὐτοκρατορικῶς διοικουμένην).” In his interpretation of Gen 1.26–27, Gregory argues that divine imaging necessarily includes “freedom from necessity (ἐλεύθερον ἀνάγκης)” (De hominis 16.11). The final homily on the beatitudes, to cite one final example, describes “the pinnacle of freedom” as “self-determination (τὸ δὲ ἀκρότατον τῆς ἐλευθερίας εἶδος τὸ αὐτεξούσιόν ἐστι)” (Beat 8.5).
Scholars, in turn, have frequently emphasized this picture. Giampietro Dal Toso speaks for many when he judges that “we can conclude that for Gregory of Nyssa, the human being is his very προαίρεσις,”[i] a conclusion echoed by Hans Boersma, who writes that “the notion of freedom from necessity—which Gregory describes as free will (αὐτεξούσια)—constitutes for him the very core of what it means to be a human being.”[ii] It comes, then, as little surprise that much of the attention to one of Gregory’s more remarkable passages, the critique of slavery advanced in the fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, has primarily been explored in terms of how Gregory appeals to human freedom to undercut the legitimacy of enslaving fellow humans, who are by nature and in their essence created for autonomy, independence, and freedom.[iii] These readings converge in understanding the core of Gregory’s critique to arise from his high estimation of the dignity and worth of the human creature, who as images of God are by nature free. Human beings cannot be treated as material possessions because such possession fails to see that in their freedom itself they transcend the material world.
While the homily has engendered a number of other fascinating questions—both about the scope and telos of Gregory’s critique and its relation to his own family’s practice of manumission[iv]—little attention has been paid to a second set of arguments Gregory raises against the practice of slavery, which rather than focusing slavery’s abrogation of human freedom instead stress the ways in which the practice of enslaving expresses a denial of the finitude that is also proper to human creatures. Slavery, as Gregory argues, is a feeble and vicious pretension to immortality, a misguided effort to seek permanence through unjust power and acquisition. To enslave, that is, not only violates the dignity and freedom of the enslaved; it also denies the finitude and humility of the enslaver. Those who seek to own a human being, Gregory writes, forget that their “origin is from the same ancestors,” that their “life is of the same kind,” subject to the same “pains and pleasures, merriment and distress, sorrows and delights, rages and terrors, sickness and death.” They forget, ultimately, that all humans are “one dust after death.”[v]
The aim of this essay is to explore the connection between these arguments. Following a brief exegesis of the different aspects of the homily’s critique of slavery, I will offer a constructive account of the resources of Gregory’s vision of freedom for anthropological theological today. At the root of this account is a summons to see freedom not simply alongside but inseparable from human finitude, from the contingency, dependence, and fragility that shape our existential experience. Gregory’s understanding of freedom, put otherwise, is not a static faculty that itself satisfies the condition of divine likeness. Rather it names the possibility of mutability and finite creation coming into union with divine goodness. We can be truly free only in the light of a dispossession that accepts the fate of our mortality. What Gregory teaches, then, I will argue, is that freedom is realized not in transcending the limitations of finitude but in inhabiting them otherwise, in accepting our human littleness as the primary resource for divine likeness.
[i] Giampietro Dal Toso, “Proairesis,” in The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, ed. Mateo-Seco (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 649.
[ii] Hans Boersma, Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa: An Anagogical Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153.
[iii] Among an extensive bibliography on the homily, this point plays a crucial role in, e.g., T. J. Dennis, ‘The Relationship between Gregory of Nyssa’s Attack on Slavery in his Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes and his Treatise De Hominis Opificio’, Studia Patristica 17.3 (1982): 1065–7; Maria Bergadá, ‘La condamnation de l’esclavage dans l’Homélie IV’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes. An English Version with Supporting Studies, ed. Stuart George Hall (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), 185–96; David Bentley Hart, ‘The “Whole Humanity”: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (2001): 51–69; J. Kameron Carter, ‘Theology, Exegesis, and the Just Society: Gregory of Nyssa as Abolitionist Intellectual’, Ex Auditu 22 (2006): 181–212; Giulio Maspero, ‘Slavery’, in The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, 683–85; Ilaria Ramelli, ‘Gregory of Nyssa’s Position in Late Antique Debates on Slavery and Poverty, and the Role of Asceticism’, Journal of Late Antiquity 5, no. 1 (2012): 87–118; Boersma, Embodiment and Virtue, 158–60.
[iv] On the first see, e.g., Lionel Wickham, ‘Homily IV’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes. An English Version with Supporting Studies, 177–84 and Susanna Elm, ‘Virgins of God:’ The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 103. On the second, see particularly Anna Silvas’s introduction in Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).
[v] Gregory, Eccl 4. Translation is from Stuart Hall, Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes. An English Version with Supporting Studies, 75.
Freedom’s centrality in Gregory of Nyssa’s theological anthropology and understanding of the divine image has long been recognized. The soul, he writes in De hominis, is “without master (ἀδέσποτον),” “self-governing (αὐτεξούσιον),” and “ruled autocratically by its own will.” Unsurprisingly, then, interpretations of Gregory’s famous critique of slavery have focused on his judgment of slavery’s violation of the freedom and dignity proper to all human creatures. Less attention has been paid to another set of arguments Gregory deploys, which critique slavery as a feeble and misguided effort to seek permanence through unjust power and acquisition. Enslaving denies the freedom of others, but it also denies our own finitude. This paper explores the connections between these arguments, offering a constructive account of freedom as realized not in transcending the limitations of finitude but in inhabiting them otherwise, through accepting human littleness as the primary resource for the freedom of divine likeness.