The anthropology of the fourth-century contemplative and bishop Gregory of Nyssa has long been recognised as a promising resource for queer theologians, with Linn Marie Tonstad claiming in 2018 that ‘[a]t the time of writing […] Gregory of Nyssa is the most influential early Christian writer for queer theologians’.[1] Gregory holds that sexual difference is not original to humanity’s creation, but rather an (anticipatory) consequence of the Fall,[2] and envisions an eschatological dissolution of the ‘male and female’ binary, with humanity once again reflecting the gender-transcendent divine image. The outworking of this eschatology is seen across his writings, for instance in the chaotic whirl of sexual imagery in his Homilies on the Song of Songs.[3]
In her 2000 essay ‘The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God’, Sarah Coakley brings Gregory into conversation with Judith Butler, suggesting that ‘Butler’s ingenious attempts to escape the net of sexual stereotypes are […] ironic, if ultimately depressing, secularized counterparts of an ascetical programme of gender fluidity that Christian tradition may hold out to us’.[4] There are numerous issues in Coakley’s account, not least her reification of gender roles by inscribing them into our relation to the divine. Nevertheless, her choice of these two thinkers as interlocuters is suggestive.
Jin Sook Kim, however, contests Coakley’s account, arguing instead that Butler and Gregory actually have ‘almost opposite takes on personality, the self, identity, gender, body and the soul, and the problem of category’.[5] With Coakley and against Kim, I argue that there are useful and productive resonances between the two—chiefly in their shared concerns about the effect of hegemonic discourse on the body’s material freedom. However, Kim is right to recognise a significant divergence between them on the question of subjectivity.
In Butler’s poststructuralist frame, there is no space outside the discursive operation of power, such that the human subject is materially constituted by power. Butler expresses this in their 1997 work The Psychic Life of Power: ‘the subject is initiated through a primary submission to power’.[6] This is true as much for our materiality as for our subjectivity: ‘matter itself is founded through a set of violations’ (Bodies That Matter, 1993).[7]
Gregory, like Butler, has a critique of the way in which hegemonic discourse establishes and naturalises structures of oppression. This is seen most clearly in his ‘Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes’, where he offers a sustained condemnation of the discursive practices by which the slave owners essentialise the language ‘slave and free’ through which bodies are objectified and commodified:
I got me slaves and slave-girls, he says, and homebred slaves were born for me. Do you notice the enormity of the boast? This kind of language is raised up as a challenge to God.[8]
Moreover Gregory, prefiguring Butler, recognises that the materiality of embodied subject is constituted by sin; this is especially clear in his theology of sex. Yet, for him, there is more to a person than their subjection: they are bearers of the divine image. The radically free imago dei thus continually destabilises hegemonic binaries, whether ‘slave or free’ or ‘male and female’ (Galatians 3.28). Crucially, the imago dei is, in Gregory’s theology, radically unsignifiable. It cannot operate as what Derrida calls a ‘transcendental signified’,[9] definitively grounding human meanings in a referent outside discourse; rather, it is not signified at all. The imago dei, by its radical extradiscursivity, evades and unsettles the discursive foundations of subjection, such that the deiform human being is free in a more maximal sense than that allowed by Butler.
Gregory’s thoroughgoing theology of freedom finds expression in his commitment to the autexousia (self-determination) of the human psyche (soul).[10] In contrast to the material body, which is constituted by sin (and thus power), the soul itself remains free, restrained only insofar as it is entangled with sinful materiality.[11] Queer theologians have often seen such Neoplatonic accounts of the body-soul relationship as intrinsically problematic, leading to the subjugation of the body. This paper challenges this narrative, proposing that—for Gregory—it is precisely a belief in the immaterial soul that inspires a commitment to the liberation of bodies. The human body, though subjected, remains united with the self-determining soul, imprinted with the freedom of the imago dei, a freedom that has concrete political significance. This paper proposes that the soul should not be thought of as an ethereal force animating the body; rather, to speak of the soul is recognise an aspect of humanity that remains ineffable, always beyond the grasp of hegemonic discourse. There is thus a queer horizon for humanity, beyond the psychic life of power.
Endnotes:
- Linn Marie Tonstad. Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018), 41.
- Gregory of Nyssa, On the Human Image of God (16-17), trans. John Behr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 221-237.
- Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, trans. Richard A. Norris (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012); cf. also Virginia Burrus, ‘Queer Father: Gregory of Nyssa and the Subversion of Identity’ in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body ed. by Gerard Loughlin (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
- Sarah Coakley, ‘The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God’ Modern Theology 16, no. 1 (2000), 61.
- Jin Sook Kim, ‘Performing Gender and the Death Drive’ 종교와 문화 Vol. 27 (2014), 119 145; 121.
- Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2.
- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” (London: Routledge, 1993), 29. Emphasis original.
- Gregory of Nyssa, ‘Homily 4’ in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes ed. Stuart Hall (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1993), 73. Emphasis my own.
- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1944), 49.
- Gregory of Nyssa, On the Human Image of God (16.11), trans. John Behr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 227-229.
- Gregory of Nyssa, The Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993), 93.
This paper brings Judith Butler’s work on freedom and subjection into conversation with Gregory of Nyssa’s belief in the autexousia—self-determination—of the human psyche (soul). Both thinkers are deeply committed to human liberation. Both offer critiques of the discursive practices by which structures of domination are naturalised—in Gregory’s case, chiefly in his condemnation of slavery. Moreover, both consider ‘male and female’ binary sex to present a particular affront to human freedom and flourishing, with Gregory anticipating the eventual eschatological transcendence of sexual difference. This paper advances a Butlerian reading of Gregory’s writing on freedom, while suggesting that his theology offers an apophatic route through the aporias in Butler’s poststructuralist account of subjectivity. I suggest that Gregory provides a view of the human psyche, imprinted with the freedom of the divine, that resists being reduced to the human subject, which (as Butler recognises) is constituted by power.