Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 139
tament, what he believed he saw was-as I said in my First
Meditation - not some everlasting division between the two
cities of the redeemed and the reprobate, but only a provisional
division between two moments within the single economy of
a universal salvation. What he found was-as I phrased it in
my Second Meditation - two distinct eschatological horizons,
one wholly enclosed within the other. For him, the making and
redemption of the world belong to that one great process by
which God brings to pass the perfect creation that has resided
from everlasting in the divine will, conceived and intended by
him before all ages. All of created time is, he believed, nothing
but the gradual unfolding, in time and by way of change, of
God's eternal and immutable design. For him, in fact, creation
is twofold; there is a prior (which is to say, eternal) creative act
that abides in God, as the end toward which all things are di-
rected and for the sake of which all things have been brought
about (described in Genesis 1:1-2:3); and there is a poste-
rior creative act, which is the temporal exposition-cosmic
and historical-of this divine model ( whose initial phases are
described in Genesis 2:4-25). From eternity, says Gregory,
God has conceived of humanity under the form of an ideal
"Human Being" (av0pw1roc;, anthropos), at once humanity's
archetype and perfection, a creature shaped entirely after the
divine likeness, neither male nor female, possessed of divine
virtues: purity, love, impassibility, happiness, wisdom, free-
dom, and immortality. But this does not mean, as we might
expect, simply that God first created the eternal ideal of the
human, and only then fashioned individual human beings in
imitation of this universal archetype. Rather, for Gregory, this
primordial "ideal" Human Being comprises-indeed, is iden-
tical with- the entire pleroma of all human beings in every
age, from first to last. In his great treatise On the Making of