Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 141that story. At the same time, however-so Gregory says in his
treatise On Virginity- sin has inaugurated its own history, its
own akolouthia of privation and violence, spreading through-
out time from its own first seeds, striving against God's love.
And so, of course, throughout the course of human history,
God's original unfolding of creation must overcome the para-
sitic unfolding of evil. Even so, humanity, understood as the
pleroma of God's election, never ceases to possess that death-
less beauty that humanity, understood as an historical com -
munity, has largely lost. God, reflecting eternally upon that
beauty, draws all things on toward the glory he intends for
them, although according to a mystery- a grace that does not
predetermine the operations of a human freedom that, never-
theless, cannot ultimately elude it.
For Gregory, moreover, this human totality belongs to
Christ from eternity, and can never be alienated from him.
According to On the Making of Humanity, that eternal Human
Being who lives in God's counsels was from the first fashioned
after the beauty of the Father's eternal Logos, the eternal Son,
and was made for no other end than to become the living body
of Christ, who is its only head. It is thus very much the case
that, for Gregory, the whole drama of Christ's incarnation,
death, and resurrection was undertaken so that the eternal Son
might reclaim those who are his own-which is to say, every-
one. By himself entering into the plenitude of humanity as a
single man among other men and women, and in thereby as-
suming humanity's creaturely finitude and history as his own,
Christ reoriented humanity again toward its true end; and, be-
cause the human totality is a living unity, the incarnation of
the Logos is of effect for the whole. In a short commentary on
the language of the eschatological "subordination" of the Son
to the Father in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, Gregory