142 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
even speaks of Christ as having assumed not just human na-
ture in the abstract, but the whole pleroma, which means that
his glory has entered into all that is human. Nor could it be
otherwise. Such is the indivisible solidarity of humanity, he
argues, that the entire body must ultimately be in unity with
its head, whether that be the first or the last Adam. Hence
Christ's obedience to the Father even unto death will be made
complete only eschatologically, when the whole race, gathered
together in him, will be yielded up as one body to the Father, in
the Son's gift of subjection, and God will be all in all. At Easter,
Christ's resurrection inaugurated an akolouthia of resurrec-
tion, so to speak, in the one body of the race, an unfolding that
cannot now cease (given the unity of human nature) until the
last residue of sin-the last shadow of death-has vanished.
Gregory finds this confirmed also, according to one of his early
treatises ( a "Refutation" of the teachings of the theologian
Eunomius), in John 20:17: When Christ, says Gregory, goes
to his God and Father, to the God and Father of his disciples,
he presents all of humanity to God in himself. In his On the
Soul and Resurrection, moreover, Gregory reports the teaching
of his sister Makrina that, when this is accomplished, all divi-
sions will at last fall away, and there will no longer be any sepa-
ration between those who dwell within the Temple precincts
and those who have been kept outside, for every barrier of sin
separating human beings from the mysteries within the veil of
the sanctuary will have been torn down; and then there will be
a universal feast around God in which no rational creature will
be deprived of full participation, and all those who were once
excluded on account of sin will enter into the company of the
blessed. We see here the exquisite symmetry in Gregory's read-
ing of scripture's narrative of creation and redemption, and in
his understanding of eternity's perfect embrace of history: just