Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 143
as the true first creation of humanity (Genesis 1:26-27) was
the eternal conception in the divine counsels of the whole race
united to him while the second (Genesis 2:7) was the inaugu-
ration of a history wholly dependent upon that eternal decree,
so the culmination of history (1 Corinthians 15:23) will at the
last be, as it were, succeeded by and taken up into this original
eternity in its eschatological realization (1 Corinthians 15:24),
and the will of God will be perfectly accomplished in the ever-
lasting body of Christ.
For Gregory, then, there can be no true human unity, nor
even any perfect unity between God and humanity, except in
terms of the concrete solidarity of all persons in that complete
community that is, alone, the true image of God. God shall be
all in all, argues Gregory in a treatise on infants who die pre-
maturely, not simply by comprising humanity in himself in the
abstract, as the universal ideal that he redeems in a few select
souls, but by joining each particular person, each unique in-
flection of the pleroma's beauty, to himself. Even so, Christ's as-
sumption and final recapitulation of the human cannot simply
be imposed upon the race as a whole, but must effect the con-
version of each soul within itself, so that room is truly made
for God "in all"; salvation by union with Christ must unfold
within human freedom, and so within our capacity to venture
away. For Gregory, of course, good classical Christian meta-
physician that he was, evil and sin are always accidental con-
ditions of human nature, never intrinsic qualities; all evil is a
privation of an original goodness, and so the sinfulness that
separates rational creatures from God is only a disease cor-
rupting and disabling the will, robbing it of its true rational
freedom, and thus is a disorder that must ultimately be purged
from human nature in its entirety, even if needs be by hell. As
Gregory argues in On the Making of Humanity, evil is inher-