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The Formation of the Human Body According to Gregory of Nyssa within Contemporary Perspectives in Sports Pedagogy декември 22 - 2012 година
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| 2013-09-03, 6:16 AM |
The Formation of the Human Body According to Gregory of Nyssa within Contemporary Perspectives in Sports Pedagogy
Alexandra Bekiari & Kimon Sakelariou
University of Thessaly
Introduction
The work by Gregory of Nyssa (born about 335 A.D. and died about 394 A.D.) was written in 379 with the title "The formation of man" (De opificio hominis). It met the requirements of completeness for the nine sermons about creation preached by his brother Basil the Great and collected under the title of Hexaemeron (The six days). Basil had adopted the scientific doctrines of the ancient times, mainly Aristotle's, and though dealing with different topics concerning creation, he hadn't commented on that which concerns the creation of man.
In his work Gregory gives us a great synthesis of Christian theology and philosophy, with a particular stress on anthropological aspects, and an excellent knowledge of contemporary medicine.
This research concerns just the analysis of Chapter Lambda [hereafter L], "Considerations drawn from the medicine about the formation of our body"1. The chapter may have been taken into consideration with detachment and sometimes with a certain conceit by theology, as it concerns a theme, the physical making of the human body, generally unrelated to the problems with which it deals. Gregory of Nyssa himself looked upon this "medical" theory of the body, going back to Galen, as a problem to deal with carefully. That is why he confines the discussion to the last chapter.
From the analysis of this chapter we can draw out some principles that may concern the Pedagogy of Sport. We have attached more importance to two of them. The first is general: we must learn. The reason for this principle is to be found in the fact that man's intellect, at birth, is tabula rasa: the world logos resides in the divine intellect, not in man's intellect, who needs to search for it in things, through their direct observation. The second principle is specific: we must learn from nature[[2]]. Man in general, unable to be his own teacher, must go to the school of a teacher; in the specific case, the teacher whose school man must go to is nature, that is the physical structure of man's body mainly from the point of view of his physiological dynamism, which aims at achieving the highest perfection of the body and its preservation in this condition.
This theory by Gregory of Nyssa, which must be considered a strongly educational principle, at the same time, has a fundamental relevance in the Pedagogy of Sport. It is, a somewhat original chapter, because in the past this chapter was never the precise objective of a specific research, and because the scientists of this subject have never perceived its existence or the modernity of its perennial validity.
The structure of De opificio hominis
It is a matter of method that research starts from certain principles. This research, anyway, doesn't only want to single them out. As specific conclusions are virtually contained in each principle, it follows that the constitution of the principle(s) explains at the same time the objectives or the aims the research should or might lead to. We need to know, therefore, not only what these principles are, but also why, or in view of what, we are searching them. Thus, we are searching for what Gregory of Nyssa calls the "first principles"3 not only to understand how our body is structured or to know what makes our body structured in this specific way, but also to understand how these principles, acting and interacting with each other, favour all those procedures connected with the development, preservation, and reproduction of life. Our first objective is the knowledge of the formation of man, "the precise structure of [his] body"[4], the "moulding of the body"[5], the way that "from the power of God's prescience all the human pleroma has been pre-determined"[6], "the Creation [of the body]",[7] or the "nature" of the body[8].
The starting point for Gregory of Nyssa's research is the argument that we can know man's body by both learning at the school of nature thanks to reading or to the direct observation of our body (this is the method the Scholastics will call via inventionis ), and learning at the school of men who have got the science of these aspects, thanks to the reading of the works in which they discussed this specific topic (the method the Scholastics will call via doctrinae).
In the via inventionis, that we can translate as the modern self-teaching, we need to explore our own body carefully, learning from it to understand it's structure. From Gregory of Nyssa, who had modulated his philosophical thought on the works of the Jewish Platonist Philo of Alexandria, we couldn't help but expect a kind of research modelled on the a priori method that Plato had adopted in the Timaeus and which he explained in the Sophist.
At the beginning of his De opificio hominis, though, Gregory of Nyssa seems to rely on the methodology of research theorised and applied by Aristotle in his studies on animals. He says that man can manage to know his own body starting from the immediate and perceptible experience "of what he sees, lives and feels"[9] in his own body, because "our own nature gives explanation"[10]; therefore, Gregory of Nyssa quotes to the reader Moses's saying, "you'll know as in a book the history of the works of soul"[11]. In the development of his treatise, when he applies to the structure of the body some categories of thought, not derived empirically, such as the concept of the triadicity of reality, Gregory of Nyssa moves according to the same procedure used both by the Pythagoreans and by Plato himself, who had taken it from the former.
The things that we learn by reading the great book of nature can be learnt via doctrinae, as well, as Gregory of Nyssa affirms when he writes: "He who receives the doctrine elaborated in the books by those people who are experts in this subject, can learn all these things with precision"[12]. The via doctrinae moves along the teaching of the Church, so our teachers must be not only the experts in this subject but the Church itself[13].
Surely Gregory of Nyssa must have experienced both viae before starting the composition of book L, on the formation of man. This reference to pagan authors as concerns the science of body might have been judged unorthodox and it might have brought about concern that the teaching of the Church was incomplete and inadequate. On the other hand, what Gregory of Nyssa was going to do was in contrast with the teaching of John's Gospel, where it is said that Christ's sheep recognise only the voice of their Shepherd, but they don't recognise the voice of "strangers"[14], as pagan authors were considered and whose word shouldn't be listened to by a Christian.
To prevent the method used for this topic from causing discussions of this kind, Gregory reassures the reader he will add "some words about these things"[15], to dissolve any doubt.
To correctly understand the anatomic physiology explained by Gregory of Nyssa in his De opificio hominis, we must include it in his anthropo-theological concept. He interprets Adam's creation by the Platonic category of the perfect ideal man explained in the Republic, that is of a man whose being is submitted to the rational soul and the latter to the divinity. Man, according to Gregory, was created by God similar to the angels: rationality was his nature and no irrational element was present. He had no material body or sex; he was bereft of all the inclinations and instinctive impulses due to his corporeity. Gregory states, thus, that the soul "would have been perfect since the beginning, if [human] nature hadn't been mutilated because of sin"[16]. Therefore there's a "double nature", which includes apparent man and hidden man"[17].
The Christian's commitment must consist in the recreation in himself of the ideal and perfect man, that is man as he was made by the hands of God and who corresponds to the "new man" St. Paul's writes about in his Letter to the Ephesians[18]. He must grow from "his littleness to his fulfilment"[19], leaving aside the "old man"[20], as he had become after the sin. In this task of regeneration of his own nature man is not left alone: God helps him with his Grace, leading him "to perfection"[21], in the same way as by His Grace He had created him.
Analysis of Gregory's points of view about human body
The short account by Gregory of Nyssa about the formation of man is an interesting document, which collects and makes a synthesis of ancient theories about human physiology and anatomy. Gregory's synthesis is based on the method of the tripartite subdivision, according to the belief that the power of life "doesn't come out of a single organ"[22]; nature, in fact, has entrusted "the preservation of the body to a lot of limbs"[23], each of which gives its specific contribution to the perfect functionality of the whole organism.
Gregory, who learned from the works by Philo of Alexandria how the being is divided, adopts the analytic method of tripartition as concerns the body for two reasons: one concerns division in general, the other concerns more specifically the division by three or tripartition. As only the divine reality is simple, while everything that has been created by the power of God is compound, to know the structure of any body, the human one included, it's necessary to divide it into the parts that make it (generic division).
The reality of man is, in fact, a manifold reality, in which the philosophical tradition had seen two opposite elements coexisting (soul and body, spirit and matter, instinct and reason, rationality and irrationality), that the theological and mystical tradition, dating back to St. Paul, had plastically translated into the image of the old man, under the sway of the irrational materiality of instincts, and of the new man, whose soul holds sway over the body and the spirit over the matter. But the philosophical tradition dating back to Plato, who had theorised the dihairetic-dichotomic method, according to which each thing is always divided into two parts (a right one and a left one), further divides the irrational element of man into two more parts. The further subdivision, though keeping the basic dualism of soul and body, highlights three elements in the reality of man: there's originally a first part which is the rational soul and a second one which is the corporeity; the latter in its turn is divided into two more parts, one of which represents the irascible located in the chest, and the other the concupiscible located in the loins. In Plato, anyway, the method is always characterised by the diairethic-dichotomic procedure.
The novelty in Gregory's method, if we can call it novelty, lies in the fact that he introduced in his research about the body the trichotomic method or the division by three, as later St. Augustine would do in his research about the soul. Such a novelty ought to be searched in what is common in the procedures followed by the two saints and this is undoubtedly an argument of faith, explained in the words that God said before creating man and by which De opificio hominis ends: "Let's make man to be like ourselves"[24]. If the divine reality is made by three different people unified in the unity of substance, it's obvious that man as well, having been formed like God, must be made fundamentally, not only in his soul but also in his body, of three "first principles", that must be interpreted, in Aristotelian manner, like elements rather than platonically like parts, as they are unities distinguished among them, but organically structured in the substantial and organic unicity of the body.
"Three things, he writes, we have observed concerning the nature of the body"[25]. These three things concern living, living well and reproduction. The things that concern living are three, too, and they are: brain, heart, liver[26]. Number three is also present in the three powers that govern life. The three powers reside respectively in the heart, in the liver and in the brain.
On the basis of his organic vision of the body, deriving from his teleological conception of the world, Gregory looks upon each part of the body[27] together with its function as necessary for the preservation of the whole body and he observes that some organs, three of them (i.e. brain, heart, liver), are so necessary that "it isn't possible to have human life"[28] without them.
In any case, Gregory doesn't keep strictly to the method of tripartition, as not to take into consideration the other organs, as vital as the three mentioned above, such as the stomach and the lung, "the latter, by reviving the fire in the heart through the air, the former by introducing nourishment into the bowels"[29]. By these further additions, it comes out that "the structure of our body"[30] isn't subdivided into three parts anymore, as the method of tripartition would have required, but into five vital parts: the first three (brain, heart and liver) are the first principles of the being of life, because without just one of them life is extinguished, the other two parts (stomach and lungs) are the means by which life is preserved.
The fact that Gregory put aside the method of tripartition is meaningful in the light of the introduction to De opificio hominis, which is having nature as a teacher, whose school we go to in the moment when we start the direct observation of what we see, live and feel in ourselves. It's obvious that Gregory forgot this starting purpose when he applied the trichotomic method to the study of the structure of our body in the same way as Plato had theorised the dihairetic-dichotomic one, that is when he applied some mental schemes (the dichotomic division) to reality to know it. In this application, though, it happened that nature became a student of man's intellect rather than teacher, as it was bridled in pre-determined mental schemes. At the same time, the relationship between man's intellect and nature was reversed: it wasn't man's intellect that had to suit itself to the reality of the facts experienced in nature, as it would have been natural to do in the case in which nature had been adopted as a teacher, but on the contrary nature had to suit itself to man's intellect and to its categories.
If Gregory had gone on using this procedure of Platonic origin, he should have transformed the data he had seen, felt and lived or he should have added or taken off something, moving thus against the reality of facts. It mustn't be judged hazardous that in this leaving aside the method of aprioristically pre-determined schemes and in this sticking to facts we find references or at least strong analogies with the method of empirical observation adopted by Aristotle in his study on animals.
Gregory doesn't notice this methodological aporia and he continues his analysis of the body mainly relying on the method of tripartition, that he considers necessary, to deeply understand how man's body was formed. And, as he had already revealed, he says he has learnt this method of tripartition from the teaching of nature, which coincided with the teaching of those people who had studied it in the past and had left the evidence in their works. Thus Gregory doesn't go only to the school of nature, but also to the school of the ancient doctors, who had written about the body and the specific functions of each organ, and whose works he must have known, as we can understand from the careful reading of De opificio hominis, though he never quotes any of them.
What Gregory of Nyssa first of all sees in the body are three things and they "are the things concerning living, the ones which are suitable to living well and the ones which are suitable to the succession of posterity"[31]. As he considers man's body from the teleological point of view, he considers each of these three things from the same point of view, as he looks at the aim they have inside and in relation with the whole human body, in the same way as he had considered the human body inside and in relation with the whole universe.
The method of tripartition is applied by Gregory to the body's life as well: the body, to preserve its life, needs three things, which are the qualities of the four elements: the cold of the earth, the heat of fire, the dampness of water and the dryness of the air. To hold fast to the method of tripartition, Gregory unites dampness and dryness in a single quality. He writes, in fact: "By considering that there's something of each element in all of us that we find in the world, something of the heat and the cold and something of the composition that we see in dampness and dryness, we must write about each element"[32].
A new observation of the body makes us see, Gregory says, that there are three powers in it that govern life[33]; of these three powers "one warms everything by its heat, another wets by its dampness [...], the third power collects articulations in a harmonic meeting harmonising them and conveying the self-moving and self-determining power"[34].
The three powers reside the first in the heart, origin of heat, "the noblest of all the vital parts"[35], from which "the igneous and hot spirit spreads through the body"[36]; the second in the liver, that gives origin to the blood ducts that, warmed by the heat coming from the heart, circulates through the whole organism; the third in the brain that owns the "leadership and the supreme power"[37] concerning the life-keeping. Should the latter fail in one of the parts of the body, "this part will be limited and dead, deprived of the spirit of self-determination"[38].
Going on observing "the art of nature in the moulding of the body"[39], we can see that the human body has developed an intermediate compactness between softness (the flesh) and hardness (the bones), that allows it to exercise "the nicest activity of all, the one of sensible movement"[40].
For this reason nature, according to Gregory, mingles harmonically strong bones with the body. The flesh is partly immovable and partly movable not only by impulses coming from the brain, but also by stimuli coming from external objects which produce the process of sensation in it.
Nature has laid the flesh on the skeleton as on supporting columns, but it has wisely avoided that the skeleton be made of one single bone. The multiplicity of bones, joined together by means of articulations, allows man to move and not to be "like a tree which is still in a place, as the movement of legs doesn't stir it to a movement forward"[41]. In that way, we wouldn't have had the motions of translation by means of our feet, or the motions of our arms or our hands, which are in service of life.
After having explained the structure of the body, Gregory goes on listing the different free motions we can make with our body: handling, circular motion of our head, the opening of eyelids and the "movements of the other limbs as if they were produced by a machine in the nerves which tighten and relax"[42]. At the basis of all these movements Gregory places the brain membrane. The brain's greatly important function can be inferred from the fact that when it's hurt or when it's struck by an illness, "it follows that death comes"[43].
Other causes of death are also the want of heat, produced by the heart, so that when the heart is hurt or ill, the body's death follows, too.
The idea of the body's death calls to Gregory's mind the soul's death, thus he takes advantage of this circumstance to rebuke intemperate men, warning them that also "avarice is an illness that brings death"[44], obviously to the soul; they must beware of it, then.
From the research concerning what makes life possible Gregory moves then to examine what makes the preservation of life possible. In this new research Gregory's theological animus comes out. He observes that there's a great ontological difference between man and God: God is the perfect being and, as such, he has got everything and he doesn't want anything; man is an imperfect being and, as such, he needs everything. To go on living, he needs "to get things from outside"[45]. The organ that is responsible for the body's nourishment, by means of the blood circulation, is the liver, which transforms food fitting it to the body and then it introduces it into the blood, which distributes it throughout the body.
Besides food, our body needs air and heat, too, for its own preservation. The air comes into the lungs and, from here, by compression; the heart attracts it within itself, warms it by its heat and then, by expansion, drives it, through the arteries, throughout the body. The whole procedure occurs automatically, without the freedom of choice contributing to it, because neither the heart nor the lungs ever stop, not even when man sleeps.
To explain the way how a unique nourishment, distributed into the various parts of the body becomes homogeneous with them, meaning that it becomes flesh when it arrives at the flesh, cartilage when it arrives at the cartilage, etc., Gregory makes the example of agriculture. As in a garden, he says, the same nourishment (that is, the same ground and the same water), by producing different plants, "becomes bitter in the wormwood, deadly poison in the hemlock, other things becomes in a plant, others in another one"[46], in the same way it happens in our body that "in each organ it arrives at, food changes itself and becomes similar to the peculiarity of that part"[47].
In this part of his work Gregory realises he has gone far from his original aim, having gone deeper into the description of those parts of the body that are necessary to live or to live well. Here he clearly reveals what his plan was, that he wanted to bring to an end by means of De opificio hominis and, at the same time, he was in a sort of ideal dialogue with his ideal interlocutors.
"What we had intended, he writes, was to show the cause [or the principle] that produces the compound we are: it isn't a soul without body, nor a body without soul that since the beginning was born by living animal bodies, but a living animate being[48]. We are discussing here the origin of man that, according to the philosophy of platonic foundation had started from a presumed pre-existence of a soul without body and, according to the philosophy of atomistic foundation, had started from a casual aggregation of atoms, similar to a body without soul. Gregory answers both philosophical visions of man saying that, originally, there was a compound of soul and body, so that man's seminal cause resides in two principles of different nature, but linked organically in the whole of the unique reality man.
Gregory, in this ideal dispute, is undaunted by moving into exquisitely naturalistic and medical issues and he seems to forget his theological vocation. He always calls nature, in the specific case he calls human nature that he considers the nurse, which "gives its nourishment to one part and to the other"[49] of the reality man, that is to his soul and to his body.
By this "ingenious and intelligent"[50] work, nature drives man's reality to a complete development starting from a small seed until the fullness of its utmost perfection. And here Gregory of Nyssa shows once again his theological vocation: the aim of nature is to make man, at the highest point of his full development, show himself as image of God which, he says, would have been perfect since its origins, "if nature hadn't been mutilated by vice"[51].
Nature, anyway, fulfils its task in the development of man through his own soul, which exists imperfectly in every living being (both in the plants and in the animals, besides man), but it achieves its highest perfection only in man. In the plants, the development their soul tends to doesn't lead them to acquire the capacity to have sensations; in the animals, the development their soul tends to doesn't lead them to acquire the capacity to produce thought. "For this reason we say, he writes, that man's soul is true and perfect and it is recognised through its spiritual activity"[52].
The conclusion of the treatise has a pastoral character. Gregory of Nyssa urges his readers to keep perfect, as nature tends to, out of a law written in its ontological constitution; and if a reader has lost this perfection because of sin, clothed in the old man, he urges him paraphrasing the words St. Paul had addressed to the Ephesians: "You must put aside the old man with his former behaviour [...] and clothe the new man"[53].
Valuation of the text according to the Pedagogy of Sport
In Chapter L of his De opificio hominis, after having attended the school of nature, Gregory seems to have taught two things in his turn:
To really understand the formation of man, we need a good knowledge both of the methods that the different sciences, medical sciences in particular, have adopted in their study of man, and above all the results they have achieved.
We must respect the miracle of life, no matter which evolutionary stage it has achieved, and we must greatly commit ourselves for its protection, defence and development.
Nature has a precise plan in the formation of man: achieving its highest perfection through different phases of development in time, so that man can be the revelation of God's face in the world. However, this development was stopped at a certain time because of a break caused by sin.
Man must repair this break in himself, depriving himself of the old man and clothing himself in the new man, "created according to God in justice and true holiness"[54], according to St. Paul in the above mentioned Letter to the Ephesians.
Inside these so-called main teachings of the treatise, main because they clearly concern the author's objectives, we can single out some secondary teachings that, from the Pedagogy of Sport's point of view, are not inferior. We are referring in particular to that section of the treatise where the author highlights the fact that the body, endowed with a multiplicity of bones, linked among them by articulated joints, is able to move in space instead of being thrust on the ground like a tree.
In this case, two statements by Gregory of Nyssa sound particularly interesting as concerns the Pedagogy of Sport:
The fact that nature, by enabling man to move, has followed its precise plan - and we can clearly see here the divine intelligence that presides originally to the creation and the providential preservation of the world; consequently, every motory activity is according to nature and it just keeps on developing the work started by nature on man's body;
The fact that the motory activity, aiming at living well, depends on man's free initiative.
The last part has its own highly pedagogic and formative value: man has in his own hands the possibility of living well, if he can apply these skills, through an intelligent and free motory activity. All this happens according to a starting plan by the God who, originally, created the world and made man's body out of the earth.
Notes:
[1] Cfr. la tr. it., cui, quando � possibile, si far� riferimento, edita a cura di Bruno Salmona (GREGORIO DI NISSA, L'uomo, Roma, Citt� Nuova, 1982), p. 123.
[2] Cfr. PG, 44, 245B.
[3] PG, 44, 241B; tr. it. cit., p.l24.
[4] PG, 44, 240C. Non diamo la referenza della traduzione italiana, quando, come in questo caso, essa si discosta dall'originale.
[5] PG, 44, 237D.
[6] PG, 44, 233D; tr. it. cit., p. 118.
[7] PG, 44, 256A.
[8] PG, 44, 240D.
[9] PG, 44, 237C.
[10] Ib.
[11] PG, 44, 237D; tr. it. cit., p. 122.
[12] PG, 44, 240C; tr, it. cit., p. 123.
[13] Cfr. ib.
[14] Gv., 10, 4-5.
[15] PG, 44, 240D; tr. it. cit., p. 123.
[16] PG, 44, 256A.
[17] PG, 44, 236A.
[18] Ef., 3, 22-24.
[19] PG, 44, 237C.
[20] PG, 44, 256C.
[21] PG, 44, 256A; tr. it. cit., p. 134.
[22] PG, 44, 241A-B.
[23] Ib.
[24] PG, 44, 256C e Gn., l, 26.
[25] PG, 44, 240D.
[26] Ib.
[27] Cfr. PG, 44, 241B; cfr. tr. it. cit., p. 124.
[28] PG, 44, 240 s.; tr. it. cit., p. 123.
[29] PG, 44, 241A.
[30] Ib.
[31] PG, 44, 240D; tr. it. cit., p. 123.
[32] PG, 44, 241C; tr. it. cit., p. 124.
[33] PG, 44, 241C; tr. it. cit., p. 124.
[34] PG, 44, 241C; tr. it. cit., pp. 124 s.
[35] PG, 44, 248B; tr. it. cit., p. 129.
[36] PG, 44, 245A; tr. it. cit., p. 127.
[37] PG, 44, 249C.
[38] PG, 44, 241D; tr. it. cit., p. 125.
[39] PG, 44, 241D; tr. it cit., p. 125.
[40] PG, 44, 244A; tr. it. cit., p. 125.
[41] PG, 44, 244B; tr. it. cit., p. 126.
[42] PG, 44, 244C; tr. it. cit., p. 126.
[43] PG, 44, 244D; tr. it. cit., p. 126.
[44] PG, 44, 245B; tr. it. cit., p. 127.
[45] PG, 44, 245B; tr. it. cit., p. 127.
[46] PG, 44, 252C; tr. it. cit., p. 132.
[47] PG, 44, 252D; tr. it. cit., p. 133.
[48] PG, 44, 253B; tr. it. cit., p. 133.
[49] PG, 44, 253B ; tr. it. cit., p. 133.
[50] PG, 44, 253B; tr. it. cit., p. 133.
[51] PG, 44, 256�; tr. it. cit., p. l34.
[52] PG, 44, 256C; tr. it. cit., p. 135.
[53] Ef., 4, 22-24.
[54] Ef., 4, 24.
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