Mind-Body Unity: Gregory of Nyssa and a Surprising Fourth-Century CE Perspective

Can we really reduce the mind to the functioning of the brain, as we do so often in the United States? One can imagine the ancients, who believed that the liver was the seat of the soul, scratching their right sides when perplexed by such a question, just as we scratch our heads when in a conundrum. Are questions of mind-body even relevant any more? Certainly they are, for we in the West define death as whole-brain death. Technologically advanced Japan performs few transplants, because the Japanese notion of mind-body does not fit into the neat package of the Western paradigm: they cannot bring themselves to define “death” as brain death [1, p. 578]. Like many ancient philosophers, Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century CE bishop in the recently legitimated Christian church, thought and wrote on questions of mind-body unity that still plague us today. What is the interaction of the mind and body? Where does the mind reside? What influence does the body have over the soul? Gregory was very much a man of his era. However, he did not shrink from asking and attempting to answer some of the most pertinent questions about mind and body. While Gregory’s anthropology may limit our appreciation of his answers, his questions remind us that we are not nearly so advanced as we think. In fact, his philosophical anthropology challenges us to reexamine both the modernist and postmodernist interpretation of mind-body interaction. Where the modern person wants to divide things into ever smaller and smaller components, Gregory, in On the Making of Man, attempts a philosophical inquiry that preserves the whole. His unique conclusion insists on a unity of mind-body that does not appear to be present in many of his contemporaries or his predecessors.