Still can’t find that passage in GN about Satan being the administrator of creation. But in the meantime, here’s something very interesting:
With regard, then, to this created Spirit-world we find that Gregory, as Basil, teaches that it existed, i.e. it had been created, before the work of the Six Days began. ‘God made all that is, at once’ (ἀθρόως). This is only his translation of the verse, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth;’ the material for ‘heaven’ and ‘earth,’ i.e. spirits and chaos, was made in a moment, but God had not yet spoken the successive words of creation. The souls of men, then, existed from the very beginning of creation, and in a determinate number; for this is a necessary consequence of the ‘simultaneous creation.’ This was the case with the Angels too, the other portion of the created Spirit-world. Gregory has treated the subject of the Angels very fully. He considers that they are perfect: but their perfection too is contingent: it depends on the grace of God and their own wills; the angels are free, and therefore changeable. Their will necessarily moves towards something: at their first creation the Beautiful alone solicited them. Man ‘a little lower than the Angels’ was perfect too; deathless, passionless, contemplative. ‘The true and perfect soul is single in its nature, intellectual, immaterial16.’ He was ‘as the Angels’ and if he fell, Lucifer fell too. Gregory will not say, as Origen did, that human souls had a body when first created: rather, as we have seen, he implies the contrary; and he came to be considered the champion that fought the doctrine of the pre-existence of embodied souls. He seems to have been influenced by Methodius’ objections to Origen’s view. But his magnificent idea of the first man gives way at once to something more Scriptural and at the same time more scientific; and his ideal becomes a downright forecast
of Realism.
Interesting, eh? All the souls of human beings were created—poof—at one and the same time, “at once.” His only difference from Origen is that he does not view the souls created in the beginning as embodied (in the sense Origen did) and he views them as all created "in the beginning" (unlike Origen who viewed them as eternally pre-existent). Don’t think I’ll buy into EITHER view.
T |