Patristic concept of human eidos

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original titleСвятоотеческая концепция эйдоса человека
3. Language term Russian
4. lemma author Saprykin, Dmitry
5. lemma category Modes of interaction
6. Publication date 2-02-2012
7. lemma work Климик Иван [Author]. Patristic concept of human eidos
8. lemma manifestations Богослов.ру
9. Keywords soul - body - Cloning - genetic code
10. Citations
    1. http://www.bogoslov.ru/text/2421037.html
11. Lemma body

    1. The author of the article analyzes the Holy Fathers’ teachings about the connection between soul and body of man and comes to the concept of a distinctive species, or eidos of a person, “whatness” of his hypostasis, a logically conditioned patristic view of the integrity of man, as not reducible to the sum of his parts. That is, from the point of view of Orthodox theology, that a person's soul and body can not be considered outside of the context of a specific human hypostasis: the soul is once and for all the soul of a particular person, which corresponds to his body, and only with it, and the body is just and forever the body of a particular person, which relates to his soul, and only to it.

       The author also emphasizes that human eidos is non-material therefore one should not identify it with human genotype. Besides this, we cannot place the connection of genotype directly to the human eidos, because in the course of a person's life genetic mutations occur, while eidos is independent of any kind of fluidity. One can only say that eidos generates a unique unified structure (ἕξις) of the soul and body in a person, on which the genotype depends to some extent.

       However, according to St. Gregory of Nyssa, eidos itself depends on the conformity of man's actions to the logos of his goodwill. Hence, one can obviously assume, according to the author, some dependence of genetic mutations in the course of human life on the sinful actions of man, although the nature of this connection is unknown and may be of separate research interest.

       The author speaks about the possibility of applying the patristic teaching on the eidos to resolve the question "Will the human clone be a full-fledged person?" "After all, there are no medium or intermediate souls between the souls of the human and animal types. Therefore, if the living germ of the being is human in its flesh, then the soul must be truly human, according to the indicated principle of strict correspondence between the types of the soul and the body, which, in turn, follows from the principle of eidos immutability. However, although the human clone will be a full-fledged person with body and soul, the tropos (image) of his birth, as not blessed by God and therefore not corresponding to the logos of multiplying people in number, will be sinful, somewhat like the birth of a person from adultery. "