The Dialogue with Macrina

On the Soul and the Resurrection is St. Gregory of Nyssa’s “Christian Phaedo”: a deathbed dialogue, set in the grief-stricken days after St. Basil’s death in early 379, in which his dying sister St. Macrina the Younger — called throughout simply “the Teacher” — instructs a grieving and doubting Gregory on the immortality of the soul, the passions, the purifying fire of the world to come, and the resurrection. In it Gregory reverses the gendered conventions of Greek philosophy by casting a woman as the Socrates and Diotima of the Christian hope, and articulates a doctrine of the final restoration of all things in which “God shall be all in all.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Setting: A Philosopher’s Deathbed

The dialogue takes its occasion from the gravest passage in Gregory’s own life. His brother and master in the faith, St. Basil the Great, had died on the first of January 379. Travelling through Pontus, Gregory turned aside to the ascetic community his sister had founded at Annesi (Annisa), on the river Iris, and found Macrina herself mortally ill, lying not on a bed but on the ground (On the Soul and the Resurrection, opening; cf. Life of Macrina). She would die later that same year. The treatise — De anima et resurrectione, composed about 380 — frames its whole argument within this scene: the teacher is dying as she teaches, and the doctrine of the soul’s immortality is set against the immediate fact of a beloved’s approaching death (De anima et resurrectione, PG 46:11–160).

Gregory presents himself as overwhelmed by a double grief — for Basil newly dead, and for Macrina dying before his eyes — and it is out of this raw mourning that the conversation grows. The bereavement is not a frame external to the argument but the very thing the argument must answer.

The “Christian Phaedo” and the Inversion of Plato

The form is deliberately and unmistakably Platonic. As Plato’s Phaedo sets Socrates on the eve of his execution discoursing serenely on the immortality of the soul to his weeping friends, so Gregory sets Macrina on her deathbed discoursing on the same theme to her weeping brother. The parallel is structural: Macrina is the dying philosopher whose calm rebukes the disciple’s grief, and Gregory takes the part that Socrates’ interlocutors take — the doubter, the objector, the advocate of every materialist and sceptical position the Teacher must overcome. Scholars accordingly speak of the work as a “Christian Phaedo,” at once an imitation of Plato and a silent reversal of him (cf. Catharine Roth, introduction to On the Soul and the Resurrection, SVS Popular Patristics).

The reversal is twofold. First, where Socrates is a man and the master of his circle, here the philosopher is a woman — and not a woman idealized at a distance, but Gregory’s own sister, unlettered by the schools yet supremely wise. Throughout the dialogue Gregory never names her; he calls her only hē didaskalos, “the Teacher.” She is, in effect, his Socrates and his Diotima at once: as Plato’s Diotima in the Symposium instructs Socrates in the ascent of love, so Macrina instructs Gregory in the ascent of the soul to God. The learned bishop sits as pupil at the feet of his dying sister. This inversion of the ancient hierarchy of teacher and learner, and of male and female, is itself a piece of theology: in the new order inaugurated by Christ, wisdom is the fruit of a purified life rather than the property of the schools or of men (see The Life of Macrina).

Second, and more deeply, Macrina corrects Plato even while borrowing his form. She defends the soul’s immateriality and immortality with arguments that often run parallel to the Phaedo, but she rejects the Platonic doctrines of the transmigration and pre-existence of souls, and she insists — against the whole drift of Greek thought — on the resurrection of the body. The Christian hope is not the soul’s escape from the body but the restoration of the whole human being. Plato is thus taken up and overruled by Scripture.

The Doctrine of the Soul

The dialogue opens from Gregory’s grief, which Macrina meets first by challenging the very notion that the soul perishes with the body. Against the materialists — those, in the manner of Epicurus, who reduce the human being to a chance concourse of atoms and deny any reality beyond the senses — she argues that the ordered intelligence everywhere visible in creation points to an intelligent cause, and that the mind in man, which is itself invisible and incorporeal, is the image of that invisible God (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5).

Macrina’s definition of the soul is precise and becomes a touchstone of Greek patristic anthropology. The soul is “an essence created, and living, and intellectual, transmitting from itself to an organized and sentient body the power of living and of grasping objects of sense, as long as a natural constitution capable of this holds together” (De anima et resurrectione; trans. NPNF II/5). In its own nature, on her account, the soul is simple, uncompounded, and intelligible — without parts, without quantity, not extended in space. Precisely because it is simple and not composite, it is not subject to the dissolution that destroys composite bodies; what has no parts cannot be taken apart. The soul’s immortality follows from its simplicity and from its kinship, as image, with the incorruptible God whose likeness it bears.

This simplicity raises an immediate problem that drives much of the dialogue: if the soul is simple and the image of God, what are we to make of the passions — desire, anger, fear, grief — which seem so evidently bound up with our inner life?

The Passions as Accretions, Not Essence

On this point Macrina takes a position of great consequence for later Orthodox ascetical theology. Plato’s tripartite soul — reason, the spirited part (thymos), and desire (epithymia) — would make the passions constitutive parts of the soul itself. Macrina will not allow this. If the soul is the image of God, and God is simple and impassible, then the passions cannot belong to the soul’s true nature; for there is no desire or anger in the Archetype. The passions are therefore not essential to the soul but accidental to it — accretions, “borderline” growths that have attached themselves to human nature through its kinship with the irrational, animal life of the body, and that are to be purified away rather than indulged or merely managed (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5).

Yet Macrina does not simply condemn them. The passions, she allows, are morally neutral impulses that become good or evil according to the direction the mind gives them: rightly ordered toward God, thymos becomes courage and zeal for the good and epithymia becomes desire for God Himself; misdirected, they become the roots of vice. The goal of the ascetic life is thus not the Stoic extinction of feeling but the reordering of these movements so that the soul, freed of what is alien to it, may recover its pure likeness to God. This is the anthropological ground of Gregory’s whole doctrine of purification (see The Homilies on the Song of Songs).

The Purifying Fire: Gold in the Furnace

From the nature of the soul Macrina turns to its destiny after death, and here the dialogue gives one of its most influential images. The “fire” of which Scripture and the Lord’s own parables speak is, on Macrina’s teaching, not retributive but purgative. Its purpose is not the eternal torment of the damned as an end in itself but the healing and cleansing of the soul. She likens it to the refiner’s fire that purges gold: as the goldsmith melts the ore to separate the precious metal from the dross alloyed with it, so the divine fire of judgment burns away the evil that has grown into human nature, separating it from the good until only the good remains (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5; cf. 1 Cor 3:13–15).

The pain of this purgation is real — Macrina compares it to a surgical cure, sharp but ordered to health — yet it is medicinal, proportioned to the evil to be removed, and therefore finite. The longer and deeper the soul’s attachment to material things, the longer the cleansing; but the fire’s logic is everywhere the same: to restore, not to destroy. This conception, which Gregory inherits and transforms from Origen, is the seedbed of his teaching on the universal restoration (see Apokatastasis in Gregory).

The Resurrection Body and the Restoration of Human Nature

Macrina then meets Gregory’s objections concerning the resurrection of the body — the very point at which Greek philosophy balked. How can a body scattered to dust and dispersed among the elements be raised again the same? Her answer turns on the soul’s abiding relation to its own body: the soul, she argues, retains a recognition of and affinity for the elements once united to it, “like marks,” and at the resurrection gathers its own again. The risen body is the same body, yet transformed — restored not to the condition of fallen, mortal existence but to the integrity God intended in creating man in His image (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5; cf. On the Making of Man).

The resurrection, for Gregory, is thus the restoration (apokatastasis) of human nature to its original beauty: the stripping away of the “garments of skin” — the mortality, passibility, and division that came with the Fall — and the return of human nature to its archetype. This is no mere resuscitation of corpses but the consummation of the whole economy of salvation, in which the image is at last fully conformed to its Archetype. Macrina’s doctrine of the soul, her teaching on the passions, and her vision of the purifying fire all converge here.

“God All in All”

The dialogue rises at its close to its governing text, 1 Corinthians 15:28: “that God may be all in all.” This is the horizon of the whole work. When the purifying process is complete and evil — which has no substance of its own but is only the privation of the good — has been wholly burned away and has ceased to be, then nothing will remain outside the good; and God, the Good itself, will be present in and to all things without remainder. There will then be no place left for evil, for if God is genuinely all in all, evil has nowhere to exist (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5; 1 Cor 15:28).

This final unity is the goal toward which the entire dialogue has moved: the immortal soul, purified of its accidental passions, raised in an incorruptible body, and human nature restored to its archetypal beauty, is gathered with the whole creation into the unhindered communion of God. The deathbed in Pontus thus opens onto the last things. What Macrina teaches her grieving brother is, in the end, not a consolation merely but the shape of the Christian hope — the soul’s deification in the God who will be all in all (see Theosis).

References

Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). PG 46:11–160. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 5 (NPNF II/5), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. New York: Christian Literature, 1893.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection. Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Saint Macrina. Trans. W. K. Lowther Clarke. London: SPCK, 1916. (Greek: GNO VIII/1, ed. V. Woods Callahan. Leiden: Brill, 1952.)
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio). PG 44:123–256; trans. NPNF II/5.
Maraval, Pierre. Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de sainte Macrine. Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Cerf, 1971.
Roth, Catharine P. Introduction to On the Soul and the Resurrection. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
Ramelli, Ilaria L. E. The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 120. Leiden: Brill, 2013.