The Christian Phaedo

On the Soul and the Resurrection is the deathbed dialogue St. Gregory of Nyssa modeled on Plato’s Phaedo, in which his dying sister St. Macrina the Younger — called throughout only “the Teacher” (hē didaskalos) — instructs her grieving, doubting brother on the immortality of the soul. Where Plato set the dying Socrates among weeping friends, Gregory sets a woman, unlettered by the schools yet supremely wise, in the philosopher’s chair; and where the Phaedo hoped for the soul’s escape from the body, Macrina corrects Plato by her own form and insists on the resurrection of the whole human being.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

A Philosopher Dying as She Teaches

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

The bereavement is not a frame external to the argument but the very thing the argument must answer. 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, not out of a schoolroom calm, that the conversation rises (De anima et resurrectione, PG 46:11–160). The reader who would understand the dialogue must keep the sickroom in view: every argument is offered to a man weeping, by a woman in pain, and is meant to bear the weight of an actual death (see The Family of Saints).

The Phaedo Reworked and Inverted

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 disciples, so Gregory sets Macrina on her deathbed discoursing on the same theme to her weeping brother (Plato, Phaedo; On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). The mapping of roles is exact: Macrina is the dying philosopher whose calm rebukes the disciple’s grief, and Gregory takes the part Socrates’ interlocutors take — the doubter and objector, the advocate of every materialist, Epicurean, 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 (Catharine P. Roth, introduction to On the Soul and the Resurrection, SVS Popular Patristics, 1993).

The reversal is twofold, and the first turn is the more startling. 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, untrained in the schools of rhetoric and philosophy yet wiser, the dialogue insists, than the bishop who records her. Throughout the work Gregory never once names her; he calls her only hē didaskalos, “the Teacher,” fixing the feminine article to a noun the language ordinarily kept masculine, so that the very title registers something unheard of: a woman in the chair of the master (On the Soul and the Resurrection, opening and throughout; PG 46:11–160). She is, in effect, his Socrates and his Diotima at once. As Plato’s Diotima in the Symposium is the wise woman who instructs Socrates in the ascent of love, so Macrina instructs Gregory in the ascent of the soul to God — except that Gregory does not, like Socrates, merely report a wise woman’s teaching at second hand; he stages the wise woman herself, present and speaking, with the learned bishop seated as her pupil (Plato, Symposium; cf. Virginia Burrus, Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000). 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 New Philosophy).

The second reversal is doctrinal and runs deeper. 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 (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). The Christian hope is not the soul’s escape from the body but the restoration of the whole human being; Plato is taken up by the borrowed form and overruled by Scripture. That a treatise should adopt the most famous pagan defense of immortality precisely in order to surpass it is the characteristic gesture of the whole dialogue.

The Doctrine of the Soul

The conversation 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 who, in the manner of Epicurus, 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, itself invisible and incorporeal, is the image of that invisible God. The very faculty by which the objector reasons against the soul’s reality is the soul reasoning; the materialist refutes himself in the act of thinking (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, and death, which is only the unbinding of what was bound together, has no purchase on what was never compounded (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). The soul’s immortality follows on two grounds at once — from its simplicity, and from its kinship, as image, with the incorruptible God whose likeness it bears.

This simplicity raises the problem that drives much of the dialogue. If the soul is simple and the image of the simple God, what are we to make of the passions — desire, anger, fear, grief — which seem so evidently bound up with our inner life? The very grief from which the conversation began is itself a passion; the question is therefore not abstract but presses on the two mourners in the room.

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 it. If the soul is the image of God, and God is simple and without passion, then the passions cannot belong to the soul’s true nature, for there is no anger or appetite in the Archetype. The passions are therefore not essential to the soul but accidental to it — accretions, “borderline” growths that have fastened 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 (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). She thus dismantles the Platonic model she has otherwise leaned upon: the parts Plato made structural she makes alien overgrowth.

Yet Macrina does not simply condemn the passions. They are, she allows, 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 toward lesser things, the same movements become the roots of vice (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). The goal of the ascetic life is therefore not the Stoic apatheia understood as the extinction of all feeling, but the reordering of these movements, so that the soul, stripped 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, and it foreshadows the purifying fire by which, in the world to come, what the will cannot put right is finally healed (see Apokatastasis and the Purifying Fire).

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, and the point on which her Christian dialogue parts most sharply from its Platonic model. How, Gregory presses, can a body scattered to dust and dispersed among the elements, mingled with the matter of other bodies, 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” it has set upon its own — and at the resurrection, by that affinity, gathers its own again from wherever they have gone (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). 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.

The resurrection, on this teaching, 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 (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5; cf. On the Making of Man). 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 definition of the soul, her teaching on the neutral and accidental passions, and her vision of the body recovered all converge here — and they open, at the dialogue’s close, onto the last horizon of the work: the purifying fire of judgment and the final word that God shall be “all in all,” which the companion file takes up (see Apokatastasis and the Purifying Fire).

A Note on Whose Voice This Is

It must be said plainly that these arguments are presented as what Gregory’s text voices through Macrina, not as her independently attested words. In the dialogue she is never named, only “the Teacher,” and the speeches assigned to her are, on every side of the scholarly debate, Gregory’s literary composition; we do not possess a single independent syllable of the historical Macrina (On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160; cf. Roth, SVS, 1993). [Disputed: Whether the teaching voiced by “the Teacher” recovers a real woman’s mind or is substantially Gregory’s literary construction. Elizabeth A. Clark (“The Lady Vanishes,” Church History 67/1 [1998]: 1–31) and Virginia Burrus (Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000) read “Macrina” largely as a literary foil through whom Gregory speaks his own theology; Anna M. Silvas (Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008) and Pierre Maraval (SC 178, 1971) hold that a real, historically remembered teacher stands behind the literary figure even granting the words are Gregory’s. This collection reports both and rules on neither.] The theology is received and weighed by the Church on its own merits; that Gregory chose to voice it through his sister and to seat himself as her pupil is itself a deliberate act (see The Question of Her Voice; What Is Voiced Through Macrina).

See Also

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. On the Soul and the Resurrection. Trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, in Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works. Fathers of the Church 58. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Saint Macrina (Vita Sanctae Macrinae). PG 46:959–1000; ed. Pierre Maraval, Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de sainte Macrine, Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Cerf, 1971; trans. Anna M. Silvas, in Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Brepols, 2008).
  • Plato. Phaedo and Symposium (the Diotima discourse). In Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
  • Roth, Catharine P. Introduction to On the Soul and the Resurrection. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
  • Clark, Elizabeth A. “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn.’” Church History 67, no. 1 (1998): 1–31.
  • Burrus, Virginia. Begotten Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.