The New Philosophy

In the writings of St. Gregory of Nyssa his sister St. Macrina the Younger is “the philosopher” of the family and, in the deathbed dialogue, simply “the Teacher” (hē didaskalos). The “philosophy” she embodies is not the learning of the schools but the disciplined ascetic and contemplative life ordered wholly toward God — a wisdom Gregory presents as the fruit of a purified life rather than the property of the schools or of men, so that a woman untrained in rhetoric sits in the master’s chair and a bishop sits at her feet.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

What “Philosophy” Means in Gregory

When Gregory of Nyssa calls his sister “the philosopher” he is not awarding her a chair in dialectic. In the usage that runs through the Cappadocian writings, philosophia — “love of wisdom” — had come to name the whole disciplined life of asceticism and contemplation ordered toward God: poverty, virginity, vigil, prayer, the stripping away of the passions, and the soul’s ascent to its Archetype (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000; cf. On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160). To “take up philosophy” or “embrace the philosophic life” in these texts is to renounce the world for the ascetic vocation; the word denotes a manner of living before it denotes any body of doctrine. The Life of Macrina presents the household at Annesi as a school of exactly this philosophy, and Macrina as its mistress (Life of Macrina; see The Domestic Monastery).

This is why Gregory can hold that Macrina is supremely a philosopher while granting that she was never schooled in pagan letters. Her mother Emmelia, the Life reports, had deliberately kept the girl’s education within the Scriptures and the Wisdom literature rather than the poets and the rhetorical curriculum, so that Macrina came to maturity unlettered by the schools yet steeped in Scripture (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000; cf. Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008). The wisdom Gregory ascribes to her is therefore not erudition but the clarity of a life purified and turned wholly Godward — a knowledge won by ascesis rather than by reading. On this account asceticism is philosophy, indeed the true philosophy, set over against the worldly learning that Gregory and Basil had themselves pursued at Athens and Caesarea before the household’s conversion to the ascetic life (see Forming Basil).

The True Philosophy Against the Worldly

The whole shape of the Life of Macrina is an argument that this ascetic wisdom is the genuine article and the schools’ philosophy a lesser, derivative thing. Gregory frames his sister’s biography as the life of one who attained “the height of human virtue through philosophy,” and he repeatedly contrasts the rest of the family’s worldly attainments — Basil’s celebrated rhetorical training, the brothers’ public careers — with Macrina’s hidden and steadier ascent (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000). The famous scene of Basil’s return from Athens “monstrously conceited about his skill in rhetoric,” whom Macrina swiftly drew to “the goal of philosophy” — the ascetic life — sets the two philosophies in direct competition and awards the victory to hers (Life of Macrina; cf. Silvas, Brepols, 2008). The man crowned by the schools is converted by the unschooled woman; the worldly philosophy yields to the true.

This conviction is not Gregory’s idiosyncrasy but a settled Cappadocian and broader fourth-century idiom in which monastic and ascetic life is “the philosophy” without qualification, the discipline that delivers what the philosophic schools only promised (cf. Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, Oxford, 1994). What is distinctive in Gregory is that he locates the fullest embodiment of this true philosophy not in a desert father or a bishop but in his own sister, and that he is willing to be instructed by her in it (see Women’s Asceticism in the Fourth Century).

The Woman as Teacher of Bishops

The pointed inversion to which all this tends is that a woman, and one unlettered by the schools, becomes the teacher of bishops. In On the Soul and the Resurrection Gregory — already by then a consecrated bishop — stages himself as the doubting pupil and assigns to Macrina the entire burden of doctrine, calling her throughout only hē didaskalos, “the Teacher,” and fixing the feminine article to a noun the language ordinarily reserved for men (On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160; see The Christian Phaedo). She instructs him on the immortality of the soul, the nature of the passions, and the resurrection of the body; he raises the objections of the materialist and the sceptic and is answered. The learned man sits at the feet of the wise woman, and the Life tells the same story in narrative form, presenting the dying Macrina as the one who consoles and steadies her grieving brother rather than the reverse (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000).

Gregory makes the literary kinship explicit by casting the dialogue in the mold of Plato’s Phaedo, with Macrina in the place of the dying Socrates. But she is at once his Socrates and his Diotima — the dying philosopher whose calm rebukes the disciple’s grief, and the wise woman who, like the Diotima of the Symposium, leads the man up the ascent to the divine (Plato, Phaedo and Symposium; cf. Virginia Burrus, Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000). The difference, and it is decisive, is that where Plato’s Socrates merely reports Diotima’s teaching at second hand, Gregory stages the wise woman herself, present and speaking, with the bishop transcribing. The ancient hierarchies of master and pupil, of male and female, of the lettered and the unlettered, are deliberately turned over.

That overturning is itself a piece of theology, not merely a literary conceit. If wisdom is the fruit of a purified life and not the property of the schools or of men, then it may come to rest as fully in an unlettered virgin of Pontus as in a rhetor of Athens — and in the order inaugurated by Christ, where “there is neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28), it does (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000; cf. On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160). Gregory’s portrait thus enacts a claim about the sources of theological knowledge: it is given to the pure in heart, and the schools have no monopoly on it. This is the theological substance of the gender inversion, and it is why the figure of Macrina has become central to scholarship on gender and authority in early Christianity (see What Is Voiced Through Macrina).

“Philosopher of God”

Modern scholarship has taken up the same vocabulary. Anna M. Silvas, whose 2008 volume gathers and translates the principal Macrinian texts, titles the book Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, deliberately recovering Gregory’s own designation and pressing the claim that a real teacher of theology — not merely a literary device — stands behind the sources (Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008). For Silvas the “philosophy” of Macrina is recoverable as the lived and transmitted wisdom of an actual woman whose influence shaped Basil, Gregory, and the household. On the other side, a strong current of feminist and rhetorical scholarship reads “the philosopher” and “the Teacher” primarily as Gregory’s idealizing construction — a figure through whom the bishop voices his own theology and works out his own anxieties about masculinity, authority, and the body (Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes,” Church History 67/1 [1998]: 1–31; Burrus, Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000).

[Disputed: Whether Macrina’s “philosophy” is her own intellectual and spiritual achievement, recoverable behind the texts, or substantially Gregory’s literary construction of an idealized ascetic teacher. Anna M. Silvas (Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008) and Pierre Maraval (SC 178, 1971) hold that a historically remembered teacher stands behind the portrait; Elizabeth A. Clark (“The Lady Vanishes,” 1998) and Virginia Burrus (Begotten Not Made, 2000) read “the philosopher”/“the Teacher” largely as a rhetorical figure through whom Gregory speaks. This collection reports both positions and rules on neither.]

A Note on Whose Portrait This Is

It must be kept steadily in view that everything said here of Macrina-the-philosopher comes through Gregory’s pen. She left no writings of her own; the designation “philosopher,” the title “the Teacher,” and the whole portrait of unlettered wisdom seating a bishop at her feet are Gregory’s presentation, found in his Life of Macrina and On the Soul and the Resurrection and nowhere independently attested (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000; On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160; see Gregory’s Two Works). Whether one reads the portrait as faithful memory or as literary idealization, it is Gregory who chose to draw it this way — to call his sister the philosopher of the family and to record himself as her pupil. That choice, by a bishop and master of the Church, is a deliberate theological act whatever its relation to the historical woman, and it is on the meaning of that act, as much as on the recoverable facts, that the Church and the scholars reflect (see The Question of Her Voice).

References

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. W. K. Lowther Clarke, The Life of Saint Macrina. London: SPCK, 1916; trans. Anna M. Silvas, in Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Brepols, 2008).
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; trans. Catharine P. Roth, Popular Patristics Series, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1993.
Plato. Phaedo and Symposium (the Diotima discourse). In Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Burrus, Virginia. Begotten Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Clark, Elizabeth A. “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn.’” Church History 67, no. 1 (1998): 1–31.