Virginity and the Angelic Life

In his earliest treatise, On Virginity, St. Gregory of Nyssa presents virginity not as mere abstinence but as participation in the incorruptible, “angelic” life — a restoration of the soul’s likeness to God and an anticipation here and now of the resurrection state in which the children of the age to come are “equal to the angels.” St. Macrina the Younger is the lived embodiment of this theology: she does what her brother theorizes, and the irony that Gregory praised a state he had not himself entered is bound up with his portrait of her.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

Gregory’s Theology of Virginity

On Virginity (De virginitate) is Gregory of Nyssa’s first work, composed about 371 at the urging of his brother Basil, then newly bishop of Caesarea, as a protreptic commending the virgin life (On Virginity, PG 46:317–416; cf. NPNF II/5). Its argument moves well beyond the bodily fact of continence. For Gregory, virginity rightly understood is a comprehensive disposition of the whole person — a purity that reaches through body and soul alike and orders the entire life toward God, the cutting-off not merely of marriage but of every entanglement that binds the soul to the passing, corruptible world (On Virginity, PG 46:317–416). Bodily integrity is the outward sign and instrument of an inward integrity; the point is the soul’s undivided attachment to God.

On this account virginity is above all a sharing in incorruption. Gregory grounds the ideal in the divine nature itself: the Father is, so to speak, ever-virgin, generating the Son without passion and without the division that marks bodily generation, and the life of incorruptible purity is therefore a participation in the very manner of the divine life (On Virginity, PG 46:317–416; NPNF II/5). Where marriage and generation belong to the order of mortality — children replacing parents who die, life perpetuated only because death consumes it — virginity breaks the cycle of corruption and aligns the human person with the incorruptible God. It is thus presented as a power that “stops” death, not by escaping the body but by anticipating the body’s coming incorruption (On Virginity, NPNF II/5).

Restoration of the Divine Likeness

Behind this lies Gregory’s anthropology of the image and likeness. Humanity was made in the image of God, and the Fall overlaid that image with the “garments of skin” — mortality, passibility, the divided and corruptible mode of existence into which Adam fell (cf. On the Making of Man; On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160). The whole work of salvation is the recovery of the buried image and the soul’s reconformity to its Archetype. Virginity, in On Virginity, is one of the chief instruments of that recovery: by purifying the soul of the passions and detaching it from corruptible things, the virgin life wipes the image clean and restores the likeness to God that sin had defaced (On Virginity, PG 46:317–416). The treatise’s governing image is of the soul as a mirror: cleansed of the grime of passion, it once more reflects the divine beauty it was made to bear.

This restoration is not a private achievement but a return to the human nature God first intended. Gregory consistently reads the ascetic recovery of purity as the undoing of the Fall’s effects and the re-establishment of the original, paradisal condition — the same movement of apokatastasis, of nature restored to its archetype, that governs his eschatology (On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160). Virginity and deification are thus two descriptions of one trajectory: the purified soul, recovering the divine likeness, is being conformed to God. The horizon of the whole theology is therefore theosis, the participation in the divine life toward which the restored image tends (see Theosis).

The Isangelos Bios: The Life Like the Angels

The decisive scriptural warrant is the Lord’s word on the resurrection. To the Sadducees Christ declared that “the children of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are counted worthy to attain that age and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage… for they are equal to the angels” (Luke 20:34–36; cf. Matt 22:30). From this Gregory and the wider tradition drew the conception of the isangelos bios, the “life equal to the angels”: since in the resurrection there is no marrying, the virgin who already lives without marriage anticipates in this present age the manner of life proper to the age to come (On Virginity, PG 46:317–416; cf. NPNF II/5). The virgin does not merely abstain; she begins, here and now, to live the angelic and resurrected life before its time.

This gives virginity its eschatological character. It is not chiefly a discipline of self-denial but a foretaste — a realized anticipation of the kingdom, a living of the resurrection’s conditions in advance. The angels neither marry nor die nor are torn by the passions; the virgin, embracing incorruption, reaches forward into that condition and makes the future age present in the body (On Virginity, PG 46:317–416). For Gregory the ascetic life is in this sense proleptic: the monastery and the virgin’s cell are outposts of the resurrection in the midst of the mortal world. The “angelic life” became, for this reason, a standing name for monastic and ascetic existence in the Greek tradition that Gregory and Basil did so much to shape (cf. Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, Oxford, 1994).

Macrina as the Lived Embodiment

What On Virginity sets out as theology, Macrina lives. The Life of Macrina presents her as the one who, betrothed in youth and bereaved by her intended husband’s death before the marriage, refused all further offers and held herself pledged — insisting that her betrothed was “not dead but living” unto God, and that to take another husband would be a kind of infidelity to one who, in the resurrection, still awaited her (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000; cf. Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008). By this reasoning her widowhood became a virginity, and her fidelity to the dead man opened onto fidelity to the immortal Bridegroom, Christ, to whom her whole subsequent life was given (see The Betrothal and the Vow). The existential ground of her philosophy is precisely this vowed virginity (see The New Philosophy).

In Gregory’s telling she goes on to realize the angelic life in full. The Life repeatedly describes her existence at Annesi in terms that hover at the border between the human and the angelic — a life so purified of bodily attachment, so given to prayer and contemplation, that she seems already to stand on the threshold of the resurrection (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000). The deathbed scenes press this furthest: Macrina dies with her gaze fixed on the Bridegroom, conversing with God in the language of the Psalms, her last prayer a request to be received into incorruptible life — so that the Life reads her death as the visible passage of one who had already been living the angelic life into the angelic life made complete (Life of Macrina; see The Deathbed and the Scar). She is, in short, On Virginity rendered as a person.

The Irony of the Married Theorist

There is a pointed irony at the heart of this, and Gregory does not hide it. He composed On Virginity — his great praise of the virgin and angelic life — as a married man, for he had married a woman the sources name as Theosebia, and he says in the treatise itself that he writes as one shut out from the very glory he commends, separated from the virgin life “as by a chasm” and able only to admire it from the far side (On Virginity, PG 46:317–416; NPNF II/5; cf. Silvas, Brepols, 2008). The bishop theorizes the state he cannot enter; the unlettered sister lives it. The relation between the brother’s books and the sister’s life is thus exactly inverted from what one might expect of a man of letters and a woman of the household: he supplies the words, she supplies the thing itself.

[Disputed: Whether On Virginity reflects Macrina’s direct influence or is only thematically related to her life. The treatise is dated c. 371 and so precedes the deathbed works (On the Soul and the Resurrection and the Life, c. 380) by nearly a decade; some scholars (e.g. Anna M. Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008) see the household ascetic ideal that Macrina embodied as formative for Gregory’s earliest thought, while others treat the connection as a retrospective thematic parallel drawn by readers and by Gregory’s own later portraiture rather than a documented influence. The texts establish the shared theology, not a line of dependence; scholars differ on how tightly to draw it.]

Yet the irony is also, in Gregory’s hands, the very lesson. That the doctrine of virginity should be most fully embodied not by its learned expositor but by a woman who never wrote a line is of a piece with the larger claim his Macrinian writings make — that the true philosophy and the angelic life are gifts of a purified existence, not of erudition or office, and may rest more fully in an unlettered virgin than in a bishop who can only describe them (Life of Macrina, PG 46:959–1000; On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160; see What Is Voiced Through Macrina). The married theorist and the virgin saint together make a single argument: the angelic life is to be lived, and its living is the higher thing.

References

Gregory of Nyssa. On Virginity (De virginitate). PG 46:317–416. 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. 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).
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). PG 46:11–160. In NPNF II/5; trans. Catharine P. Roth, Popular Patristics Series, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1993.
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.