Gender and Authority

In On the Soul and the Resurrection St. Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop and one of the great Fathers, casts his sister St. Macrina the Younger as “the Teacher” (hē didaskalos) — the philosopher who instructs him on the soul, death, and the resurrection while he sits as her pupil. This file weighs the significance of a woman placed in such doctrinal authority within a Father’s text: the teacher-of-bishops inversion, the scholarly debate over whether it reflects real female theological authority in the fourth century or a literary strategy, and the Orthodox reception of Macrina as a Mother and Teacher of the Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

The Inversion: A Woman in the Chair of the Master

The central fact is easy to state and hard to absorb. In the dialogue that made Macrina famous, Gregory does not call her by name; he calls her hē didaskalos, “the Teacher” — fixing the feminine article to a noun the Greek language ordinarily kept masculine, so that the title itself registers something unusual: a woman in the chair of the master (On the Soul and the Resurrection, opening and throughout; PG 46:11–160). And the pupil is no ordinary one. Gregory is a bishop, a brother of Basil the Great, and would be reckoned among the Cappadocian Fathers; yet in the dialogue he takes the part of the doubter and objector, the one whose grief must be steadied and whose errors must be corrected, while the woman teaches. The ordinary hierarchies of the age — male over female, ordained over lay, the schooled over the unlettered — are, within the text, deliberately inverted: the woman teaches the bishop, and the bishop records that she was right (see The Christian Phaedo).

The inversion is sharpened by the model Gregory chose. He reworked Plato’s Phaedo, setting Macrina where Plato set the dying Socrates — and behind the Phaedo stands the Symposium, where Socrates reports that he learned the mysteries of love from a woman, the priestess Diotima, whom he placed above himself as his teacher. Gregory goes further than Plato: he does not merely report a wise woman’s teaching at second hand, as Socrates reports Diotima; he stages the wise woman herself, present and speaking, with the philosopher-brother seated as her living pupil (Plato, Phaedo and Symposium; On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). The gesture is unmistakable, and it is doing theological work. In the Vita, Gregory makes the inversion explicit beyond the dialogue’s frame, calling Macrina his teacher and the one who formed the whole family in the philosophic life (Life of Macrina; PG 46:959–1000; SC 178). That a Father of the Church should so present his sister is the datum this file weighs.

What Does the Inversion Mean?

Two readings of this datum have shaped the modern discussion, and the collection reports both without adjudicating between them, per its rule on live disputes (METHODOLOGY §4; see METHODOLOGY).

On the first reading, the teaching woman is largely a literary and rhetorical construction, and the inversion tells us more about Gregory’s authorial purposes than about any social reality of female authority. Elizabeth A. Clark argued that “Macrina” functions as a literary foil for Gregory’s own persona and teaching, that the historical woman “vanishes” behind a text written by a man and saturated with his culture’s discourse, and that the feminist historian who hopes to recover a real female theologian from such a text is, after the “linguistic turn,” chasing a figure she cannot reach (Clark, “The Lady Vanishes,” Church History 67/1 [1998]: 1–31). Virginia Burrus pressed the point in a different key: Gregory’s staging of the teaching woman belongs to his own reconfiguration of manhood and of the image of God, in which the feminine figure serves the male author’s self-construction — Macrina is the medium through which Gregory works out a theology that surpasses the categories of male and female, and the woman’s authority is thus structural to his project rather than a window onto women’s actual standing (Burrus, Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000). On this whole reading, the inversion is real as a piece of rhetoric and theology, but it is Gregory’s inversion, and one should not read off it the conclusion that fourth-century women taught bishops.

On the second reading, the inversion has purchase precisely because women did exercise real ascetic and spiritual authority in the fourth-century Church, and Gregory’s portrait, however literary its form, reflects that social reality rather than inventing it from nothing. Susanna Elm’s study of women’s asceticism documents a world in which women founded and governed ascetic households, instructed disciples, and were revered as spiritual mothers and teachers — a world in which a woman like Macrina, presiding over the community at Annesi, could plausibly be the formative theological influence Gregory says she was (Elm, Virgins of God, Oxford, 1994; see Women’s Asceticism in the Fourth Century). Anna M. Silvas extends this to Macrina specifically: Gregory wrote of a sister he had known and revered for fifty years as his actual teacher, and the attribution of theological authority to her is a historical claim made in good faith, not a transparent fiction; the teacher-of-bishops inversion records, on this view, something that really happened in one remarkable household (Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Brepols, 2008). On this reading the inversion is not merely a trope but testimony.

[Disputed: Whether Gregory’s casting of a woman as doctrinal authority reflects real female theological authority in the fourth century or is principally a rhetorical and literary strategy. Susanna Elm (Virgins of God, Oxford, 1994) and Anna M. Silvas (Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008) hold that women exercised genuine ascetic and teaching authority in the period and that Gregory’s portrait reflects that social reality. Elizabeth A. Clark (“The Lady Vanishes,” Church History 67/1 [1998]: 1–31) and Virginia Burrus (Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000) hold that “Macrina” is substantially a literary construction serving Gregory’s own rhetorical and theological self-construction, so that the figure cannot be read straightforwardly as evidence of women’s authority. This collection reports both and rules on neither.]

As with the kindred question of whether the theology is hers or Gregory’s (taken up in the companion file), the two readings are not as far apart as their strongest forms suggest (see What Is Voiced Through Macrina). All sides grant that the words are Gregory’s and the staging deliberate; all sides grant that fourth-century women did exercise some real ascetic authority. What divides them is how much of Gregory’s particular portrait is testimony to Macrina and how much is the author’s art. The texts cannot settle it, for there is no second witness; and the collection does not pretend they can.

Why the Inversion Is Significant Either Way

It is worth seeing that the significance of the inversion does not depend on which reading prevails. Suppose the constructionists are largely right and “the Teacher” is substantially Gregory’s literary creation. Even so, the choice to create her is itself the significant act and cannot be waved away. That one of the great Fathers chose to voice his deepest theology of death and resurrection through a woman, to name her “the Teacher,” to seat himself — a bishop — as her corrected pupil, and to do so within a corpus that the Church has received as authoritative, is a theological statement about wisdom, authority, and the image of God in which “there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28). The decision is Gregory’s whether or not the historical Macrina spoke a word of the dialogue, and the decision stands as a datum of the patristic tradition regardless of its source (see The New Philosophy).

And suppose the recoverable-authority reading is largely right. Then the significance is greater still, for then the patristic age held at least one woman whose theological formation of a future Father and a future bishop was real, acknowledged by him, and consequential for the tradition. On either reading, the figure of the woman teaching the bishop is not an embarrassment to be explained away or a curiosity to be marginalized; it is a deliberate and weighty feature of the Cappadocian legacy, planted there by a Father’s own hand. The collection neither overclaims — Macrina is not a fully recoverable female systematic theologian whose lectures we possess — nor dismisses — she is not a mere mouthpiece; it states the debate and lets the significance stand on whichever ground the reader finds firmer.

The Orthodox Reception: Mother and Teacher of the Church

Whatever the historians conclude, the Church’s reception is not in doubt. Orthodoxy venerates Macrina as a saint, commemorating her on the nineteenth of July, and remembers her in the tradition’s own honorifics as a Mother of the Church and a teacher of the philosophic life — the very role Gregory gave her (see Veneration). The Church does not resolve the source-critical question of who composed the dialogue’s arguments; it receives the theology of On the Soul and the Resurrection as part of Gregory’s patristic legacy, and it venerates Macrina as the one through whom that legacy is voiced. The two acts are distinct and both are real: the doctrine is weighed on its merits as Christian teaching, and the woman is honored in the speaking role the Father assigned her.

That a woman holds this place in the patristic corpus — named “the Teacher,” staged as the instructor of a bishop on the last things — is itself significant for how the tradition understands the dignity and the gifts of women within the Church. It does not, of itself, settle any modern question about ministry or office; the Macrina dialogues are not an argument about ordination, and the collection does not enlist them as one. But the figure stands, within the sources the Church has received, as a witness that theological wisdom is the fruit of a purified life and the gift of the Spirit rather than the property of men or of the schools — a witness the Orthodox tradition has venerated for sixteen centuries (see Women in Orthodoxy; Church and World). Macrina’s enduring authority in the tradition rests not on a transcript we do not possess but on this: that a Father of the Church chose her, of all possible voices, to teach him the things that matter most, and that the Church has honored her as that teacher ever since.

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; trans. Catharine P. Roth, Popular Patristics Series, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993; trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, 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. (The Socrates/Diotima pattern Gregory inverts.)
  • The Holy Bible. Galatians 3:28 (“there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”).
  • Clark, Elizabeth A. “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn.’” Church History 67, no. 1 (1998): 1–31. (The “literary foil” thesis; the vanishing of the historical Macrina behind Gregory’s text.)
  • Burrus, Virginia. Begotten Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. (The teaching woman within Gregory’s reconfiguration of manhood and the image of God.)
  • Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The social reality of women’s ascetic and teaching authority in the fourth century.)
  • Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. (The recoverable-teacher reading; the good-faith attribution of authority to a remembered sister.)
  • Roth, Catharine P. Introduction to On the Soul and the Resurrection. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993. (On Macrina as “the Teacher” and the Phaedo model.)