What Is Voiced Through Macrina

Through the figure of “the Teacher” in On the Soul and the Resurrection, St. Gregory of Nyssa voices a substantial body of doctrine — an anthropology of the soul as image of God, a theory of the passions as accidental and reorderable, a defense of the bodily resurrection, and a vision of the final restoration in which God is “all in all.” This file does not re-expound that teaching, which the fifth section sets out; it asks instead what status the teaching has as Macrina’s — whether it is hers or Gregory’s, and what it means for the Church to receive it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

The Body of Doctrine, in Brief

The theology that the dialogues place in Macrina’s mouth is not a scattering of pious sayings but a connected body of doctrine, the most sustained piece of philosophical theology in the Greek patristic corpus to be attributed to a woman. Its members are well known and are expounded in detail elsewhere in this collection (see The Christian Phaedo; Apokatastasis and the Purifying Fire). It will be enough here to name them, since the present question is not what they say but whose they are.

First, an anthropology: the soul is an essence created, living, and intellectual, simple and uncompounded, intelligible and therefore immortal, the image within man of the invisible God; the human being is a microcosm gathering the orders of creation, and the mind (nous) is the image of the unseen Godhead (On the Soul and the Resurrection; PG 46:11–160). Second, a teaching on desire and the passions: the passions are not constitutive parts of the soul but accidental accretions, morally neutral movements to be reordered toward God rather than extinguished — epithymia, redirected, becomes desire for God Himself — a position deliberately set against both the Platonic tripartite soul and the Stoic ideal of feelinglessness (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). Third, the resurrection of the body: the same body, gathered again by the soul’s abiding affinity for its own elements and restored, with the “garments of skin” of mortality stripped away, to the integrity God intended (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5; cf. On the Making of Man). Fourth, the eschatological horizon of apokatastasis — the medicinal, purifying fire that heals what the will could not, evil understood as privation with no nature of its own, and the final word that, the last enemy abolished, God shall be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28; On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160).

This is a complete, if compact, dogmatic vision, running from the constitution of the soul to the consummation of all things. The question this file presses is the one that follows from its being placed in a woman’s mouth by her brother: in what sense is this Macrina’s theology?

Whose Theology Is This?

The difficulty is plain once stated. We possess not a single independent syllable of the historical Macrina; everything attributed to her comes through Gregory, who never even names her in the dialogue but calls her only hē didaskalos, “the Teacher,” and who composed — on every side of the scholarly debate — the speeches she delivers (On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160; cf. the companion treatment of the problem in The Question of Her Voice). The body of doctrine surveyed above is, in its developed and argued form, the same theology Gregory advances in his own treatises under his own name: the anthropology of On the Making of Man, the eschatology of the Catechetical Oration and of his treatise on infants who die early, the doctrine of perpetual ascent into God that runs through the Life of Moses and the homilies on the Song of Songs. The dialogue thus reads, at the level of content, as Gregory’s own thought — which raises the question whether “the Teacher” transmits a theology Macrina actually held or supplies a literary voice for theology that is finally his.

Here the collection observes its rule and reports the standing scholarly disagreement without ruling on it. [Disputed: Whether the theology voiced through Macrina is substantially her own, faithfully transmitted, or Gregory’s literary attribution. Elizabeth A. Clark (“The Lady Vanishes,” Church History 67/1 [1998]: 1–31) reads “Macrina” as a literary foil through whom Gregory speaks his own culture’s discourse and his own theology, so that the historical teacher “vanishes” behind the text; Virginia Burrus (Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000) holds that the teaching woman serves Gregory’s own reconfiguration of manhood and the image of God, a figure within his self-construction. Anna M. Silvas (Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008) holds that a real teacher stands behind the figure, whose theological substance Gregory transmits in good faith, having revered her for fifty years as his actual instructor. This collection reports all sides and rules on none.] The dispute is not resolvable from the texts, because there is no second witness against which to test Gregory’s attribution.

Yet the disagreement is narrower than it can appear. Two things are not in dispute on either side. The words are Gregory’s: even Silvas grants that the speeches are his literary composition, not a transcript. And the attribution is Gregory’s deliberate act: he, not a later editor, chose to assign this theology to his sister and to seat himself as her pupil. What divides the readings is only whether, behind the composed words and the chosen attribution, there stands a remembered mind whose teaching Gregory is faithfully rendering, or a constructed figure serving the author’s ends. The honest verdict lies between the strong forms: we do not have Macrina’s words, but we have Gregory’s words attributed by Gregory to Macrina, in good faith, about a sister he had every reason to revere as a teacher. The collection presents the theology accordingly — as what Gregory’s texts voice through Macrina, not as her independently attested teaching (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see METHODOLOGY).

Why the Question Is Not Idle — and Why It Does Not Disable the Theology

It would be possible to think the whole question academic: if the theology is sound, what does it matter whose mouth phrased it? But the question is not idle, for two opposite reasons, and seeing both keeps the reception honest.

It is not idle for the historian, because a great deal hangs on it for the recovery of women’s voices in late antiquity. If the teaching is genuinely Macrina’s, then the fourth-century Church possessed at least one woman of first-rank theological mind whose thought is partly recoverable — a fact of real consequence for how we understand who did theology in the patristic age (see Women’s Asceticism in the Fourth Century). If it is wholly Gregory’s, then “Macrina the theologian” is a literary effect, and the recovery is an illusion. The stakes of the source-critical question are therefore high, and the collection does not minimize them by pretending the attribution is secure.

But the question is also not disabling, because the truth and authority of the theology do not rest on its chain of custody from Macrina’s lips. The Church does not receive the doctrine of the soul, the passions, the resurrection, and the restoration because Macrina is certified to have spoken it; it receives them, where it receives them, on their own merits as Christian teaching, weighed against Scripture and the wider consensus of the Fathers (see Church Fathers). Some of this teaching — the anthropology of the image, the medicinal purification, the reordering of desire toward God — has entered deeply into the Orthodox tradition and into its doctrine of deification (see Theosis). Some of it — the strongest universalist construals of “God all in all” — the tradition has received with reserve and qualification, as it has the kindred passages in Gregory’s own name (see Apokatastasis and the Purifying Fire). In neither case does the reception turn on whether the historical Macrina or her brother first framed the argument. The dialogue is read by the Church as theology, not as a deposition.

How the Church Receives It

How, then, does the tradition hold this body of doctrine as Macrina’s? Not by claiming what cannot be claimed — that here we have the recorded teaching of a female systematic theologian, verbatim and independently attested. And not by dismissing what should not be dismissed — that a Father of the Church chose, of all possible voices, his sister’s, to carry his deepest reflection on death and the last things. The Church receives the theology of On the Soul and the Resurrection as part of Gregory’s patristic legacy, weighed on its merits, and at the same time venerates Macrina as the one through whom that legacy is voiced — “the Teacher,” and in the Church’s memory a Mother of the Church (see Gender and Authority).

There is a real theological surplus in the form of the attribution that the source-critical question must not be allowed to dissolve. Gregory did not merely happen to record a sister’s words; he made a choice, weighty and deliberate, to attribute his theology of the soul and the resurrection to a woman, to name her “the Teacher,” to cast himself — a bishop — as the grieving disciple corrected by her wisdom, and to model the whole on the death of Socrates with his sister in the philosopher’s chair. That choice is itself a statement about wisdom, authority, and the image of God in which male and female are one (Galatians 3:28), and the Church has received the statement along with the doctrine (see The New Philosophy). The teaching may be voiced in Gregory’s words; the decision to make it a woman’s is also Gregory’s, and the Church has venerated Macrina in precisely that role ever since.

The collection therefore refuses two false simplifications. It does not present the doctrine of the dialogues as Macrina’s independently recoverable system, which the sources cannot support. And it does not treat that doctrine as merely Gregory’s, with Macrina a discardable device, which the deliberateness of his attribution and the Church’s veneration forbid. What is voiced through Macrina is a real and largely orthodox theology, phrased by her brother, attributed to her in good faith, and received by the Church both for its truth and for the dignity of the woman through whom it is spoken. That is the precise and modest sense in which this theology is hers.

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. (The dialogue in which Macrina appears only as hē didaskalos, “the Teacher.”)
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).
The Holy Bible. 1 Corinthians 15:28 (“that God may be all in all”); Galatians 3:28 (“there is neither male nor female”).
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.)
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 transmission of theological substance.)
Ludlow, Morwenna. Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. (The modern reception of Gregory’s thought and of the Macrina dialogues.)