Modern Scholarship

Because St. Macrina the Younger left no writings and is known almost entirely through her brother Gregory of Nyssa’s two works about her, the modern study of Macrina is inseparably bound up with the study of those texts — their criticism, translation, and interpretation. Over the past half-century that scholarship has moved through a recognizable arc: from the text-critical foundation laid by Callahan and Maraval, through the social history of women’s asceticism opened by Susanna Elm, into the gender-critical and literary “linguistic turn” of Virginia Burrus and Elizabeth Clark, and on to the comprehensive dossier assembled by Anna Silvas. At the center stands one unresolved question — whether a historical Macrina can be recovered behind Gregory’s portrait, or whether “Macrina” is finally Gregory’s construction — on which the leading scholars take opposed and named positions.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

The Shape of the Problem

The modern scholarship on Macrina begins from a single, defining constraint: she left nothing of her own, and nearly everything known of her comes through Gregory of Nyssa (see Gregory’s Two Works). The two works — the Life of Macrina (Vita Sanctae Macrinae; PG 46:959–1000) and the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione; PG 46:11–160), supplemented by a handful of external testimonia in Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa’s own Letter 19 — are the whole archive (Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Brepols, 2008). Every scholarly question about Macrina is therefore at once a question about Gregory: about his reliability, his literary aims, his theological program, and the degree to which a real woman can be distinguished from the figure he composed (see The Question of Her Voice). The history of Macrina scholarship is the history of how successive generations have answered that question.

The Text-Critical Foundation: Callahan and Maraval

Modern study rests first on reliable editions of the Greek. Virginia Woods Callahan prepared the critical edition of the Vita Sanctae Macrinae for the Leiden Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO VIII/1; Brill, 1952), the standard scholarly Greek text, and contributed English translations of Gregory’s ascetical works, including the Life of Macrina, to the Fathers of the Church series (FOTC 58). On this textual basis Pierre Maraval produced what remains the indispensable critical foundation: Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de sainte Macrine, Sources Chrétiennes 178 (Cerf, 1971), a critical edition with facing French translation, full introduction, and apparatus. Maraval established the text, set out the manuscript tradition, reconstructed the chronology of Macrina’s life and of the family, and dated the Vita itself (see The Vita and Its Genre). His edition is the point of departure for all later work and the standard reference for the text and its date. [Disputed: The date of the Life of Macrina. Maraval (SC 178, 1971) dates the work c. 380, shortly after Macrina’s death in 379; other scholars narrow it to 381/382, after Gregory’s return from the Council of Constantinople. The difference does not affect the Vita’s status as a near-contemporary composition by the bereaved brother.]

The companion dialogue received its standard accessible English form from Catharine P. Roth, whose translation of On the Soul and the Resurrection in St. Vladimir’s Popular Patristics Series (1993) made the work in which Macrina is the philosophical teacher widely available to non-specialists and to Orthodox readers (see The Christian Phaedo). Together the Callahan, Maraval, and Roth editions and translations are the textual platform on which the interpretive debate has been built.

The Social History of Asceticism: Susanna Elm

The first great interpretive movement beyond text-criticism was the social history of late-antique asceticism, and its decisive contribution to Macrina studies is Susanna Elm’s Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). Elm reads the Life of Macrina not primarily as a literary artifact but as evidence for the social reality of women’s ascetic life in fourth-century Asia Minor. On her account Macrina holds a genuine historical priority: the community she gathered at Annesi represents an early and formative instance of organized communal monasticism, and Macrina’s household ascetic practice precedes and helps to shape the institutional monasticism later associated with Basil (see The Domestic Monastery; Women’s Asceticism in the Fourth Century). Elm’s work recovered Macrina as an actor in the social history of monasticism — a foundress whose role had been obscured by the fame of her brothers — and made the case that behind Gregory’s portrait stands a recoverable history of women’s ascetic community.

The Gender and Literary Turn: Burrus and Clark

In the 1990s and 2000s the study of Macrina was reshaped by the “linguistic turn” and by gender-critical method, which shifted attention from the historical woman to the text and its construction. Two contributions are central.

Virginia Burrus, in Begotten Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford University Press, 2000), reads Gregory’s Macrina as part of his larger project of reconceiving manhood and gender in the wake of the Nicene settlement. On Burrus’s reading the figure of “Macrina” — the virgin who transcends the categories of male and female, the woman who teaches the bishop, the ascetic whose body is disciplined into a kind of angelic neutrality — is an instrument of Gregory’s theological and gendered imagination rather than a transparent window onto a historical person (see Virginity and the Angelic Life; Gender and Authority). The Macrina of the Vita is, in this account, “Macrina” — a literary and theological construction serving Gregory’s purposes.

Elizabeth A. Clark pressed the methodological stakes furthest in “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn’,” Church History 67/1 (1998): 1–31 — one of the most influential essays in the field. Clark argues that the textual and rhetorical sophistication of sources like the Life of Macrina makes the recovery of a “real” woman behind them deeply problematic: the woman tends to “vanish” into the literary strategies of her male author, leaving the historian with a textual construction (a foil, an exemplar, a vehicle for the author’s ideas) rather than a recoverable historical subject (see The Question of Her Voice). Macrina becomes the paradigm case of the post-linguistic-turn dilemma: the very richness of Gregory’s portrait is what makes it hardest to see through.

The Comprehensive Dossier: Anna Silvas

The most important single contribution to recent Macrina scholarship is Anna M. Silvas’s Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). Silvas gathers all the relevant sources into one volume in fresh English translation with introductions and notes: Basil’s testimonia, Gregory Nazianzen’s epigrams on the family, Gregory of Nyssa’s Letter 19, the full Life of Macrina, and On the Soul and the Resurrection. The result is the indispensable modern dossier — the place where a reader can find the entire textual basis of Macrina’s life assembled and contextualized. Silvas’s interpretive stance is also significant: against the more skeptical constructionist readings, she is confident of a recoverable historical Macrina, arguing that the convergence of the sources, the circumstantial detail Gregory supplies, and the independent testimonia together yield a genuine historical figure behind the Vita (Silvas, Macrina the Younger, 2008). Her work thus both equips the debate — by making the whole dossier available — and takes a clear position within it.

A handful of further studies round out the field. Kevin Corrigan’s translation and study, The Life of Saint Macrina (Toronto: Peregrina, 1987), provided an accessible English Vita with commentary before Silvas’s volume. Morwenna Ludlow’s Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern (Oxford University Press, 2007) situates the Macrina texts within Gregory’s whole reception, including the modern and postmodern readings, and is a useful guide to how the interpretive debate stands.

The Arc and the Unresolved Debate

Seen as a whole, modern Macrina scholarship traces a clear arc. It begins with text-criticism — Callahan’s GNO edition (1952) and Maraval’s SC 178 (1971), which fixed the Greek and the chronology. It moves into social history with Elm’s Virgins of God (1994), which recovered Macrina as a historical foundress of women’s monasticism. It passes through the gender and literary turn — Clark’s “The Lady Vanishes” (1998) and Burrus’s Begotten Not Made (2000) — which problematized the recovery of the historical woman and read “Macrina” as a construction of Gregory’s text. And it arrives at the comprehensive dossier of Silvas’s Philosopher of God (2008), which assembled the whole archive and argued for a recoverable historical figure. Each phase did not simply replace the last; the editions, the social history, the literary criticism, and the dossier now stand together as the layered resources of the field.

What the arc has not resolved is the central question the whole scholarship circles: can a historical Macrina be recovered behind Gregory’s portrait, or is “Macrina” finally Gregory’s literary and theological construction? The compendium presents this as a genuine, named, and live dispute rather than settling it. [Disputed: Whether the historical Macrina is recoverable behind Gregory of Nyssa’s portrait. On one side, Elizabeth A. Clark (“The Lady Vanishes,” Church History 67, 1998) and Virginia Burrus (Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000) argue, on post-linguistic-turn and gender-critical grounds, that the textual and rhetorical construction of the Vita largely dissolves the recoverable historical woman, so that “Macrina” functions as Gregory’s foil and instrument. On the other side, Anna Silvas (Macrina the Younger, Brepols, 2008) and, on text-critical and historical grounds, Pierre Maraval (SC 178, 1971) and Susanna Elm (Virgins of God, Clarendon, 1994) hold that a genuine historical Macrina is recoverable from the convergence of the sources, the circumstantial detail, and the independent testimonia. The debate is unresolved; the constructionist and historicist readings remain the two standing positions, and this compendium follows METHODOLOGY §4 in presenting both rather than adjudicating between them.] This unresolved tension — between the woman the texts may preserve and the figure the texts certainly construct — is the defining feature of the modern study of Macrina, and it is itself a fruit of taking her, at last, seriously as a subject of scholarship in her own right (see What Is Voiced Through Macrina).

See Also

References

  • Callahan, Virginia Woods, ed. Vita Sanctae Macrinae. In Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO) VIII/1. Leiden: Brill, 1952. (The critical Greek text of the Vita.) Also Callahan’s English translation in Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works, Fathers of the Church 58. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967.
  • Maraval, Pierre. Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de sainte Macrine. Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Cerf, 1971. (The critical edition, French translation, chronology, and dating; the standard text-critical foundation.)
  • Roth, Catharine P., trans. St. Gregory of Nyssa: On the Soul and the Resurrection. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993. (The accessible English translation of the companion dialogue.)
  • Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Macrina’s historical priority in founding communal women’s monasticism; the social reality of women’s asceticism.)
  • Clark, Elizabeth A. “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn’.” Church History 67, no. 1 (1998): 1–31. (The post-linguistic-turn problem; Macrina as literary construction.)
  • Burrus, Virginia. Begotten Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. (Gender and Gregory’s reconstruction of manhood; “Macrina” within Gregory’s project.)
  • Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. (The comprehensive modern dossier — all the sources in fresh translation — and the case for a recoverable historical Macrina.)
  • Corrigan, Kevin, trans. The Life of Saint Macrina. Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1987. (An earlier accessible English Vita with commentary.)
  • Ludlow, Morwenna. Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. (Situates the Macrina texts within Gregory’s reception, ancient through postmodern.)
  • Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Saint Macrina (Vita Sanctae Macrinae). PG 46:959–1000. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). PG 46:11–160. (The primary texts under study.)