Open sample · Greek Fathers
On the Soul and the Resurrection
Gregory of Nyssa, c. 380. The dialogue with Macrina.
Editorial introduction
The dialogue Gregory wrote in the months following his sister Macrina's death — a work informally known to the early manuscript tradition as Ta Makrinia, "the things of Macrina" — is one of the most carefully composed of his philosophical works, and at the same time one of the most personal. The setting is the sickbed at Annisa; the interlocutors are Gregory himself, returned from the funeral of his brother Basil and overwhelmed by a second bereavement, and Macrina, dying but presiding over the discussion with the calm of a philosophical teacher. The form is unmistakably Platonic; the analogy with the Phaedo is established at once, and Gregory does not attempt to disguise the literary debt. But the content is not the Phaedo's, and the conversation moves rapidly into questions distinctive to Christian theology: the integrity of the resurrected body, the relation between soul and the elements of which the body is composed, the meaning of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the apokatastasis.
The translation that follows is in dialogue with the older NPNF rendering of W. Moore (1893) and with Roth's more recent translation (St Vladimir's, 1993). Both have their virtues; both, we believe, fall short in a similar respect, which is in their handling of Macrina's voice. The dialogue depends on the contrast between Gregory the bereaved younger brother, often interrupting with raw emotion, and Macrina the philosophical teacher, who speaks with extraordinary economy and precision. The earlier translations smooth this contrast: Gregory's grief becomes formulaic, Macrina's clarity becomes prosy. We have tried to preserve the registers — Gregory's halting and Macrina's measured — as carefully as we can.
A note on the title: the work is commonly known in English as On the Soul and the Resurrection, following the headline of Migne. The Greek manuscript tradition is in fact divided. Several important manuscripts give simply Ta Makrinia, and we have considered, but not adopted, restoring this older title. Our reasoning is recorded in the full editorial introduction in the members' library.
The dialogue, opening
Basil, great among the saints, had departed from this human life to God; and the impulse to mourn him was shared by all the churches. My sister, the Teacher, was still living, and I journeyed to her to communicate to her the sorrow of our loss. My heart was very heavy and I sought one who would weep with me, sharing my burden of grief. But when we saw each other the sight of the Teacher kindled my sorrow even more, for she too was already in the grasp of her last illness. Yet she, like one of the great masters in some great drama, surrendering herself to no impulse — not even at the moment of the body's failing — endured her bodily pain by reason of the soul, and was in nothing put out of countenance by the loss we had suffered.
Rather, she upheld the falling spirit of my soul, and called it back from despair, and persuaded it by various and sober reflections, until I in turn began to wonder, when I considered what sort of person was speaking to me, how she, weighed down with so heavy and bitter a sickness, could possibly look such suffering in the face with so much steadiness of mind. So now, when I had given utterance to no part of my grief, but at last opened my heart and told her the cause of my sorrow, she at once began the discourse that follows. Now, the conversation between us was somewhat to this effect.
I said: "It is not strange if those who, on the death of a friend, give themselves over to lamentation, should do so by reason of their bodily affection for those they have lost. For nothing of the dead survives in the perception of the senses. The friend whom we have loved is no longer with us, and the gaze of the eye seeks him as in a place that has been left empty. But how is it that those who are persuaded that the soul of the friend who has been taken away from us subsists somewhere in some sort of being — how is it that they too cannot tolerate the loss, and weep, and lament, just as those who hold the soul to be coextensive with the body do?"
And the Teacher said: "Tell me first what most weighs upon you. Among the things which throng upon you because of your grief, what most pains you?"
And I: "How could anyone fail to be pained, who has lost so dear a companion, the friend of his soul, his teacher? But the matter that strikes me with most violence is not the loss of his presence — though that too is sharp — but the apparent uselessness of the philosophy which we have practised. The pagans give to their dead the honour they give to the dead, and there is no difference between us and them when we stand at the graveside. The grief is the same, the lamentation is the same. The philosophy of the resurrection seems then a far-off and a colder thing than the warmth of grief allows us to feel."
And she: "This is what your trouble is. Listen, then, and I will speak first of the soul, that is, of what we are saying must subsist after the body's dissolution; then we shall consider the resurrection of the body itself. Yet I should not call this an order; it is rather a single question, considered in two of its aspects. For if there is no soul, there is nothing to be raised; and if there is a soul, but no resurrection of the body, then what is raised is not the human person, but only some fragment of it."
A note on Macrina's voice
The Macrina of Gregory's dialogue is, as has often been observed, both a real woman and a literary construction. Gregory composed the dialogue at most some months after her death, with vivid memory of her conversation; he certainly draws on what she actually said. But he also gives her, more deliberately than the form of dialogue strictly requires, the philosophical authority of a Diotima or a Phaedo's Socrates. We have not attempted to undo this layering. Macrina's voice in our translation is firm, philosophically precise, and economical; Gregory's voice is more variable, sometimes raw, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes argumentative. We believe this is what the Greek text gives us.
The decision to render Macrina as "the Teacher" (Greek: ἡ διδάσκαλος) follows the manuscript tradition. Roth rendered the term as "she", smoothing it into the narrative voice; Moore variously used "the great teacher" or "she". We have preferred the consistent "the Teacher" — capitalised — because Gregory's choice of the term itself is a deliberate identification of his sister with a philosophical office whose male equivalents (ὁ διδάσκαλος) were familiar in the Christian discourse of the period.