Spiritual siblings

In my reading of Church history, I have come to the 4th century. I recently read about the Cappadocians, specifically Basil of Cesarea and Gregory of Nyssa. Also mentioned was their sister, Macrina.

Macrina was engaged to be married, but upon the death of her fiance, she retired to the family estate in Pontus and established a monastic community which was dedicated to prayer and contemplation. She had a very big impact upon her two brothers who would both become influential men in the Eastern church.

Macrina was no slouch when it came to academics. As she grew older, she became more learned and intellectual in her life. Her brother Gregory wrote a volume called On the Soul and the Resurrection, which is a set of conversations between himself and his sister on those two subjects. As the story goes, Gregory was grieved at the death of his brother Basil and went to see his sister, only to find her on the verge of death herself. During this conversation, Macrina's views on the nature of the soul and the theology of the resurrection are articulated.

I must admit that when I read through the excerpt I have, it required a lot of concentration, because these are weighty things which she is pondering. When she discusses the nature of the soul, she discusses at length how the soul relates to matter, specifically how it relates to individual particles which comprise our flesh and blood. I found this to be a very compelling thing for her to have thought upon, because she amount of scientific information about such things in the fourth century was nothing compared to what it is now. I, myself, having lived in the shadow of centuries of scientific inquiry, have never really considred how the soul, which is not material, relates to the individual particles of my body.

Some of what Macrina said kind of confounded me, because it was written in overly philosophical language. I am no philosopher, so I had to read slowly. I felt very Pooh Bear-ish at times. The sentences are very long as well, which, I am assuming was part of the rhetorical style of the day. One thing is certain about Macrina, she understood and believed in God the Creator:

The Creation proclaims outright the Creator; for the very heavens, as the Prophet says, declare the glory of God with their unutterable words. We see the universal harmony in the wondrous sky and on the wondrous earth; how elements essentially opposed to each other are woven together in an ineffable union to serve one common end, each contributing its particular force to maintain the whole; how the unmingling and mutually repellent do not fly apart from each other by virtue of their pecularities, any more than they are destroyed, when compounded by such contrariety.

This excerpt also discussed the Resurrection. Macrina contemplates the Resurrection at length, pondering how the Divine will put our bodies back together, given that the soul and flesh are divided from one another at death:

The Divine power, in the superabundance of Omnipotence, does not only restore your body once dissolved, but makes great and splendid additions to it, whereby the human being is furnished in a manner still more magnificent.

These are weighty things that this woman thought upon. She had a powerful influence over her brothers, Basil especially. At one point, when Basil was becoming rather prideful over his intellectual and rhetorical abilities, Macrina intervened and influenced him. Perhaps she gave him a good sisterly talking to.

It's tempting for me, as a woman who has lived with the legacy of hundreds of years of theological scholarship, to regard Macrina as rather mystical and strange, and at first, I did think that. I tend to want to hear this woman speak like an evangelical woman of the 21st Century. It isn't going to happen, because that kind of woman didn't exist back then; that kind of woman is a product of history. Centuries divide our thoughts because of the fact that she lived at a time when the church was is in infancy. She was alive as the church was articulating its beliefs and contradicting heresy. It was really fascinating to me, though, to see that there have always been women who want to ponder the weighty issues. The issues I think upon aren't so nearly as deep as Macrina's, though. I found it quite inspiring.

I'm currently supplmenting my reading of Church history with two books, Daughters of the Church, and In Her Words. I confess to a real interest in women and family when I read any kind of history, and these books seem to be a good supplement to my other reading.