St. Gregory comes to mourn St. Basil; St. Macrina argues instead

ANNESI, Pontus, 379 AD — Saint Gregory of Nyssa crossed Asia Minor this year to grieve with his elder sister over the brother they had lost, and she would not grieve with him. She turned the visit into a cross-examination on whether the soul survives the body at all. He has written the whole of it down, in the first person, and the man who comes off worst in it is himself.

The brother was Saint Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, who died in that city on January 1 this year, not yet fifty. Saint Macrina was the eldest of the family’s children, St. Basil the eldest of the sons, St. Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, the third of them. She governs a community of women on the family’s land at Annesi in Pontus. St. Basil came home from Athens a trained public speaker, and she talked him out of that career and into a life of prayer and work with his hands.

The book he made of the conversation, On the Soul and the Resurrection, opens on why he went. “But his sister the Teacher was still living; and so I journeyed to her, yearning for an interchange of sympathy over the loss of her brother,” St. Gregory writes.

He found her on the floor rather than on a bed — a sack spread over a board, a second board propped up to hold her neck. The fever had left her so little strength that she could only raise herself on one elbow to give him the greeting a bishop is owed. Then she raised her hand to God: “This favour also Thou hast granted me, O God, and hast not deprived me of my desire, because Thou hast stirred up Thy servant to visit Thy handmaid.” All through what followed she held in her groans and hid how hard her breathing had become, so as not to distress him.

He got no tears from her. “Well, she gave in to me for a little while, like a skilful driver, in the ungovernable violence of my grief; and then she tried to check me by speaking, and to correct with the curb of her reasonings the disorder of my soul,” St. Gregory writes. She began with St. Paul: Christians are not to grieve for those who sleep as men without hope grieve.

He argued back: everything people make is built to hold death off, houses, farming, medicine, armour, gates barred with iron. “Why, what is the special pain you feel, in the mere necessity itself of dying?” St. Macrina answered. So he pointed to the dead body itself. A man who had been living and speaking a moment before lay with no feeling left in him, and it made no difference to him whether he was burned or cut.

He was still enlarging on it when St. Macrina lifted her hand and signed to him to stop. Then she said the thing he had been arguing around: “Surely what alarms and disturbs your mind is not the thought that the soul, instead of lasting for ever, ceases with the body’s dissolution!”

He answered badly. “I answered rather audaciously, and without due consideration of what I said, for my passionate grief had not yet given me back my judgment,” he writes. Scripture’s promises about the soul had always read to him as commands to believe rather than reasons for believing, he told her, and he had gone along with them without ever being convinced. Greeks of real standing in philosophy, he added, held that the soul is nothing in itself.

“Away, with that pagan nonsense!” St. Macrina said. “For therein the inventor of lies fabricates false theories only to harm the Truth.”

Then she gave her own answer, with the physician sitting by her and watching her. She called the soul “an essence created, and living, and intellectual”, and said it gives a body the power to live and to feel. “There is a proof of what I say close by us,” she said. The physician’s fingers were on her pulse, and the beat under them told him what the fever was doing inside her. A hand teaches a man nothing by itself, she said; the physician’s mind read the pulse through his fingers.

When the conversation was over she sent him to bed. “It is time, brother, for you to rest your body awhile, since it is wearied with the great toil of your journey,” she told him, and he went out and lay down under the vines of a garden nearby. By the next evening the fever had taken her voice. A lamp was carried in at dusk and she turned her eyes to it; her lips moved through the thanksgiving at the lighting of the lamps and her hands finished it for her. Then she drew one deep breath and died.