Macrina the Philosopher—the Fourth Cappadocian

An excerpt from Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), 8–10.

To the three Cappadocians should be added, as “the Fourth Cappadocian,” Macrina (the Younger), the oldest sister of Basil and of Gregory of Nyssa, named for their grandmother, Macrina the Elder. Not only was she, according to Gregory's accounts, a Christian role model for both of them by her profound and ascetic spirituality, but at the death of their parents she became the educator of the entire family, and that in both Christianity and Classical culture. Through her philosophy and theology, Macrina was even the teacher of both of her brothers, who were bishops and theologians, “sister and teacher at the same time,” as Gregory called her in the opening sentence of the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection (as he elsewhere referred to Basil, his brother, as “our common father and teacher”). Adolf von Harnack once characterized the Life of Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa as “perhaps the clearest and purest expression of the spirituality of the Greek Church,” which anyone looking for an epitome of Greek Orthodoxy should consult at the outset. Its author did intend it to be an authentic portrait of this saint who was his sister, of whom he said elsewhere that she was the only one on whom, in her final hours, he could rely to answer the objections of unbelievers to the resurrection. Although various scholars have pointed out the parallels between this statement by Gregory of Nyssa about Macrina and Plato's description of the disciples of Socrates in the Phaedo, that literary device does not necessarily take away from its historical verisimilitude, any more than it does from that of Plato's accounts of the public defense and the final hours of Socrates. But without reopening here the entire quest for the historical Socrates, it does seem to be at least permissible, if perhaps not obligatory, to take Gregory of Nyssa at his word about Macrina's philosophical learning and about her doctrinal orthodoxy, and therefore to link her name with those of her two brothers and Gregory of Nazianzus as the Fourth Cappadocian.

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Each of the three (or four) Cappadocians stood squarely in the tradition of Classical Greek culture, and each was at the same time intensely critical of that tradition. Each was in constant intellectual interchange, and in no less constant controversy, with the monuments of that culture and with contemporary expositors of the monuments. Gregory of Nazianzus claimed that there was nothing inconsistent with the Christian gospel in the Classical learning of such Christian scholars as his brother, Caesarius. After all, even the sainted Athanasius of Alexandria had studied Classical literature and philosophy. Gregory of Nyssa was conscious of the cultural differences between more cultivated and “more barbarian peoples,” a term that does seem to have referred to the differences between the Greek-speaking peoples and those who did not speak Greek; he also added the warning, however, that sin and vice were universal, regardless of language or level of culture. For him, the supreme example of how the believer could properly benefit from pagan learning was Moses, who had, according to the Book of Acts, “‘received a paideia in all the sophia of the Egyptians,’ a powerful speaker and a man of action.” Therefore “the paideia of the outsiders” was not to be shunned, but cultivated. What it imparted, moreover, as the text of Acts conceded, was not nonsense, despite its pagan origins, but an authentic sophia of some kind. According to Basil, “even Moses, that illustrious man, with the greatest name for sophia among all mankind, first trained his mind in the learning of the Egyptians, and then proceeded to the contemplation of the one who is.” Macrina, too, drew on the ideas of “various writers,” chiefly pagan philosophical writers, in her disquisition on the soul, and she quoted “wise men”—whom she did not identify by name in this context, although from other statements attributed to her it would appear to have been Greek philosophers whom she had in mind—about man as “microcosm.”