Justified True Belief

(●) The eldest sister of the Cappadocian household, who turned the family estate into a monastery, taught the brothers who became two of the greatest theologians in the Greek church, and argued the case for the resurrection while she was dying on a board on the floor. + Two of the three men later called the Cappadocian Fathers, the theologians who settled how the Greek church would speak about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, were her younger brothers. Basil of Caesarea was the second child; Gregory of Nyssa was somewhere in the middle. Gregory said in writing that she had been his teacher, and that she was the one who turned Basil off the career he had trained for. Basil left no such sentence, and no surviving letter of his names her. Modern writers sometimes call her the fourth Cappadocian, and the phrase is a modern one, but it is not a flattering invention: it is close to what her younger brother said about her first. She is on a Christian apologetics site because of one afternoon in the autumn of 379. Gregory arrived at the family retreat in Pontus, the region along the southern shore of the Black Sea in what is now northern Turkey, grieving for Basil, who had died nine months earlier, and found Macrina too weak to stand. What followed was an argument, a real one, about whether the soul survives the body and what God has actually promised to do with the dead. Gregory wrote it down afterwards as a dialogue and put his own objections in his own mouth, including the hard materialist ones, and gave her the answers. Whatever else that book is, it is the earliest full-dress Christian case for the resurrection that has a woman at the centre of it. One fact is worth keeping, because it says in a line what the rest of the story takes pages to say. When she died, her community searched for something decent to bury her in, and the deaconess in charge, the woman the church had set apart to serve the sisters, told Gregory there was nothing to find: a cloak, a head-covering, and a pair of worn shoes were the whole estate of a woman who had been born rich enough to have suitors queuing at the door.

(●) c. 327 AD: She was born into a family that had already lost its property for refusing to deny Christ, and was given a second name that was never used out loud. + No ancient source records the year of her birth, so the c. 327 the handbooks print is not a record of anything. It is arithmetic. Gregory calls her the first child his mother bore, Basil was born around 329 or 330, and the gap between a first child and a second cannot have been large, which is where the counting back lands. Her birthplace is usually given as Caesarea in Cappadocia, the provincial capital in what is now central Turkey, though Gregory himself never says. What Gregory does say is what the family had already paid. His father’s parents had their goods confiscated for confessing Christ in the persecutions, and their mother’s father was executed by imperial order and his estate handed to other men. The grandmother the child was named for, Macrina the Elder, had lived through those years, which is why there are two Macrinas in this family and why this one is called the Younger. There was also a private name. Gregory reports that during her mother’s labour a figure in shining clothing appeared to her in sleep, addressed the child she was carrying as Thecla, and said it three times before leaving. Thecla was the famous virgin of the early Christian story that circulated under Paul’s name, the Acts of Paul and Thecla: a young woman who heard the apostle preach, broke off the marriage that had been arranged for her, and followed him, and whose story was read all over the Greek-speaking church. Gregory tells the vision as a family memory and reads it as a forecast rather than an instruction: the name, he says, indicated the life she would live. The name never left the house.

(●) c. 339 AD: Betrothed in her twelfth year, she lost the young man before the wedding and then argued that the marriage stood anyway. + Her father picked the husband, which is what fathers did. Gregory describes him as a relative of the family, just out of school, of good birth and steady, already making a name for himself in the law courts by speaking for people who had been wronged. Betrothal in the fourth century was a binding legal contract made well before the wedding, so a girl in her twelfth year, which is what Gregory says she was, could be promised and then wait. The young man died first. The suitors came back, because she was beautiful and the family was wealthy, and she refused all of them with an argument. There is only one marriage, she said, as there is one birth and one death, and the man her father had chosen was not dead but living to God, so he was absent rather than gone, and it would be a breach of faith to treat a husband who is away as though he had never existed. Gregory gives it as reasoning, not as piety, and he notes that it was firmer than anyone expected from a girl that age. Underneath the argument is the belief that runs through the rest of her life and turns up again on her deathbed forty years later: that the dead in Christ are alive now and will be raised, so a promise made to one of them is still a promise made to somebody. She was not refusing marriage in general. She was saying that hers had already happened.

(●) c. 341 AD: Her father died, her youngest brother was born, and she took on a newborn and an estate taxed in three provinces at once. + Peter was the last of the children, and Gregory puts it starkly: he received the names of son and orphan at the same moment, because as he entered this life his father left it. The year is a reckoning from Peter’s birth, which is usually placed around 340 or 341. The family was large, and exactly how large is a small puzzle worth pausing over. Gregory gives his mother, whose name was Emmelia, four sons and five daughters, and says the property was later divided into nine parts according to the number of the children, which is where the figure of nine comes from. Some accounts say ten instead, because the dying prayer Emmelia prayed years later called Macrina her first-fruits and Peter her tenth. Two readings have been offered, and Gregory settles neither, since he never gives a total anywhere. The commoner one, and the one W. K. Lowther Clarke prints flatly in the introduction to his 1916 translation of the Life, is that ten were born and nine lived, a child lost in infancy leaving no share to divide. The other is that a dying woman was not counting heads at all but speaking the language of the Law’s offerings, where the first sheaf of a harvest and the tenth part of it are the portions that belong to God. What the widow now had was land scattered across three districts, which meant paying taxes to three different governors, and a house full of children to educate and marry off. Macrina made herself the second half of that operation. She would not be separated from her mother, who used to say that she had carried her other children for a fixed term but carried this one always, and she cooked her mother’s meals with her own hands rather than leaving them to the kitchen. She also took the baby from the wet nurse and raised him herself, becoming, in Gregory’s list, father, teacher, tutor, mother and giver of all good advice to him. That last item is easy to read past, and it should not be, because it is the whole of Peter’s education. He never went to the schools his brothers went to; his sister was the school. He grew up nonetheless to be a bishop, and Gregory judged him no worse a man than Basil.

(●) c. 355 AD: Her famous brother came home from Athens insufferable, and within a short time he had given away everything he owned. + Basil had spent years in the best schools in the Greek world and came back a trained rhetorician, a professional public speaker, which in the fourth century was the surest road to money and office. Gregory’s description of him at this point is not kind, and Gregory loved him: puffed up beyond measure with the pride of oratory, looking down on the local men of standing, reckoning himself better than all of them. Macrina took him in hand. Gregory says she drew him toward the mark of philosophy, and the word needs unpacking, because it does not mean what it means in a university catalogue. For these writers philosophy is a whole way of living, stripped down on purpose: little food, few possessions, hours of prayer, no career. Basil gave up the applause, gave up the property, and went off to look at monks in Egypt and Syria before settling on the far bank of the river Iris, across the water from his sister. At home she was doing the harder thing. Gregory sets it down once the property has been divided and the distractions of a rich household are out of the way: she persuaded her widowed mother to stop living like a wealthy provincial lady and to live instead on a level with the household’s slave women, eating the same food, sleeping in the same kind of bed, treating them as sisters of the same rank. That is what turned the estate at Annisa in Pontus into a community rather than a pious household, and it is the reason her arrangement is counted among the first monasteries in that part of the world: not the prayer, which any devout family might keep, but the deliberate abolition of rank inside the front door.

(●) c. 357 AD: Her brother Naucratius was carried home dead with no warning, and she held her mother up through it. + Naucratius was the second brother, the gifted one, fast and strong and good with his hands. At twenty-one he had spoken in public well enough to thrill a theatre, and then he walked away from all of it and went to live alone by the Iris with one servant, Chrysapius, for company. He spent five years there looking after a group of poor old men who could no longer look after themselves, fishing the river to feed them. Then he went out on one of those expeditions and was brought back dead, and Chrysapius with him. Gregory names no cause, and what he stresses is that there was no cause to name: no illness anyone had been watching, no accident anyone had feared, only a young man who went out to fish and did not come home. Gregory gives no year either, so the c. 357 is arithmetic again, the five years of the retreat counted on from a withdrawal usually put in the early 350s. Their mother was three days’ journey away when the news reached her, and she collapsed under it, losing breath and speech, thrown to the ground like an athlete hit from a blind side. Gregory is careful to say that Macrina was suffering too, and that the brother who had died was her favourite. What he records is that she did not let herself go down, and that she talked her mother back up. This is the first of three such tests, and Gregory counts them in order: Naucratius, then their mother, then Basil. He reaches for an image from the goldsmith’s shop. Gold is refined by being put through the fire more than once, so that whatever survives the first furnace is caught by the second, and the metal that comes out of the last one with no dross left is the metal you can trust.

(●) c. 368 AD: Famine emptied the countryside, and the children it left by the roadside were raised in her house. + The rains failed across Cappadocia and the country round it in 368, the shortage ran on into the next year, and the roads filled with people walking in search of food. Gregory dates nothing, so the match between the famine in his story and that one is the handbooks’ work rather than his. What he does give is the scene at the retreat: crowds arriving from every direction, drawn by what they had heard about the place, and Peter feeding them on such a scale that a stretch of empty country came to look less like a wilderness and more like a city. The detail that carries the chapter comes later, at the funeral, and Gregory mentions it almost in passing. Among the mourners the loudest were the ones who called her mother and nurse, and these, he explains, were the infants she had picked up where they had been left beside the road in the famine years. Exposure, leaving an unwanted or unfeedable baby outdoors to die or be taken, was legal and ordinary in the Roman world. She collected them, fed them and brought them up in the community. Gregory also tells us what he is leaving out, which is unusual and worth noticing. He says he will not relate the business of the grain in the famine, how the corn kept being handed out and did not go down in the bin, because most readers judge what is credible by what has happened to them, and a story like that only invites the charge of lying. A hagiographer, a writer of saints’ lives, was under no obligation to be so careful; the form existed partly to collect wonders, and a hagiographer with no scruples simply puts the miracle in and leaves the reader to take it or leave it. Gregory does the opposite, and then tells us why. Not long after, their mother died, with her eldest child and her youngest sitting on either side of the bed and holding a hand each. Her last words were an offering rather than a farewell: she gave the fruit of her womb back to God, calling Macrina her first-fruits and Peter her tenth, and asked that God’s blessing come down on the first and on the tenth. Then she asked to be laid in her husband’s grave. The year is not recorded. Gregory sets the death just before Basil’s election as bishop of Caesarea in 370, and the handbooks, reading him differently, print anything from 370 to 375.

(●) 379 AD: Nine months after Basil died, Gregory found her lying on a board on the floor, and she spent her last day teaching him. + Basil died on the first of January in 379. Gregory was by then bishop of Nyssa, and had spent years driven out of it by an emperor who backed the other side of the century’s great quarrel, the long argument over whether the Son is God in the same full sense as the Father. That autumn found him at a council of bishops in Antioch, and when it broke up he went north into Pontus to see his sister, having not managed a visit in about eight years. On the last night of the journey he dreamt the same dream three times over: that he was carrying the relics of martyrs in his hands, the bones the churches kept from Christians who had died for the faith, and that light came off them so brightly it blinded him. He found her too weak to get up. She was not in a bed. A sack had been spread on a board on the floor, with a second board angled under her head for a pillow, and she was burning with fever. She got herself up on one elbow, could not come to him, and leaned over as far as she could from the pallet to show the respect due to a bishop. Then she thanked God for stirring up his servant to visit his handmaid. Gregory’s face fell when Basil’s name came up. Hers did not. She took the mention of their brother as an opening and talked instead about what happens to the dead, and about what human suffering is for, and Gregory wrote afterwards that the words came out of her like water from a spring that does not stop. When he complained about his own troubles, the exile and the church politics, she told him he was ungrateful and reminded him whose prayers had put him where he was (T4). She ordered him off to rest, and sent word later that day that he should be more hopeful about her, which was true in a way he did not understand yet: Gregory compares her to a runner who has passed the last rival and can already see the crown. She died at sunset the next day. Her couch had been turned to face east, and when she stopped being able to talk to the people in the room she went on talking to God (Q). Then the lamp was brought in at evening, as it was brought in every evening, and she opened her eyes toward it. Christians of that century sang a short thanksgiving at the lighting of the lamps, a household hymn for the end of the day, and she plainly wanted to sing it and had no voice left. Her lips moved through it anyway. Her hand made the sign of the cross at the end, and she finished her life and her prayer at the same moment. Two things were found on the body when the women laid her out, and both of them had a story attached. Around her neck, on a thread, hung a small iron cross and an iron ring; the ring was hollow and, the woman laying her out said, held a fragment of the cross. Under the neck was a faint mark like the scratch of a needle, and that one had to be explained to Gregory by the household: a tumour had grown there years before, she had refused to let a doctor see it, and after a night of prayer she had asked her mother to make the sign of the cross over the place instead. They buried her beside her mother in the family grave, seven or eight stades away, which is a little under a mile, with the bishop of the district helping to carry the bier and the whole neighbourhood walking behind.

What She Taught

(T1) The world is a made thing, and the people who cannot see that are not looking hard enough. + Gregory opens the deathbed dialogue by playing the sceptic on purpose, and he plays it well. Bodies are made of the elements, which in the physics of that world meant earth, water, air and fire. When a body comes apart, each element goes back to its own kind, and there is no third place left over for a soul to be. A thing that can be found nowhere, the objection runs, does not exist. Before Macrina answers that, she goes after the assumption underneath it, which is that the universe is the sort of thing that just happens to be there. Her reply is an argument from design, which is the ordinary move from an ordered thing to the mind that ordered it, and she makes it with three homely pictures. You see a garment and you think of the weaver. You see a ship and the shipwright comes to mind. You look at a building and your thoughts go to the hand that built it. Nobody has to be taught this; it is what a mind does with a made thing. Then she turns to the sky and the earth and lists what she sees there: opposed elements woven together to serve one end, weight lifted into the air as water becomes vapour, heat from the sun reaching down into the ground, rain falling as one substance and coming up as countless different kinds of seedling, the planets keeping their intervals. A power working with skill and method is showing itself in all of it. She names the target too. Epicurus, the Greek philosopher whose followers held that the world is a chance collection of atoms with no providence running it, is her example of the man who closed the eyes of his soul: a prisoner in a cabin whose walls and roof shut out the view, so he never sees the sky and concludes there is nothing to see. The point is not that unbelievers are stupid. It is that a narrow soul can look straight at the evidence and come away with the wall.

(Q) "The Creation proclaims outright the Creator; for the very heavens, as the Prophet says, declare the glory of God with their unutterable words." + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, her first reply to the materialist objection (translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 5). She introduces the argument by saying it is not hers and not any human being’s, since an argument that belonged to a person would be worth little; it is the one the whole creation makes to anyone with eyes. The prophet she means is David: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1).

(T2) The soul is a real thing in its own right, not a by-product the body gives off while it is working. + There was a physician in the room, and she pointed at him: the proof, she said, is close by us. Look at what the man is doing. He puts his fingers on the wrist to feel the pulse and hears something through his sense of touch: not a sound, but the fact that there is inflammation, and roughly where, and how far the fever has gone. He looks at the patient and learns more of the same from the colour of the skin and the set of the eyes. He listens to the breathing and to the groan that comes with it. Now, she asks, which organ did the knowing? The fingers felt, but fingers do not conclude anything, and neither do eyes or ears. Something else is using the hand as an instrument, and she reaches for a line from a pagan writer to put it exactly: it is the mind that sees and the mind that hears. From there she gives a definition, and definitions are worth slowing down for because this one is doing several jobs at once. The soul is created, which rules out the pagan idea that souls are little pieces of God and have always existed. It is living and intellectual, which means it thinks and is not merely a life force. And it transmits to the body the power of living and of taking in the world through the senses, for as long as the body is in a fit state to receive it. A corpse has every organ it had an hour before, arranged the same way, and does nothing with any of them. The nerve of the argument is a comparison. She has just said that God is not made of any element and is not located anywhere, and yet holds the whole universe in being and penetrates every part of it. If you can believe that about God, she says, you cannot turn round and say that the soul must be nowhere simply because it is not one of the four elements. The objection proves too much: run it consistently and you have abolished God as well.

(Q) "The soul is an essence created, and living, and intellectual, transmitting from itself to an organized and sentient body the power of living and of grasping objects of sense, as long as a natural constitution capable of this holds together." + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, the definition of the soul (translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 5). Gregory has just asked her whether the soul’s nature can be sketched at all. She prefaces the definition by saying that it has been attempted in different ways by different writers, each according to his own bent, and then she points at the physician at her bedside as the proof (T2).

(T3) What God has promised is not an escape from the body but the mending of the whole human being. + This is where she parts company with the book her brother was quietly imitating. Gregory wrote the dialogue in the shape of Plato’s Phaedo, the conversation Socrates has with his friends on the day he is executed, and in the Phaedo death is a release: the soul gets out of the body the way a prisoner gets out of a cell, and good riddance to the cell. Macrina will not have it. Immortality of the soul, the idea that the thinking part survives, is not yet the Christian hope. The Christian hope is resurrection, which means that the human being who died, body and all, is put back together and made new. Her definition of it is deliberately modest in shape and enormous in content: the resurrection is the restoring of our nature to what it originally was. Not an upgrade into something else, and not a repair of the damage as though the damage were the point, but human nature returned to the condition God made it in, before it went wrong. The picture she uses is Paul’s. A grain of wheat goes into the ground and loses its size and its shape, and what comes up is an ear: the same thing, still itself, but larger, brighter, more complicated, better formed. Paul’s line is that the body "is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power" (1 Corinthians 15:43). Then Macrina notices something in the picture that is easy to walk straight past. We take the seed for the beginning of the thing and the full ear for what it grows into, as though the plant were an improvement on the grain. In the order of creation it runs the other way round: the ear did not come out of the grain first, because in the beginning God made the plant, and the grain came off it. On her reading Adam was the full ear. We are the scattered grain. And the harvest is not us becoming something we have never been, but the crop coming back up as what it was at the start.

(Q) "the Resurrection is no other thing than the re-constitution of our nature in its original form." + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, her answer from Paul’s grain of wheat (translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 5). She reaches the definition at the end of the long argument about the body, setting it beside Paul’s grain of wheat and finding that the apostle is saying the same thing (T3). Before it she has answered Gregory’s objections about what a risen body could possibly be like, and has told him plainly that the real answer will not arrive until the thing itself does: people can sit up all night debating what sunshine is, and then it simply appears, and the descriptions are not needed.

(T4) A reputation is mostly borrowed, and the people who prayed for you own more of it than you do. + The scene is worth setting, because it is the one moment in the record where we hear her talking to somebody who has it coming. Gregory is a bishop. He has been driven out of his own city by opponents, dragged through years of church conflict, and he sits at his dying sister’s bedside and tells her about it. She does not sympathise. She asks him how long he means to go on being insensible to what God has given him, and tells him to compare his position with their parents’. Their father was admired as a young man for his learning and was famous in the law courts of the province, and even at his height his name did not travel beyond Pontus. Gregory is known in cities and nations; churches send for him and ask him to lead them. And then the sentence that lands: the reason for all of it is their parents’ prayers lifting him up, because there is little enough in him to account for it. This is not modesty as a social manner. It is the same claim she makes about the world in (T1) applied to a career: what looks self-explanatory is not, and the cause is outside the thing you are looking at. Gregory kept the line and published it, which is its own kind of answer to it.

(Q) "Do you fail to recognise the cause of such great blessings, that it is your parents’ prayers that are lifting you up on high, you that have little or no equipment within yourself for such success?" + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Macrina, her rebuke at their last meeting (translated by W. K. Lowther Clarke, 1916). The rebuke runs on from three questions she has already put to him: will he not stop being insensible to the divine blessings, will he not remedy the ingratitude of his soul, will he not compare his own position with his parents’. Gregory records it in his own account of his own visit, and adds that he wished the day would go on longer so that she would not stop talking.

(Q) "Thou, O Lord, hast freed us from the fear of death. Thou hast made the end of this life the beginning to us of true life." + Source: Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Macrina, the prayer at sunset on her last day (translated by W. K. Lowther Clarke, 1916). The opening of the prayer she prayed at sunset on the last day, whispered so quietly that Gregory and the others could only just make it out. It goes on through the whole story: God rests our bodies for a season and wakes them at the last trumpet, gives the earth back the earth he shaped with his hands, and will one day take again what he gave, transfiguring what is mortal and unsightly. Then it turns personal and asks for an angel of light to lead her to the place of refreshment, and for her sins to be forgiven, and for her soul to be received spotless like an offering. She sealed her eyes and her mouth and her heart with the cross as she finished. The whole of it is her theology said in the second person, and it is worth reading beside the apostle’s reason for not grieving like other people: "But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). That is the verse she put to Gregory at the opening of the conversation he later wrote down as a dialogue, while he was still grieving for Basil (T1).

What the Church Made of Her

(†) Her brother wrote her into the chair Plato had given Socrates, and the church kept the book. + A dialogue is a genre with rules, and in the fourth century everyone who could read Greek knew them. The teacher asks the questions and holds the answers; the pupil raises the objections and gets corrected. Gregory wrote On the Soul and the Resurrection in that form, on the model of the Phaedo, with the dying teacher in the Socrates chair. Then he put his sister in the chair and himself in the pupil’s seat, and throughout the book he does not call her Macrina. He calls her the Teacher. He also wrote her life, and it survives. He wrote it as a letter to a monk named Olympius whom he had met at Antioch, apologised at the start for its length, and said the reason for writing was that a woman who had raised herself by philosophy to the height of human virtue should not be allowed to pass into oblivion. Within a year of her death he wrote a shorter notice of her in a letter, which is the earliest surviving mention of her anywhere. Two things follow. The literary one is that the church kept both books and copied them for sixteen centuries. The historical one is a limit worth stating plainly: almost everything known about Macrina comes through the pen of the brother she taught. There is no page in her own hand, and the only other ancient witness is a short verse epitaph by Gregory of Nazianzus, which praises her without adding a fact.

(†) The common life she improvised at home became, through Basil, the shape of Greek monasticism. + The monastic movement of the fourth century began in the Egyptian desert with solitaries: men who went out alone to fight their own souls in a cell. Basil went and looked at them, travelling through Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia, and came back convinced that the solitary life was a mistake, because a man alone has nobody to serve and nobody to correct him. What he built instead was community: houses living under a common rule, with work, prayer, hospitality and care of the sick in one arrangement. The rules he wrote for it, the Asketikon, are still the foundation of Eastern monasticism. The order of events is the part worth noticing. Before the rules were written, and before there was a brotherhood of his own to write them for, there was already a household on the Iris in which the mistress and the maids ate the same food and slept in the same kind of bed, run by his sister, and when Basil settled down he settled across the river from it. Gregory says flatly that Macrina drew him to that life in the first place. The rules are Basil’s own work and the theology in them is his; but the experiment was hers, and he had it in front of him. Basil himself said something similar about where his faith came from. Accused late in life of inventing a novel doctrine of God, he answered that the teaching he held was what he had received as a boy from his mother and his grandmother Macrina, and that he had only held it more firmly since (Letter 223). He does not name his sister in any surviving letter, a silence his modern readers have puzzled over at length. The claim that she taught him is Gregory’s, made repeatedly and in detail, and it is the claim the church has accepted.

(†) She has been commemorated as a teacher, not merely as a holy woman, since the century she died in. + The Orthodox churches keep her feast on 19 July, a feast being the day the calendar sets aside for reading a saint’s story and praying in that saint’s name, and Lutheran calendars commemorate her on 14 June together with Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, which puts her in the group rather than in a side chapel of her own. A feast day is a day of remembrance and not a record of a death, and the July date is no exception, since Gregory puts her death about nine months after Basil’s, which lands in the autumn. The funeral itself is described as the kind of event a martyr got: an all-night vigil with hymns, the bishop of the district carrying one corner of the bier himself, and so many people crowding the road that seven or eight stades took the best part of a day. What the tradition has made of her has varied. For most of the middle ages she was read as a model of the virgin life, which she was, and the theology in the dialogue was read as Gregory’s, which in one obvious sense it is, since he wrote the sentences. More recent work has taken the attribution more seriously and asked what it means that a fourth-century bishop chose to give his own best arguments to his sister and to sign her name on them, in a world where he had nothing to gain by it. The retrieval is not a modern invention imposed on the sources. It is what the sources say. Gregory calls her the Teacher on every page of the dialogue; in Letter 19, written within a year of her death, he calls her a teacher of how to live and a mother in place of their mother.

(†) Where Christians have had to part company with her: the fire that empties hell, and the doctor she would not see. + Two entries, and the first is a real division inside Christendom rather than a minor blemish. - The restoration of all things. In the dialogue Macrina teaches that punishment after death is medicine rather than retribution: God is not taking revenge but pulling what belongs to him out of the wreckage, as a rope plastered with clay is dragged through a narrow hole and comes out scraped clean. The pain is real and is measured out by how much evil there is to burn, and the process is long, "the long revolutions of the ages". But it ends. Evil is not a thing in its own right, only the absence of good, so when every will finally rests in God, evil has no room left to exist in and is annihilated, and nothing at all is left outside the world of goodness, including the evil spirits. She reads Paul’s "that God may be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28) as requiring exactly this, since an exception would spoil the word "all". That teaching is usually called universal restoration, the belief that every soul without exception is finally brought home to God, and it has never been the mind of the church as a whole. The plain objection is a sentence of the Lord’s: "And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (Matthew 25:46). Christians have divided over it since, some holding that Macrina and Gregory hoped for more than Scripture licenses, others that they were drawing out what Paul says. Two things should be said fairly. Gregory holds the same view in works written under his own name, the Catechetical Oration among them, so the doctrine is not being smuggled onto her; and the words are on her lips in a book her brother composed, so no reader can separate her voice from his pen at this point. - The tumour. A growth appeared near her breast, and she would not let a physician examine it, because she judged it worse than the pain to uncover any part of her body to a stranger’s eyes. Her mother begged her repeatedly and made the argument a Christian ought to make, that the art of medicine was sent by God for the saving of human beings. Macrina’s answer was to pray all night and then ask her mother to trace the sign of the cross over the place instead. Gregory reports that the tumour went. He also reports the mother’s objection, and the mother was right about the principle even if the daughter was spared the consequences. The refusal of ordinary help is not the same virtue as the modesty behind it, and the household plainly knew the difference at the time.