Gregory's Macrina and Plato's Socrates

Abstract

Gregory of Nyssa’s De anima et resurrectione is a famously sophisticated work in the rare genre of theological dialogues. Long known to be conceived in imitation of Plato’s Phaedo, this book sees Gregory’s choice of the dialogue form as tied to fundamental tenets of (Neo-)Platonic epistemology and cosmology. It argues that Gregory employs this form so as to effectively project an account of the divine economy that he principally develops in his commentaries on Moses’ creation account and Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai, texts which in turn can be set in relation to Plato’s Timaeus and Republic. Gregory, however, orients the cosmos strictly around where the image of the divine resides: the human being. Based on fundamental mimetic forces at work in the cosmos, the human being undergoes a liturgical and epistemological ascent in which knowledge arises ultimately out of a “being like” to what is known. Gregory discerns as the goal of this ascent, and thus as the nature and purpose of the human being, the completion of the divine economy through a free and rational turning toward goodness. Gregory can expect this vision to be accomplished by his dialogue, for it, especially if read in conjunction with the Vita of his interlocutor Macrina, is endowed with the same psychagogical abilities as the cosmos. The dialogue thus achieves what is required for the accomplishment of the divine economy that it unfolds. Just as the dialogue is a literary microcosm, so the macrocosmos is revealed to be a dialogue.