On the Soul and the Resurrection

Contents

Reading pages: 11–37 · 39–61 · 63–87 · 89–115 · 117–141 · 143–159

1. 11After Basil’s death Gregory visits his dying sister Macrina, who first lets him grieve and then begins to restrain his grief by reason.
2. 13Gregory objects that grief at death is natural: all human effort, from houses and farming to medicine and armour, springs from the fear of death.
3. 15Asked what is most painful about death, Gregory describes the dead body and the disappearance of the soul, which no element shows to have gone anywhere.
4. 17Macrina asks whether Gregory fears that the soul perishes with the body; he admits that faith in its survival rests on command rather than reason, and she replies that such doubt destroys virtue.
5. 19Gregory, at Macrina’s request, states the materialist objection: when the body dissolves into its elements, the soul either is one of them and so perishes, or has nowhere to be.
6. 21Macrina answers that such arguments are those of the Stoics and Epicureans who opposed Paul at Athens; Epicurus, denying providence, thought life a bubble because he trusted only the senses.
7. 23Macrina argues that those who deny the soul because it is unlike the elements must also deny that the living body has a soul, and even that God, who is unlike them, sustains the world.
8. 25Macrina answers that creation itself proclaims its Maker: the harmony of opposed elements, the movements of heat and water, rain, and the heavens show a divine power at work.
9. 27From the ordered motions of the heavens one infers one divine power holding the universe together; and since man is a little world, the visible body likewise points to the hidden, intelligible soul.
10. 29Macrina says the soul teaches us about itself, defines it as a created, living, intellectual substance that gives life and perception to the body, and illustrates by the physician who diagnoses her illness through his senses guided by mind.
11. 31The senses learn only because mind works through them (“mind sees, mind hears”), as in the astronomical reasoning by which we know the sun’s size and the moon’s borrowed light.
12. 33Macrina ends her argument from astronomy: the eye alone could not teach the phases of the moon without a mind seeing through it. Gregory objects that thought might be a natural power of matter, like the workings of machines.
13. 35Gregory asks whether thought might be a mechanical power of matter, like an automaton; Macrina replies that the inventor who designs such machines in his mind proves the existence of an intelligent soul, and begins to explain how the water-organ was devised.
14. 37Macrina explains how the inventor of the water-organ, by observing that air fills seemingly empty vessels, devised a way to drive air into pipes with water.
15. 39Gregory accepts that mind differs from what appears but asks what it positively is; Macrina answers that it can be known by negation, as not colour, shape, weight, or any material property; Gregory fears that nothing then remains.
16. 41Macrina rebukes the view that what sense cannot grasp does not exist, since that would abolish God; the mind is not the same as God but like him as his image, as a small piece of glass reflects the whole sun.
17. 43Macrina argues that, as God is present in all things though unlike them, the soul, though unlike the elements, can exist and remain present to the scattered elements of its body after death.
18. 45Gregory objects that when the body’s elements scatter, the soul, being indivisible, could cling to only one of them, like a shipwrecked sailor clutching a single plank.
19. 47Macrina argues that the indivisible soul, like the art that fused gold and silver, remains present to the separated elements without being divided. Gregory objects that her definition leaves out desire and anger.
20. 49Gregory argues that if desire and anger are intellectual they would be separate souls; Macrina replies that the question is old, and that Christians must take Scripture, not pagan philosophy such as Plato’s chariot image, as their rule.
21. 51Macrina sets aside Plato and Aristotle and dialectical proofs, taking Scripture as her rule: since the soul is God’s likeness, nothing foreign to God, such as anger or desire, belongs to its essence; and the definition of man as rational does not include them.
22. 53Since anger and desire are common to animals, they cannot define human nature; Moses, free from both yet fully human, shows they are not of the soul’s essence.
23. 55Macrina defines anger, desire, and the related passions and concludes that they are around the soul but not the soul, like warts growing on its thinking part.
24. 57Gregory points out that Scripture praises desire, anger, fear, and grief in the saints; Macrina distinguishes the soul’s godlike power of contemplation and judgment, its own by nature, from movements like anger and fear, which came upon it from outside and can be used for good or ill.
25. 59Macrina explains that creation advanced from plants to animals to man, who contains all forms of life; reason alone is proper to man and bears God’s image, while anger, fear, and the like came from his kinship with the animals.
26. 61The passions were not given for evil: like iron they can be shaped by free choice into tools of virtue or vice; ruled by reason they serve virtue, but when reason drops the reins they make man brutish.
27. 63Gregory asks for Scripture’s witness; Macrina cites the parable of the wheat and the tares: the soul’s impulses are the good seed, and sin sowed beside them an error about the good that turned them toward the brutish.
28. 65Desire, anger, and love are left in the soul like the tares, because without them we could not rise to God or fight the enemy; reason must master them, and in themselves they are neither virtue nor vice.
29. 67Gregory asks where Hades is; Macrina explains that Hades means the soul’s passage into the invisible, and that even if it is under the earth this does not harm the doctrine, since the spherical earth is surrounded alike on every side.
30. 69Macrina declines to fix Hades in any place, since the soul is incorporeal; Gregory raises Phil 2:10, and Macrina begins to explain that the “heavenly, earthly, and under the earth” are three states of rational beings, not places.
31. 71Macrina reads Phil 2:10 as the final harmony of all rational beings (angels, the living, the dead, and even the demons) in confessing Christ, when evil has been destroyed. Gregory, satisfied that the soul survives, asks to return to the main argument.
32. 73Gregory asks how the soul will recognize its elements once the body’s form is gone; Macrina answers with the image of a painter who can unmix colours and still recognize each and remix them.
33. 75The soul, like the painter who knows each separated colour, remains with each of its body’s elements until they come together again in the resurrection; Macrina states the objection that a body made of other matter would be a new man, not the same one.
34. 77Gregory concludes that the soul guards its elements and at God’s signal will draw them together again like ropes tied to one point; Macrina adds the example of a potter’s vessels owned by different masters.
35. 79As owners know their own broken vessels, the soul knows its body’s remains. Gregory raises the rich man and Lazarus; Macrina argues that the story’s bodily details (eyes, tongue, finger, chasm) cannot be literal for incorporeal souls and must be read spiritually.
36. 81Macrina begins to interpret the details of the parable: Abraham’s words about each having received his share in life point to a deeper doctrine.
37. 83Macrina interprets the chasm as the gulf made by contrary choices in life, Abraham’s bosom as the haven of goods awaiting those who endured hardship as he did, and the flame as the soul’s deprivation of those goods.
38. 85The soul’s presence to its scattered elements explains the bodily terms (finger, eye, tongue) in the parable; Hades is a formless state of life, not a place; the parable also shows the rich man’s concern for his living brothers.
39. 87Macrina teaches that one should be detached from the flesh by virtue during life, so as not to need a further cleansing after death; souls attached to the flesh carry its foulness with them, as ghosts seen near tombs suggest. Gregory notes a difficulty about the passions.
40. 89Gregory objects that if desire is removed by purification the soul can no longer long for God; Macrina answers that the purified soul’s contemplative power is drawn by the beautiful itself, and so is united with God.
41. 91Macrina contrasts human life, always moving between hope and memory and driven by desire for what it lacks, with the divine nature, which lacks nothing because it is itself the fullness of good.
42. 93God, being the good itself, needs neither hope nor memory and has nothing outside him but evil, which is non-being; the purified soul, freed from desire, keeps only love and is united with God, being formed ever anew by what it finds.
43. 95The purified soul, lacking nothing, has no further need of desire, hope, or faith; only love remains, as Paul says, and love is the very life of God, who never tires of the beautiful.
44. 97Since the good is limitless, love has no end; God draws every soul, as his own, to himself; souls nailed to material things suffer as they are pulled free, like bodies dragged from earthquake ruins, but this pain is not God’s revenge, only the cost of being drawn to good.
45. 99Like gold refined by fire, or a clay-coated rope pulled through a narrow hole, the soul suffers while its vice is burned or scraped away; God’s judgment aims only at good, and the pain is proportioned to the amount of vice.
46. 101Evil, existing only in choice, will vanish when every choice is in God. Gregory fears long suffering; Macrina urges keeping sins few and curable, since, as the Gospel’s debtors show, each will pay in torment until all is paid, and then be free.
47. 103Freed from vice, all will be in God, who will become “all in all”: everything we now need will be supplied by God himself, and therefore evil will no longer exist at all.
48. 105Macrina tells the faint-hearted that all things are ordered toward union with God, and that rational souls were made as free vessels for God’s goods, ever growing as more is poured in.
49. 107Macrina promises that the body will be rewoven finer and more beautiful; Gregory asks for reasoned support for the resurrection; Macrina reviews pagan views of transmigration, accepting only what agrees with the resurrection, that the soul is again joined to a body made of the world’s elements.
50. 109Pagans and Christians agree the soul returns to a body of the world’s elements, but transmigration into animals and plants confuses all natures into one, which is absurd.
51. 111If souls passed into animals and plants, one could not reap, prune, or kindle a fire without fear of harming kin; and the related myth that pre-existent souls fall into bodies for their sins is equally untenable.
52. 113The doctrine of a cycle of falls and ascents is self-contradictory: it makes heaven the source of vice and the life of plants a purification, and leaves the soul forever unstable.
53. 115The transmigration doctrine confuses changeless heaven with passion and makes the world’s very existence begin from vice, since every birth would require a soul to fall by sin.
54. 117Linking souls’ falls to matings, plantings, and births is absurd, leaves souls homeless if people stay unmarried, and makes life begin by chance and evil, which denies providence.
55. 119If life began from vice, there would be no providence, no judgment, and no desire for virtue; in fact God’s wisdom begins life, and the soul, created good and free, can choose to close its eye to the good, like a man who shuts his eyes.
56. 121How the soul or anything came into being is beyond inquiry, as Hebrews 11:3 shows; creation cannot be from God’s substance, nor from some other eternal matter.
57. 123Macrina leaves aside how creation happened, saying only that God’s will becomes reality at once; bodies are a concurrence of qualities that are themselves intelligible, so an intellectual God can produce them.
58. 125Macrina asks when souls begin: not before bodies (that leads to the absurd fall of souls), nor after them, since the embryo already moves and grows, which nothing without soul can do.
59. 127Soul and body begin together, the soul’s powers unfolding with the body’s growth; when humanity reaches its full number, birth and death will cease and a stable, indissoluble life will follow.
60. 129Gregory, fearing Macrina will soon die, asks her to address the doctrine of the resurrection itself, which Scripture teaches will follow when humanity is complete.
61. 131Macrina finds the resurrection in Ps 104:29–30 (the Spirit’s return renews the dead) and in Ps 118:27, where the feast of Tabernacles “with thick branches” prefigures the rebuilding of the body’s tent; the temple’s graded courts introduce her next point.
62. 133The graded courts of the temple image the ranks of rational beings, with humanity shut out by vice; at the resurrection the barriers will fall and all, even those now outside, will share one feast within the sanctuary.
63. 135Phil 2:10–11 states the same universal harmony plainly; Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones and Paul’s teaching on the last trumpet show the resurrection, which Christ also performed in deed.
64. 137Macrina recalls Christ’s miracles of raising the dead and his own resurrection. Gregory grants that the resurrection is believed but asks whether bodies will rise as they died, old, wasted, or diseased, which would make resurrection a misfortune.
65. 139Gregory presses the dilemma: if bodies rise as they were (mutilated, diseased, infant), the resurrection is a misfortune; if they rise different, it is not the same person who rises.
66. 141Gregory adds a stronger objection: the body is always in flux like a flame, never the same from day to day, so a resurrected body containing all its states would make one man a crowd.
67. 143Gregory continues the objections: which body will be judged, since the body of the sinner and the penitent keep changing? And what use will the organs of eating and procreation have in a life without marriage or food?
68. 145Gregory ends his objections; Macrina praises their rhetorical skill but says the truth will be shown by the event itself, like sunrise ending talk of the sun; she begins by defining the aim of the resurrection.
69. 147Macrina defines the resurrection as the restoration of human nature to its first state, which had no age, disease, or misery; these came with sin, symbolized by the “garments of skin,” and will be cast off with it.
70. 149The resurrection requires only that a man was born; how long he lived or how he died bears on judgment, not on resurrection; when God restores nature to its first state, the objections about age and disease fall away.
71. 151God’s single aim is to bring all humanity, once complete, into the good beyond sight and hearing: some purified in this life, others healed afterward by fire, the length of healing matching each one’s vice. Paul’s answer to the Corinthians silences those who measure God by their own power.
72. 153Macrina explains Paul’s seed analogy: the grain dies and is dissolved, yet God brings from it an ear both the same and more glorious; so the risen body will be restored and enriched, raised in incorruption, power, glory, and spirit.
73. 155As the grain becomes an ear, human nature will shed the marks of passion and rise incorruptible and spiritual; and since in Genesis the plant came before the seed, the resurrection is a return to the first state of grace.
74. 157Adam was the first ear; through sin humanity was scattered like grain, and at the resurrection all will rise; the virtuous at once in full form, the vicious only after the tares within them are burned away by fire, when, after long ages, they too will regain the original form.
75. 159The difference between the good and the wicked at the resurrection is not bodily but in joy or deprivation of good; once the passions of vice have been cleansed by fire, incorruption, life, honour, and glory will take their place in human nature, God’s image.