Macrina and Monica: the names of these contemporaries, virgin and widow, are inextricably linked with their famous kinsmen. The narratives of the lives and especially the deaths of these holy women are bound up with the theological questions of brother and son. Macrina, older sister of Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea, died in 380 at the age of fifty-six, on her family’s estate in Cappadocia, which she had converted into a monastery. Monica, mother of Augustine of Hippo, died in 387 at the age of fifty-four while traveling with her family in Ostia, one year after her son’s conversion. Both Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine were professional rhetoricians before they were bishops. As we approach their texts, therefore, we must remember that, as Elizabeth Clark writes, “far from uncovering ‘the women themselves,’ we encounter literary set pieces by male authors”1 and “that we deal, always, with representation.”2 Though they were historical figures known intimately by those relatives who wrote about them, Macrina and Monica are also characters playing many different roles in Nyssen’s and Augustine’s texts.
This essay explores the way in which Gregory’s and Augustine’s representations of sister and mother are bound up with philosophical questions of the role of the emotions in the Christian life. The two theologians also use the death scene of each woman to work out what I call the problem of Christian grief: Is it permissible to grieve for someone who dies in the hope of the resurrection? And if so, is it possible to grieve without giving over to an immoderate wave of passion? Is there such thing as “reasonable grief”?
Macrina and Monica as Historical and Philosophical Figures
Gregory and Augustine have a double relationship with Macrina and Monica: they are connected both physically through bloodlines and spiritually through membership in the body of Christ. These familial relationships were spiritually formative for them. Gregory repeatedly calls Macrina his teacher, and though Augustine in the Confessions credits his friends Simplician and Theodore with the intellectual stimulus for his conversion,3 he recognizes the many occasions his mother acted as, to use George Herbert’s phrase, an “engine against the Almighty,” praying and lamenting ceaselessly on his behalf. Indeed, Augustine writes, “she suffered greater pains in my spiritual pregnancy than when she bore me in the flesh.”4
Both women appear in biographical narratives and philosophical dialogues, Macrina discoursing for nearly seventy pages in The Soul and the Resurrection, and Monica appearing in Vita beata and De ordine. In the dialogues especially, the women often function as “types,” Macrina as a classical philosopher and Monica as representative of the Spirit-inspired wisdom of the humble Christian believer.
As J. Warren Smith writes, “Through her ascetic piety and chastity, Macrina embodies the angelic life which is humanity’s eschatological destiny.”5 Macrina’s persona in the dialogue is modeled after Socrates in the Phaedo and Diotima, Socrates’s female teacher in the Symposium.6 However, due to her sex, Gregory adds some qualifiers to her philosophical resume. Despite the numerous complex arguments Macrina makes in The Soul and the Resurrection, Nyssen writes in the Vita that she was taught at home not from the poets, which were considered a bad influence on a young girl, but from the Bible, learning all the Psalms by heart.7 Her wisdom comes not from formal education but from God. She has dedicated her life to the pursuit of philosophy, and she lives out this commitment not by traveling to study with rhetoricians and philosophers but through prayer, Scripture reading, and ascetic acts in her rural retreat.8
Augustine values Monica’s contributions to the dialogues in which she is named, though he first has to convince her to join them. In chapter 11 of De ordine, Monica checks in on the progress of the dialogue but protests when Augustine wants her entrance and her question recorded by their stenographer. Monica says, “What are you doing? In those books which you read, have I ever heard that women were introduced into this kind of disputation?” Augustine acknowledges how she could have gathered this impression but tells her that he does not care and that “in olden times, women, too, have worked on the problems of philosophy. And your philosophy is very pleasing to me.”9 It is likely that Monica was illiterate; she has heard Augustine and his friends reading aloud, as was their custom.10
In response to one of Monica’s points in Vita beata, Augustine writes, “At these words, she so exclaimed that we, entirely oblivious of her sex, believed that some great man was with us. Meanwhile I understood, as well as possible, from what source those words came and how divine was the source.”11 Later in the dialogue, Augustine refers to Monica directly: “‘Do you all see,’ I asked, ‘that a great difference exists between many and varied doctrines and a soul wholly devoted to God? For whence come those words which we admire unless from Him?’”12
Macrina, having dedicated herself to philosophy and asceticism, is portrayed as disputing with a high level of theological knowledge, while Monica makes more humble contributions from a more traditional standpoint. Both women are portrayed as mouthpieces for the divine, possessing a direct connection with God that the more highly trained men lack.
Clark has commented on the phenomenon of women presented as teachers of wisdom in early Christian Vitae and other texts, connecting it back to the Life of Anthony, whose wisdom was also God-given instead of being acquired in philosophical schools. “The ascetic as philosopher is a literary topos,” she writes. The woman philosopher “provides a tool with which men can ‘think’ the values of their culture. . . . [Diotima in the Symposium] stands for something else—namely, as a trope for Socrates himself, the quintessential philosopher. She is not a true female ‘Other’ to the male philosopher, but ‘a masked version of the same.’”13 Macrina, in The Soul and the Resurrection, “ponders the acceptability of a modified Origenism that skirts ‘dangerous’ theological points,” provides a “shaming” device for ascetically lax Christian men, and is a living example of Gregory’s teaching of someone who, through virginity and asceticism, has taken steps to restore the pure “image of God,” which includes moving beyond gender divisions.14 Though Clark does not discuss Monica directly, Augustine’s portrayal of his mother’s participation in the dialogue fits with Clark’s assessment of women as teachers of wisdom. In the two dialogues, Monica is not a woman, but Woman, an uneducated but devout “soul wholly dedicated to God.” However, while Monica may stand in for more than herself the historical person, she represents not the ascetic as philosopher but the ordinary pious Christian as philosopher. This is a significant adjustment of the literary topos away from the spiritual elite toward common urban Christian experience.
Macrina and Monica on the Passions
The description of both women as teachers of wisdom with a direct connection to the divine is quite possibly their only similarity. They are each other’s emotional inverse, two mothers of the church on opposite ends of the spectrum of the passions. Macrina, virgin and abbess, is so otherworldly as to seem cold and heartless in the face of others’ grief. Monica, on the other hand, takes “attachment parenting” to a whole new level, as her love for her son and the emotions it evokes in her become an obstacle to her own spiritual growth.
Macrina in her Vita is the model virgin ascetic. When Gregory, after an absence of nine years, returns to the family home to visit her, he finds her “in the grip of a grievous sickness, but she was resting not on a bed or a couch, but on the ground, on a plank covered with sack-cloth, with another plank supporting her head and designed to serve instead of a pillow.”15
Macrina and the virgins in her care are already participating in the life to come, “removed from all life’s vanity and fashioned in harmonious imitation of the life of the angels.”16 She is so spiritually advanced that at the beginning of the Vita, Gregory wonders if he can still call her a woman, “for I do not know if it is appropriate to apply a name drawn from nature to one who has risen above nature.”17 Gregory—unlike Augustine, who calls his mother’s faith “virile”18—is not saying that Macrina has been promoted to masculinity for her ascetic accomplishments; instead, she has actually transcended embodied gender itself.
Macrina also rises above nature at the death of her younger brother Naucratius, killed in a hunting accident, whose corpse was brought back to the family estate, overwhelming their mother, Emmelia, with grief: “By means of her own reasoned reflections she lifted her mother up together with her and placed her beyond suffering, guiding her to patience and courage by her own example.”19 Macrina is so “apathetic” that in The Soul and the Resurrection she initially describes emotions as warts on the soul.20 Gregory objects with lauded biblical examples of eagerness, anger, fear, and sorrow, and Macrina tempers her position, saying that emotions are instead on the boundary of the soul. Not one for tea and sympathy, Macrina rebukes Gregory when he begins to tell her of his episcopal troubles with the emperor Valens. “Will you not put an end,” she asks, “to your failure to recognize the good things that come from God?”21
Where Macrina is dispassionate to the point of callousness, Monica spends much of the Confessions weeping over Augustine. While both Gregory and Augustine point out that weeping over sins is the only consistently acceptable form of tears, Augustine makes clear that his mother was overly attached to him: “As mothers do, she loved to have me with her, but much more than most mothers; and she did not understand that you were to use my absence as a means to bring her joy. She did not know that. So she wept and lamented, and these agonies proved that there survived in her the remnants of Eve, seeking with groaning for the child she had brought forth in sorrow.”22
Monica’s affection goes beyond what Augustine considers “normal” attachment. Where Macrina has transcended her gendered nature and has returned to a “prelapsarian image of God,” Monica is overly identified with Eve after the fall. Monica’s devotion to Augustine and his spiritual welfare is symbolized by her copious tears; a priest, irritated that she will not stop begging him to visit Augustine, famously tells her, “It cannot be that the son of these tears should perish.”23 Through synecdoche, Monica’s tears represent her as a whole. Macrina, however, sternly reprimands Gregory for weeping on seeing her on her deathbed so soon after their brother Basil’s death.24
There are heroic aspects to the characterizations of both Macrina and Monica: Macrina, in her asceticism, is several times described as a victorious athlete, while Monica’s persistent love for and lamentation over her wayward son, which becomes a kind of paradoxical ascetic practice, is eventually heard by God beyond her expectations. However, traces of excess exist on both sides. While both Gregory’s Vita and his dialogue The Soul and the Resurrection are full of praise for his sister, her somewhat extreme view of the relation of emotions to the soul needs to be modified.25 Monica’s lamentations and prayers for Augustine are eventually answered, but her attachment to Augustine as her son, and not just as a lost soul, is disproportionate. From the perspective of their episcopal interlocutors, there is a sense in which Macrina’s otherworldliness and Monica’s this-worldliness must each be tempered.
Death and Grief as Theological and Moral Problems
In the deaths of Macrina and Monica, the personal intersects with the theological. The amount of space given to Macrina’s death in the Vita and the placement of Monica’s death at Ostia at the very end of the biographical portion of the Confessions together demonstrate the importance these events held for Gregory and Augustine. The bishops are not only “working through their grief,” as we might say using the language of psychology, but working through grief itself: Can it have a valid place in the emotional life of the Christian? Or does Christ’s death and resurrection necessarily evict grief from the heart of the believer? Is grief as an emotional experience now out of bounds for Christians? And is there a way that grief, like lust, can somehow be redirected toward the divine?
Macrina, chastising her brother at the beginning of The Soul and the Resurrection, says, “It is not right to grieve for those who are asleep, since we are told that sorrow belongs only to those who have no hope.”26 Augustine comments more fully along these lines in the Confessions: “We did not think it right to celebrate the funeral with tearful dirges and lamentations, since in most cases it is customary to use such mourning to imply sorrow for the miserable state of those who die. . . . But my mother’s dying meant neither that her state was miserable nor that she was suffering extinction. . . . Why then did I suffer such sharp pains of inward grief?”27
How is one to grieve properly for a Christian person? Is there anything to grieve, since the Christian who has died is now dwelling in the bosom of Abraham? And what is to be done with the intense feelings of sorrow that arise despite this knowledge? Robert C. Gregg defines this problem as “the morality of grieving,” a question of ethics.28
Gregory and Augustine explore this ethical dilemma in the Vita and the Confessions by setting up various scenarios of grieving in the narratives, some of “bad,” out-of-control, or unbalanced grief, and some of “good” or right, orderly, and moderate grief. Gregory and Augustine also describe their own experience of grieving and the tension that remains even after they have concluded that their actions were appropriate.
The Death of Macrina in Vita Macrinae
In Vita Macrinae (The Life of Macrina), it is the deaths of Macrina and Gregory’s brother Naucratius, a young man who had chosen the life of a hermit, which provide the catalyst for appropriate and inappropriate grief. When the messenger arrives at the family estate and delivers the bad news of Naucratius’s death to Emmelia, Macrina’s mother, she becomes overwhelmed. Gregory writes, “Perfect though she was in every virtue, nature prevailed all the same even over her. She became breathless and speechless and fainted away on the spot, reason giving way to grievous shock, and she lay under the assault of the dreadful news like an athlete of noble stock felled by an unexpected blow.”29
Gregory is setting up a foil for Macrina. Although Emmelia is not a “weak, undisciplined woman of low birth,” her reason is supplanted by the unexpected ordeal.30 Emmelia’s life was ordered according to virtue and reason, but this surprise test of her mettle has felled her. By contrast, Macrina is able to pull her mother “from the depths of her grief,” teach her to be brave and not “give vent to her suffering in any base or womanish way” (i.e., by customs of public lamentation and wailing associated with lower-class women).31 Gregory observes that Macrina’s nature also experienced suffering over the death of her beloved brother, but she was victorious over it, “like an undefeated athlete, who does not cringe at any point before the onslaught of misfortune.”32 Indeed, Smith describes Macrina’s primary pastoral role in the Vita as grief counselor, first to her mother and then also to Gregory.33
Throughout the Vita, Gregory wrestles with his own grief during the approaching death of his sister and then, after she dies, struggles to behave in the impassive, reasoned way in which she has urged him. He is not alone in this struggle: Macrina’s community of virgins is present as well. Macrina’s rebukes help keep the grief of the group around her in check while she is alive, but after she dies, Gregory and the community falter under the weight of their sorrow. Unlike Macrina, who views grief as irrational, Gregory reflects that the grief of the virgins makes sense: “The maidens’ grief seemed to me to have a just and reasonable cause. For they were not bewailing the loss of some ordinary acquaintance or physical attachment, . . . but it was as if they had been cut off from their hope in God and from the salvation of their souls.”34 The virgins have lost their bridge between the present life and the life to come, and so they cry out, “The lamp of our eyes has been extinguished; the light to guide our souls has been carried off.”35 But looking at Macrina’s face reminds Gregory of her instruction, and he shouts over the wailing of the maidens that they should conduct themselves in the orderly and graceful fashion she taught them. Instead of lamentation, they should sing psalms together, channeling their wild grief into liturgical order. Macrina has instructed that the only appropriate time for weeping is during prayer. During the funeral, the virgins manage to contain themselves for a time, but as Macrina’s body is about to be put in the tomb of her parents, wailing breaks out, and Gregory and the bishops must once again try to funnel the public display of grief into psalm-singing. Although Gregory, in contrast to his sister, concludes that there are times when grief can be “just and reasonable,” public lamentation is liable to carry the rational soul away on a river of immoderate sorrow and so must be directed into contained, orderly forms such as psalm-singing.
The Death of Monica in the Confessions
In the Confessions, Augustine presents his own youthful love of tragic theater, his grief over the death of his friend, and Monica’s grief at his covert departure for Rome as three kinds of inappropriate, or disordered, grief. As a student at Carthage, Augustine is “captivated by theatrical shows.” Reflecting back, Augustine is critical of the desire to witness tragic events one would never wish to go through, and to feel pleasure at this sort of removed pain.36 It is this pleasurable wallowing in pain that is the reason he condemns his grief at the death of a close friend during his Manichaean days: “Only tears were sweet to me, and in my ‘soul’s delights’ weeping had replaced my friend.”37
Against the Stoics, Augustine argues that the emotions are fundamental parts of the human person and that ignoring them makes us not more divine but less human. Augustine uses three aspects of his own emotions to evaluate them: the source or object of the emotions, the experience of the emotions themselves, and the result or goal of the emotions.38 By these criteria, his love of the theater, his grief over his friend, and Monica’s grief at Augustine’s voyage are not worthy forms of sorrow. The source of his experience of pleasure from tragic theater is immoderate love of what is not real. The experience is taking pleasure in another’s (though fictional) misfortune, and the result does not make Augustine a more compassionate person. His grief in the loss of his friend is caused by attachment to an impermanent relationship: the experience is again a kind of pleasure in pain, and the result is debilitating. Likewise, Monica’s grief stems from an immoderate attachment to her son, which manifests itself as her inability to let him go, resulting in much pain and consternation at their separation, even though this separation is ultimately for Augustine’s good.
Monica’s deathbed is the scene of appropriate, ordered grief, though not without the presence of the kind of tension that Gregory experienced with the wailing maidens. At the conclusion of Augustine and Monica’s mystical conversation at Ostia, Monica tells him that he is a Christian, her hope in this world has been fulfilled, and so she no longer sees a reason to live.39 Soon afterward she, like Macrina, contracts a fever. In her illness she tells her sons to bury her at Ostia and not in the tomb of her husband at their home in North Africa; Augustine interprets this as a sign that his mother’s nature has finally transcended the earthly attachments, including the attachment to her son, to which she had previously clung, and she is focused only on heavenly things.40
At her last breath with her two sons and grandson at her side, the boy Adeodatus cries out. All present silence him. Like the wailing virgins in the Vita Macrinae, Augustine recognizes that his son’s cry is “the voice of my heart,” expressing what he struggles to suppress. As in Macrina’s community, after the crying has been checked, someone begins to chant a psalm and all join in.41
Although Augustine feels as if “my life were torn to pieces, since my life and hers had become a single thing,” he manages for a time to fool those around him into thinking that he is not grieved. The recognition that emotions have such power over him, “though they are a necessary part of the order we have to endure,” is an additional grief to him.42 After trying to “sweat out” his grief through a bath to no avail, he finds some relief through sleeping. On waking and remembering a poem by Ambrose, he feels free to weep before God. He writes, “I was glad to weep before you about her and for her, about myself and for myself. Now I let flow the tears which I had held back so long so that they ran as freely as they wished. My heart rested upon them, and it reclined upon them because it was your ears that were there, not those of some human critic who would put a proud interpretation on my weeping.”43 Like Gregory, Augustine has come to an understanding of certain kinds of grief as “just and reasonable,” though his acceptance of his own tears, about his situation and not only for his sins, is distinct from Gregory’s. Still, Augustine weeps only once, for “a fraction of an hour,” and in the next paragraph says that his heart is now healed of that wound. Even a rightly ordered sorrow must be tempered by moderation and control of the emotions. However, this brief time of weeping and crying out to God from the depths of his grief brings about a renewed awareness of his own weakness and dependence on God. As Augustine declares in this section, this is a fitting way to honor one who shed so many tears for his sake.
Conclusion
Macrina and Monica, with their contrasting modes of life and divergent approaches to emotion and worldly attachment, represent exaggerated versions of two paths to holiness for early Christian women. Gregory and Augustine engage them both as personalities and as literary types in their own theological wrestling with attachment, asceticism, and the place of grief in Christian experience. The bishops’ relationship to grief, like their relationships to their kinswomen and foremothers in faith, remains complex. They grant grief an uneasy place in the believer’s heart, recognizing that in this life it is not always possible to subordinate the passions to reason, but are still deeply suspicious of the sway this powerful emotion can have over the Christian. The expression of grief, especially in public, undermines faith in the life to come by privileging the bonds of earthly relationships. Yet the departed sister and mother played formative roles in the second births of Gregory and Augustine, and so demonstrations of grief at their passing also honor the incarnate presence of Christ to which their lives bore witness.
1. Elizabeth A. Clark, “Holy Women, Holy Words: Early Christian Women, Social History, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 3 (1998): 416.
2. Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” Church History 67, no. 1 (March 1998): 30.
3. Garry Wills, Saint Augustine: A Life (New York: Penguin, 1999), 58.
4. Augustine, Confessions (5.8.15), trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 83; this translation is cited as Chadwick.
5. J. Warren Smith, “A Just and Reasonable Grief: The Death and Function of a Holy Woman in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12, no. 1 (1994): 58.
6. Ibid., 62; and Clark, “The Lady Vanishes,” 24.
7. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Kevin Corrigan (Toronto: Peregrina, 1987), 28; this work is cited below as Life.
8. Ibid., 31.
9. Augustine, “Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil,” in The Writings of St. Augustine, trans. Robert P. Russell, vol. 1, FC 2 (New York: CIMA, 1948), 269–71. For a list of philosophically involved women in the Hellenistic world, see Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Life of St. Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa,” in On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 207.
10. Augustine comments: “Whose books I see are known to you, whenever we read them”; in “Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil,” 269.
11. “The Happy Life,” in Augustine, Selected Writings, trans. Mary T. Clark, CWS (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 174–75.
12. Ibid., 187.
13. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes,” 22, 25–26.
14. Ibid., 27, 29–30.
15. Life, 41.
16. Ibid., 36.
17. Ibid., 26.
18. Augustine, Confessions (= Conf.) 9.4.8, trans. Chadwick, 160.
19. Life, 35.
20. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, in Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, FC 58 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 219; this work is cited below as Callahan.
21. Life, 45.
22. Augustine, Conf. 5.9.15, trans. Chadwick, 82.
23. Augustine, Conf. 3.12.21, trans. Chadwick, 51.
24. Callahan, 198.
25. For a full discussion of the evolution of Macrina and Gregory’s views on the emotions, see J. Warren Smith, Passion and Paradise: Human and Divine Emotion in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa (New York: Crossroad, 2004); and Rowan Williams, “Macrina’s Deathbed Revisited: Gregory of Nyssa on Mind and Passion,” in Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity, ed. Lionel R. Wickham and Caroline P. Bammel, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 19 (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 227–46.
26. Callahan, 198. Gregory is citing 1 Thess. 4:13.
27. Augustine, Conf. 9.12.29, trans. Chadwick, 174.
28. Robert C. Gregg, Consolation Philosophy: Greek and Christian Paideia in Basil and the Two Gregories, Patristic Monograph Series 3 (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1975), 83.
29. Life, 34.
30. Smith, “Reasonable Grief,” 70.
31. Life, 34.
32. Life, 39.
33. Smith, “Reasonable Grief,” 60.
34. Life, 51.
35. Ibid.
36. Augustine, Conf. 3.2.2, trans. Chadwick, 35.
37. Augustine, Conf. 4.4.9, trans. Chadwick, 58. The term “soul’s delights” is a reference to Psalm 93:19 Vulgate (94:19).
38. Kim Paffenroth, “The Young Augustine: Lover of Sorrow,” Downside Review 118, no. 412 (July 2000): 221–22.
39. Paraphrased from Augustine, Conf. 9.10.26, trans. Chadwick, 172.
40. Augustine, Conf. 9.11.28, trans. Chadwick, 173.
41. Augustine, Conf. 9.12.29–31, trans. Chadwick, 147–75.
42. Augustine, Conf. 9.12.31, trans. Chadwick, 175.
43. Augustine, Conf. 9.12.33, trans. Chadwick, 176.