Salvage: Macrina and the Christian Project of Cultural Reclamation
Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: While many have seen the equation between Macrina and Socrates drawn in theTreatise on the Soul and the Resurrectionas Gregory of Nyssa's attempt to honor his sister, a closer look at Gregory's attitude about the relative power of Christianity at the end of the fourth century suggests the opposite: that the character of Macrina lends validity to Socrates and, by extension, to non-Christian intellectual traditions. In this article, I argue that theTreatiseis part of a larger project of cultural reclamation enacted by some Christians near the end of the fourth century. The educational reforms of the emperor Julian had instituted a public discourse of evaluation by which one's reading material indicated one's religious identity; after Julian, some Christians adopted this idea, yet in reverse, arguing that reading traditional literature was out of the question for Christians, as it would signal a non-Christian religious commitment. Gregory'sTreatise on the Soul and the Resurrectionwas an effort to walk back the effects of that discourse and to return Christian pedagogy, philosophy, and cultural evaluation to a stance of ambivalence regarding Greek literature.
Source: Church History
Author: Ellen Muehlberger
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2138124965