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[ 66 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
includes ten chapters, each of which highlights a specific issue: survival of the soul;
nature of the soul; emotions; condition of the soul after death; how the soul recognizes
the elements of its body; purification of the soul; why purification is painful;
transmigration of souls; origin of the soul; and resurrection.
Macrina defends the view that the soul, which is immaterial, begins but does not
end. Yet, she claims, each person’s soul is attached to the elements of his or her
body, so that when the elements are scattered at bodily death, the soul continues to
be in contact with them. Emotions and desire, while not evil in themselves, are
inessential, so they cease at bodily death. Purification of the soul, which begins at
bodily death, is painful because the dead person had adhered so closely to what needs
to be removed, mainly attachments to the pleasures of the senses. The process of
purification ends no later than the conclusion of the present age, when we shall all be
restored to our bodies.
Gregory, as a character in the dialogue, defends a materialistic atomism
according to which a person is
his or her body, which is merely a biological
machine. He claims that a person’s life consists simply in the person’s function-
ing biologically, a view that he says is supported by sensory evidence. Macrina,
by contrast, extols the virtues of intellectual intuition to defend a Christianized
version of Platonic dualism. However, unlike Plato and some other Christian
Platonists, such as Origen, she claims that the soul begins only when the human
whose soul it is begins. Late in the dialogue she arrives at her developed view,
which is that the soul is “an essence created, and living, and intellectual” which
gives to the body both life and the ability to have sensations.
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Macrina claims that even though at bodily death the elements out of which
the body had been composed may scatter, the soul remains in contact with them,
if only intellectually. She points out that this intellectual contact is not unlike the
connection that the soul, which is nonspatial, has with the body even before
bodily death. Hence, she says, in bodily death the soul and its body never really
separate since they were never spatially adjacent in the first place. All
that hap-
pens is that the spatial configuration of the bodily elements changes as the body
loses its ability to function. Eventually, the soul gathers the bodily elements
together again and refashions out of them a new body, which is purer than the
old body, including in its lacking organs of excretion and reproduction and in its
no longer causing the person whose body it is to have emotions or desire. The
new body is the body one would have had but for the Fall.
Gregory then uses this conception of
resurrection to respond to a question that
did not arise clearly in the works of his predecessors: why he should even care
about being resurrected, especially in light of the worry that the resurrected
person—because it would not be continuous with, or qualitatively the same as,
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