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| Macrina the Younger |
Now I turn to later receptions of the parable of the rich
man and Lazarus. Many of these people and their interpretations are also
treated in much more depth in the book, but these blog posts will give you some
indication of who they are and their points of view.
First, Macrina the Younger (ca. 327-380), the sister Basil the Great,
Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste, who all were bishops. Like her
brothers, Macrina would be canonized as a saint (see also her brother Gregory’s
hagiography of her, Life of Macrina; Gregory repeatedly calls her teacher and says
that she was “father teacher, guide, mother, counsellor in every good”; Gregory
1989: 37).
In his On the Soul and
the Resurrection, Gregory describes the conversation he had with his sister
while she was on her deathbed. Macrina presents the case for the resurrection
of the dead, and she and Gregory discuss the nature and the immortality of the
soul.
Gregory asks his sister to explain the location of the “much-talked-of
and renowned Hades.” Macrina answers that Hades does not exist in a particular
location; instead, the soul migrates from “the seen to the unseen.” Hades is
invisible, and any passages from the Bible that suggest otherwise are
allegorical (e.g., Phil. 2:10).
But how can this view cohere with the teachings of Jesus,
who clearly speaks of the existence of Hades, such as in the parable of the
Rich Man and Lazarus? Macrina responds that the parable itself gives many hints
that it is allegorical; these hints lead “the skilled inquirer to a more
discriminating study of it.” A non-allegorical reading is “superficial,” since such
aspects as the “great gulf” between Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham and the
rich man being in torment in Hades should not be interpreted literally. How can
the rich man, for example, lift up his eyes to heaven, when his bodily eyes
remain in his tomb? Both of the men’s bodies physically are in a tomb, and
disembodied spirits cannot feel the heat of a flame or have a tongue cooled by
a drop of water:
Therefore, it is impossible to make
the framework of the narrative correspond with the truth, if we understand it
literally; we can do that only by translating each detail into an equivalent in
the world of ideas. Thus we must think of the gulf as that which parts ideas
which may not be confounded from running together, not as a chasm of the earth.
The many figurative elements of the parable, though, speak important
truths about the soul. The chasm in the parable, for example, represents the
decisions human beings make in their earthly lives between good and evil. Those
who choose evil dig for themselves the “yawning impassable abyss” that nothing
can breach. Lazarus reclining in Abraham’s bosom, on the other hand, represents
those who choose the virtuous life:
As then figuratively we call a
particular circuit of the ocean a “bosom,” so does Scripture seem to me to
express the idea of those measureless blessings above by the word “bosom,”
meaning a place into which all virtuous voyagers of this life are, when they
have put in from hence, brought to anchor in the waveless harbor of that gulf
of blessings. Meanwhile the denial of these blessings which they witness
becomes in the others a flame, which burns the soul and causes the craving for
the refreshment of one drop out of that ocean of blessings wherein the saints
are affluent; which nevertheless they do not get. If, too, you consider the
“tongue,” and the “eye,” and the “finger,” and the other names of bodily
organs, which occur in the conversation between those disembodied souls, you
will be persuaded that this conjecture of ours about them chimes in with the
opinion we have already stated about the soul. Look closely into the meaning of
those words. . . . If one, then, thinks of those atoms in which each detail of
the body potentially inheres, and surmises that Scripture means a “finger” and
a “tongue” and an “eye” and the rest as existing, after dissolution, only in
the sphere of the soul, one will not miss the probable truth.
The lesson of the parable, Macrina concludes, is that during
their earthly lives, Christians should free themselves as much as possible from
the attachments of this life “by virtuous conduct.” The rich man in the parable
symbolizes such inordinate attachment to matters of the flesh, something that
Christians must avoid.
Macrina is a fascinating interpreter, and it was great fun
exploring her interpretations of other parables for the book.
Next up: Ephrem the Syrian.
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