On the Soul and the Resurrection: St. Macrina’s Dialogue on Grief, Death, Judgment, and Eternal Life - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

What becomes of the soul when the body dies and can grief be answered by more than consolation?

In the final days of St. Macrina the Younger, her brother St. Gregory of Nyssa sits beside her with the questions that confront every person who has stood at the edge of loss. Does the soul survive death? What becomes of the person when the body returns to dust? How should Christians understand judgment, purification, Hades, and the promised resurrection of the body?

Macrina—remembered throughout the dialogue as “the Teacher”—does not offer Gregory a collection of comforting sayings. She leads him through a sustained and fearless argument about the human person, the image of God, the passions, the soul after death, and the restoration promised in the resurrection. The result is one of the most intimate and intellectually powerful works of the early Church Fathers: Christian philosophy spoken in the presence of death.

This complete reader’s edition includes:

• William Moore’s complete 1893 English translation
• All 187 original notes presented as page footnotes
• King James Version wording for complete biblical quotations
• Expanded Contents with accurate landmarks throughout the dialogue
• A thirty-entry glossary of important names, terms, and ideas
• A Scripture Index and an Index of Names and Subjects with printed page numbers

The conversation begins in grief and moves steadily toward hope. Macrina first addresses whether an immaterial soul can exist and remain after the body’s dissolution. She then considers the soul’s relation to the body, reason and the passions, the meaning of Hades, the rich man and Lazarus, the purification of evil, the errors of transmigration, the recovery of the body’s scattered elements, and the final reunion of soul and body.

Gregory’s questions keep the work human and immediate. Macrina’s answers make it a landmark of patristic theology. Their exchange joins Scripture, philosophical reasoning, and the experience of bereavement without reducing death to an abstraction. The dialogue asks not merely whether life continues, but whether the person is preserved, whether the body matters eternally, and how divine justice can be understood in the light of divine goodness.

This edition is designed for serious reading without the obstacles common to photographic reprints. The text has been carefully typeset as a genuine dialogue, complete biblical quotations use the King James Version, and every original note appears where the reader needs it. The expanded Contents makes the work’s major turns easy to locate without inventing artificial chapters. The glossary and two indexes make the volume useful for study, teaching, and return reading.

On the Soul and the Resurrection will speak especially to readers exploring the soul after death, resurrection theology, Christian grief, Eastern Orthodox thought, early Christian theology, the Cappadocian Fathers, and the writings of the Church Fathers. It is at once a record of a brother’s loss, a portrait of St. Macrina’s spiritual authority, and an enduring statement of Christian hope: the person is not lost, the body is not forgotten, and resurrection is more than a metaphor.

Whether you come to the book through personal bereavement, theological study, or a desire to read the Christian classics in full, this edition gives you a clear path through a demanding work. Macrina’s voice remains direct and compelling: death must be faced honestly, the soul cannot be reduced to matter, and Christian hope rests not in escape from the body but in resurrection.

For readers of St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Macrina the Younger, the early Church Fathers, Christian philosophy, Orthodox Christianity, and classical works on death and eternal life.

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