Gregory's Macrina and Plato's Socrates

This book delivers a new reading of On the Soul and the Resurrection, a famously intractable and intriguing text by Gregory of Nyssa. It takes seriously Gregory's decision to write this text as a dialogue, a literary form that is linked like no other to fundamental Platonic teachings about knowledge, nature, and the cosmos. Heinbokel argues that Gregory's text is a sophisticated appropriation of the teaching that dialogues present literary microcosms and are able to participate in the fundamental relation between language and reality that is at work in the cosmos. By writing his dialogue, the book concludes, Gregory aims to employ this relation to direct the souls of his readers to the intellectual grasp and material accomplishment of his Christian contemplation of the cosmos.