My Daughter Recommends a Patristics Dictionary

So I took my wife to Half Price Books the other day, since she hadn’t been yet, and of course I bought a book. As I was browsing the biblical studies section, my 5-year-old daughter, who was next to me, in theology, said, ‘Here daddy, why don’t you get this book? It has a pretty cover!’ Instinctively, I said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so, honey…’, but then I saw what it was. It was The SCM Press A-Z of Patristic Theology, 2nd ed., by Fr John Anthony McGuckin (London: SCM, 2005), and it was only $5.98. Granted, the entire thing was printed at an angle, including the cover, and the ‘concluding Bibliographic Guide Essay and General Bibliography’ mentioned on the back seem to be missing (perhaps this is why the price is so low), but all of the entries appear to be there with no missing text, so it still strikes me as pretty useful!

As a sample, I shall give the article on ‘Macrina’ in honour of Sr Macrina, the retired blogger at A vow of conversation, whom we should all remember in prayer (McGuckin, pp. 211-2; the bold-faced words in the main text—not the bibliography—are those that have articles in the dictionary):

Macrina (c. 327-380) Macrina was an ascetic of Cappadocia. She was the elder sister of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, and granddaughter of Macrina who had been the disciple of Gregory Thaumaturgos, the great Origenist theologian whose authority was almost ‘patronal’ in Cappadocia. Betrothed, and soon ‘widowed’ while only twelve years of age, she appealed to church laws that equated betrothal with a wedding to block her father’s plans to have her married again, and instead lived as an ascetic at home, teaching her brother Gregory of Nyssa while Basil was away studying rhetoric. On her father’s death Macrina transformed their country estate in Pontus (Annessoi) into a familial monastery. There Basil was won over to asceticism (it has often subsequently been attributed as his idea), and it was the site of Gregory of Nazianzus’s and Basil’s construction of the rule of monasticism (the 'Asceticon' attributed to Basil), which had great subsequent influence in the Eastern churches. Macrina established a community, where it is possible she followed Eustathius of Sebaste’s radical ideas about monastic life, such as invoking social equality among monastics. The men of the family do not appear to have agreed with this leveling of social ranks. Macrina may also have retained an attachment to Eustathius, who was condemned by the family because he resisted the Nicene confession of the homoousion and the deity of the Holy Spirit of God. As a result, Basil condemned his sister to a literary annihilation, although Gregory of Nyssa wrote a moving 'Life of Macrina' as a testament to her ascetical philosophy. In Letter 19 he speaks of her, and in his treatise 'On the Soul and the Resurrection' he presents her, like the dying Socrates, musing on the immortality of the soul from her deathbed.

V.W. Callahan, Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Macrina (FOTC 58; Washington, D.C., 1967), 161-191; idem, On the Soul and the Resurrection (FOTC 58; Washington, D.C.), 195-272; S. Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994); J. Laporte, The Role of Women in Early Christianity (New York, 1982), 80-88, 103-5; P. Wilson-Kastner, ‘Macrina: Virgin and Teacher,’ Auss 17 (1979): 105-17.