Evolution As A Methodology:
The Logic Of An Early Christian Woman (Part 1)
The Bible tells the story of the creation of humans last (Genesis 1:26) because humans incorporate every earlier form of life.
The italicized language is a slightly modified, interpretive translation of what is covered in two consecutive sentences in the passage of OSR excerpted in the prior post. Two points deserve special focus.
First, Macrina manifests her sophistication as a reader by calling attention to the fact that the narration of the creation of humans follows the narration of the creation of all other life forms. What she is referring to is known as ‘iconicity,’ a term coined by the late 19th/early 20th century American philosopher Charles Peirce to characterize how language often communicates ideas not just grammatically, but by the position of words, phrases and paragraphs. An example is when you see the phrase ‘The End’ at the end of a story or movie: its position is iconic of its meaning. The fact that the term iconicity was coined by Peirce to refer this way in which language functions can well be taken to suggest it has potentially significant implications for a wide range of disciplines, including, but not limited to, modern science (it and other terms coined by Peirce are widely used by modern comparative linguists).
Second, Macrina interprets the iconicity of Genesis as not merely relating to time (i.e., that humans are created last in a sequence of creations) but to an organizational (organic) principle (cf. Schelling’s use of the German word Erzeugungsdialektik). Within themselves humans have incorporated all that went before them. This appears to betray Aristotle’s influence, but there is much more to it than that. That is because the metaphysics of Aristotle (or Plato) does not allow for a coherent theory of evolution. Indeed, according to that metaphysics the physical world is if anything is inherently disappointingly devolutionary.
Macrina’s Microcosmic Methodology
By contrast, Macrina’s reading of Genesis is one of many ways in which she applies the microcosmic principle (that she calls attention to early in OSR) in a logically coherent way to two basic issues she addresses: (1) human consciousness (i.e., epistemology or psychology — how we think) and (2) the cosmos itself (i.e., ontology in the broadest sense of that word, which for Macrina as for most Greek thinkers meant theology — what we think about the cosmos (the word ‘cosmology’ is essentially a modern neologism, coined no doubt to avoid using the word ‘theology’)). There are multiple sources prior to Aristotle where such a principle is articulated in what survives of early Greek literature.
Macrina & Sappho
The microcosmic principle is, for example, implicit in how Sappho uses the image of the moon as a reflection of her own psychology (Fragment 168b).

That is relevant because as a highly educated Greek woman Macrina would have been familiar with most, if not all, of Sappho’s poetry. A comment she makes in relation to the microcosmic principle seems to attest to her familiarity with Sappho. To emphasize for her brother how important the microcosmic principle is to psychology and theology, she refers to it as her ‘ally,’ an echo of a word Sappho uses in a poetic prayer.
Though that evidence is only suggestive, it provides a basis for speculating that Macrina identified Sappho with the concept that is the focus of OSR, a concept commonly translated as ‘soul’ (ψυχή). One of the earliest attested uses of the Greek word for soul possibly with the special meaning it came to have in Western philosophy is in the phrase ‘beloved soul’ from a very scrappy fragment of Sappho’s poetry (Fragment 62).

Macrina would have noticed that the Greek word for ‘beloved’ that Sappho uses to characterize the soul is a cognate of what came to be a concept central to early Christianity (agape).
Such speculation can be supported by citing the evidence of Sappho’s importance to the Abrahamic religious tradition (her influence on Song of Songs) and Christians in particular. Sappho’s influence on Luke’s narrative of the conception of Christ can quite literally be heard in the famous verse: Luke 1:28 (the alliteration seems to echo a line from Sappho’s wedding song poetry (Fragment 108)).

It is also arguable that the characterization of the fetus as the ‘fruit of the womb’ (Luke 1:42) manifests influence of the embryology of Sappho and Empedocles.
The fact that Macrina had chosen to live as a celibate for her entire life after the man she had been engaged to died meant that the erotic association of Sappho’s phrase ‘beloved soul’ would have been especially appealing to Macrina. She would not have been the first or only Christian to associate salvation with some sort of erotic or even sexual fulfillment. Saint Nazianzus (a friend of Basil (another of Macrina’s younger brothers)) in a funeral eulogy for his own sister (delivered roughly five years before the date of the conversation OSR memorializes), suggested that her death meant only a change of households and that she was sleeping with Christ. This Oration is important evidence for it seems Nazianzus would have expected his audience (possibly including Macrina) to have recognized his allusion to Helen of Troy and hence Sappho’s poem on her (Fragment 16) as well as an interpretation of that poem by Gorgias.
There is nothing as provocative as what Nazianzus says about his sister in what Macrina imagines for souls generally. Yet, she does indulge in a fantasy of an afterlife of quasi-erotic cuddling with the Good and The Beautiful. The way Greek philosophy is typically taught makes it almost impossible not to identify that fantasy with the Phaedrus of Plato. But a fragment preserved by quotation by the famous physician Galen shows that Sappho, two hundred years before Plato, closely associated both the Good and the Beautiful with true love (Fragment 50).
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For how Macrina’s microcosmic methodology click here for Part 2. If you want more on Macrina’s fantasy of cuddling in the afterlife here is an excerpt from Catherine Roth’s translation of On The Soul And The Resurrection (the first screenshot is from the bottom of page 79 and the second screenshot is the continuation on page 80):
