Band of Angels by Kate Cooper

Author:Kate Cooper [Cooper, Kate]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848873315
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Gregory remembers their mother Emmelia as having been in favour of the idea that Macrina should marry. But this seems somehow out of character, given what Gregory tells us about her desire as a young woman to live the life of a Christian virgin. Why had she not supported her daughter’s wish for the same thing? One wonders if Gregory is reporting his mother’s own views accurately. He wrote the Life of Macrina nearly forty years after the events in question, after his sister’s death in 379, so his memory may well have been uncertain. Was he simply remembering his mother’s dreams for her daughter as overshadowed by those of her husband? Or was he trying to bring out the force of Macrina’s own character, by claiming that her wish had met resistance from both parents?

There is another possibility, however. Gregory does not give the date of his father’s death, which might be important for understanding how he represents his mother’s view of Macrina’s future. Basil seems to have died shortly after the birth of the youngest son, Peter, around 343, when Macrina would have been in her teens. If Basil had died shortly after Macrina’s fiancé, Emmelia may have changed her position on the marriage in light of her own widowhood. She may have allowed her daughter to persuade her, after Basil’s death, that their position together was secure enough to dispense with the need for a male protector. Alternately, she may have supported her husband’s wishes – perhaps reluctantly – while he was alive, and quietly changed course on his death.

In any event, it was by blurring the boundary between widowhood and virginity that Macrina was able to prevail.

She maintained that the man who had been joined to her by her parents’ arrangement was not dead, but that she considered him to be only absent, not dead, because he was alive in God, thanks to the hope of the resurrection. So it was wrong not to keep faith with the bridegroom who was away.11

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