Revealing from Above What Is Hidden Below: Macrina's Seal and Gregory's Hermeneutics of Optimism

Abstract

Though scholarship treating Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina abounds, what I am calling the "signet ring episode" in the Life (V. Macr. 30) has been largely neglected. Yet an exploration of sealing as a material technology that shapes idealized notions of identity in the ancient Mediterranean contributes richly to our understanding of how sealing works as metaphor in the discernment and (re)production of model Christians in late antiquity. I offer a close reading of this episode, drawing on material and metaphorical contexts for understanding the semiological force wielded by Macrina's signet ring—and Gregory's inheritance of it—in this fourth-century hagiography. I argue that Gregory's inclusion of the signet ring episode capitalizes on the longstanding authority of the seal as an emblem of power and efficacious transmission, offering a potent imagistic shorthand for complex negotiations of presence and absence, concealment and revelation, and identity and replication operative in this hagiography and pertinent to hagiographical production at large. This episode also serves to illuminate a logic of concordances running through the Life that suggests relative optimism regarding the potential of material signs as "starting points" for anagogy.