BIOGRAPHY, HAGIOGRAPHY, AND PHILOSOPHY: EROTICISM, ASCETICISM, AND PATRISTIC PLATONISM.

This essay will investigate two late antique Christian bio-hagiographies: the Life of Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa and the Life of Evagrius within Palladius's Lausiac History. Special attention will be paid to eroticism and its relation to asceticism, an ideal upheld both by Gregory and Macrina and by Evagrius and Palladius. By highlighting the paradoxical relation between eroticism and asceticism, suppression and sublimation, and through comparisons with late antique "pagan" bio-hagiographies and Neoplatonism (both "pagan" and Christian), also in conversation with recent scholarship, this article aims to contribute substantially to the study of late antique spirituality, religious and social life, and their link with philosophy, including patristic philosophy. While the strategy of repression of pἀπάθεια (passions, negative emotions) has been widely recognized by scholarship within the context of ἀπάθεια (or impassivity, absence of passions) in ancient and patristic philosophy, that of sublimation of pἀπάθεια is subtler and still needs to be investigated and emphasized. For it is an important element not only in late-antique bio-hagiography and narrative in general, but also in late-antique philosophy, including patristic philosophy. Nyssen comes to the fore here, as will be argued. Just as his De anima et resurrectione (On the Soul and the Resurrection) is the Christianization of Plato's Phaedo, the sublimation of erotic love into love for God is in fact - I will suggest - the Christian revisitation of Plato's ladder of love. It is its patristic Platonist version, valid for the ascetics primarily, but spiritually for everybody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]