Macrina's Tattoo

When the time came to cover the body with the robe, the injunction of the great lady made it necessary for me to perform this function. The woman who was present and sharing the great assignment with us said: "Do not pass over the greatest of the miracles of the saint." "What is that?" I asked. She laid bare a part (méros) of the breast (stethos) and said: "Do you see this thin, almost imperceptible, scar (semeîon) below the neck?" It was like a mark (stígma) made by a small needle. At the same time, she brought the lamp nearer to the place she was showing me. "What is miraculous about that," I said, "if the body has a small mark (semeîon) on this part (méros)?" She said: "This is left on the body as a reminder of the great help of God. . . ."

—Gregory of Nyssa, Vita Macrinae ¹

I find myself frankly fascinated by that little part of Macrina's body—indeed, no more than a part of a part, "a part of the breast"—that is marked as if by a "small needle." The "thin, almost imperceptible sign" on her breast, "below the neck," modestly veiled by the woman herself during her life, is nakedly exposed to her brother after her death. The miracle that the brother, Gregory, is instructed to read in this revealed sign lies as much in the presence of the mark itself as in the divine healing that it commemorates: Macrina's body, we subsequently learn, was in fact untouched by the steel of either needle or knife. As Vetiana, the woman who attends her body, explains to Gregory, "At one time, there was a painful sore (páthos) on this part and there was the risk that if it was not cut out it would develop into an irremediable illness if it should spread to places near the heart." Despite her mother's anxious pleas, Macrina refused the physician's services, for she "considered worse than the disease laying bare anything of the body to another's eyes." In the event, she was healed by her own prayerful tears (from which she prepared a mud poultice) and also by her mother's chastened faith: when the mother, following her daughter's stern instructions, "put her hand inside her bosom (kólpos) to place the seal of the cross on the part," the sore simply disappeared. All that remained in its stead was the "little sign," as "a reminder of the divine consideration, a cause and reason for unceasing thanksgiving to God," Vetiana concludes (Vita Mac. 31).

As Georgia Frank notes, "By inserting a scar where the story requires none, Gregory can insert Macrina into a long tradition of the saintly wounded"—threading from Christ through the martyrs, who, according to Augustine, would retain the visible marks of their wounds for eternity (City of God22.19). ² More than that, Macrina's "scar," which recalls the celebrated scar (o'ule) of Odysseus (Odyssey 19), provides a fixed point for Gregory's recognition of his sister's complex and fractured identity and thereby "becomes the site of a locational memory, a place from which to remember the departed Macrina." ³ At this point, however, a question arises: If Gregory punningly equates Odysseus's scarred "thigh" (merós) with Macrina's marked "part" (méros), as Frank suggests, why does he describe Macrina's "part" not as scarred by a wound but rather as inscribed by a "sign" (semeîon) or "mark" (stígma)? The insinuated distinction—which only becomes perceptible in the light of the Homeric allusions identified by Frank—seems to me as important as the implied slippage between "scar" and "sign"/"mark." Gregory might, after all, have simply called the mark a "scar," if such it was meant to be, thereby tightening the link not only with the scar of Odysseus but also with...