Macrina the Younger

Macrina was born about 327 at Caesarea in Cappadocia, the eldest of ten children in one of the most remarkable families in Christian history. Her grandmother Macrina the Elder had survived the persecution under Diocletian, hiding in the woods of Pontus. Her mother Emmelia and father Basil the Elder were wealthy landowners. Three of her brothers became bishops: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste.

Almost everything known about her comes from Gregory, who wrote her life shortly after she died and put her at the center of a second book as well.

She was betrothed at twelve to a young lawyer, who died before the wedding. Macrina refused every other match, saying that her husband was not dead but living with God and that a second marriage would be unfaithfulness. She stayed home and took over the running of the household and the education of the younger children, Peter, the youngest, she raised outright.

When Basil came home from Athens full of himself and his rhetorical training, Gregory says it was Macrina who cut him down to size and turned him toward the ascetic life. Basil went on to write the monastic rules that still govern Eastern Orthodox monasticism. Gregory is explicit that the family owed the change to his sister.

After their father's death, Macrina persuaded her mother to give up rank and property and to live at their estate at Annisa, on the river Iris in Pontus, alongside their own servants as equals in a common life of prayer and work. It became one of the earliest communities of its kind in Asia Minor, a household turned into a monastery, with the mistress and the maids at the same table. During a famine Macrina took in abandoned children.

In 379, nine months after Basil died, Gregory travelled to Annisa and found his sister dying on a plank bed on the floor, refusing to be moved. Instead of comforting him, she spent her last strength arguing with him about death, a long, close conversation on whether the soul survives, what the resurrection body will be, and why grief is not a Christian's final word. Gregory wrote it down as On the Soul and the Resurrection, and in it he is the pupil and she is the teacher; scholars have long called it the Christian answer to Plato's Phaedo, with Macrina in the seat of Socrates.

She died that year. Gregory records that when the women prepared her body they found a scar where a tumor had been, and an iron ring at her throat holding a fragment of the cross. She was buried beside her parents.

The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches both honor her; the East calls her Saint Macrina the Younger and keeps her feast on 19 July.

Sources: Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Macrina and On the Soul and the Resurrection (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series volume 5); Basil of Caesarea, Letters; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church.