Ecumenical Commemoration
Monastic & Teacher of the Faith
July 18 · d. 379
also known as Macrina the Younger, Macrina of Cappadocia
Macrina the Younger was the eldest of a great Cappadocian family and, by her brother Gregory's account, the teacher of them all. Elder sister of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, she turned the family estate into a community of prayer where mistress and servant lived as equals, and on her deathbed she discoursed on the soul and the resurrection with such wisdom that Gregory wrote her down as a Christian Socrates.
Macrina was born around the year 327 into one of the most remarkable families in the history of the church, a Christian household of Caesarea in Cappadocia, in the Roman East, today central Turkey. Her grandmother had learned the faith from a disciple of the apostolic generation; two of her brothers would be numbered among the Fathers of the church, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa. And the one who shaped them all, by the testimony of Gregory himself, was their elder sister Macrina.
She was betrothed as a girl, but her intended husband died before the wedding, and Macrina refused every other suitor, declaring that she was still betrothed, for her promised husband was not dead but living with God, and she would keep faith with him until the resurrection. So she gave herself wholly to God. When her father died she persuaded her widowed mother, Emmelia, to lay aside the showy life of their rank and to live alongside their own servants as equals, mistress and maid sharing one table and one prayer, on the family estate at Annesi, on the river Iris in Pontus. It became one of the first communities of monastic women in the Christian East.
She was the rudder of the whole family. When her brilliant younger brother Basil came home from the university swollen with his own learning, it was Macrina who, in Gregory's words, "took him in hand," and "with such speed did she draw him also toward the mark of philosophy," meaning the life given wholly to God, the life that would make Basil a Father of the church. To her youngest brother, Peter, she was father and teacher and mother all at once.
She wrote nothing; we know her only through Gregory, who came to her as she lay dying in 379, not long after Basil's death, and found her on a bed of boards with no possession but an iron cross. There, wasted with fever, she spoke to him of the soul and the resurrection with such rising clarity that he set it all down afterward as a dialogue, casting his sister in the part Plato had given Socrates: the teacher who, at the gate of death, is most alive. He called her, simply, "the Teacher." Her last words were a prayer, that the God who had freed her from the fear of death would receive her soul, for, she said, "thou hast made the end of this life the beginning to us of true life."
She is one of the great hidden figures of the church, a woman who founded no school and wrote no book and yet stands behind two of the greatest theologians it has ever known, having taught them first how to pray. The church remembers her not for what she left in writing but for whom she made, and for the witness of a life so wholly given that her own brother, a Father of the church, knelt to call her his teacher.
How we know Macrina is entirely through her brother Gregory of Nyssa, for she wrote nothing herself. Two of his works are our sources: the Life of Macrina, which he wrote soon after her death in 379, and the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, in which he sets down her words on the life to come. Both must be read for what they are, the loving portraits of a brother who consciously cast his sister as a Christian Socrates and modeled his dialogue on Plato's Phaedo; her voice reaches us only through his pen and his purposes. The family around her is well attested in the letters of Basil and Gregory: the grandmother Macrina the Elder, the parents Basil the Elder and Emmelia, the brothers Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste. The Life in W. K. Lowther Clarke's translation and the dialogue in the translation of William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson are both in the public domain.
Macrina is honored in both East and West, and her feast falls in mid-July, beside that of her brother Gregory of Nyssa. She is remembered as the matriarch of the Cappadocian renaissance, the spiritual mother of the household that gave the church Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, and she is venerated together with her grandmother Macrina the Elder, who first handed the faith down to them. The Christian Socrates of her brother's dialogue, she might be called the patron of every teacher whose greatest work is not a book but a person, and a standing reminder that the church is carried forward as much by the unwritten holiness of the hidden as by the labors of the famous.
Further reading. Everything we have of Macrina comes from her brother Gregory of Nyssa: his Life of Macrina and his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, both freely available in the public domain. For a modern scholarly treatment with fresh translations of the sources, Anna Silvas's Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God is the standard, though it is an academic volume.
Online resources. The Life of Macrina, in W. K. Lowther Clarke's translation, is at Tertullian.org; On the Soul and the Resurrection, in the translation of Moore and Wilson, is at New Advent.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Macrina the Younger special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52