Macrina the Younger

Origins and early life

Macrina was born about the year 327, at Caesarea in Cappadocia, the eldest of the ten children of Basil the Elder, a Christian rhetorician and landowner, and Emmelia. The family's Christianity was already two persecutions deep: Basil the Elder's mother was the confessor Macrina the Elder, who with her husband had hidden in the forests of Pontus during the persecution under Galerius and Maximinus, and who had received the faith in the tradition of Gregory the Wonderworker of Neocaesarea; Emmelia was herself a martyr's daughter. The child was given her grandmother's name openly, but Gregory records that in the pains of labour her mother saw a figure who three times named the unborn girl Thecla, after the protomartyr among women — a private name, Gregory says, that was less a title than a prophecy of the life she would lead.

Her education was deliberately unusual. Emmelia set aside the tragedies and comedies on which a girl of her rank would ordinarily have been trained — Gregory remarks drily that these were thought unsuitable to a soul still soft and formable — and gave her instead the Wisdom of Solomon and above all the Psalter, which Macrina learned entire and recited at the fixed hours of the day: rising, meals, the day's tasks, the lamp-lighting, the night watches. Alongside this she was taught wool-work and the management of a great household, and she proved formidable at both.

At about twelve she was betrothed, by her father's arrangement, to a young advocate of good family. He died before the marriage. When further offers came — and they came, for Gregory says her beauty was such that painters were said to have attempted it — Macrina refused them all with an argument that was already theological: marriage is one, and her husband was not dead but away on a journey; to take another man would be to deny the resurrection, and to behave "unlawfully" toward one who was living to God. Under cover of this reasoning, Gregory notes, her real purpose was to stay with her mother and never leave her. It was the first recorded instance of a habit that shaped her whole life: she got what she wanted by making it look like a duty to someone else.

The house at Annisa

At the death of Basil the Elder — Macrina was still young — the widowed Emmelia was left with the estates and with a household of children to settle. Macrina took the burden of it on herself: Gregory describes her as sharing in her mother's anxieties, managing the property, and refusing all the diversions proper to her rank. When the children were married or launched, she began to work on her mother, and by degrees persuaded her to give up her establishment, her retinue, and the distinctions of birth.

They withdrew to the family property at Annisa (Annesi) on the river Iris in Pontus, and there Macrina did a thing more radical than her asceticism. She abolished the difference between mistress and servant: the maidservants of the household were made sisters and equals, sharing one table, one rule, one rank, and the two great ladies of Cappadocia lived on their own labour. Gregory presents this not as a social experiment but as an eschatological one — a household living now as human beings will live when rank has been taken away. From it grew a community of virgins, drawn from noble and from poor families alike, of which Macrina was the head; and across the river, in time, a parallel brotherhood formed round her youngest brother Peter. The Annisa foundation stands at the head of the coenobitic tradition of Asia Minor, and behind Basil's Asketika.

The making of her brothers

Four of Macrina's brothers are counted among the saints, and she had a hand in all of them.

Naucratius, the second son, brilliant and athletic, abandoned a public career at twenty-one to live as a hermit on the Iris, hunting and fishing to feed a household of destitute old men. About 357, some five years into that life, he was killed in an accident on the river. The news broke Emmelia utterly; Gregory's account of what followed is one of the great scenes of the Life. Macrina, herself grieving, would not let her mother collapse, but "raised her up by reasoning," and held the house together by refusing to be undone.

Peter of Sebaste (January 9), the last-born, never knew his father. Macrina took him from infancy and, in Gregory's phrase, was to him father, teacher, guide, mother and counsellor at once; she formed him from the cradle in the ascetic life, so that he passed into it without ever having had to be converted to it. He became abbot at Annisa, and afterwards bishop of Sebaste.

Basil returned from the schools of Athens, Gregory writes, "monstrously conceited about his rhetoric," despising every dignity in the province and thinking himself above all the notables of the place. It was Macrina who took him in hand and drew him "with such speed to the mark of philosophy" — that is, to the ascetic life — that he renounced worldly reputation and went off to the solitary life on the Iris, within sight of her community. Between them stands the founder of Eastern monastic legislation. Gregory himself, who wrote all this down, was her debtor too, and says so.

Emmelia died about 373, in her own bed with her two youngest children beside her — Macrina at her right hand and Peter at her left — praying that God would give the firstfruits and the last of her womb to him. Macrina then governed the community alone.

Famine, and the ordinary miracles

Gregory reports without emphasis that in the famine that struck Cappadocia and Pontus (the great dearth of 368–369, in which Basil also laboured) Macrina's community took in the starving, and that women found abandoned on the roads were gathered up, fed, and raised in the sisterhood. The Life also records two healings that belong to the household rather than to the shrine. Emmelia developed a tumour of the breast and would not go to a physician for shame of exposing herself; Macrina spent a night on the church floor in prayer, wet the ground with her tears, and in the morning made the sign of the Cross over the place with the mud of her own weeping — and the growth vanished, leaving only a small scar, which Emmelia kept as a reminder. Macrina afterwards bore a like affliction herself and treated it in the same way, and it was only when her body was being prepared for burial that the deaconess Vetiana, who had known her, saw the mark and told Gregory the story.

The last conversation

Basil died on 1 January 379. Nine months later Gregory, coming back from the synod at Antioch, turned aside to Annisa. He found the community in mourning for Basil, and his sister on the floor of her cell: she had refused a bed, and was lying on two planks with a board under her head, burning with the fever that was killing her. She raised herself on her elbow — she could not stand — and spent what strength she had in giving thanks aloud for the whole course of her life.

What followed is the substance of Gregory's dialogue Περὶ ψυχῆς καὶ ἀναστάσεως, On the Soul and the Resurrection, written afterwards from that conversation. Gregory casts himself as the grieving, protesting pupil and Macrina as ἡ διδάσκαλος, "the Teacher" — the term is used of her throughout — who argues him through the immateriality and simplicity of the soul, the nature of the passions, the meaning of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the resurrection of the body, and the final purification of all that is capable of being purified. The form is openly Platonic: it is Socrates' last day in the Phaedo, with the positions reversed, and it is among the very few philosophical dialogues of antiquity in which the philosopher is a woman.

She spoke on, Gregory says, until her voice failed. At the hour of the lamp-lighting she turned her face to the east and prayed aloud — a prayer he sets down, ending with the plea that the flaming sword might be withdrawn and the thief's word said to her also — and then, no longer able to speak, she traced the sign of the Cross upon her eyes, her mouth and her heart, drew a deep breath, and died with the prayer. It was 19 July 379.

Burial

There was nothing to bury her in. Gregory found that his sister owned no property whatever: her whole estate was the coarse garment she wore, a veil, and — worn at her throat under it — an iron cross and an iron ring containing a fragment of the wood of the Cross. Vetiana and Lampadion, the head of the community's choir of virgins, laid out the body; Gregory covered it with the dark cloak his mother had left, and it shone, he says, even under that.

The bier was carried to the church of the Forty Martyrs at Ibora, where Basil the Elder and Emmelia lay, in a procession of lamps and psalmody so slow, with the crowd of mourners so dense, that a journey of a few miles took most of the day. Gregory himself and the local bishop Araxius bore the bier at the front, with two others of the clergy at the back. The stone was lifted, and Macrina was laid in her parents' tomb; Gregory, overcome, could hardly look at what he was doing.

Returning, he heard from a soldier at Sebastopolis the story of a small daughter with a diseased eye, brought years before to Annisa, whom Macrina had kissed and blessed and who was found whole; and the soldier's telling of it, Gregory says, was the point at which he understood what the Church had lost.

Legacy

Gregory wrote the Life of Macrina (Βίος τῆς ὁσίας Μακρίνης) within a few years of her death, addressing it to a monk named Olympius whom he had met at Antioch, in answer to a request for an account of her. With On the Soul and the Resurrection it forms a diptych, and the two together are the reason we know her: no letter of Macrina's survives, and Basil, strikingly, never mentions her in his own writings. What comes down is therefore her brother's portrait — but a portrait drawn by a man who was in a position to know, and who had every reason of family pride to make her smaller rather than larger than she was.

Modern scholarship has consequently taken to calling her the fourth Cappadocian. The description is a fair one: the household ascetic community, the doctrine of the soul's ascent, the refusal of rank, and the theology of the resurrection that shaped Gregory's mature work all pass through her. She is also, in the Byzantine tradition, the pattern to which later foundresses of women's communities are assimilated, and the standing proof in the synaxaria that the teaching office in the Church has never been confined to the ordained.