The Life
Saint Macrina is one of the most extraordinary women in the whole history of the Church. She was the older sister of Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory of Nyssa — two of the greatest theologians of all time — and they both called her, simply, the Teacher. When Macrina was a young woman, her fiance died before their wedding. She refused to remarry. She turned the family estate into a women’s monastery and lived there in radical asceticism for the rest of her life. She converted Basil to the ascetic life. She helped raise her younger brothers in the Faith. When she lay dying, Gregory of Nyssa came and recorded their last conversation, which became the great philosophical dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection. She was the spiritual mother of an entire generation.
Macrina was the oldest daughter of Saint Emilia and the elder Basil. While Emilia was carrying her, she had a dream. An angel appeared and gave the child a secret name: Thekla, after the great Protomartyr who had given up her own marriage to follow Saint Paul. The angel was telling Emilia: this daughter of yours will be like Saint Thekla. She will give up worldly marriage to be wedded to Christ. Emilia kept this secret name in her heart all her life. The official name they gave the baby was Macrina, after her grandmother who had been a confessor under Diocletian. But the angel had named her too. The whole pattern of her life was set before she was born.
When Macrina was about twelve years old, by the custom of her time and station, her parents betrothed her to a worthy young man. She had no objection. She accepted the engagement as a daughter accepts the wisdom of her parents. But before the wedding could take place, the young man died suddenly. Many other suitors wanted to take his place. Macrina refused them all. She told her parents: I gave my word to that young man. He has only died, not been unfaithful. To marry another would be a kind of betrayal. I will keep my faith with him until I see him again in the resurrection. They could not move her. The decision shaped her whole life.
When Macrina was still young, her father died. She was the eldest child. By Roman custom her oldest brother would have been the head of the household, but Basil was off in Athens studying rhetoric and the younger brothers were still in school. So Macrina took up the responsibility. She managed the family estate, cared for her widowed mother, helped raise her younger siblings, and kept the household running. She did not see this work as beneath her contemplative calling — she saw it as part of it. The same hands that prayed the Psalms also kept the household ledger and tended the smaller children. The contemplative life and the practical life were not, for her, in opposition.
When all the children had grown and left the family home, Macrina turned to her mother with a plan. Why should they keep this big estate, all this wealth, all these servants? Why not give the wealth to the poor, free the servants, and turn the estate itself into a women’s monastery where they could all live together as sisters in Christ? Emilia agreed. They freed their entire household. Many of the freed servants asked to stay and become part of the new community as fellow nuns. They lived together as a family, prayed together, worked together, owned everything in common. There was no distinction anymore between mistress and servant. They were all sisters before the Lord.
When Basil returned from Athens, he was twenty-six years old and one of the most learned men in the world. The leading citizens of Caesarea wanted him to teach their sons. He could have had a brilliant secular career. Macrina took one look at him and saw the danger. Saint Gregory of Nyssa says she found her brother "puffed up with the pride of oratorical skill." She talked to him. She did not flatter him. She showed him what she had given up for the love of Christ, and she showed him what he was about to throw away. He listened. He gave up the rhetorical career. He gave away his inheritance to the poor. He went on pilgrimage to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine to learn the ascetic life, and then he came home and started his own monastery on the river opposite his sister’s. The Father of Eastern Monasticism became what he became because his older sister told him to.
When Macrina was dying, her younger brother Gregory of Nyssa came to be with her. She was lying on a wooden plank — she refused even a bed at the end. He found her in extreme pain but radiant with peace. They spent her last day talking. She was the teacher; he was the student. They talked about the soul, about death, about the resurrection of the body, about what would happen to her in the hours and days after her last breath. Gregory wrote down their conversation afterward and made it into a book called On the Soul and the Resurrection. He modeled it on Plato’s Phaedo — the dialogue where Socrates discusses the soul on the day of his death — except that here the wise teacher was a Christian woman dying in a Cappadocian monastery, and her teaching was not Greek philosophy but the Christian Faith.
In the last moments of her life, Macrina turned and made a long prayer of thanksgiving to God for everything he had given her. Her brother Gregory was sitting beside her bed listening. One of the lines stopped him cold. She was thanking God for delivering her from the love of life itself. She had loved many things — her family, her sisters in the monastery, the prayer of the Liturgy, the words of Scripture. But she was thanking God that he had so completely possessed her heart that even her love of life itself had been replaced by the love of him. That is the final note of her teaching. Christ is the only love that survives death because Christ is the only love that has gone through death and out the other side.
Saint Macrina’s entire life embodied this Pauline confession. Death could not separate her from the Lord because she had given herself entirely to him long before death came. Her fiance’s death did not separate her. Her parents’ deaths did not. Her own approaching death certainly did not. She had built her whole life on the conviction that the love of Christ is stronger than death, and at the end she could speak as one who had proved it.
Macrina died in 380, the year after her beloved brother Basil. She was about fifty-three years old. To the very end she would not accept even a bed — she lay on a wooden plank covered with a single coarse blanket. She offered her final prayer of thanksgiving while her brother Gregory of Nyssa sat beside her. She was buried at Annisa, in the same grave as her parents. The wonderworking gift she had received during her lifetime continued at her tomb. The community she had founded survived for generations. Her teaching had passed into Basil’s rules, into Gregory’s dialogues, into the very heart of the Cappadocian theological tradition. She had no academic chair. She wrote no books. But the entire fourth-century theological achievement bore the mark of her hidden work, and bears it still.
Macrina matters to every Orthodox Christian because she shows us that the deepest theological work in the Church does not always happen in books or pulpits. Sometimes it happens in a quiet women’s monastery on a Cappadocian river, in the daily prayer of a sister who refused to marry anyone but Christ, in the patient formation of younger brothers whose names would later fill the Synaxarion. She did not seek public recognition. She did not write her own books. But she shaped Basil. She shaped Gregory of Nyssa. She gathered around herself a community of freed women living the Gospel together. The entire Cappadocian theological flowering of the late fourth century rests, in some real sense, on the hidden work of a woman who is invoked in the prayer book by a single name: the Teacher.