Saint · Patristic
St. Macrina the Younger
c. 327–379 · Cappadocian ascetic philosophy
Venerated East and West (feast 19 July); eldest sister of Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, who called her “the Teacher.”
The eldest of ten children in a Cappadocian Christian family, Macrina refused a second betrothal after her fiancé died, saying a marriage once given was one, and turned the family estate at Annisa into an ascetic community where she lived on equal terms with the former household slaves and took in children abandoned in famine. Gregory credits her with drawing Basil from his rhetorical career to the ascetic life. In On the Soul and the Resurrection, set at her deathbed, she argues against the Epicureans that the order of the world shows a governing Mind, that the soul survives death and will know its own body again, and that love alone remains when faith and hope have passed.
Why he matters: She is the woman behind the Cappadocian Fathers, and the dialogue Gregory set in her mouth is the first Christian treatise on the soul and the resurrection written as a woman's teaching.
Where to be careful
Her teaching survives only through her brother Gregory: the Life he wrote and his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, where the arguments she voices may be largely his own. The hope voiced there that evil and punishment will at last come to an end (apokatastasis) goes beyond what the Church teaches.
Reading
-
The Life of St. MacrinaSt. Gregory of Nyssa (trans. W. K. Lowther Clarke), 1916 · Gregory's account of her life and death at Annisa; short and moving.
-
On the Soul and the ResurrectionSt. Gregory of Nyssa · Her deathbed dialogue with Gregory on the soul, death and the resurrection.
-
Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of GodAnna M. Silvas, 2008 · Translations and a full study of every source on her.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.