Macrina the Elder

Macrina the Elder was a Christian woman of the third and fourth centuries, associated with Neocaesarea in Pontus in northern Asia Minor. She is remembered chiefly as the grandmother of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Macrina the Younger, and Peter of Sebaste. Family tradition held that she had been instructed in the faith by Gregory Thaumaturgus, the bishop of Neocaesarea who had studied under Origen. Through her memory and teaching, the doctrine she had received from Gregory, especially concerning the Trinity, was handed down in the household and was later cited by Basil as the measure of the faith he had held from childhood.

During the persecutions of the early fourth century, under Galerius and Maximinus Daia, Macrina and her husband suffered as confessors. Their property was confiscated and they were driven from their home. Gregory of Nazianzus, in his funeral oration on Basil, relates that Basil's paternal grandparents spent seven years in the wilderness of Pontus, enduring privation and living on what the forests afforded. After the persecution ceased they returned, though the family's estates had been harmed by confiscation. Contemporary sources do not preserve the name of her husband.

Her son, known as Basil the Elder, became a distinguished rhetorician and advocate. He married Emmelia of Caesarea, and their children included Macrina the Younger, who led an ascetic community on the family estate at Annesi; Basil, afterward bishop of Caesarea; Naucratius; Gregory, afterward bishop of Nyssa; and Peter, afterward bishop of Sebaste. The grandmother took a substantial part in the Christian formation of these grandchildren. In his letters Basil insisted that he had never altered the conception of God given him in childhood by Macrina, and that her words transmitted the teaching of Gregory Thaumaturgus.

What is known of her comes not from a dedicated ancient biography but from the writings of her grandsons and of Gregory of Nazianzus. Gregory of Nyssa's account of his sister Macrina alludes to the grandparents' confession of Christ and the loss of their possessions. Basil's correspondence, especially when he defended his theology before critics in Neocaesarea, appeals to his grandmother's reputation and to the tradition she had guarded. These notices present her as a woman of firm conviction and as a link between the confessors of the third century and the Nicene theologians of the fourth. Precise years of birth and death are not recorded in contemporary documents; later tradition assigns her death to about the year 340.

She has been venerated as a saint in both the Eastern and Western churches, with a feast on 14 January. Her cult belongs to the ancient veneration of holy confessors rather than to a later formal process of canonization. No securely attested burial place or extensive list of patronages has been preserved. Her historical significance rests on her role as educator and bearer of tradition within a family that deeply influenced Greek Christian theology in the fourth century.