Virgin Macrina

Saint Macrina the Younger, commonly called the Virgin Macrina, was a fourth-century Christian ascetic and monastic foundress in Cappadocia and Pontus. She was the eldest child of Basil the Elder, a rhetorician and advocate, and of Emmelia, and the granddaughter of Macrina the Elder, who had confessed the faith during the persecutions and had been associated with Gregory Thaumaturgus of Neocaesarea. Among her siblings were Basil of Caesarea (Basil the Great), Gregory of Nyssa, Peter of Sebaste, and Naucratius. The family belonged to the Christian landowning elite of Asia Minor and held estates in Pontus, above all at Annesi on the Iris River. Traditional accounts place her birth at Caesarea in Cappadocia in the earlier decades of the fourth century; no contemporary source records an exact year of birth.

According to the Life of Macrina written by her brother Gregory of Nyssa, she was educated primarily from Scripture rather than from the pagan authors usually given to children of her rank. At about twelve years of age she was betrothed, but her intended husband died before the marriage. She thereafter refused all other suitors, treating the betrothal as a completed union and herself as a widow consecrated to Christ. After her father's death she remained with her mother, helped to raise the younger children, and took a large share in the direction of the household. Gregory portrays her as the family's teacher and spiritual centre, whose example and counsel strongly influenced Basil's turn from a secular career toward asceticism and later episcopal office, and likewise shaped Peter.

Following the sudden death of Naucratius, who had already withdrawn to a life of solitude and service to the poor, Macrina persuaded Emmelia to lay aside remaining worldly standing and to embrace a common life of prayer and simplicity. The estate at Annesi was reorganized as a monastic settlement. Macrina headed a community of women in which former servants lived as equals with their former mistresses; Peter directed a corresponding community of men nearby. The rule of life joined liturgical prayer and the recitation of the Psalter with manual work and care for the needy. This household is among the earliest well-attested examples of organized coenobitic monasticism for women in the Greek East and stands in close relation to the monastic teaching later associated with Basil.

After Basil's death in 379, Gregory of Nyssa visited Macrina at Annesi and found her dying. He recorded their last conversations on the soul, the resurrection of the body, and Christian hope; those discussions underlie his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, in which Macrina appears as the teacher. She died at the monastery in 379, by traditional liturgical dating on 19 July, and was buried in the church of the martyrs there, in the tomb of her parents. Gregory describes the funeral, the mourning of the community, and a healing associated with her relics. She has been venerated since late antiquity as a virgin and monastic saint in East and West; her feast is kept on 19 July. No later formal process of canonization is recorded: her cult belongs to the ancient pattern of popular and episcopal recognition of holiness.