The Family of Saints

St. Macrina the Younger (c. 327–379) was the eldest child of what is very likely the most saint-dense household in Christian history: a fourth-century Cappadocian–Pontic family venerated across three generations, from the confessor-grandmother Macrina the Elder, a transmitter of the tradition of St. Gregory the Wonderworker, through the parents Basil the Elder and Emmelia (herself a martyr’s daughter), to a generation of sainted siblings that included Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste. This file sets out that family as Gregory of Nyssa preserves it in his Life of Macrina, supplemented by Basil’s letters for the grandmother, together with Macrina’s secret name “Thecla,” the deaths that turned the household toward asceticism, and Macrina’s place as its eldest child and spiritual head.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

A Source Built of Family Memory

Almost everything that can be said of Macrina’s household comes from a single pen. She left no writings of her own, and the texture of the family’s life survives chiefly because her brother Gregory of Nyssa chose, after her death, to write its eldest member’s Life — a work cast as a letter to the monk Olympius and woven through with the recollections of a brother who had grown up inside the household he describes (Life of Macrina §1; SC 178; PG 46:959–1000). The family’s spiritual genealogy reaching back before Gregory’s own memory is corroborated independently in the letters of his brother Basil the Great (Basil, Epistle 204; On the Holy Spirit 29.74 [PG 32:208]). The reader should therefore hold the whole portrait, vivid as it is, within the frame Gregory gives it: this is a saint’s Life, written by a devoted brother for the edification of the Church, and its biographical detail is pinned to that source rather than corroborated from neutral records.

A Lineage of Confessors: Macrina the Elder and the Neocaesarean Tradition

The household’s self-understanding reached back into the third century, to Macrina’s paternal grandmother, St. Macrina the Elder. She and her husband had been among the confessors of the persecutions — Basil recalls forebears who endured the loss of property and a season of hardship in the woods and mountains of Pontus during a time of imperial pressure on the Church (Basil, Epistle 204; cf. Epistle 223). What mattered most for the family was that Macrina the Elder had been formed in the living memory of St. Gregory the Wonderworker (Thaumaturgus), the third-century apostle of Neocaesarea and disciple of Origen. Basil insists that the faith he and his brothers held was no innovation but the teaching they had received as children from their grandmother, who in turn had it from those who had heard Gregory Thaumaturgus himself (Basil, Epistle 204.6; On the Holy Spirit 29.74). The family thus understood its Nicene orthodoxy not as a position arrived at by argument but as an inheritance handed down within the household across generations — a confessor’s deposit, received at the knee of a grandmother who had paid for her faith. It is from this same grandmother that the younger Macrina took her name, so that the family’s confessing past was carried forward, quite literally, in its eldest daughter.

The Parents: Basil the Elder and Emmelia

Macrina’s father, Basil the Elder, was a rhetor and advocate of Neocaesarea, a man of the Christian curial aristocracy who trained his children in letters and arranged their futures in the ordinary way of his class (Life of Macrina §2–3). Her mother, St. Emmelia, was, Gregory relates, herself the daughter of a martyr, orphaned by the witness of a father who had died for the faith (Life of Macrina §2; SC 178). Gregory presents Emmelia as a woman who had wished for the virginal life but was given in marriage for the protection of her inheritance and beauty, and who then bore an extraordinary number of children — the sources speak of around nine or ten — of whom an unparalleled number are commemorated as saints (Life of Macrina §2–3). Basil the Elder died comparatively early, leaving Emmelia a widow with a large household; and from that point, in Gregory’s telling, mother and eldest daughter together presided over the family and over its decisive turn toward the ascetic life (Life of Macrina §5, §11). Emmelia would end her own days within Macrina’s community at Annesi and is venerated together with her children.

The Secret Name: “Thecla”

Gregory frames Macrina’s whole vocation with a story he says belonged to the family’s private knowledge. Her public name, given for the grandmother, was Macrina; but she bore in addition a hidden name, used only secretly within the household. As Emmelia was in labor, Gregory relates, she saw in a vision an awe-inspiring figure who addressed the child she was carrying as “Thecla” — “that Thecla famous among the virgins” — the namesake being the virgin disciple of St. Paul celebrated in the Acts of Paul and Thecla (Life of Macrina §2; SC 178). Gregory reads the secret name as a prophecy: the unborn child was marked, before her birth, for the virginal and philosophic life that she would in fact embrace, and the name “predicted the manner of life she would choose” (Life of Macrina §2). The episode is structurally important to Gregory’s portrait, supplying a providential signature for everything that follows — Macrina’s refusal to marry, her ascetic leadership, her death.

[Disputed: How to read the Thecla vision. Silvas and Maraval treat it as authentic family tradition — a recollection Gregory could have had only from within the household, and which he plainly believed (Silvas, Macrina the Younger, intro.; Maraval, SC 178, notes ad loc.). Many modern critics read it instead as a hagiographic topos: a literary device by which Gregory links Macrina to the figure of Thecla from the Acts of Paul and Thecla and so casts his sister as a new model of consecrated virginity, whatever its historical kernel (so a broad strand of scholarship on the Life of Macrina as gendered hagiography). The two readings are not strictly exclusive, since a remembered family story can also be deployed as a literary type; what is certain is only that Gregory transmits the name and reads it as prophecy.]

The Roll of Sainted Siblings

Of Emmelia’s children, four sons besides Macrina stand out in the family’s story, and the calendar venerates a remarkable number of them. St. Basil the Great (c. 330–379), archbishop of Caesarea, was the most celebrated — and, as the next file in this section and Gregory’s Life both relate, was recalled by Macrina from rhetorical vanity to the philosophic life when he returned swollen with pride from his studies at Athens (Life of Macrina §6). St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–after 394), the family’s chief witness and the author of the Life, was among the younger children. St. Peter of Sebaste (d. c. 391), the youngest of all, was born about the time of his father’s death and raised, Gregory says, chiefly by Macrina, who was to him “father, teacher, guide, mother, counsellor in every good” at once; reared from infancy in the ascetic household, he succeeded to the leadership of the Annesi community and was at last consecrated Bishop of Sebaste (Life of Macrina §12; §14). To these is added Naucratius, second-born after Basil, whose early death (see below) Gregory makes a hinge of the whole family’s history (Life of Macrina §8–10). The household thus furnishes the calendar with a single generation — Macrina, Basil, Gregory, Peter, and Naucratius (locally commemorated) — venerated alongside their mother Emmelia and grandmother Macrina the Elder, a concentration of sanctity within one family that is without parallel.

Macrina’s birth is conventionally placed about 327, making her the eldest and the senior of all these. [Disputed: The precise year of Macrina’s birth. Maraval and Silvas reconstruct c. 327 from Gregory’s chronology of the family and from her age (about thirty in 357, dying at roughly fifty-two in 379–380) (Maraval, SC 178; Silvas, Macrina the Younger). Some scholars prefer c. 330, in line with the conventional dating of Basil’s birth and the order of the siblings. The difference of a few years does not affect her standing as the eldest child.]

Naucratius and the Death That Turned the Family

Among the brothers was Naucratius, a gifted young man who, Gregory relates, renounced a promising public career to live in ascetic retirement near the river Iris, supporting a community of the poor and aged by hunting and fishing (Life of Macrina §8). His sudden death — struck down with a companion in the prime of life, in an accident at the river — was, in Gregory’s narrative, a hinge in the family’s history (Life of Macrina §9–10). Gregory describes Emmelia’s overwhelming grief and the steadiness with which Macrina bore both her own sorrow and her mother’s, presenting the loss as the moment that confirmed mother and daughter decisively in the renunciation of the world (Life of Macrina §10). In Gregory’s hands the family’s asceticism is thus bound up from the start with the experience of mortality and bereavement — the very theme that Macrina would later raise to doctrine on her deathbed, in the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection (PG 46:11–160). The reader should note that this providential shaping of bereavement into vocation is Gregory’s interpretation of events, offered as a brother’s reading of his family’s grief rather than as a neutral chronicle.

Macrina the Eldest: The Family’s Spiritual Head

Through all of this, Gregory’s consistent claim is that Macrina, as the eldest, was the spiritual center of the household — not Basil the bishop nor Gregory the theologian, but their sister. She turned the family estate at Annesi (Annisa), on the river Iris in Pontus, into an ascetic community; she drew in her widowed mother; she reared and formed Peter; she recalled Basil to humility; and she gathered household servants and free women into a common life that, Gregory says, erased the distinctions of rank (Life of Macrina §5, §6, §11–12). Within the family she was known simply as “the Teacher” (hē didaskalos) and as “the philosopher” — where “philosophy,” in the family’s usage, means not the schools of Athens but the disciplined ascetic life ordered wholly to God (Life of Macrina §1, §11; On the Soul and the Resurrection, opening). It is this eldest daughter, in Gregory’s account, who is the spring of the whole family’s ascetic turn, and through whom — in his two works about her — its theology of the soul, the resurrection, and the virginal life would finally be voiced.

References

Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Saint Macrina (Vita Sanctae Macrinae). Greek: GNO VIII/1, ed. Virginia Woods Callahan. Leiden: Brill, 1952. PG 46:959–1000. Critical edition with French translation: Pierre Maraval, Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de sainte Macrine, Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Cerf, 1971.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). PG 46:11–160; trans. Catharine P. Roth, On the Soul and the Resurrection, Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993; trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, Fathers of the Church 58, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967.
Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Saint Macrina. Trans. W. K. Lowther Clarke. London: SPCK, 1916. Trans. Kevin Corrigan, The Life of Saint Macrina. Toronto: Peregrina, 1987. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 5 (NPNF II/5), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. New York: Christian Literature, 1893.
Basil of Caesarea. Letters (esp. Epistles 204, 223) and On the Holy Spirit 29.74 [PG 32:208]. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 8 (NPNF II/8). New York: Christian Literature, 1895.
Acts of Paul and Thecla. In The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. J. K. Elliott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.