Peter and the Household

If St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina makes his sister the one who recalled the brilliant Basil from pride, it makes her even more plainly the maker of the youngest brother, St. Peter of Sebaste, to whom — born about the time of their father’s death — she was “father, teacher, guide, as well as sister.” This file follows Macrina’s domestic vocation as Gregory frames it: her assumption of headship over the household after Basil the Elder’s death, her constant companionship with her widowed mother Emmelia, her taking on herself a share of the servants’ labor, her steadying of the family through the death of Naucratius, and the upbringing of Peter, who would rise from that ascetic household to be a priest, the leader of the Annesi community, and finally Bishop of Sebaste — all pinned to Gregory’s single, family-internal source.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

The Center of Gravity After the Father’s Death

Gregory’s account turns on a death and a redistribution of authority. Basil the Elder, the rhetor and advocate of Neocaesarea who had trained his children in letters and arranged their futures in the ordinary way of his class, died comparatively early, leaving his widow Emmelia at the head of a large household and a still-unfinished family (Life of Macrina §2–3, §5; SC 178; PG 46:959–1000). In Gregory’s telling, it is from this point that Macrina, the eldest child, becomes the household’s center of gravity. She did not leave her mother to govern alone, nor did she withdraw into a private devotion; rather, she bound herself to Emmelia in constant companionship and made herself the partner of her mother’s life and cares (Life of Macrina §5, §11).

Gregory is emphatic that this was a deliberate descent from the privileges of rank. Macrina, he says, took upon herself a share of the labors that fell to the household’s servants, refusing the ease and deference that her birth and station entitled her to, and entered into the common toil of the house with her own hands (Life of Macrina §5, §11). The same impulse that would later, at Annesi, erase the distinction between mistresses and maidservants in a single common life begins here, within the family home, as an eldest daughter’s refusal to stand above the work of the household.

Raising Peter: “Father, Teacher, Guide, as Well as Sister”

Into this reordered household the youngest sibling was born. Peter, last of Emmelia’s many children, came into the world, Gregory tells us, about the time of his father’s death — so that he never knew Basil the Elder, and was reared from infancy not by a father but within the ascetic and increasingly fatherless household that Macrina and Emmelia together governed (Life of Macrina §12). Gregory makes Macrina the chief agent of his upbringing. She “reared him herself,” he writes, and was to her youngest brother “father, teacher, guide, mother, counsellor in every good” — taking the whole office of formation upon herself, so that the boy who would become a bishop was, in Gregory’s phrase, the work of his sister’s hands (Life of Macrina §12).

The result, as Gregory presents it, was a brother formed wholly within the family’s philosophia — the disciplined ascetic life ordered to God that Macrina embodied as “the Teacher.” Peter grew up knowing no other pattern of life than the one his sister had made; he was, in a sense the Life underscores, the household’s own ascetic produced from within, raised from the cradle in the renunciation that his elder siblings had had to convert to as adults. Gregory adds that Peter became skilled in practical management as well as in the spiritual life, and that his competence in providing for the community in seasons of need — notably a great famine — showed the fruits of the formation his sister had given him (Life of Macrina §12, §14).

Steadying the Family Through Grief

Macrina’s headship was tested by bereavement, and Gregory makes her steadiness under it a defining trait. The most severe blow was the death of the second brother, Naucratius, a gifted young man who had renounced a public career to live in ascetic retirement near the river Iris, supporting a community of the poor and aged by hunting and fishing; he was struck down in the prime of life in an accident at the river (Life of Macrina §8–9). Gregory describes Emmelia’s grief as overwhelming — a mother prostrated by the sudden loss of a son — and presents Macrina as the one who bore both her own sorrow and her mother’s, raising Emmelia up out of her despair and holding the household together (Life of Macrina §9–10).

In Gregory’s narrative this is the hinge on which the family’s asceticism finally turns: the steadiness Macrina showed in the face of death confirmed mother and daughter decisively in their renunciation of the world, and bound the household’s ascetic vocation to the experience of mortality from the start (Life of Macrina §10). The reader should note that this shaping of grief into vocation is Gregory’s interpretation, a brother’s reading of his family’s sorrow, rather than a neutral chronicle; but it is the lens through which he wants Macrina’s domestic leadership understood — not administration only, but the spiritual governance of a family learning, through loss, to die to the world. It is the same theme Macrina would raise to doctrine on her own deathbed, in the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection (PG 46:11–160).

Emmelia’s Last Years and the Passing of the Community

The companionship of mother and eldest daughter ran to its end. Emmelia spent her last years within the ascetic community at Annesi, on the river Iris in Pontus, that Macrina had made of the family estate, and died there in her daughter’s arms, blessing her children (Life of Macrina §11, §13). Gregory presents Emmelia’s death as the moment at which the leadership of the community’s two branches — the women’s under Macrina, the men’s under Peter — passed fully to the next generation. With their mother gone, Macrina continued at the head of the women’s ascetic house, while Peter succeeded to the leadership of the men’s community at Annesi (Life of Macrina §12, §14). The household that had begun as a family had become, by Emmelia’s death, a monastic settlement governed by the two siblings whom Macrina’s formation had most directly shaped.

Peter’s Later Career: Priest and Bishop of Sebaste

The brother Macrina had reared rose, in the years after, to the highest offices of the Church. Peter was ordained priest and led the Annesi community through the period of famine and need in which, Gregory says, his practical gifts were most evident; he was at last consecrated Bishop of Sebaste, an elevation conventionally dated to about 380 (Life of Macrina §14; cf. §12). He outlived both his great brothers Basil and Gregory’s record of him, and is venerated in the Orthodox calendar as St. Peter of Sebaste. That a child born fatherless and raised entirely by his sister should end as a bishop and a saint is, in Gregory’s account, the vindication of Macrina’s domestic vocation: the youngest brother is the visible fruit of the formation she gave him.

The fraternal bond between Peter and Gregory of Nyssa left its own literary trace. Gregory dedicated his treatise On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio) to Peter, addressing him as a brother and as one whose judgment he honored — a work composed to complete and extend Basil’s Hexaemeron after Basil’s death (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, prologue; PG 44:125–256). The dedication shows the youngest sibling, by then a churchman in his own right, taking his place within the family’s theological enterprise — the household that Macrina had made, still working as a single body of teaching after her death.

[Disputed: The precise dating of Peter’s consecration as Bishop of Sebaste. Gregory of Nyssa narrates Peter’s rise to the episcopate but does not fix the year (Life of Macrina §14); the conventional date of c. 380 is a modern reconstruction from the chronology of the family and the see of Sebaste (so Maraval, SC 178; Silvas, Macrina the Younger). The substance — that Peter was reared by Macrina, became priest, led the Annesi community after Emmelia’s death, and was eventually Bishop of Sebaste — rests on Gregory; the year is inferred. As throughout the Life, Macrina’s role as Peter’s “father, teacher, guide” is Gregory’s characterization of his own family and is not independently attested.]

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. 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.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). PG 46:11–160; trans. Catharine P. Roth, Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio). PG 44:125–256; trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 5 (NPNF II/5). New York: Christian Literature, 1893.
Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.