Who Was St. Macrina the Younger? The Woman Behind the Cappadocian Fathers

Many Christians know the names Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa. Far fewer have heard of their older sister. Yet the brother who knew her best called her simply "the Teacher," and wrote two books in which she is the central figure: a biography, and a dialogue in which she lies on her deathbed and instructs him on the soul, death and the resurrection while he plays the pupil.

St. Macrina the Younger (about 327 to 379 or 380) stands near the beginning of organized monastic life in Asia Minor, and she is one of the few women of the early Church whose life we can follow in some detail. Because nearly everything about her comes from one devoted author, she is also a test case for how much we can know about a saint. This article tells her life as the Church remembers it, shows where that memory comes from, and separates what can be checked from what cannot.

In brief

Almost everything we know about Macrina comes from her younger brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, who was present at her death and wrote the Life of Macrina within a few years of it, probably in the early 380s. He also wrote On the Soul and the Resurrection, a dialogue in which Macrina teaches him. According to Gregory, she chose virginity after her fiancé died, turned the family household at Annisa in Pontus into an ascetic community, drew Basil away from a career in rhetoric, raised her youngest brother Peter, and died in poverty after a prayer the Church still treasures. A short epitaph by St. Gregory the Theologian independently confirms that she was a famous virgin, the first-born of Emmelia. Basil, however, never names her in his surviving writings, and Gregory wrote with literary models in mind, among them Thecla, Socrates and even Homer. Scholars therefore debate how far his portrait is biography and how far idealization, and the reported healings are stories Gregory was told, which history can record but not verify. The Orthodox Church commemorates her on July 19.

Thesis: Macrina was a real and influential ascetic leader, known chiefly through a loving, near-contemporary and carefully crafted portrait by her brother, and an honest reader can accept the core of that portrait while recognizing its literary shaping and the limits of the evidence.

The life, as the Church remembers it

A family of confessors

Macrina was born into a Christian landowning family with estates in Cappadocia and Pontus, in modern Turkey. Gregory says she was named after "our father's mother, who had confessed Christ like a good athlete in the time of the persecutions."¹ Basil later wrote that this grandmother, Macrina the Elder, "taught me the words of the blessed Gregory," meaning St. Gregory the Wonderworker, the apostle of Pontus.² Her parents were Basil the Elder, a respected advocate and rhetorician, and Emmelia. Macrina was the first of their children; four sons and five daughters survived infancy, and the sons were Basil (later bishop of Caesarea), Naucratius, Gregory (later bishop of Nyssa) and Peter (later bishop of Sebaste).³

Gregory adds a family story. During labor, Emmelia dreamed that a figure "more splendid than a human being" three times called the unborn child Thecla, after the virgin disciple of St. Paul in the popular Acts of Paul and Thecla. Gregory reads the dream as a forecast of her way of life rather than a naming instruction.⁴

Scripture, a betrothal and a choice

Emmelia taught her daughter from the Wisdom of Solomon and the Psalms instead of classical poetry; the Psalter, Gregory says, was her "constant companion, like a good fellow-traveller that never deserted her."⁵ When she was about twelve, her father chose a promising young man as her future husband, but he died before the marriage. She then refused all other suitors, arguing that "in the nature of things there was but one marriage, as there is one birth and one death," and that her betrothed, alive to God in the hope of the resurrection, was "absent only, not dead."⁶

Basil comes home

The most famous episode concerns Basil. After years of study, ending at Athens, he came home "puffed up beyond measure with the pride of oratory." Gregory continues: "Nevertheless Macrina took him in hand, and with such speed did she draw him also toward the mark of philosophy that he forsook the glories of this world and despised fame gained by speaking."⁷ In fourth-century Christian usage "philosophy" often meant the ascetic life itself, and that is Gregory's meaning.⁸

Basil tells his own conversion differently. He says he had "wasted nearly all my youth" on worldly learning until, "like a man roused from deep sleep, I turned my eyes to the marvellous light of the truth of the Gospel." He read the Gospel's call to sell one's goods and went looking for ascetics in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia.⁹ His sister does not appear.

Naucratius and Peter

The second brother, Naucratius, left a promising career at twenty-one to live as a hermit beside the River Iris, caring for poor old people, and was killed in an accident about five years later. Gregory describes Emmelia's collapse and Macrina's steadiness, which "raised her up from the abyss of grief."¹⁰ The youngest, Peter, was born about the time their father died. Macrina "took him soon after birth from the nurse's breast and reared him herself," becoming to him "father, teacher, tutor, mother, giver of all good advice."¹¹

Annisa on the Iris

At the family estate of Annisa, beside the Iris in Pontus, Macrina persuaded her widowed mother to give up the comforts of their rank and "to live on a footing of equality with the staff of maids, so as to share with them in the same food, the same kind of bed, and in all the necessaries of life." Gregory's summary is memorable: "Continence was their luxury, and obscurity their glory."¹² It became a double community, women under Macrina and men under Peter, and in a famine it fed crowds of the hungry. Among the sisters were a young widow of senatorial family named Vestiana; Lampadia, "leader of the band of sisters, a deaconess in rank"; and foundlings whom Macrina had "picked up, exposed by the roadside in the time of famine."¹³

Susanna Elm argues that this community came first and that Basil later shaped and regulated the model. Her reviewer Claudia Rapp summarizes the thesis: "it is Macrina whose resolve and initiative give birth to the monastic model of communal life in Asia Minor."¹⁴ Philip Rousseau, reading the same text, stresses how domestic it remained; the community, he concludes, "is best thought of as an extended family."¹⁵

The last days

Emmelia died in the arms of Macrina and Peter. Basil became bishop of Caesarea in 370. In the ninth month or a little longer after Basil's death, Gregory, returning from a synod at Antioch, went to see his sister, whom he had not seen for nearly eight years. On the way he dreamed three times that he was carrying martyrs' relics that shone like the sun.¹⁶

He found her dying of fever, lying on a board on the floor. Peter had gone out to meet Gregory by another road and was absent. She would not let Gregory grieve for Basil and turned the conversation to "the nature of the soul" and "the journey from death to life again." On her last evening, her couch turned toward the east, she prayed in a low voice: "Thou, O Lord, hast freed us from the fear of death. Thou hast made the end of this life the beginning to us of true life." She asked Christ, who had opened Paradise to the thief, to "remember me, too, in Thy kingdom; because I, too, was crucified with Thee, having nailed my flesh to the cross for fear of Thee." When the lamps were lit she tried to join the evening thanksgiving, made the sign of the cross, and died.¹⁷

There was nothing to bury her in. Lampadia told Gregory: "There is the cloak, there is the head-covering, there the well-worn shoes on the feet. This is all her wealth." Preparing the body, Vestiana found an iron cross and an iron ring on her neck, and explained that "the ring is hollow in the hoop, and in it has been hidden a particle of the Cross of Life." She also showed Gregory a faint scar on Macrina's chest, where a dangerous tumor had once vanished after Macrina prayed through the night and her mother made the sign of the cross over it.¹⁸ After an all-night vigil, the local bishop Araxius and Gregory carried the bier to the church of the Holy Martyrs, and she was laid beside her mother in their parents' grave.¹⁹

The primary evidence

Gregory of Nyssa, the Life of Macrina

The Life is a long letter to a monk named Olympius, whom Gregory met at Antioch on his way to Jerusalem. Gregory insists that his account "was not based on the narrative of others" but on "what we had learned by personal experience."²⁰ That holds for the deathbed and funeral; it holds less for her childhood, which Macrina recounted to him in her last days, and for stories told him by others. Derek Krueger describes the work as "written shortly after his sister's death in 380," and the Oxford Cult of Saints database dates it to the early 380s.²¹ {{very-strong: The main source for Macrina's life was written by her eyewitness brother within a few years of her death.}} The critical edition is Pierre Maraval's (Sources Chrétiennes 178, 1971); English translations include W. K. Lowther Clarke's public-domain version of 1916, quoted here, and those of Kevin Corrigan and Anna Silvas.²²

Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection

This dialogue opens as Gregory, grieving for Basil, comes to "his sister the Teacher" and finds her "lying in a state of prostration even unto death." She rebukes his grief with the Apostle's words (1 Thessalonians 4:13, "lest you sorrow as others who have no hope," NKJV) and leads a long argument. She defines the soul as "an essence created, and living, and intellectual," and the resurrection as "the reconstitution of our nature in its original form."²³ Its modern publisher says Gregory wrote it after "Plato's literary example," and Patricia Wilson-Kastner argued that it was written "as a direct parallel to Plato's Phaedo," where Socrates discusses the soul on the day of his death.²⁴ Lowther Clarke put it carefully: in the dialogue "Gregory purports to reproduce this conversation."²⁵

An independent witness: Gregory the Theologian

One short text comes from outside the immediate family. Among the epitaphs of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil's closest friend, is one for Macrina: "The earth holds the glorious virgin Macrina, if ye ever heard her name, the first-born child of great Emmelia. She let herself be seen by no man, but is now on the tongues of all, and has glory greater than any."²⁶ It confirms that she was a consecrated virgin, the eldest of Emmelia's children, and widely honored at her death.

Basil's silence

Basil's many surviving letters name his grandmother Macrina, recall being raised at Annisa ("From my childhood I have been familiar with this spot, for here I was brought up by my grandmother"), and mourn his mother ("I have lost my Mother, the only comfort I had in life").²⁷ He never names his sister. Ana Cristina Villa Betancourt, in a 2023 study of Basil and women, notes that he does not speak of her explicitly anywhere, does not describe the change in his life that Gregory credits to her, and is equally silent about his father and his teachers at Athens.²⁸ {{strong: Basil never names his sister in his surviving writings, and his own account of his conversion does not mention her.}}

Villa Betancourt reports Anna Silvas's view that the silence shows neither coldness nor disagreement: Silvas finds implicit references to Macrina's community in Basil's writings, such as Letter 207, where he tells the clergy of Neocaesarea that "we rejoice to have assemblies of both men and women, whose conversation is in heaven," and Letter 210, written from Annisa itself.²⁹ Other readers suspect that Gregory, writing after Basil's death, enlarged his sister's role. There is a further twist. Basil's ascetic beginnings owed much to Eustathius of Sebaste, with whom he later broke over the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and Gregory's Life never mentions Eustathius at all.³⁰

What can we actually verify?

(a) Contemporary or near-contemporary documentary evidence

• Macrina's existence, consecrated virginity and fame at death: Gregory of Nyssa's eyewitness Life, confirmed by Gregory of Nazianzus's epitaph.
• The ascetic community at Annisa: described by Gregory and corroborated in general terms by Basil's letters from Annisa.
• Her death and funeral: the testimony of a participant, written shortly afterward.

(b) Later tradition and literary shaping

• Her childhood and betrothal come through Gregory, who was a small child or not yet born at the time, partly from Macrina's own deathbed recollections.
• Her decisive role in Basil's conversion is Gregory's account alone.
• The Thecla dream, the Socratic dialogue and other features follow recognizable literary models; On the Soul and the Resurrection is a philosophical dialogue, not a transcript.
• Later Lives, including the brief OCA synaxarion, depend on Gregory, add little independent information, and sometimes blur his details (the OCA life has the sisters, not the girl's father, report the eye healing, and tells the unfailing grain as fact).³¹

(c) Reported miracles

• The healing of the tumor on her chest was told to Gregory after her death by Vestiana; he did not witness it.
• The healing of a little girl's diseased eye was told to Gregory by the child's father, an officer at Sebastopolis, on Gregory's way home from the funeral.³² (It is sometimes said that Macrina's own eye was healed; in the Life the eye belongs to the officer's daughter.)
• Gregory deliberately omits other wonders he had heard of, including grain that did not diminish in the famine, because "most men judge what is credible in the way of a tale by the measure of their own experience."³³

{{debated: Whether the miracles reported in the Life happened as described cannot be settled by historical method; what can be verified is that Gregory recorded them from named or described informants within a few years.}}

Biography or literary portrait?

In 1916 Lowther Clarke thought the plain style of the deathbed scenes was "a convincing proof that he is giving a true account of actual facts, written down shortly after their occurrence."³⁴ Few scholars would now put it so simply. Gregory was a trained rhetorician, and Wilson-Kastner argued that "Gregory models her portrait on two major figures: Socrates of pagan antiquity; and Thecla."³⁵ Georgia Frank argued that the discovery of the scar on Macrina's body echoes the famous recognition of Odysseus' scar in the Odyssey, so that Gregory presents his sister as a kind of "baptized Odysseus."³⁶ Krueger reads the work as an act of liturgical remembrance.³⁷

Literary craft is not fiction. Ancient biographers routinely shaped real lives through familiar models, and Gregory's narrative is full of names, places and awkward details, such as his own loss of composure and the crowds slowing the funeral, that read like memory. The fair conclusion is that the Life is a real biography by an eyewitness who loved its subject and arranged her story to teach. Its outline and public events deserve more trust than its speeches, its reading of motives, and the episodes Gregory did not see.

The Orthodox position

The Orthodox Church honors Macrina among the venerable (monastic) saints and keeps her memory on July 19.³⁸ Three levels of teaching should be kept apart.

Dogma. Nothing in Macrina's biography is dogma. What touches dogma is what her story assumes: the resurrection of the body, prayer to Christ who "hast freed us from the fear of death," and, behind the cross and relic she wore, the teaching of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) that holy images and "the figure of the precious and life-giving Cross" receive "due salutation and honourable reverence," "not indeed that true worship of faith [latreia] which pertains alone to the divine nature."³⁹ Veneration is honor given for God's sake; worship belongs to God alone.

Common tradition. The Church receives Gregory's Life as the foundation of her commemoration and a model of holy dying, but Orthodox Christians are not required to treat every detail of a saint's Life as documented history.

Theological opinion. On the Soul and the Resurrection gives Macrina some of Gregory's boldest ideas, including a purifying fire after death and the hope that evil will finally be reduced "to complete annihilation."⁴⁰ The Church honors Gregory as a Father, but these hopes remain theological opinion, not defined teaching, and whether they were Macrina's, Gregory's or both cannot now be known. For the wider story of the family's theology, see The Cappadocian Fathers, Who Was Basil the Great? and the Church Fathers guide; for early monasticism, see Where Did Christian Monasticism Come From?

The strongest objections

"Macrina was the real theologian, and her brothers took the credit"

Some modern readers, especially in feminist history, argue that Gregory's portraits preserve the memory of a woman who was the true intellectual and spiritual center of the family. The evidence gives this real support: Gregory calls her "the Teacher," credits her with turning Basil and raising Peter, and makes her the voice of his own teaching on the soul, while Elm's work suggests her community set the pattern Basil later regulated.

Response. We cannot measure Macrina's theology independently, because she left no writings. Everything she "says" is written by Gregory, in Gregory's style. It is reasonable to believe she shaped her brothers' spiritual lives, since Gregory says so repeatedly and had no obvious reason to invent it; it is not possible to show that particular doctrines were hers. Orthodox Christians can gladly honor her as the teacher of her family without claiming more than the sources allow.

"Gregory invented an idealized Macrina"

Others take the opposite line. Elizabeth A. Clark's influential essay "The Lady Vanishes" (1998) used Macrina as a test case for whether historians can recover real women from texts written by men; as Andrea Sterk summarizes it, Clark concluded that "we can never recover 'real' women from the literary constructions of male elites," though "traces" of them remain.⁴¹ Morwenna Ludlow describes readings in which, "even in these apparently intimate pictures of a female life, the woman is a construct and is not allowed to speak for herself."⁴² Gregory's own praise of her as one of whom "I do not know whether it is fitting to designate her by her sex, who so surpassed her sex" shows how he measured holiness in the gendered terms of his age.⁴³

Response. This is a fair warning against reading the Life naively, and this article accepts it. But a constructed portrait is still a portrait of someone. Gregory wrote for readers who had known her, including the community at Annisa, and Gregory of Nazianzus independently attests her fame. The sensible position is the one Ludlow's survey points toward: read the texts both as evidence for a real ascetic woman and as literature with purposes of its own.

"Basil's silence shows Gregory exaggerated her role"

Response. The silence is real; it means her influence on Basil is not independently documented. But arguments from silence are fragile. Basil also never names his father or his Athenian teachers, and his conversion narrative in Letter 223 was written to defend his orthodoxy against Eustathius, not to tell his family story. The likeliest picture is that several influences converged on Basil, including Macrina's household, Eustathius and the ascetics he met on his travels, and each brother told the part that mattered to him.

"The relics, the sign of the cross and the healings are later superstition"

Many Protestants are uneasy with the ring holding a fragment of the True Cross, Gregory's dream of shining relics, a vigil kept "as in the case of martyrs' festivals," and healing through the sign of the cross. The Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles, for example, call "the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints" a "fond thing vainly invented."⁴⁴

Response. First, Macrina's dying prayer is addressed to Christ, asking Him to forgive her sins and receive her soul. Second, these practices are not medieval inventions: they appear as ordinary features of devout life in a text written around 380 by a bishop who attended the Council of Constantinople in 381, the council that completed the Nicene Creed.⁴⁵ Third, Scripture records God working through things associated with His servants: a dead man revived when he "touched the bones of Elisha" (2 Kings 13:21, NKJV), and "handkerchiefs or aprons were brought from [Paul's] body to the sick, and the diseases left them" (Acts 19:12, NKJV). The distinction between veneration and worship set out at Nicaea II is the Church's answer to the charge of idolatry; see Do Orthodox Christians Worship Icons? and The Intercession of the Saints in the Ancient Church. A Protestant may still disagree, but these practices belong to the generation that defended the Creed.

"The miracles discredit the whole account"

Response. Historians do not discard ancient sources because they report miracles; they distinguish what the author witnessed from what he was told, and Gregory draws that line himself. Whether God heals in answer to prayer is a question about God, not about Gregory's reliability (see Can Miracles Really Happen?). Christians believe that "the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much" (James 5:16, NKJV), but the historical case for Macrina does not depend on the miracles.

What we can say confidently

• Macrina was the eldest child of Basil the Elder and Emmelia and the sister of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Naucratius and Peter of Sebaste.
• She lived as a consecrated virgin and led the women of an ascetic community at the family estate of Annisa on the Iris.
• Gregory was present at her death and wrote the Life of Macrina within a few years of it.
• She died in voluntary poverty, was buried beside her mother, and was widely honored, as Gregory of Nazianzus also attests.
• Basil never names her in his surviving writings.
• The Orthodox Church commemorates her on July 19.

What remains disputed

• The year of her death. Modern works give 379 or 380. The Life places it soon after a synod at Antioch held "the ninth month or a little longer" after Basil's death, and Basil's own death date is debated.
• Her role in Basil's conversion, which rests on Gregory alone.
• How much of On the Soul and the Resurrection is hers.
• Who pioneered communal ascetic life in Asia Minor: Elm credits Macrina's household with the model Basil later regulated, while tracing communal asceticism in the region back to Eustathius of Sebaste; older accounts give Basil the leading role.
• How far the Life is idealized, from reliable family memory to mainly literary construction.
• The reported miracles, which historical method cannot confirm or rule out.

Conclusion

Macrina comes to us through the eyes of a grieving brother, and we should read him as he wrote, with love, with art and with a purpose. After every fair critical question has been asked, a recognizable woman remains. She turned a wealthy household into a place of prayer where mistress and servant ate the same bread, raised an orphaned brother, gathered abandoned children, and died owning a cloak, a head-covering and a pair of worn shoes.

For Orthodox Christians she is a witness to the faith her brothers defended in words. The Creed confesses that "the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures," and ends, "I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Macrina's last prayer says the same thing in the voice of a person: "Thou hast made the end of this life the beginning to us of true life." Gregory wrote so that her life would not pass "into the shades of useless oblivion." Sixteen centuries later the Church still keeps her memory, and that hope of his has been fulfilled. For more on the hope she died in, see Why Do Christians Believe in Bodily Resurrection?

Notes

1. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina, trans. W. K. Lowther Clarke (London: SPCK, 1916), PG 46:960C-962A. All quotations from the Life are from this translation, cited by the Migne (PG 46) column numbers printed in its margins. ↩
2. Basil, Letter 204.6, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8. See also Letter 223.3: "The teaching about God which I had received as a boy from my blessed mother and my grandmother Macrina, I have ever held with increased conviction." ↩
3. Life, PG 46:964D-966A (four sons and five daughters), 966C, 968A, 972B-C, 982B (their father's fame in the law courts and in rhetoric); Lowther Clarke, introduction, pp. 7-8, on the family and the later sees of Gregory and Peter. ↩
4. Life, PG 46:962A-C. ↩
5. Life, PG 46:962C-964A. ↩
6. Life, PG 46:964B-D. ↩
7. Life, PG 46:966C. ↩
8. Lowther Clarke, note on Life 960C: "philosophy" was used in the fourth century both of the Christian religion generally "and of asceticism in particular." ↩
9. Basil, Letter 223.2, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8. ↩
10. Life, PG 46:968A-970B. ↩
11. Life, PG 46:972B-D; Peter's ordination by Basil, 974B-C. ↩
12. Life, PG 46:970C-D. ↩
13. Life, PG 46:972D (famine), 976C and 996D (men's and women's sides), 988B (foundlings), 988C-990A (Vestiana and Lampadia). ↩
14. Claudia Rapp, review of Susanna Elm, 'Virgins of God': The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 1995.04.07. Rapp reports Elm's dating of Basil's first retreat to 357/8, "more than a decade after the retreat of Macrina and her mother." ↩
15. Philip Rousseau, "The Pious Household and the Virgin Chorus: Reflections on Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina," Journal of Early Christian Studies 13, no. 2 (2005): 165-186, abstract. ↩
16. Life, PG 46:974A-976B; on the year of Basil's consecration, Lowther Clarke, introduction, p. 9. ↩
17. Life, PG 46:976B-978D (arrival, Peter's absence, conversation), 984B-986B (prayer and death). ↩
18. Life, PG 46:990A-992C. ↩
19. Life, PG 46:992D-996B. ↩
20. Life, PG 46:960A-B. ↩
21. Derek Krueger, "Writing and the Liturgy of Memory in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina," Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 4 (2000): 483-510, abstract; The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database (University of Oxford), record E01877, whose title describes the Life as "composed in the early 380s." ↩
22. Grégoire de Nysse, Vie de sainte Macrine, ed. and trans. Pierre Maraval, Sources Chrétiennes 178 (Paris: Cerf, 1971); The Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Kevin Corrigan (Saskatoon: Peregrina, 1987); Anna M. Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), which gathers and translates all the sources. ↩
23. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, NPNF2 vol. 5 (opening; definition of the soul; definition of the resurrection near the end). ↩
24. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, publisher's description of Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth, Popular Patristics 12 (Crestwood, NY, 1993); Patricia Wilson-Kastner, "Macrina: Virgin and Teacher," Andrews University Seminary Studies 17, no. 1 (1979): 105-117, at 110. ↩
25. Lowther Clarke, note on Life 978B. ↩
26. Gregory of Nazianzus, epigram in Greek Anthology 8.163, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 2 (1917). Epigrams 8.161-162 are on Emmelia. ↩
27. Basil, Letters 223.3, 210.1 and 30, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8. ↩
28. Ana Cristina Villa Betancourt, "«El conocimiento de Dios que de niño recibí de mi bienaventurada madre y de mi abuela Macrina»: Basilio de Cesarea y las mujeres," Estudios Eclesiásticos 98, no. 386 (2023): 469-504, section 2.4 (pp. 482-484). ↩
29. Villa Betancourt, pp. 483-484, summarizing Silvas, Macrina the Younger, pp. 55-57; Basil, Letter 207.2, NPNF2 vol. 8. ↩
30. Basil, Letter 223.3; Villa Betancourt, p. 477 n. 26, who attributes Gregory's silence about Eustathius to the later doctrinal break. ↩
31. Orthodox Church in America, "Venerable Macrina, sister of Saint Basil the Great," Lives of the Saints, July 19. ↩
32. Life, PG 46:996C-998D. ↩
33. Life, PG 46:998D-1000B. ↩
34. Lowther Clarke, introduction, p. 12. ↩
35. Wilson-Kastner, "Macrina: Virgin and Teacher," 105. ↩
36. Georgia Frank, "Macrina's Scar: Homeric Allusion and Heroic Identity in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina," Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 4 (2000): 511-530, abstract. ↩
37. Krueger, "Writing and the Liturgy of Memory," abstract. ↩
38. OCA, "Venerable Macrina," July 19. ↩
39. Second Council of Nicaea (787), Decree, trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14. ↩
40. On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF2 vol. 5 (the discussion of purifying fire and of evil's final annihilation). ↩
41. Elizabeth A. Clark, "The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the 'Linguistic Turn,'" Church History 67, no. 1 (1998): 1-31, as summarized by Andrea Sterk in her introduction to the Church History virtual issue "Asceticism, Monasticism and Gender in Early Christianity" (Cambridge University Press, 2021). ↩
42. Morwenna Ludlow, "Macrina—in Life and in Letters," in her Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 202-219, abstract. ↩
43. Life, PG 46:960B. ↩
44. Church of England, Articles of Religion (1571), Article XXII, "Of Purgatory." ↩
45. Lowther Clarke, introduction, p. 10: "In 381 he was present at the Council of Constantinople." ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Basil of Caesarea. Letters 30, 204, 207, 210 and 223. Translated by Blomfield Jackson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 8. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Epigrams, in The Greek Anthology, vol. 2, book 8. Translated by W. R. Paton. Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917.
• Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of St. Macrina. Translated by W. K. Lowther Clarke. London: SPCK, 1916. Transcribed by Roger Pearse at tertullian.org.
• Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection. Translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 5. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• Grégoire de Nysse. Vie de sainte Macrine. Introduction, critical text, translation and notes by Pierre Maraval. Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1971.
• Second Council of Nicaea. Decree. Translated by Henry Percival. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 14. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1900. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection. Translated by Catharine P. Roth. Popular Patristics Series 12. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993.
• Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Saint Macrina. Translated by Kevin Corrigan. Saskatoon: Peregrina, 1987.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Venerable Macrina, sister of Saint Basil the Great." Lives of the Saints, July 19. oca.org. Also "Symbol of Faith" (the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed), oca.org.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Elm, Susanna. 'Virgins of God': The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Reviewed by Claudia Rapp, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 1995.04.07.
• Frank, Georgia. "Macrina's Scar: Homeric Allusion and Heroic Identity in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina." Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 4 (2000): 511-530. doi:10.1353/earl.2000.0063.
• Krueger, Derek. "Writing and the Liturgy of Memory in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina." Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 4 (2000): 483-510. doi:10.1353/earl.2000.0069.
• Rousseau, Philip. "The Pious Household and the Virgin Chorus: Reflections on Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina." Journal of Early Christian Studies 13, no. 2 (2005): 165-186. doi:10.1353/earl.2005.0027.
• Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. ISBN 978-2-503-52390-3.
• Villa Betancourt, Ana Cristina. "«El conocimiento de Dios que de niño recibí de mi bienaventurada madre y de mi abuela Macrina»: Basilio de Cesarea y las mujeres." Estudios Eclesiásticos 98, no. 386 (2023): 469-504. doi:10.14422/ee.v98.i386.y2023.002.
• Wilson-Kastner, Patricia. "Macrina: Virgin and Teacher." Andrews University Seminary Studies 17, no. 1 (1979): 105-117.

Sources from the traditions discussed (feminist-historical and Protestant)

• Clark, Elizabeth A. "The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the 'Linguistic Turn.'" Church History 67, no. 1 (1998): 1-31. doi:10.2307/3170769. Read via Andrea Sterk's introduction to the Church History virtual issue "Asceticism, Monasticism and Gender in Early Christianity" (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
• Ludlow, Morwenna. "Macrina—in Life and in Letters." In Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern, 202-219. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199280766.003.0014.
• Church of England. Articles of Religion (the Thirty-Nine Articles), 1571. Article XXII. churchofengland.org.