The OCN is happy to offer, thanks to our friends at Conciliar Press, an article about St. Macrina the Elder written by Bev Cooke for AGAIN Magazine . Be sure to listen to our interview with Bev this week on Come Receive the Light as she discusses her book, Keeper of the Light: St. Macrina the Elder, Grandmother of Saints, and informs us about St. Macrina's influence on Ss. Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Macrina the Younger.

St. Macrina the Elder: Bridge of Theology

She’s called “Confessor of the Faith.” Her family contains so many saints she’s known as the mother and grandmother of saints. She should be given another title—Bridge of Theology—for her invisible contributions to the understanding of our faith and its expression in the world.

Born about AD 270, St. Macrina the Elder grew up a pagan. Most of the city she lived in was pagan, until St. Gregory Thaumaturgis arrived.

The Heritage of St. Gregory

St. Gregory and his brother, both pagans and thirsty for learning, traveled to Alexandria as young men to study philosophy. It was here that some of the most influential metaphysical work was being conducted. The two men arrived at the peak of the “flowering of a tradition that had flourished at Alexandria” since the first century of Christian thought—the melding of early Christian thought and pagan philosophy that has given rise to our modern understanding of Christian faith and theology.

Once there, they fell under the influence of a man who might be described as one of the most difficult theologians the Church has ever dealt with. By turns strikingly orthodox and breathtakingly heretical, Origen was undoubtedly a brilliant man, and some of his work has been widely influential.

Certainly he made a lasting impression on St. Gregory and his brother. For five years, they studied and worked under Origen, examining the seeds of truth found in the pagan philosophers before moving on to the fullness of philosophy that is the Christian faith. St. Gregory gained a solid base in both Christian thought and theology and Greek pagan philosophy and rhetoric. More importantly, his studies, and his exposure to Origen, converted him to the faith.

Once ordained priest, St. Gregory traveled to the city of Neocaesarea, in the region of Pontus. Set in rolling, forested mountains near fast-flowing rivers, Pontus was located south of the Black Sea in what are now the regions of Amayra and Tokat in Turkey.

St. Gregory, zealous and, as it turned out, influential, arrived in a place where “no more than seventeen were present who committed themselves to the faith,” in both the city and the surrounding countryside. When he died, it’s said that there were just seventeen pagans left in the area.

One of the pagans he encountered in his work was a young woman named Macrina. She and her husband so preferred the company of Christians and St. Gregory’s friendship to the delights and conversation of her pagan family and friends that they ended up "estranged from the properties of their parents because of their faith."
Over the years of their association, St. Gregory the Wonderworker adopted Macrina as his spiritual daughter. St. Macrina so loved and revered him that she kept his relics her entire life, finally settling them in a chapel at her estates at Annesi, on the river Iris. She cherished the wisdom he passed on to her.

Confessor of the Faith

St. Macrina lived almost half her life under what could be considered some of the worst persecutions of the early Christian era. Diocletian and Maximian were determined to wipe out every evidence of Christianity and Christians, if they had to kill every person in the empire to do it. St. Gregory Nazianzen describes the last persecution under Maximian as "the most frightful and severe of all."

Neither the name of St. Macrina’s husband nor his date of death is known. Nor do we know how much of her suffering her two children, St. Basil (the Elder) and Gregory, shared.

Spared the fate of the martyrs, St. Macrina nevertheless suffered for her beliefs. She and her husband escaped to the forests surrounding their city and hid for seven years.

In spite of being disowned by her family, St. Macrina was a wealthy patrician. Rich Romans disdained manual labor and counted it a point of pride to have never baked, woven, or farmed. It’s likely that the hardest physical labor she’d undertaken before her exile was giving birth.

Certainly neither she nor her husband knew anything of hunting or fishing, carpentry, or skinning and tanning hides to make shelters, clothing, and shoes. They’d have been lost in the woods, a walking storehouse for the human and animal predators that lurked in the copses and thickets of the mountainous region.

That she survived is due solely to God’s miraculous intervention. At his funeral oration for his close friend, St. Basil the Great (St. Macrina’s grandson), St. Gregory Nazianzus described God’s provision for St. Macrina:

. . . their quarry lay before them, with food come of its own accord, a complete banquet prepared without effort, stags appearing all at once from some place in the hills. How splendid they were! how fat! how ready for the slaughter! It might almost be imagined that they were annoyed at not having been summoned earlier. Some of them made signs to draw others after them, the rest followed their lead. Who pursued and drove them? No one. What riders? What kind of dogs, what barking, or cry, or young men who had occupied the exits according to the rules of the chase? They were the prisoners of prayer and righteous petition. Who has known such a hunt among men of this, or any day?

Once the persecution had died down, Macrina and her family returned to Neocaesarea. A short time later, the Roman authorities stripped them of everything they owned and turned them out into the streets. With nothing more than the clothes on her back to call her own, St. Macrina was forced to rely on the generosity and mercy of God in order to survive. Begging in the streets, telling stories for the few paltry coins it brought, and accepting the cast-off food and clothing of her former equals, she endured their pity, and the insults and mockery of the pagans in her town. She must have learned valuable lessons in humility.

If St. Macrina’s husband did die early, then she raised her two children, Gregory and St. Basil (the Elder), as a single parent. In spite of the obstacles, she succeeded in passing on her faith and tradition to them.

Gregory disappears very early in the histories—in fact all we have left of him is his name, and the fact that he was a bishop of some renown in Cappadocia.
St. Basil the Elder, a lawyer and teacher of rhetoric, married St. Emmelia, a beautiful and devout Christian. Their household, including Macrina, “was notable for many reasons, especially for generosity to the poor, for hospitality, for purity of soul as the result of self-discipline, for the dedication to God of a portion of their property,” throughout Pontus and Cappadocia.

St. Basil and St. Emmelia’s children, St. Macrina’s grandchildren, nine of whom survived to adulthood, were raised in an intensely Christian atmosphere, taught to read from the Psalms and thoroughly immersed in a Christian manner of living.

St. Macrina the Elder taught her grandchildren to read from the Bible, trained them in piety and practical Christian values, and told them stories of her spiritual father, St. Gregory Thaumaturgis (the Wonderworker).

St. Gregory of Nyssa, one of these grandchildren, recorded a creed given to the Wonderworker in a vision of St. John the Theologian and the Theotokos (if true, which is disputed by St. Basil the Great, it is very likely the first-ever vision of the Theotokos in Christian history). Even if the tale wasn’t true, it indicates that Macrina passed on her spiritual father’s understanding of our faith and his theological beliefs, forming a bedrock upon which their later educations were based, as St. Basil himself confirms:

What clearer proof of our faith could there be than that we were brought up by our grandmother, a blessed woman, who came from among you? I have reference to the illustrious Macrina, by whom we were taught the words of the most blessed Gregory, which, having been preserved until her time by uninterrupted tradition, she also guarded, and she formed and molded me, still a child, to the doctrines of piety.

Grandmother of Saints

The four eldest grandchildren held so strongly to the faith their grandmother taught that we recognize them today as saints: St. Macrina the Younger, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian (or St. Gregory of Nyssa), and St. Naucratius.

St. Macrina’s firstborn grandchild was marked for a devout life while still sheltered beneath her mother’s heart. St. Emmelia, in labor with her firstborn, fell into a deep sleep. She dreamed she was walking along a street, carrying her child in her arms, when she met an angel, who called the child “Thekla” after Saint Paul’s faithful friend. After repeating the name three times, the angel disappeared. St. Emmelia woke, and delivered with remarkable ease the daughter they baptized Thekla. Still, her family and friends knew her as Macrina after her grandmother.

Young Macrina’s education was primarily supervised by her mother, although her grandmother undoubtedly had an influence on her. She swore herself to virginity after the death of her fiancé when she was twelve, claiming that the betrothal was as serious as the marriage, and since they were married in heaven, she would wait to be reunited with her chosen husband there.

The young woman helped her mother and grandmother in the education of the younger children, including Basil and Gregory. Her zeal to submit to God grew as she did, and eventually she opened a monastery at the family estate at Annesi, several years before Basil became interested in monasticism. Her life was so exemplary and she had such an influence on her brother Gregory that he wrote her biography soon after she died.

Her younger brother St. Naucratius would have been an equally bright light in the history of the Church. Determined to be a monk and hermit from his earliest days, he adopted a small community of elderly and infirm men. Selfless to the point of danger, he died in an accident in his early twenties, while hunting for his charges’ food.

The two eldest sons comprise two-thirds of the trio we know today as the Cappadocian Fathers. St. Basil, older of the two, was first educated at home, in rhetoric by his father and in the Christian faith by his mother and grandmother, as he noted when accused of heresy: “But the concept of God which in childhood I received from my blessed mother and from grandmother Macrina . . . I have held within me, for, on arriving at full reason I did not exchange one teaching for another, but confirmed those principles which they had handed over to me.”

He finished his education in Athens, where he was exposed to the best of the pagan philosophers and the cream of the rhetoricians. He scandalized his family with his secular ways, and his swelled head caused no end of trouble. “Monstrously conceited . . . contemptuous of every high reputation and exalted beyond the leading lights of the province by his self-importance” is how his younger brother, St. Gregory, described him.

Basil’s attitudes and insufferable conceit brought the wrath of his older sister down on him when, after besting the top rhetoricians Caesarea had to offer, he gloated over his opponents’ defeat and mocked their paltry talents.

St. Macrina the Younger, furious at him, gave him such a tongue-lashing he quit the law and rededicated himself to the faith and the Church. His interest in monasticism seems to have been born shortly after this experience. He traveled to Egypt and spoke with and observed the desert fathers. On his return home, St. Basil opened a monastery across the river from his sister’s and wrote a Longer and Shorter Rule for Monastics, which is still in use today.

He himself became a priest, was elevated to the bishopric, and defended orthodox Christianity against heresies, corruption, and calumny with vigor and passion, excepting no one, including his own family, from his ire.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, also educated at home, did not travel to Athens. His family, concerned for his health, agreed it would be safer for him to stay in Caesarea. Instead, he continued his education under his mother, grandmother, and sister, and, when St. Basil returned from Athens, his elder brother.

More mystical and contemplative than St. Basil, St. Gregory functioned contentedly as a priest until he was unwillingly elevated to the See of Nyssa by his brother. As he had no administrative talent at all, St. Gregory’s career as bishop was less than successful.

St. Gregory developed and extended Origen’s ideas on the otherness of God, and our ability to adequately explore His nature. He stood for the faith against the Arian heresy, most notably at the Council of Constantinople in 381, where his, St. Basil’s, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus’ contributions would make a lasting impact on the Christian understanding of the Trinity.

It is in large part due to these men that the final version of the creed was accepted at the Council in 381.

Bridge of Theology

St. Macrina the Elder died in approximately 340, when her eldest grandchild was only twelve. She never lived to see her grandchildren’s successes, or their spirited defense of our faith.

She had no new insights into our understanding of the faith. She left no letters, homilies, or books. But by simply living what she believed, by being a faithful mother and grandmother, by teaching her children and grandchildren by word and example, by telling her children stories of her spiritual father, and through her steadfast faith, St. Macrina the Elder became a bridge of theology, passing on the Tradition entrusted to her and enabling two brilliant men to take the next steps in defining the Faith.

This article originally appeared in AGAIN Magazine Vol. 28 No.3, Fall 2006. It is reproduced here courtesy of www.conciliarpress.com .