Macrina the younger (340–379) was a monastic, theologian, and teacher. She is described as having lived a “philosophical life” and she founded one of the earliest Christian monastic communities in the Cappadocian countryside, on the crossroad of Annisa. Macrina left no writings; we know of her through the works of her brother, Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory used the Life of Macrina not only to preserve the memory of his renowned sister, but also as a template in which to flesh out a practical theology of Christian holiness and union with God that supplements his more theoretical works.

Gregory relates that when Macrina’s prospective fiancé died, she refused to marry anyone else because of her conviction that there is but one marriage and because of her “hope in the resurrection.” This hope was the basis of her monastic, that is, her philosophical, life. Although he says that she, like other philosophers, chose to live “on her own”, Gregory immediately describes how Macrina lived as a student and servant to her mother, Emilia. He goes on to show Macrina taking a leadership role when she persuades her mother to join her by living on the same level as their servants. In setting out Macrina’s relationship with her brother, Peter, Gregory also shows the mutuality of Christian community. He not only describes Macrina as being everything to Peter – father, mother, and teacher of all good things – but Peter as being the person from whom Macrina learned the most.

Gregory credits Macrina with being the spiritual and theological intelligence behind her brothers’ notable leadership in the church. She is shown challenging them, telling Gregory that his fame was not due to his own merit, but to the prayers of his parents, and taking Basil in hand when he returned from Athens “monstrously conceited about his skill in rhetoric.” Notably, although Gregory and Basil, as well as Peter, became bishops, in the Life, it is Macrina who is portrayed saying a priestly, and thoroughly liturgical, prayer.

Gregory visited Macrina as she lay dying. It is only at this point in the story that he unveils how the hope of the resurrection with which Macrina began her philosophical life after the death of her fiancé was the inspiration for her decisions to free slaves and the reason why she could cross over otherwise firmly established gender divisions. He shows, too, that her belief in one marriage and her hope of union with her fiancé was, in fact, ultimately a striving towards the true bridegroom, Jesus Christ. In both his Life of Macrina and in his later treatise On the Soul and Resurrection, Gregory presents Macrina admiringly as a Christian Socrates, delivering eloquent deathbed prayers and teachings about the resurrection. This presentation of Macrina by Gregory serves as one sort of “Rule”. Basil also wrote a formal monastic rule for community life, ensuring that Macrina’s ideas for Christian community would have lasting authority through the centuries.