CH-525
Final Paper

St. Macrina: The Heart of the Cappadocians

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Week 7

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Nov 14 - Dec 17, 22
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3rd Century Monastery
Due December 13, 2022

5 December 2022

When her noble character had been tested by these different accessions of trouble, in every respect the metal of her soul was proved to be unadulterated and undefiled.

The heart of the Christian faith is the pursuit of knowing our Creator God and becoming transformed by His indwelling presence. When the small persecuted Christian sect became Religio licita after the Edict of Milan, the church needed to clearly articulate its understanding of God to mitigate ecclesiastical disputes as the gospel advanced quickly throughout the Empire. The reversal happened so quickly that some bishops who went to the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) still carried wounds from their tortures. Ecumenical councils were called to unify how Christians should speak about the Trinity. While the bishops and church leaders focused on how Christians should think about God correctly, one woman consecrated herself to embody life in full imitation and expression of the Lord Jesus. The faithful spirit of martyrdom exemplified the faithful found new life in ascetic living and self-abnegation. St. Macrina’s fervent devotion to her Lord, shown through her life, pierced the hearts and changed the course of those who would shape Christianity.

Love in Deed and Truth

My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth. —1 John 3:18

Macrina did not write theological treaties or deliver powerful sermons during her lifetime nor lollygag in endless theological debates. She crossed the theoretical boundary into the practical realm of ordinary lives. Gregory remarks in his sister’s hagiography that although Macrina was brilliant, she did not engage in the usual “worldly method of education” but consecrated herself to studying the Scriptures. To Macrina, the gospel was not some abstract philosophical endeavor wanting scholarly pursuit but a transformative power that shaped the hearts and moved the souls toward the Lord Jesus. Macrina personified the gospel in its most practical and radical form when she relinquished her wealth and status and “share the life of the maids, treating all her slave girls and menials as if they were sisters and belonged to the same rank as herself.” Macrina’s beauty surpassed painters’ illustrations, but she remained a virgin and committed to an ascetic life to serve the destitute in her community, demonstrating that “the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.”

St. Basil the Great

Macrina influenced and changed the course of one of the greatest defenders of the Nicene Creed against Arianism — Basil the Great. Gregory recorded Macrina admonishing Basil after his accomplishment as a rhetorician and became “puffed up beyond measure with the pride of oratory.” Macrina counseled her younger brother to renounce worldly possessions to pursue a virtuous life. Basil embraced his sister’s encouragement and, together with Pachomius, became known as the father of cenobitic monasticism in Eastern Christianity. Today all Eastern Orthodox monks are Basilian monks, bearing his name. Basil’s great achievement through the creation of monastic communities, biographer James Keifer reminds us that Basil’s community was “preceded and inspired by a community of nuns organized by his sister, Macrina.”

Basil’s contributions to the theological work on the nature of God were so consequential that he was given the honorific title Doctor of the Church. His magnum opus was On the Holy Spirit, where he proved the divinity and consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. However, Basil’s great legacy was the development of Christian monasticism and his influence on Benedict of Nursia. He wrote with utmost conviction on our duty to remember the poor:

The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the money in your vaults is for the needy. All of these you might help and do not—to all these you are doing wrong.

Basil’s statement carries traces of Macrina’s self-denying ethos. His life and legacy reflected the monastic impulse that was glowing in Macrina when he founded Basiliad, a city with “institutions to aid the poor, the ill, and travelers.” Basil’s significant contribution to the theological understanding of the Trinity was enormous. However, his conviction to serve the poor demonstrated the gospel’s transformative power and challenged the church to deny itself in its portrayal of Jesus’ love for the outcasts and ostracized.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa fulfilled the prophetic praise of his brother when St. Basil the Great asserted that Gregory would confer his distinguished name upon that obscured place on the West of Cappadocia, Nyssa. French historian Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont’s panegyric description of Gregory paints an intensely meek portrait of a man whose work defended the Trinitarian theology and whose life embodied the simplicity and humility of a Christian:

As much as we can judge him by his writings, he was a gentle, good, and easy-going spirit who, with a great deal of elevation and light, nevertheless had a lot of simplicity and innocence who loved peace more than action. The work of the study more than the tumult of affairs, who was without ostentation, disposed to esteem and praise others and put himself under them. However, even though he sought only peace, we have seen that his zeal for his brothers often led him to great works. God honored his simplicity by making him regarded as the master, the doctor, the peacemaker, and the arbiter of the churches.

Besides Gregory’s vast contributions to the theological understanding of the Trinity. His apophatic theology reverberated in the Eastern Orthodox Church, particularly Pseudo-Dionysius, on the incomprehensibility of God. However, it was Gregory’s opposition to the institution of slavery that bore the hallmark of Macrina’s influence; he wrote admirably about how Macrina condescended to become one of the slave girls and treated them as sisters rather than underlings.

Macrina was the family’s source of comfort and encouragement and Gregory’s spiritual motivation and teacher. When Gregory abandoned his office as a reader in the Church and returned to the secular profession as a rhetorician, Macrina convinced him to return to the ministry:

His final recovery and conversion to the Faith, of which he was always after so strenuous an asserter, was due to her who, all things considered, was the master spirit of the family. By the powerful persuasions of his sister Macrina, at length, after much struggle, he altered entirely his way of life, severed himself from all secular occupations, and retired to his brother’s monastery in the solitudes of Pontus.

Gregory wrote about this sister with great respect and tenderness, “she discussed the future life, as if inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that it almost seemed as if my soul were lifted by the help of her words away from mortal nature and placed within the heavenly sanctuary.” Gregory admired his sister’s principle of practical love and the highest expression of Christian virtue in her frail mortality.

Ascetical Theology

You have in front of you all her treasure. There is the cloak, there is the head-covering, there the well-worn shoes on the feet. This is all her wealth, these are her riches. Nothing is stored away in secret places beyond what you see, or put away safely in boxes or bedrooms. She knew of one store-house alone for her wealth, the treasure in heaven. There she had stored her all, nothing was left on earth.

Surrounding Macrina’s lifeless body, St. Gregory listened to Lampadia, in tears, recount her friend’s renunciant existence. In her death, Macrina’s life still radiated in those she touched; the multitude that came to pay their respect and mourned the loss of their leader testified to the impact she had on her community. Macrina’s life attested to the transcendency of Christ’s character and love shown intensely through her brief yet remarkable existence.

The self-abnegating instinct ran deep under Macrina’s leadership as the eldest in the family laid the foundation for ascetic theology demonstrated in the bishopric’s offices her brothers held. After her father died in 349, Macrina convinced her mother to abandon the life of luxury and its anxieties and turn their property into a monastery. Gregory wrote about his sister’s determination to “cast away all material superfluities like dust from their bodies” until nothing was left except for unceasing prayers and endless hymnody echoed the Lord’s warning regarding the deceitfulness of riches choking the life out of the plant. The family’s property in Annesi became a sanctuary for solitude and divine contemplations and a refuge for the destitute and outcasts. Not only was Macrina a teacher and instructor of the wise, but she was also a mother and nurse to the castaways by the roadside during the famine.

Macrina modeled her ascetic life and ministry according to Christ’s simplicity and poverty which transformed her community and inspired generations. The monastery’s austere lifestyles prepared them for the severe famine that struck Cappadocia in 368 AD. Gregory wrote about his youngest brother’s benevolence during the famine: “Peter’s kindness supplied such an abundance of food that the desert seemed a city by reason of the number of visitors.” Gregory not only proved that Peter’s education under Macrina was not inferior to Basil’s world-class secular education but affirmed that Macrina’s monastic pedagogy moved beyond the theoretical.

Self-Denial As the New Martyrdom

The testing of gold takes place in several furnaces.

In the early church, martyrdom was the ultimate imitation of Christ. The martyrdom of saints from the late 1st century to the early 3rd centuries strengthened the faithful and demonstrated their commitment to Christianity in its infancy years. After Constantine, Christianity was no longer persecuted as before; the quest for martyrdom remained essential to many Christians. The mark of devotion to Christ for this new age took the form of self-denial in asceticism. Macrina’s pursuit of finding contentment in Christ was portrayed brilliantly through the denial of self in moments of anguish throughout her life and culminating at her death.

The crucibles that tested Macrina’s peace came in the form of deaths. When her fiancé died, she denied herself marriage as an act of devotion to her mother. Shortly after her father died, she deprived herself of consolation by comforting her grieving mother. When her younger brother Naucratius died, her mother was so devastated that she collapsed. Again, Macrina rejected her pain as a testimony of Christ’s strength in the consolation of mother’s “weakness”:

Facing the disaster in a rational spirit, she both preserved herself from collapse, and becoming the prop of her mother’s weakness, raised her up from the abyss of grief, and by her own steadfastness and imperturbability taught her mother’s soul to be brave.

Gregory described Macrina’s refinement as happening in “several furnaces.” Her next crucibles were her mother’s and Basil’s deaths. The stings of death severely tested the “metal of her soul,” but “she remained, like an invincible athlete in no wise broken by the assault of troubles.”

The final furnace that tested Macrina’s soul was when death looked at her. The juxtaposition between Macrina’s calmness and Gregory’s troubled afflictions proved Macrina’s pure soul. The eloquence of Gregory’s depiction of Macrina’s death immortalized her conflict with commiseration that led to her triumph over the agony of death:

Therefore I think she revealed to the bystanders that divine and pure love of the invisible bridegroom, which she kept hidden and nourished in the secret places of the soul, and she published abroad the secret disposition of her heart—her hurrying towards Him Whom she desired, that she might speedily be with Him, loosed from the chains of the body. For in very truth her course was directed towards virtue, and nothing else could divert her attention.

The speed at which the church transitioned from a period of intense persecution to becoming the mainstream religion has caused some to reconsider the lack of cost in following Christ. Macrina the Younger carried her grandmother’s name and embodied her vehement spirit through asceticism. Both of Macrina’s grandfathers were martyred during the Diocletian’s “Great Persecution” of Christianity; under her grandmother’s tutelage, the same martyrdom impulse of her grandparents continued through Macrina’s steadfastness in self-denial and lifting others out of miseries.

Conclusion

Griefs and sorrows are intrinsic to the fallen humanity, especially during times of uncertainty and obscurity. Macrina personified the intensity of her love and devotion to Jesus amidst the heartbreaks surrounding her. She drank the cup of anguish reserved for mortals as if to preserve the full expression of her emotions only for the Lover of her soul. Macrina’s martyrdom was not in death but in overcoming the sting of death — time and again.

The Cappadocian Fathers are placed on the upper levels of the theological stratosphere for their defense and work on the Trinitarian doctrine. St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus are synonymous with Christian orthodoxy. Behind two of these Fathers, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa was a quiet but influential force that challenged them to learn and personify the teaching of the Lord by illuminating the heart of the Savior. Not a mother but a sister, a teacher, and a saint, Macrina left no writings nor possessions, yet her ascetic life reverberates throughout the history of Christianity; from her charity to theological anthropology, she helped shape the Christian tradition through her love and devotion to Jesus.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Final Undergrad • Six 1-Page Essay Questions
Final Paper
St. Macrina: The Heart of the Cappadocians
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