Life of Macrina

Gregory of Nyssa wrote the Life as a letter to a friend with whom he had talked about her at Antioch. He tells of Macrina’s upbringing, the death of the man to whom she was betrothed and her decision not to marry, her influence on her brother Basil of Caesarea when he came home from his studies, the community she formed with her mother and their former servants on the family estate in Pontus, and at length his own last visit to her and her death.

Gregory writes as a brother and an eyewitness of the last days, and from family memory for the earlier ones. The Life is a portrait of an ideal, the “philosophic” life of prayer, work and poverty, and it shapes its subject to that ideal. It gives two useful dates in relative form: Basil died eight years after he became bishop, and Gregory’s last visit to Macrina followed a synod at Antioch that met about nine months after Basil’s death.