Venerable Macrina the Younger

Venerable Macrina was born around 327 in Caesarea of Cappadocia, the eldest of ten children of Basil the Elder and Righteous Emilia; she was named after her paternal grandmother, Righteous Macrina the Elder. From her youth she was noted for deep piety and was betrothed, but her fiancé died before the wedding; she refused a new marriage, considering herself bound to him forever, and devoted herself to virginity and service to God.

After her father's death she became the effective head of the family, helping her mother raise her younger brothers — among them the future Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, as well as St. Peter of Sebaste. She had a decisive spiritual influence on Basil's formation as a monk and ascetic. Together with her mother she founded a women's monastic community on the bank of the Iris River in Pontus (the Annisa estate), where she led a strict ascetic life, sharing labor and prayer with the community's sisters on equal terms with the servants, whose status she equalized.

She reposed on July 19, 379, in the arms of her brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, who had come to her specially before her death. Gregory of Nyssa dedicated two works to his sister — the Life "On the Life of St. Macrina" and the dialogue "On the Soul and the Resurrection" ("Macriniana"), written in the form of her deathbed conversation with her brother — the most important sources of information about her life.

Her feast is kept on July 19/August 1.

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: the New Style conversion has been corrected from "August 2" to the correct August 1 (a 13-day offset from July 19 gives August 1, not August 2). The category has also been refined from righteous to venerable, since the saint was a monastic founder of a community, as the stub's own text reflected ("Venerable"), even though the structured category field erroneously said "righteous."