Ten children in one house, taught by their big sister

ANNESI, Pontus, 379 AD — Ten children were born to one couple in Cappadocia — five boys and five girls. One of the boys died as a baby, so nine grew up together. The eldest of the nine was their sister, Saint Macrina.

Three of her brothers ended up bishops, of Caesarea, Nyssa and Sebasteia. They were Saint Basil the Great and his younger brother Saint Gregory. The third was Peter, the youngest of the ten.

And St. Macrina talked St. Basil out of the career he had spent years training for.

St. Macrina was named after her grandmother. The older Macrina had lived through a persecution. She and her husband hid in the mountains of Pontus for about seven years. She brought St. Basil up in a village near Neocaesarea when he was a boy.

Years later, other churchmen said he was teaching the wrong things about God. St. Basil wrote back: “The teaching about God which I had received as a boy from my blessed mother and my grandmother Macrina, I have ever held with increased conviction.”

Their father, Saint Basil the Elder, was a well-known teacher of public speaking. He died while his son St. Basil was still young. The family then moved onto the older Macrina’s estate at Annesi, on the river Iris.

The two eldest children were not taught the same way. St. Basil was sent away to school at Caesarea. Then he went to Constantinople, and then all the way to Athens. St. Macrina stayed at home, where their mother, Emmelia, taught her.

Most children learned out of the poets and the playwrights. Emmelia thought those stories were wrong for a child, so her daughter learned out of the Bible instead. St. Macrina knew every part of the Psalms by heart, and said them at set times all day.

The brother who came home pleased with himself

St. Basil came home to Caesarea from Athens at about twenty-six. St. Gregory of Nyssa, the third of the brothers, wrote later that St. Basil arrived “puffed up beyond measure with the pride of oratory.”

By then St. Macrina had started a community of women on the family estate. She pulled her brother toward the same life, and fast. St. Basil gave up the fame he had trained for and went to work with his hands.

Peter was born just before their father died. St. Macrina took him from the nurse soon after and brought him up. St. Gregory wrote that his sister had been “all things to the lad — father, teacher, tutor, mother, giver of all good advice.” Peter grew up to run the men’s side of the community at Annesi. St. Basil was bishop of Caesarea by then, and he made Peter a priest. Peter became a bishop too.

The last visit

St. Basil died at Caesarea on January 1 this year, not yet fifty. St. Gregory of Nyssa was a bishop himself by then, and he took the death hard. Nine months later he crossed Asia Minor to see their sister. He wanted someone who would cry over St. Basil with him.

At Annesi he found St. Macrina lying on the floor, not in a bed. She was on a sack spread over a board, with a second board propped up for a pillow. She was too weak to stand, so she raised herself on one elbow to greet him.

St. Macrina let her brother grieve for a little while, and then she stopped him on purpose. She quoted St. Paul’s words about not grieving over the dead the way people do who have no hope.

Later St. Gregory told her about his own troubles, and St. Macrina turned the talk round onto him. “But you are renowned in cities and peoples and nations,” she said. His success came from their parents’ prayers, she told him, and not from anything he had done himself. They talked again the next day, until the fever took her voice, and she died that evening.

Afterwards St. Gregory wrote down all they had said and made a book of it. In the whole book he never once uses her name. He calls her “the Teacher.”