Macrina the Younger

Macrina the Younger was the eldest of ten children of a wealthy Cappadocian Christian family, elder sister of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, two of the three Cappadocian Fathers. After her betrothed died before their marriage, she refused to marry and instead turned the family estate at Annisa, in Pontus, into an ascetic community she founded together with her mother Emmelia, living a life of communal prayer, simplicity and shared work with the household's women, including former servants brought in as equals. Gregory of Nyssa, writing after her death, credited her with shaping both his own and Basil's turn toward ascetic discipline and theological life, and cast her as the central voice of his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, framed as a conversation held at her deathbed in which she answers questions about grief, the soul and the resurrection of the body.