The right hand of Saint Macrina the Younger is kept in the treasury of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Showing posts with label St. Macrina the Younger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St. Macrina the Younger. Show all posts
July 19, 2022
July 19, 2017
Saint Macrina the Younger Resource Page
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| St. Macrina the Younger (Feast Day - July 19) |
Verses
Little by little Macrina distanced herself,
From the world and approached the Lord.
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Sisterly-minded to your brethren, O Macrina,
You dwell with them on high fraternally also.
On the nineteenth Angels took Macrina hence.
Family
Feast of the Holy Family of Saint Basil the Great (2nd Sunday of January)
Saints Emmelia, Nonna and Anthousa - Mothers of the Three Hierarchs (Sunday After Feb. 2nd)
The Relics of Saint Macrina the Younger (photos)
1. Portion of the foot is at the Athonite Monastery of Iveron.
The Life of Saint Macrina (St. Gregory of Nyssa)
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| St. Macrina the Younger (Feast Day - July 19) |
The Life of Saint Macrina, written sometime between A.D. 380 and 383 by her younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, is the story of a remarkable woman and a remarkable family. Gregory wrote two works about Macrina (together referred to as Ta Makrinia, "The Macrina Works"), the Life and a Dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection. The two works are independent, but they refer to one another and should be read together, since the Dialogue is in fact the long conversation Macrina had with Gregory upon his arrival at the monastery. Behind the personal tribute in these works there lies a deeper typology at work: Macrina is the virgin-philosopher par excellence, and although Gregory wants us to see the type, or deeper imprint of tradition in her, the type which Macrina embodies is nonetheless unique. In the Life Macrina is presented as a second Thekla, the legendary virgin who, in the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thekla, is the faithful disciple to whom St. Paul entrusts the continuation of his apostolic ministry. This traditional continuity Gregory intimates not only in the dream which his mother Emmelia has when she is in labour with Macrina, but in his insistence that Macrina is a teacher, a leader and a mistress of Scripture. Her incomparably beautiful deathbed prayer bears witness to the fact that Holy Scripture permeated her every word. In the Dialogue (so reminiscent of Socrates' death bed scene and his arguments for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo), Macrina is presented as the Christian Socrates, equal to, or even surpassing, that profound intelligence. The Socratic typology also enters into the Life, both in the "ideal of philosophy" which is central to Macrina's life and also in the dramatic fibre of the whole work, centred upon the deathbed of a mighty religious and intellectual leader. The idea of putting the two figures, Thekla and Socrates, together might have been suggested to Gregory by a work written in the second half of the third century, the Symposium of Methodius of Olympus (after Plato's famous Socratic dialogue of the same name) in which a group of ten women, whose intellectual leader is Thekla, discuss the theme of virginity at a banquet, instead of love (eros) as in Plato's Symposium. In the Life and the Dialogue, however, Gregory weaves these two themes together in such a natural way within the figure of Macrina that there is nothing procrustean or out of place about the union. Furthermore, the ideal of philosophy itself is so central to Macrina's monastic life that we undoubtedly hear the original phrases when the soldier tells of St. Peter's pressing invitation to take part in "the philosophic table".
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