Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

What the implications might be for infants tossed out with the trash was best demonstrated not by Basil, nor by Gregory, but by their sister. Macrina, the eldest of nine siblings, was in many ways the most influential of them all. She it was who had persuaded her brother to abandon the law and devote himself to Christ; similarly, she could be hailed by Gregory as the most brilliant of his instructors. Erudite, charismatic and formidably ascetic, she devoted herself to a renunciation of the world’s pleasures so absolute as to fill her contemporaries with awe; and yet she did not abandon the world altogether. When famine held Cappadocia in its grip, and ‘flesh clung to the bones of the poor like cobwebs’,11 then Macrina would make a tour of the refuse tips. Those infant girls she rescued she would take home, and raise as her own. Whether it was Macrina who had taught Gregory, or Gregory Macrina, both believed that within even the most defenceless newborn child there might be glimpsed a touch of the divine. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Cappadocia and its neighbouring regions, where – even by the standards of other lands – the abandonment of infants was a particular custom, should also have been where the first visions of Christ’s mother had lately begun to be reported. Mary, the virgin Theotokos, ‘the bearer of God’, had herself known what it was to have a baby when poor, and homeless, and afraid. So it was recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.