Basil of Caesarea (Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

Stephen M. Hildebrand, Boersma, Hans, Levering, Matthew, Hans Boersma, Matthew Levering

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780801049071
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441245298
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea was an erudite Scripture commentator, an architect of Trinitarian theology, a founder of monasticism, and a metropolitan bishop. This introduction to Basil's thought surveys his theological, spiritual, and monastic writings, showing the importance of his work for contemporary theology and spirituality. It brings together various aspects of Basil's thought into a single whole and explores his uniqueness and creativity as a theologian. The volume engages specialized scholarship on Basil but makes his thought accessible to a wider audience. It is the third book in a series on the church fathers edited by Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering.

1
Awakenings

Living the Gospel at Home and in the Church

In the fourth century there was nothing perfunctory about baptism. There is evidence that the practice of infant baptism was around at least a century earlier, but by St. Basil’s time it had not yet achieved the status of a widely used custom. Christianity, moreover, even after the conversion of Constantine and his subsequent toleration of his new religion, had not yet succeeded in creating a culture whose first reflex was to baptize its newest members. Baptism, then, was largely the domain of adults, especially those in danger of death. There developed a robust tradition of postponing the cleansing bath.

From one point of view, the postponing of baptism casts the fourth and fifth centuries in a negative light, for the practice came along with a sense of the inevitability of serious sin and a corresponding complacency. The most famous example of this, of course, we find in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine explains why his mother had not had him baptized as a child. He had come down with a fever and himself begged for baptism, and St. Monica made the arrangements. Augustine, however, suddenly recovered, and, he relates, “my cleansing was deferred on the assumption that, if I lived, I would be sure to soil myself, and after that solemn washing the guilt would be greater and more dangerous if I then defiled myself with sins” (Conf. 1.11.17; 13–14).

Here, of course, Augustine refers to the severe penitential practice of the early church that only strengthened and encouraged the postponement of baptism. One had only two opportunities in life for the forgiveness of serious sin, baptism (first penance) and second penance, a public ritual that began with the physical separation of the sinner from the community (sometimes separation meant standing in a different part of the church, sometimes it meant staying outside the church) and culminated, after a long and more or less difficult penance, with the public reacceptance of the sinner into the community through the laying on of hands. Moreover, when one applied a cost-benefit analysis to these two options, as Monica had done for Augustine, the first was so much more appealing than the second, whose penances could be very long, very painful, and very inconvenient.

We can also, however, view the custom of postponing baptism more positively, for it was put off not merely because second penance was so difficult and unrepeatable. Baptism was put off, too, because it meant a serious change in one’s life. It was no empty ritual, for those who received it were to be zealous for the Lord and his commandments. To be baptized, in other words, was to undertake the Christian life with earnestness and seriousness. Baptism was put off because it was meaningful.

We have no indication that Basil’s mother, St. Emmelia, was of the same mind as St. Monica when she postponed her eldest son’s baptism. Indeed, there is good reason to think that Basil was expected not to sin, as Augustine was expected to sin. While we will consider Basil’s familial background later, suffice it to say here that Basil senior was himself a committed Christian, not a pagan as Augustine’s father, Patricius, was.

Though Patricius had become a catechumen around the time of Augustine’s adolescence, he seemed then not quite ready to embrace the rigors of the Christian life, for when he saw Augustine at the baths, “showing sign of virility and the stirrings of adolescence,” he got drunk to celebrate the imminent arrival of grandchildren (Conf. 2.2.6; 26). Augustine says that his father “was drunk with the invisible wine of his perverse will directed downwards to inferior things” (Conf. 2.2.6; 27). It is impossible to imagine such a scenario unfolding with Basil and his father.

John Henry Newman offers infant baptism as an example of a development of doctrine; the turning point, in the Eastern Church, is the generation between St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom, who supports the practice of infant baptism. “It is difficult for us at this day,” Newman writes, “to enter into the assemblage of motives which led to this postponement” of baptism, but he goes on to mention a few reasons, among which two approximate the two reasons we have mentioned: “a keen sense and awe of the special privileges of baptism which could only once be received” and the “reluctance to being committed to a strict rule of life.”1 Newman’s description of Basil’s family, which we will consider again later, communicates well that they had a “keen sense and awe of the special privileges of baptism.”

St. Basil was the son of Christian confessors on both father’s and mother’s side. His grandmother Macrina, who brought him up, had for seven years lived with her husband in the woods of Pontus during the Decian persecution. His father was said to have wrought miracles; his mother, an orphan of great beauty of person, was forced from her unprotected state to abandon the hope of a single life, and was conspicuous in matrimony for her care of strangers and the poor, and for her offerings to the churches. How religiously she brought up her children is shown by the singular blessing, that four out of ten have since been canonized as Saints. St. Basil was one of these; yet the child of such parents was not baptized till he had come to man’s estate.2

Newman implies here that the piety of Christians such as Emmelia and Monica led to the near universal observance of the rite of infant baptism in later generations. There must be something more, something else, besides piety that accounts for the development of infant baptism, for there were pious Christians before Emmelia and Monica, and yet the practice of infant baptism did not take off. Nevertheless, if we grant Newman’s inference to be at least partially true, then Basil had the piety but not its consequence.

Basil senior and Emmelia postponed Basil’s baptism, then, not out of resignation to the power of passion but because baptism was a serious commitment at that time in the church, thought to be best made by adults. The circumstances of Basil’s adult baptism bear this out, for it was an important aspect of the spiritual awakening that proved so very important in his life.

Indeed, if we are to understand Basil’s theological vision of God, man, the world, the church, and the Scriptures, we must begin with this awakening that he experienced as a young man, just after he finished his schooling to become a rhetor. Basil’s awakening was a “conversion,”3 if we may speak loosely, to a life of Christian asceticism, and this Christian ascetic life is at once the context for Basil’s reading of the Scriptures and the key to his understanding of God himself and his role in the economy of salvation. A fuller explication of these claims must await an account of Basil’s awakening, which itself is but one example of a much broader movement in the fourth century that has been called “domestic asceticism” or “household asceticism.”

Domestic Asceticism

The fourth century marks the beginning of a golden age of monasticism in the church, and in the forefront of our minds here are the great founders and fathers of Christian asceticism. We think, rightly, of Antony the Great (d. 356), about whom several lives were written, though Athanasius’s became the most famous. We think of Pachomius (d. 346), whom we regard as the founder of coenobitic monasticism and who wrote the first rule to guide the common life for communities of both male and female ascetics. We think of Rufinus (d. 410) and Jerome (d. 420). The pioneering female ascetics should not be forgotten: Marcellina (d. 398), Demetrias (after 440), Melania the Elder (d. 410) and the Younger (d. 439). And, of course there are our Basil and Macrina (d. 379).

We do well to recognize, however, that this golden age is not limited to the institutionalized forms of asceticism but also embraces the less organized and more inchoate movement, from which some of the more organized forms grew.4 At least two factors spurred the growth of this movement, as they did of organized asceticism: persecution before Constantine’s conversion and the secularization of the church that followed it. While persecution must have affected individual families differently, Gregory of Nazianzus indicates how it affected Basil’s paternal grandparents.5 During the reign of Maximinus, he tells us, Basil’s ancestors steered the virtuous mean between cowardice and foolhardiness in the face of persecution (Or. 43.5–6). They fled to the mountains of Pontus as a small company without servants and stayed there for around seven years. “Their mode of life,” Gregory relates, “delicately nurtured as they were, was straitened and unusual, as may be imagined, with the discomfort of its exposure to frost and heat and rain, and the wilderness allowed no fellowship or converse with friends” (Or. 43.6; 397). Gregory describes here a sort of forced ascetic life. The wilderness forced on Basil’s grandparents not only the bodily discomfort turned asceticism brought on by the elements but also ascetic isolation, a sort of social abstinence. As a very famous and later example of the former, we can call to mind Augustine’s dear friend Alypius, who “tamed his body to a tough discipline by asceticism of extraordinary boldness: he went barefoot on the icy soil of Italy” (Conf. 9.6.14; 163). Basil’s grandparents and their companions, Gregory tells us, did not grumble as did the Israelites in the desert. Rather, in piety and faith they cast themselves upon the mercy and bounty of God, who provided them wild game for food. These animals were not hunted or chased with dogs but with prayers, at which “their quarry lay before them, with food come of its own accord, a complete banquet prepared without effort, stags appearing all at once from some place in the hills” (Or. 43.7; 397). Persecution became the occasion for prayer and ascetic struggle, and Basil’s grandparents took advantage of it. Indeed, Gregory wonders at these wild animals presenting themselves as food to Basil’s relatives, not hunted by them but “caught by [their] mere will to do so” (Or. 43.8; 397). He sees this both as a foretaste of heaven and a reward for the “struggle” (athlēsin) in which they had been engaged (Or. 43.8).

With the conversion of Constantine, mediocrity and sometimes corruption replaced persecution as a spurring influence on both formal and domestic asceticism, for Constantine’s beneficence to the church was a mixed blessing. It meant the production of Bibles, the building of churches, the restoration of property, tax breaks and some civil powers for clergy, and so on, but it also meant lukewarm half-converts from paganism and unscrupulous men seeking ecclesial office for worldly reasons.6 We will see later that one of the moving forces behind Basil’s ascetic thought was his conviction that the church of his time experienced so many difficulties and internal divisions because Christians, especially Christian leaders, had abandoned the commandments of Jesus and the order and peace that flow from keeping them (On Judg. 1–2).

Anna Silvas describes well the household asceticism that resulted from Christian families devoting themselves to living the gospel:

The values of the Graeco-Roman civic politeia gradually yielded to more explicitly Christian virtues. The cultural shift is seen especially in the fostering at home of the Scriptures and church traditions, in the practice of hospitality, personal frugality, and a Gospel charity in which the ruling idea is no longer philanthropy with a view to civic kudos, but self-effacing succour of the poor in imitation of Christ. (Silvas, 68)

We see a shift too from the ascetic practices of Basil’s grandparents to those of his parents. There was a movement from the forced and prayerful austerity of living in the woods to avoid persecution to the “community of virtue” notable “for generosity to the poor, for hospitality, for purity of soul as the result of self-discipline, [and] for the dedication to God of a portion of their property” (Or. 43.9; 398). This is not quite the shift that Silvas describes above, but, of course, the one type of shift is not exclusive of the other, and we will see in Basil himself as in his family a gradual abandonment of the trappings and values of the secular culture in which they lived as they ever more thoroughly embraced the gospel and its social implications.

Eustathius of Sebaste

Eustathius may have been a friend of Basil’s family and certainly exercised a spiritual and theological influence upon him. Born around 300, he belonged to the generation before Basil’s and, so, was a father figure to him. The son of Bishop Eulalius of Sebaste,7 Eustathius was a leader in both formal and domestic asceticism and advanced the former in the Roman provinces of Armenia, Paphlagonia, and Pontus, Sozomen tells us (Eccl. Hist. 3.14). He established “a society of monks,” Sozomen says, but he also seems to have had a deep connection with St. Basil’s family, and presumably other similar families (Eccl. Hist. 3.14; 293). We will see later Eustathius’s doctrinal elasticity as he moves from one theological and doctrinal camp to another (from the “Semi-Arian” to the Nicene to the Pneumatomachian, who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit); he also shows himself able to adjust his ascetic ideals in the face of ecclesial opposition.

This first sign of trouble was his condemnation by his own father “for dressing in a style unbecoming the sacerdotal office” (Eccl. Hist. 2.43; 72). Eustathius was a priest, but he had adopted the garb of a philosopher. His manner of dress turned out to be symbolic of more serious problems. In 340 or 341, the bishops of the area gathered in council at Gangra and condemned certain ascetic practices and Eustathius by name.8 Gangra’s prefatory letter summarizes the charges against Eustathius and his followers and then anathematizes the alleged beliefs and practices. They “find grave fault with marriage and suppose that none of those in the married state has hope with God, so that many married women, being deceived, have withdrawn from their own husbands and husbands from their own wives” (Gangra, pref.; 487; also can. 1, 9–10, 14). They will not even offer prayers in the houses of the married or take part in the Eucharist celebrated there, and they despise married clergy and their liturgies (Gangra, pref.; 488–89; also can. 4, 11, 20). Their rejection of marriage is made all the worse in the event that these ascetics, unable to control themselves, commit adultery. And it was not only the husband and wife who were the victims of these extreme views, for children were abandoned by their ascetic parents and themselves encouraged to withdraw from their parents and the filial obligations owed to them (Gangra, can. 15–16).

The Eustathians, however, did not stop at the destruction of marriage and the family, for they undermined in various ways not only the social order in the church but also that in secular society. They withdrew from the church and held their own assemblies, drawing away not only people but also their tithes (Gangra, can. 15–16, 5–8). The secular social order was undermined by the encouragement of slaves to withdraw from their masters and by the condemnation of the rich who did not forsake all their possessions (Gangra, can. 3). This social disruption, secular and ecclesial, was given concrete form in the Eustathians’ ascetic practices: they wore strange clothes (Gangra, can. 12); women assumed men’s dress and cut their hair (Gangra, can. 13, 17); they fasted on Sundays (Gangra, can. 18–19) and mocked the fasts of the church; and some rejected the eating of meat (Gangra, can. 2). All of this accords with the account of both Sozomen and Socrates, who focus on Eustathius’s ascetic extremism, which was socially and ecclesially disruptive.

After the Synod of Gangra, Eustathius saw the error of his ways, repented, and suffered little ill repute from the whole affair. Sozomen reports that from this point on, “Eustathius exchanged his clothing for the stole, and made his journeys habited like other priests, thus proving that he had not introduced and practiced these novelties out of self-will, but for the sake of a godly asceticism” (Eccl. Hist. 3.14; 294).9 Indeed, says Sozomen, Eustathius was renowned for his persuasive speech as for his purity of life, for he was able to persuade many to live a life of temperance and even virginity, this time, of course, according to the customs of the church and so in a way that was not offensive to either ecclesial or social order. Another indication that Eustathius was able to enter, and even flourish, in that stream of the ascetic movement that was not at odds with the institutional church was his relationship with Basil’s family. They too were impressed with his speech and his purity of life, and he most probably played a role in their choice to continue down the ascetic road on which their persecuted grandparents had embarked. It is in the light of this larger movement in which Basil’s family and Eustathius participat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Awakenings
• 2. Man
• 3. The Two Books
• 4. The Trinity, Simply
• 5. The Trinity in Controversy
• 6. Heavenly Politeia
• 7. The Monastic Life
• 8. Tradition and Creativity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover