Athens and Conversion

St. Basil the Great received the finest Hellenic education of his age — at Caesarea, Constantinople, and finally Athens, where his friendship with Gregory of Nazianzus was forged — before turning, around 357, from the rhetorician’s career to the ascetic life. This file traces that formation: the schools, the baptism and monastic conversion, the tour of the monastic East, the retreat at Annisa with Gregory and the compilation of Origen’s Philocalia, and the path to the priesthood and episcopate that the famine of 368–369 would decisively shape.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Education: Caesarea and Constantinople

Basil’s formal education began at home under his father, Basil the Elder, a rhetorician, and continued at Caesarea Mazaca in Cappadocia around 350–351 — the metropolis of his future episcopate, and the place where he first met Gregory of Nazianzus (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 1). From Caesarea he went on to Constantinople for advanced study in rhetoric.

A long-standing question concerns whether Basil studied at Constantinople under the great pagan rhetor Libanius. Some sources place him among Libanius’ students around 348/349, and a correspondence between Basil and Libanius survives in the manuscript tradition. The authenticity of those letters, however, is widely doubted by modern scholars, and the claim that Basil was formally Libanius’ pupil is best treated as uncertain rather than secure (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 1 — noting the doubtful Basil–Libanius correspondence). What is not in doubt is that Basil received a thoroughly classical literary and rhetorical training at the highest level available in the empire.

Athens, 349–355: The Two Roads

The crown of Basil’s education was Athens, the ancient university city, where he studied roughly from 349/350 to 355. There his friendship with Gregory of Nazianzus deepened into one of the most celebrated friendships in Christian history. Our principal source is Gregory’s own Funeral Oration on Basil (Oration 43), delivered around 381–382, which idealizes their student years as a shared pursuit of virtue.

Gregory describes the discipline the two imposed on themselves amid the temptations of student life, knowing only the road to church and the road to their teachers:

“Two ways were known to us, the first of greater value, the second of smaller consequence: the one leading to our sacred buildings and the teachers there, the other to secular instructors” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.21; trans. NPNF II/7).

Gregory summarizes the bond in a phrase that became proverbial: the two of them were “one soul in two bodies,” and “our single object and ambition was virtue, and a life of union with God” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.20–21; trans. NPNF II/7). Among their fellow students at Athens, Gregory notes, was the future emperor Julian — later “the Apostate” — whose character Gregory claims already to have read as troubled. The Athenian years gave Basil mastery of the whole Hellenic curriculum, which he would later defend, in his Address to Young Men on Greek Literature, as legitimately usable by Christians who select its fruit and discard its poison.

Baptism and the Ascetic Turn (c. 357)

Basil left Athens around 355 and briefly taught rhetoric at Caesarea, on the threshold of the secular career his education had prepared. But under the influence of his sister Macrina the Younger (see The Cappadocian Family) and his own deepening conviction, he turned decisively away from it. He was baptized — having, like many of his generation, deferred baptism into adulthood — and embraced the ascetic life around 357 (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 3).

In a famous autobiographical passage, Basil describes his awakening: “I had wasted much time on follies and spent nearly all my youth in vain labours… Then one day, like a man roused from deep sleep, I turned my eyes to the marvellous light of the truth of the Gospel” (Basil, Epistle 223; trans. NPNF II/8).

The Tour of the Monastic East

To learn the ascetic life from those who practiced it, Basil undertook a journey through the great monastic centers of the eastern Mediterranean — Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia — visiting the heirs of Antony and Pachomius and observing communal and eremitic discipline at first hand (Basil, Epistle 223; Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 3). What he saw confirmed his preference for the cenobitic (communally organized) life over solitary asceticism, a conviction that shaped his later monastic legislation in the Asketikon (the Longer and Shorter Rules). For Basil, the commandment of love could not be fulfilled in isolation; the common life was the school of charity.

Annisa, Gregory, and the Philocalia of Origen

Returning from his travels, Basil established a monastic retreat at Annisa in Pontus, across the river from the ascetic community his mother Emmelia and sister Macrina had already founded on the family estate (see The Cappadocian Family). Around 358 he wrote to Gregory of Nazianzus, urging him to join him there, and Gregory came for a period of shared ascetic life that both men later remembered with longing (Basil, Epistle 14; Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistles 4–6).

During these years of retreat, the two friends together compiled the Philocalia of Origen — an anthology of selected passages from Origen’s works, especially on Scripture, free will, and the interpretation of difficult texts. The traditional attribution of the compilation to Basil and Gregory, working at Annisa around 358–359, is preserved in the manuscript tradition and accepted by most scholars, though the evidence is a later prefatory note rather than a statement by the compilers themselves (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 3; The Philocalia of Origen, ed./trans. G. Lewis, 1911, introduction). The Philocalia is significant testimony both to the Cappadocians’ debt to Origen and to their discriminating reception of him — gathering what was useful while the Church set aside what it judged erroneous.

Ordination and the Path to the Episcopate (370)

Basil was ordained reader and then priest at Caesarea (around 362), entering the service of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (not the historian of the same name). His relationship with Eusebius was initially strained, and for a time Basil withdrew again to Pontus before being recalled to assist in the governance of the church (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43; Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, chs. 4–5).

The decisive hinge toward the episcopate was the famine of 368–369. A severe drought and food shortage struck Cappadocia, and Basil — selling off inherited family property to fund relief — organized the distribution of food, personally serving and feeding the destitute, including the marginalized whom others shunned. His preaching during the famine (notably the homilies on the rich and on famine) and his practical charity made him the moral leader of the province. This experience, and the network of philanthropy it created, prepared the foundation of the Basiliad, his great complex of hospital, hospice, and poorhouse outside Caesarea (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, chs. 4–6; previewed in section 07).

When Eusebius died, Basil was elected Bishop of Caesarea in 370, despite opposition from those wary of his rigor and his Nicene commitments. As metropolitan of Cappadocia he became the leading defender of the Nicene faith in the East against the Arian-leaning policy of the emperor Valens — the office from which his great Trinitarian and pneumatological work would issue (see Against Eunomius; Ousia and Hypostasis).

See Also

References

  • Basil the Great. Letters (Epistolae), esp. Ep. 14, 223. Translated in NPNF II/8.
  • Basil the Great. Address to Young Men on Greek Literature (Ad Adolescentes).
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil. Translated in NPNF II/7.
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Letters (Epistolae) 4–6.
  • Origen. The Philocalia of Origen. Compiled by Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus. Translated by George Lewis. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1911.
  • Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
  • Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.