08 — Letters and Church Politics
The documentary and political section of the St. Basil the Great compendium: the vast letter-collection that is our chief source for his mind and his age, and the church politics — the Antiochene schism, the appeals to Rome, the confrontation with imperial power, the division of Cappadocia — in which he spent the nine years of his episcopate. Here Basil the theologian and reformer appears as Basil the statesman and pastor of an embattled Church.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
The same gifts that made Basil a great theologian made him a formidable administrator, and the 370s gave him no rest in which to be only a contemplative. As metropolitan of Cappadocia he led the Nicene resistance to the Arian-leaning policy of the emperor Valens, labored to reunite a divided East, and pressed — with limited success — for the support of the Western churches. His roughly 368 letters are the archive of that struggle, and they double as some of the most important theological, canonical, and pastoral texts of the patristic age.
This section pairs a survey of the correspondence with a focused treatment of the ecclesiastical politics that fills so much of it. It connects backward to the dogmatic sections (the ousia/hypostasis settlement that the West misheard) and to the canon-law treatment in the orthodoxy collection, whose verified numbering of Basil’s ninety-two canons this section follows rather than restates.
A note on method, per the repository’s Methodology: letters are cited by number, anchored to the web-checkable NPNF II/8 translation and to Deferrari’s Loeb edition; the contemporary narrative of the Modestus confrontation and the Sasima affair is drawn from Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration 43 (NPNF II/7), with quotations conformed to that translation. Genuinely disputed matters — the authorship of Epistle 38 — are flagged as contested rather than resolved, and the exact addressee and reading of contested letters (e.g., the “Western superciliousness” complaint of Ep. 239) are noted as such.
Files in this Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Letters of Basil | The ~368-letter corpus and its range; the three canonical epistles (188/199/217 = canons 1–92, cross-linked to the repository’s verified numbering); famous letters — Ep. 2 to Gregory on the ascetic life, Ep. 236 on ousia/hypostasis, the disputed Ep. 38; and the collection as a window on the Church of the 370s. |
| The Meletian Schism and Rome | Basil the statesman: the Antioch schism (Meletius vs. Paulinus; Rome and Alexandria’s stance); the appeals to the West (Epp. 70, 92, 242–243; the Ep. 239 complaint); relations with Athanasius; the Modestus confrontation (Oration 43.48–51, quoted); the division of Cappadocia and the Sasima affair; and his death, January 1, 379. |
See Also
- 02 — Trinitarian Theology — the ousia/hypostasis settlement at issue in the schism
- 05 — Monastic Rules — the ascetic life sketched in Epistle 2
- 09 — Legacy and Reception — Basil’s commemoration among the Three Hierarchs
- Sources of Orthodox Canon Law — the canonical letters and the ninety-two canons (verified numbering)
References
- Basil the Great. The Letters. Translated by Roy J. Deferrari. Loeb Classical Library, 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926–1934.
- Basil the Great. Letters and Select Works. Translated in NPNF II/8.
- Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil. Translated in NPNF II/7.
- Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.