Basil the Statesman: The Meletian Schism and Rome

As Bishop of Caesarea from 370 to his death in 379, St. Basil the Great spent himself in the ecclesiastical politics of a Church torn by the Antiochene schism, imperial Arianism, and the mutual incomprehension of East and West. This file treats Basil the statesman: the Meletius–Paulinus schism at Antioch and the stance of Rome and Alexandria, his repeated and largely frustrated appeals to the West, his relations with Athanasius, the celebrated confrontation with the prefect Modestus, the division of Cappadocia and the painful Sasima affair that strained his friendship with Gregory of Nazianzus, and his death on January 1, 379.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Antiochene Schism

The knot at the center of Basil’s diplomacy was the schism at Antioch. The Nicene party there was split between two rival bishops who shared the same faith: Meletius, whom Basil and most of the East recognized, and Paulinus, who led a small, intransigent group and was supported — fatefully — by Athanasius of Alexandria and Pope Damasus of Rome. The division was less a matter of doctrine than of personality, history, and the suspicion attaching to Meletius’s use of the formula “three hypostases,” which Western ears, accustomed to one hypostasis as a synonym for one substance, heard as tritheism (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 9). Basil’s strategic conviction was that the reunion of the Nicene world ran through the recognition of Meletius; Rome’s and Alexandria’s backing of Paulinus repeatedly frustrated him.

The schism’s roots lay in the confused decades after Nicaea. Antioch, the great see of the East, had fractured under successive Arian and pro-Nicene claimants; by the 360s the Nicene faithful themselves were divided between the followers of Meletius — recently returned from exile and theologically sound, but tainted in Western and Alexandrian eyes by his earlier ambiguous associations and by his party’s “three hypostases” language — and the older, smaller community under Paulinus, which had kept the strict “one hypostasis” formula and the continuity that Rome trusted. Both confessed Nicaea; the quarrel was over persons, history, and words. Basil judged, rightly in the event, that the future of the Nicene East lay with the larger Meletian body and with a vocabulary (one ousia, three hypostases) capacious enough to reconcile the moderate parties — the very settlement he was forging in his dogmatic work (see Ousia and Hypostasis). To make that case he had to overcome a Western Church that heard his preferred formula as a relapse into tritheism.

Appeals to the West

Basil’s correspondence is full of his effort to enlist Western support for the embattled Eastern Nicenes. He wrote to Rome and to the bishops of Italy and Gaul — Epistle 70 (commonly read as addressed to Damasus) describing the desolation of the Eastern Churches and inviting Western envoys; Epistle 92 (to the Italians and Gauls); and Epistles 242 and 243, renewed appeals “to the Westerns” describing the Eastern Church as a ship battered in a storm and pleading for help (Basil, Epp. 70, 92, 242–243; NPNF II/8). The help, when it came, was thin and slow, and Basil’s letters turn increasingly bitter at what he saw as Western aloofness — the conviction that the proud, courted, only grow haughtier, and that the West neither knew the true situation in the East nor wished to learn it (Basil, Ep. 239, to Eusebius of Samosata; NPNF II/8). This complaint, voiced most sharply in Epistle 239, is the passage often cited for Basil’s frustration with “Western superciliousness.”

Athanasius

Toward Athanasius, the aged hero of Nicaea, Basil’s stance was one of deep respect crossed by tactical disagreement. He corresponded with the Alexandrian and looked to him as the natural broker of unity, urging him to use his unmatched authority to heal the Antiochene breach — but Athanasius’s commitment to Paulinus set the limit on their cooperation, and Athanasius died in 373 with the schism unresolved (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 9; Basil, Epp. 66–69; NPNF II/8). The loss removed the one Eastern figure whose word the West might have heeded, and left Basil to carry the burden of mediation largely alone for the rest of the decade.

The frustration of these years is one of the recurring notes of Basil’s correspondence. He was attempting something genuinely difficult: to reconcile parties separated as much by vocabulary and memory as by faith, across the linguistic and cultural gulf between a Greek-speaking East fluent in the distinction of ousia and hypostasis and a Latin West for which substantia and hypostasis were near-synonyms. Misunderstanding ran in both directions — the West suspecting tritheism, the East resenting Western condescension — and Basil’s diplomacy fell into the gap. He did not live to see it bridged; the terminological peace he sought was ratified only at Constantinople in 381, after his death, when the formula he had championed became the common property of the Church.

The Setting: Valens and the Arian Pressure

Basil’s whole episcopate (370–379) fell under the reign of Valens, the Eastern emperor whose religious policy favored the Homoian (“Arian”) party and pressed the Nicene bishops hard — deposing, exiling, and harassing them across the East. Cappadocia was an island of Nicene resistance in this sea, and Basil its embattled metropolitan. Much of his diplomacy must be read against this pressure: he was trying to knit together a persecuted minority, secure it allies abroad, and outlast a hostile court, all while managing the internal fractures of the Nicene party itself. That he kept his see at all — when so many colleagues lost theirs — is a measure of his standing, his usefulness to the city, and, on the tradition’s account, the personal impression he made even on his persecutors.

The Confrontation with Modestus

The most celebrated scene of Basil’s episcopate is his stand before Modestus, the praetorian prefect of the Arian emperor Valens, who came to Caesarea around 371–372 to bend the bishop to imperial religious policy. Gregory of Nazianzus tells the story in his funeral oration. When Modestus threatened confiscation, exile, torture, and death, Basil answered each in turn: confiscation holds no terror “to a man who has nothing,” beyond his rags and a few books; banishment is impossible “for me, who am confined by no limit of place,” since the whole earth is God’s; torture has no hold on a body so frail that the first blow ends it; and “Death is my benefactor, for it will send me the sooner to God” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.48–50; trans. NPNF II/7). The astonished prefect protested that “no one has ever yet spoken thus, and with such boldness, to Modestus” — to which Basil replied that “perhaps you have never met a bishop,” for in defense of God’s interests a bishop would speak no differently (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.50; trans. NPNF II/7). Valens, in the end, did not depose him. The scene, whatever its rhetorical heightening in Gregory’s hands, encapsulates Basil’s stance toward imperial power: respectful of legitimate authority, immovable where the faith was at stake, and disarmingly free because he had renounced in advance everything the state could threaten. It is the political face of his asceticism.

The Division of Cappadocia and the Sasima Affair

Imperial politics struck closer to home when, around 372, Valens divided the civil province of Cappadocia in two. Anthimus, bishop of Tyana — the metropolis of the new Cappadocia Secunda — claimed that the ecclesiastical map must follow the civil one and asserted metropolitan rights over the divided territory, including its revenues. To shore up his own jurisdiction, Basil multiplied bishoprics in the contested zone and consecrated his friend Gregory of Nazianzus to a new and wretched little see at Sasima, a bleak posting-station on the imperial road (Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 9; Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations and autobiographical poems). Gregory bitterly resented being made a pawn of his friend’s strategy, never took possession of the desolate see, and even came to physical danger: when Basil and Gregory set out toward the contested zone, retainers of Anthimus blocked their path near the monastery of St. Orestes and a scuffle broke out (accounts in Gregory’s autobiographical poems and Orations; Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 9). The episode opened a wound in the most celebrated friendship in Christian history that the old intimacy never fully healed — the human cost of Basil’s statecraft, recorded with lasting bitterness by the very friend who would nonetheless, after Basil’s death, deliver the funeral oration that remains our richest portrait of him. That Gregory could both resent the Sasima affair and eulogize Basil as a saint is one of the more honest complexities the sources preserve.

Death, January 1, 379

Worn out by asceticism, chronic illness, and the unceasing labor of his office, Basil died on January 1, 379, not yet fifty — months before the Council of Constantinople (381) would vindicate the Nicene faith he had defended and ratify the very theology he had forged. The Church commemorates him on January 1 and, with Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom, among the Three Holy Hierarchs on January 30 (see The Three Hierarchs). He did not live to see the storm break; he had spent his life keeping the ship afloat until it could.

References

Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil, §§48–50, 63. Translated by C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF II/7.
Basil the Great. Letters and Select Works (esp. Epp. 66–70, 92, 239, 242–243). Translated in NPNF II/8; trans. Roy J. Deferrari, Loeb Classical Library, 4 vols., 1926–1934.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.