Forming Basil

One of the most striking claims in St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina is that the future St. Basil the Great owed the decisive turn of his vocation to his elder sister: returning from his studies at Athens “monstrously conceited” about his rhetorical skill, the young Basil was recalled by Macrina to humility and drawn toward the ascetic, philosophic life. This file traces that tradition as Gregory frames it, sets it within the family’s wider ascetic turn, and weighs the modern scholarly argument — associated above all with Susanna Elm — that Macrina, not Basil, holds the chronological and causal priority in the birth of communal monasticism in Asia Minor, while keeping in view the source-asymmetry that the whole claim reaches us from Basil’s own brother.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

The Return from Athens

Basil of Caesarea had received the most ambitious education his class could supply — schooling at Caesarea, then at Constantinople, and finally a long sojourn in the schools of Athens, where he studied rhetoric and philosophy alongside Gregory of Nazianzus and acquired a name as a coming man of letters (a course of study Basil’s own circle and Gregory of Nazianzus’ Oration 43 amply attest). Gregory of Nyssa picks up the story at the homecoming. When Basil returned to Pontus, his brother writes, he was “monstrously conceited about his skill in rhetoric, contemptuous of every high reputation, and exalted by his self-importance above the leading men of the province” (Life of Macrina §6; SC 178; PG 46:959–1000). The portrait is unsparing precisely because it is drawn by a member of the family: a brilliant young rhetor, fresh from Athens, swollen with the pride of his attainments and looking down on the provincial society into which he had been born.

It is at this moment that Gregory inserts his sister. Macrina, he says, “took him in hand” and so swiftly and decisively drew him toward “the goal of philosophy” — the disciplined ascetic life ordered wholly to God — that he renounced worldly repute, “despised the admiration of rhetorical display,” and went over to “this laborious and active life of manual toil,” preparing for himself “an unencumbered path toward the life of virtue” (Life of Macrina §6). In Gregory’s compressed account the whole reorientation of Basil’s life — from the celebrated rhetor to the ascetic, and ultimately to the bishop and monastic legislator — is set in motion by an intervention of his elder sister.

“Philosophy” and the Family’s Ascetic Turn

To read the episode rightly, one must hold to the family’s own vocabulary. When Gregory says Macrina led Basil “to the goal of philosophy,” the word does not mean the disputations of the schools he had just left; in this household philosophia means the consecrated ascetic life, the discipline of renunciation and prayer directed to God (Life of Macrina §1, §6, §11; cf. On the Soul and the Resurrection, opening; PG 46:11–160). Macrina is throughout the Life “the Teacher” (hē didaskalos) and “the philosopher” in exactly this sense. Basil’s conversion is therefore not a change of intellectual school but a change of life: away from the career the world held open to a man of his gifts, toward the manual labor, poverty, and self-abnegation of the ascetic.

That turn did not happen to Basil in isolation. Gregory presents Macrina as the spring of the whole family’s movement toward asceticism — the eldest child who, after their father’s death, bound herself to her widowed mother Emmelia, took on a share of the servants’ labor, and refused the ease of her rank, transforming the family estate at Annesi on the river Iris into an ascetic community (Life of Macrina §5, §11–12). The early death of the second brother, Naucratius, in a river accident — and the steadiness with which Macrina bore both her own grief and her mother’s — Gregory makes the hinge that confirmed mother and daughter in their renunciation of the world (Life of Macrina §9–10). Basil’s recall from Athenian vanity belongs to this same sequence: in Gregory’s narrative the household was already, under Macrina’s leadership, turning toward the ascetic life, and Basil was drawn into a current his sister had set running.

Macrina’s Priority: Elm’s Argument

The chronology matters because it bears on one of the largest questions in the history of early monasticism: who founded the communal ascetic life of fourth-century Asia Minor? The conventional answer credits Basil the Great, whose ascetic writings (the so-called Asketikon, the Longer and Shorter Rules) shaped Eastern cenobitic monasticism for centuries, and whose first monastic retreat to Annesi is dated to 357/8, after a tour of the ascetic centers of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine.

Against the simple form of that answer, Susanna Elm, in Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), argues that the priority belongs to Macrina. On Gregory’s own chronology, Macrina and Emmelia had withdrawn to the ascetic, common life at Annesi more than a decade before Basil’s retreat of 357/8 — a household already ordered to philosophia, already erasing the distinctions of rank between mistresses and servants, already a functioning ascetic community (Life of Macrina §5, §11; Elm, Virgins of God, ch. 3). On Elm’s reading, when Basil came to Annesi he came to something his sister had built; the communal model that he would later codify and propagate was, in its concrete origin, hers, and Basil is better understood as its powerful imitator and legislator than as its inventor. Macrina’s initiative and resolve, in this account, “gave birth” to the Asia-Minor form of communal asceticism, with Basil following after.

This is not merely a quarrel over dates. It reframes the relationship between two of the most consequential figures of the fourth century: it makes the woman who left no writings the originator, and the celebrated bishop and rule-giver the one who received, systematized, and broadcast what she had begun. A considerable strand of subsequent scholarship on Macrina and on early female asceticism has followed Elm in restoring this priority to the eldest sibling.

The Source-Asymmetry and the Disputed Question

Two cautions belong to any honest account of “forming Basil,” and both turn on the fact that the tradition rests on a single source written from within the family.

First, the judgment that Basil came home “conceited” is Gregory’s, not a neutral datum. It is one brother’s retrospective characterization of another, composed years after Basil’s death and in the service of a Life whose explicit purpose is to magnify their sister. Gregory had every reason — fraternal, theological, and rhetorical — to stage the great Basil’s humbling at Macrina’s hands, for it raises her precisely by lowering, for a moment, the most famous member of the household. The episode should therefore be read as Gregory’s family-piety framing of Basil’s conversion, faithful very possibly to something real in Basil’s early ambition, but shaped to its purpose and uncorroborated outside Gregory’s pen.

[Disputed: The historicity of the “recalled Basil from pride” episode. Gregory of Nyssa is the sole source for Macrina’s having recalled Basil from rhetorical conceit to the ascetic life (Life of Macrina §6). Anna Silvas treats the account as preserving genuine family memory of Basil’s homecoming and of his sister’s formative influence (Silvas, Macrina the Younger, intro. and notes ad loc.). Many critics read it rather as a hagiographic and rhetorical construction — Gregory’s deliberate subordination of the famous Basil to Macrina, of a piece with the Life‘s larger project of presenting his sister as “the Teacher” — whose historical kernel cannot be recovered behind the literary frame. What is certain is only that Gregory transmits the episode and reads it as Macrina’s doing; Macrina’s own words and Basil’s interior state are not independently attested.]

[Disputed: Whether Macrina or Basil is the true originator of Cappadocian communal monasticism. Susanna Elm gives the priority to Macrina, arguing that her and Emmelia’s retreat to the common life at Annesi preceded Basil’s 357/8 monastic retreat by more than a decade, so that Basil imitated and codified a model his sister had founded (Elm, Virgins of God, ch. 3). Older and more traditional accounts credit Basil as the father of Eastern cenobitic monasticism, reading Macrina’s community as a domestic precursor rather than the institutional origin, and Basil’s Asketikon as the true foundational act. The asymmetry that weighs on the question is that the claim for Macrina’s priority rests almost entirely on the chronology supplied by Gregory of Nyssa — brother to both Macrina and Basil — and so on a single, family-internal witness, not on independent record.]

Second, even granting Elm’s reconstruction, the evidence for it is Gregory’s chronology, and Gregory’s chronology is itself part of a Life that exists to honor Macrina. The case for her priority is strong, coherent, and increasingly accepted; but it cannot be insulated from the source-critical caution that governs everything in the Life of Macrina. The most that the documents securely establish is this: Gregory, who knew them both, believed and wished his readers to believe that the future Basil the Great owed the decisive turn of his vocation to his elder sister.

References

Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Saint Macrina (Vita Sanctae Macrinae). Greek: GNO VIII/1, ed. Virginia Woods Callahan. Leiden: Brill, 1952. PG 46:959–1000. Critical edition with French translation: Pierre Maraval, Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de sainte Macrine, Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Cerf, 1971.
Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Saint Macrina. Trans. W. K. Lowther Clarke. London: SPCK, 1916. Trans. Kevin Corrigan, The Life of Saint Macrina. Toronto: Peregrina, 1987. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 5 (NPNF II/5), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. New York: Christian Literature, 1893.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). PG 46:11–160; trans. Catharine P. Roth, Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43 (Funeral Oration on St. Basil the Great). In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 7 (NPNF II/7). New York: Christian Literature, 1894.
Basil of Caesarea. The Asketikon (Longer and Shorter Rules) and Letters. In Anna M. Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 8 (NPNF II/8).