Young adulthood, 356–363
biography
in the nets, and he drowned beneath a sudden onrush of the waters, as Gregory Nazianzen tells us.15
It was a terrible shock to Emmelia and to the whole family. In fact, it helped precipitate another transformation in the household.
Macrina, coming into her spiritual maturity, became spiritual mother to her own mother in this crisis. She used the tragedy to persuade her mother to dispense with the aristocratic manner and to put herself on a level with the virgins of the household and live with them a common life of ascetic endeavour.
Peter, the youngest child, was then about 10 or 11. He was educated at home entirely under Macrina's supervision in a religious spirit and hence was the only one of the brothers who did not follow the traditional course of rhetorical training.
We might sum up briefly the elements that wove themselves into Gregory's character from his family and social background as following:
• The social cachet of the provincial landed aristocracy.
• The culture of hellenism maintained above all through rhetorical studies.
• Family commitment to the Christian faith even to heroic resistance if need be.
• A Christian religious culture in which women played a leading role.
• A Christian praxis expressed in hospitality and service of the poor.
• The fostering of links with the local church.
• The cult of the martyrs.
• A Christian intellectual tradition of moderate Origenism.
• A favourable disposition towards the emergent ascetic movement.
Young adulthood, 356–363 In the summer of 356 Basil abruptly returned from Athens—very possibly in response to the news of Naucratius' death.16 After consoling his mother and his siblings at Annisa it seems he spent a few months at his old school in Caesarea teaching rhetoric. His younger brother Gregory was a student there. As Gregory tells in letter 13.4
15 Gregory Nazianzen, Epigrams 156, 157 and 158, Book 8 of the Greek Anthology.
16 In Or. 43.24 Gregory Nazianzen tells of the anxiety and haste of Basil's decision to leave.
biography to Libanius, he briefly had Basil as his teacher: 'I was apprenticed to my brother only a short time. I was only sufficiently purified by his divine tongue to be able to discern the deficiency of those uninitiated into discourse'. Gregory would then have been about 19 or 20 years old, in the later stages of his studies.17 But Gregory for his part was very keen on rhetorical study. Possibly feeling emulous of Basil's greater opportunities he stayed on at Caesarea. Though he did not attend the more famous schools frequented by his brother and by Gregory Nazianzen,18 and while we do not know the names of his masters apart from Basil, it is certain from a study of his own works that he underwent a thorough and wide training in rhetoric and philosophy, acquiring also the rudiments of science and more than the rudiments of medicine. He read deeply and retentively in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plotinus and other platonizing philosophers, Philo of Alexandria and Christian authors, above all Origen.
He even won the praise of the great Libanius for his rhetorical skills (letter 13).
After this brief stint in Caesarea Basil returned to Annisa for a visit. He found his life suddenly spun around by the timely spiritual intervention of Macrina. She recalled him from the worldly prospects he had been entertaining to Baptism and the Christian ascetic life.
He spent the year 357 journeying through Egypt and Palestine apparently on the trail of Eustathius of Sebasteia (Letter 1), noting the way of life of the ascetics in these regions as he went. At Caesarea, whether on the way to or from his journey, he was baptised by Bishop Dianius. From letter 14 it can be seen that on his way back he passed through Cappadocia. His brother Gregory was there; so also was his friend Gregory who had by then returned from Athens.
It is interesting to note the communication between the two Gregorys and no doubt the beginning of their life-long friendship. Both had expressed an interest in whatever philosophic retirement Basil should devise for himself and wanted to meet him to talk about it. Basil, however, was impatient of talk and eager for praxis. He did not wait
17 Libanius accepted students between 15 years and 20 years of age and considered it normal that eight years be spent on the study of rhetoric. See P. Petit, Les étudiants de Libanius (Paris, 1957), 139–144, Maraval, Vie de Sainte Macrine, 44–45 n. 4.
18 As Aubineau says (op. cit. 45): 'A défaut de l'auteur, interrogeons son oeuvre'.
On p. 48 He quotes a letter of Libanius, 1222 (Förster, 11, 304) full of praise at the high standards of rhetoric attainable in Caesarea of Cappadocia.
biography
around for them to sort out their ideas, but returned to Pontus, where in 358 he commenced his ascetic experiment at the very site left vacant by his brother Naucratius, on the river Iris, in the wooded gorge country north of the long ridge behind Annisa.
With Basil having cast the die in such practical fashion, his brother Gregory finally joined him, as also did Gregory Nazianzen, probably in this same year of 358. Basil attests in letter 223.5 (Def.
3.302–303) 'our most God-beloved brother Gregory was present with me, achieving the same goal of life as myself'. In the context we may be reasonably confident Basil is referring to his own brother and not to Nazianzen, for at the time of writing (375/376 AD) he had reason to remind his addressee, Eustathius, of his old familiarity with his brother, currently the victim of Demosthenes' politics abetted by Eustathius (see below). Moreover, at that early period Basil had often to refer to the two men of the same name in his inmost circle, and he simply distinguished them by using 'brother' in the literal sense, as can be seen at the beginning of letter 14, and consistently in later letters.19 Basil might have used 'brother' of Nazianzen if they were fellow bishops, but at that stage it was not so.
The evidences are sketchy and allusive, but they are enough to suggest that between 358 to 363 Gregory of Nyssa did in fact participate in some way in the ascetic experiment at the mone near
Annisa. This means that having finished his studies in Caesarea, Gregory embraced Baptism. That is proved by his undertaking the minor ministry of lector in the liturgy (Nazianzen's letter 11).
With all the seriousness attaching to Baptism in that time and in that circle, and, almost as a corollary in his family context, the prospect of the 'philosophic' life opened out before him. That implied or pointed to a commitment to celibacy, at least after a demonstrated period of perseverance. Alternatively one might just wonder if he preferred to sojourn at the villa rather than the mone, and that Basil is somewhat overstating the position. Still, that mysterious description in his Eulogy on Basil of Basil at prayer through the night, and the strange light that seemed to come from his hut, suggests
19 The phrase 'our most God-beloved brother, Gregory, the bishop' in letter 33 is suspect of scribal interpolation. This can only refer to Gregory Nazianzen, since the letter concerns the aftermath of the death of his brother Caesarius, but he was certainly not a bishop then.
biography something of a personal testimony.20 This may have been what Gregory himself saw in the distant wooded hills of the mone.
In addition to his tentative status as an ascetic, Gregory was in line for eventual ordination to the priesthood at the canonical age of 30.21 Nazianzen's letter 11 makes it clear that this was the path on which he was set when it mentions his ordination as a lector.
He immersed himself in studying and chanting the scriptures.
Meanwhile, at Annisa his father's library was available. The critical study, indeed the selective reading of Origen, as shown in the anthology of the great Alexandrian's Peri Archon composed by Basil and Nazianzen at this period, was also part of the younger Gregory's formative experience. The zeal for poverty, manual work and prayer did not mean the cessation of appropriate intellectual endeavour.
The kind of life lived by Basil and the male ascetics in the mone on the Iris was as yet on a somewhat freelance, empiric basis. In fact, the working out of a stable and ordered form of cenobitic life in Anatolia, especially for men, was to be the special achievement of the 360s, and its refinement and consolidation the achievement of the 370s. The crucible of these developments was Annisa. It may even be conjectured that a quite concrete event precipitated the final transformation of the Annisa household into a fully constituted monastery, and that was when the time came for Peter, the youngest in the family, to make his profession. We are told in the VSM that Peter never ceased to pursue the spiritual way in which his sister had guided him and that he supported Emmelia and Macrina at every stage of their endeavours.22 In short, he never found cause to leave the villa for the retreat in the wooded hills by the river. When he reached the earliest age suitable for profession, at about 17 years of age, in about 362/3, the household at Annisa had to work out a schema whereby a house for men might be properly incorporated into the entire establishment. Thus the essential features of a comprehensive monastic community were at last put in place. The transformation was crowned by the providential sojourn of Basil there
20 'At night [Basil] was illumined while at prayer in his house; an immaterial light filled the house by divine power which had no material source.' Gregory attests a little later: 'We know that he often entered the darkness where God resided' [cf. Ex 20.21], In Basilium Fratrem GNO 10.1, 127.
21 According to the 11th canon of the council of Neocaesarea (315).
22 VSM 14.4–5, GNO 8.1, 384, Maraval 184.
biography
from 363–365, when he toured, preached and taught among the ascetic communities of Pontus. The fruit of this period was Basil's
Small Asketikon, which was later much enlarged as the Great Asketikon.
The Small Asketikon reveals that the essential elements of the way of life at Annisa attested in the VSM are already in place by the mid
360s. So the final shift from family villa to proto-monastic community probably took place around the time of Peter's profession in the early 360s.
Eustathius of Sebasteia continued to stop at the family villa at Annisa whenever he travelled to and from Constantinople, since it was a convenient day's journey from Neocaesarea along the Via
Pontica, and this was a family worth cultivating by any serious church politician. Basil and his friends would come over to the villa for long discussions with the spiritual leader, as Basil himself reminds Eustathius in a passage of Letter 223.5.
The association with Eustathius had other consequences. The idea of Christian ascetic life promoted by him had a distinct social component and supported engagement with the Church at large. Eustathius was a metropolitan bishop anyway, and this meant for Basil, and for Gregory of Nyssa, an entrée to Church affairs, initially through his homoiousian connections. In one of those all too brief autobiographical morsels, we learn that Gregory was present along with Basil at the unhappy Council of Constantinople in 360: 'But if he speaks of the events at Constantinople . . . we would display the reason why, though present on the occasion, we did not plunge into the fight.'23 A passing comment this, but it confirms that in 360,
Gregory was in Basil's—and Eustathius'—company,24 and had sampled for himself the full rigour of contemporary doctrinal strife and church politics.
But there is something more. Not only Eustathius, but this entire homoiousian circle had a particular interest in the ascetic life.25 There is confirmation of this in On Virginity 22, where, without naming him,
Gregory mentions that he has listened to a physician discourse on the four elements of the human body. By all indications the man was Basil of Ancyra, a trained physician and a leading homoiousian
23 Contra Eunomium 1.82 GNO 1.50; NPNF ser. 2, 5.43.
24 One may suppose that in journeying to this Council, Eustathius paused as usual at Annisa, but this time continued with Basil and Gregory in his entourage.
25 This topic is canvassed at length by Elm, 'Virgins of God', 106–136.