Table Of ContentTHE FATHERS
OF THE CHURCH
A NEW TRANSLATION
VOLUME 9
THE FATHERS
OF THE CHURCH
A NEW TRANSLATION
EDITORIAL BOARD
Roy JOSEPH DEFERRARI
The Catholic University 0/ America
Editorial Director
RUDOLPH ARBESMANN, O.S.A. BERNARD M. PEEBLES
Fordham University The Catholic University 0/ America
STEPHAN KUTTNER ROBERT P. RUSSELL, O.S.A.
The Catholic University 0/ America Villanova College
MARTIN R. P. MCGtfIRE ANSELM STRITTMATTER, O.S.B.
The Catholic University 0/ America St. Anselm's Priory
WILFRID PARSONS, SJ. JAMES EDWARD TOBIN
Georgetown University Queens College
GERALD G. WALSH, S.J.
Fordham University
SAINT BASIL
ASCETICAL WORKS
Translated by
SISTER M. MONICA WAGNER, C. S. C.
The Catholic University of America Press
Washington 17, D. C.
1962
NIHIL OBSTAT:
JOHN M. A. FEARNS, S.T.D.
Censor Librorum
IMPRIMATUR:
+
FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN
Archbishop ofN ew York
The Nihil obstat and Imprimatur are official declarations that a book or
pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained
therein that those who have granted the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur
agree with the contents, opinions, or statements expressed.
Copyright © 1950
THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSI1Y OF AMERICA PRESS
All rights reserved
Reprinted 1962, 1990
First short-run reprint 1999
ISBN 0-8132-0966-8
INTRODUCTION
i\1
HATEVER MAY HAVE BEEN the factors responsible for
the marked ebullience of the ascetical movement in
the Church during the fourth century, the impulse
to withdraw from society and enter a life of rigorous austerity
in deserts or mountain fastnesses was widely experienced and
it constitutes a dominant spiritual phenomenon of the age.
An incident casually introduced by St. Augustine in the
eighth book of his Confessions illustrates the far-reaching
and impetuous force of this ascetical urge. During a conver
sation in Milan with Augustine and Alypius, Ponticianus, a
fellow African and an imperial court official, recalls the mar
vels of the life of St. Anthony of Egypt and his followers.
Amazed to find his hosts quite unacquainted with the history
of so renowned a personage and ignorant as well of the fact
that a populous monastery under the care of Bishop Ambrose
was established just outside Milan, Ponticianus enlarges upon
his theme to relate an instance of a sudden call to the mon
astic life which had been experienced by two of his colleagues.
Upon merely reading the life of St. Anthony which they had
come upon by chance during an afternoon's stroll, both men
were so profoundly affected and so transformed inwardly
that they determined to embrace then and there the mon
astic life, without even a final return to the imperial palace.
Both, as it happened, were betrothed and their fiancees, upon
hearing of their resolve, also consecrated their lives to God.
Such was the environmental context in which providentially
appeared and matured the masterful spirit of St. Basil the
Great. His family background and his own inborn tendencies
were, besides, admirably suited to the spirit of his age. Among
v
vi SAINT BASIL
the nine survlvmg children born to the staunchly Christian
and socially prominent Basil (father of the saint) and Em
melia, there were three bishops, a monk, and a nun, Macrina,
the eldest of the five daughters who became one of the most
remarkable women of the fourth century. In her later years
Emmelia, herself eminently holy, yielded to the persuasion
of Macrina and gave up the comforts and privileges of her
rank to live in a manner similar to that of her maids. Subse
quently, when the family property has been divided among
the children the widowed Emmelia, Macrina, the youngest
son, Peter, the family servants, and a number of other high
born women of Cappadocia and Pont us took up a retired
life under a strict monastic regime in the ancestral home on
the banks of the Iris opposite St. Basil's Pontic retreat.
On this family estate at Annesi near Neo-Caesarea, St. Basil
had received his first instruction in religion from his paternal
grandmother, Macrina. Earlier, Macrina had been a disciple
of St. Gregory Thaumaturgos and a fugitive with her hus
band, a wealthy landholder and a devout Christian, from the
persecution of Maximian. To his father, a prominent member
of the bar in Caesarea and also a teacher of rhetoric, Basil
owed his introduction to liberal studies and to that broad cul
ture which later distinguished him. His subsequent training in
Caesarea, the literary as well as the civil capital of Central
Asia Minor, won him a local reputation for excellence in
rhetoric and philosophy. More advanced study followed at
Constantinople and finally at Athens, now only a little pro
vincial city but an intellectual and academic metropolis.
During his sojourn in Athens, St. Basil and his famous in
separable friend, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, had often planned
the monastic retreat which they promised each other one day
to share. In 358, this dream was realized in the forest solitude
INTRODUCTION Vll
on the banks of the Iris, where Basil and Gregory collaborated
over the Philocalia, a compilation of selected excerpts from
Origen, and also in the drawing up of some monastic rules.
Between the close of his university career in Athens in about
355 and his first retirement to the hermitage on the Iris, Basil
had enjoyed a short but brilliant career as a teacher of rhetoric
in Neo-Caesarea. His instinctive yearning for the monastic
life, however, supported by the urging of his sister, Macrina,
who feared (and with some reason according to St. Gregory
of Nyssa) the effect of worldly success upon her gifted brother,
led him to renounce his professional career and, after receiving
Baptism, to dedicate himself thenceforward to God. In Epistle
223, we have Saint Basil's own account of his 'conversion':
1
'Having lavished much time on the vanity and having con
sumed almost all my youth in the futility, which were mine
while I occupied myself with the acquirement of the precepts
of that wisdom made foolish by God, when one day arising
as from a deep sleep I looked out upon the marvelous light
of the truth of the Gospel, and beheld the uselessness of the
wisdom "of the princes of this world that come to nought,"
bemoaning much my piteous life, I prayed that there be given
me a guidance to the introduction to the teachings of religion.
And before all things my care was to make some amendment
in my character, which had for a long time been perverted
by association with the wicked. And accordingly, having read
the Gospel and having perceived therein that the greatest in
centive to perfection is the selling of one's goods and the shar
ing of them with the needy of the brethren, and the being
entirely without thought of this life, and that the soul should
1 The following excerpt is from the translation by Roy J. Deferrari,
Saint Basil, The Letters III (Loeb Classical Library, London and New
York 1930).
viii SAINT BASIL
have no sympathetic concern with the things of this world, I
prayed that I might find some one of the brethren who had
taken this way of life, so as to traverse with him this life's
brief flood.
'And indeed I found many men in Alexandria and many
throughout the rest of Egypt, and others in Palestine and in
Coele-Syria and Mesopotamia, at whose continence in living
I marvelled, and I marvelled at their steadfastness in suffer
ings, I was amazed at their vigour in prayers, at how they
gained the mastery over sleep, being bowed down by no neces
sity of nature, ever preserving exalted and unshackled the
purpose of their soul, in hunger and thirst, in cold and naked
ness, not concerning themselves with the body, nor deigning
to waste a thought upon it; but as if passing their lives in alien
flesh, they showed in deed what it is to sojourn here below,
and what to have citizenship in heaven. Having marvelled at
all this and deeming the lives of these men blessed, because
by deed they show that they bear about in their body the
mortification of Jesus, I prayed that I myself also, in so far
as was attainable by me, might be an emulator of these men.'
St. Basil's journey in search of a guide in the way of the
monastic life took him to Egypt as an obvious main objective.
Here the Christian Church was eminent both for orthodoxy
and asceticism and here also was to be found the cradle of
Christian eremetical or semi-eremetical life in its two lines of
development: the Antonian and Pachomian systems. The
first originated in the life and example of the Coptic solitary,
St. Anthony, who, in spite of himself, attracted numerous
disciples. Colonies of such hermits spread throughout Egypt
and the East, but even the largest settlements remained essen
tially eremetical. The system of Pachomius, a younger contem
porary of Anthony, while it also involved an element of vol-
INTRODUCTION ix
untary, individual effort, especially as regards personal interior
life, in its external framework it represents the earliest system
atic effort toward a corporate and stable monasticism. Pacho
mian coenobitism, considerably corrected and modified, was
the model of the monastic system propagated by St. Basil.
After something over a year spent in Eastern travel, Basil
returned home to take up his own life of ascetical rigor in
his Pontic solitude. Here he would realize his monastic ideals
in a daily round of prayer, study, and agricultural labors. The
disciples who flocked to Basil when he had settled in his re
treat had not been directly inspired by his personal influence,
however, although his prestige undoubtedly gave exceptional
persuasiveness to his example. Monasteries had already been
established in Pontus as well as in Roman Armenia and
Paphlagonia by Eustathius of Sebaste, who was St. Basil's
master in the ascetical life and his intimate friend until a
breach on doctrinal grounds pennanently ruptured the inti
macy. Precisely how much Basil owed to his predecessor in
the development of his monastic ideals is difficult to assess,
but it is undeniable that his influence was of capital impor
tance in the formation of St. Basil's ascetical doctrine and
even in the practical organization of his monasteries. It was
probably at the advice of Eustathius that he undertook his
extensive Eastern travels and at his return he placed himself
under the direction of the Bishop of Sebaste.
Perhaps it may safely be asserted that the creation of true
coenobitical monachism, receptive of both sexes and all classes,
was substantially the work of St. Basil. Such features as the
common house, the common table, prayer in common, all
of which became constant and permanent in Western mon
asticism, may be considered original with him in the sense that
he regulated and systematized these elements. The Antonian
