Daley - The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy

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1998 NAPS Presidential Address Building a New City:

The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy

Brian Daley

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 1999,

pp. 431-461 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/earl.1999.0055

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DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY 431

Journal of Early Christian Studies 7:3, 431–461 © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press

1998 NAPS Presidential AddressBuilding a New City:

The Cappadocian Fathers and theRhetoric of Philanthropy

BRIAN E. DALEY, S.J.

It is a truism, perhaps, to say that the ancient Greeks were city people.Their commerce, their language, their social relations, the laws by whichdaily life was governed and the religious practices through which they

approached ultimate mystery: all were experienced and imagined, sincethe close of the heroic age, less in terms of ancient national or ethnicgroupings, or of the leagues and alliances that trade and war had madenecessary, than in terms of the small, self-sufficient community of artisans and merchants, rich and poor, that was gathered visibly arounda marketplace, a citadel, or a harbor. Most of the arts, too, that weredeveloped most highly in the post-Homeric Greek world were arts thatsuited life in a small city: public and sacred architecture, figuralsculpture, pottery and mural painting, lyric poetry and drama andhistorical narrative, the arts of reasoning and persuasion, the science of living well in a city that we have come to call philosophy. It is nosurprise, then, that when Athanasius of Alexandria, shortly after themiddle of the fourth century, set out to describe the world-transformingimpact made on his age by the new Christian “philosophy” of the Coptichermit Antony, he could do no better than depict the changes in par-adoxically urban terms; from the time when his friends discovered thatAntony’s withdrawal and hard penances had not twisted or dehuman-ized him, but had made him a perfect example of balanced, free hu-manity, many resolved to join him, Athanasius says, so that “from thenon, there were monasteries in the mountains, and the desert was made acity by monks, who left their own people and registered themselves for



432 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

the citizenship in the heavens.”1 Nor should it surprise us that whenGregory of Nazianzus, probably on January 1 of 382, pronounced hiscelebrated funeral oration on his friend and episcopal patron, Basil of Caesarea, now three years dead, he should describe the great materialachievement of Basil’s Christian “philosophy”—the cluster of hostels fortravelers, the poor, and the sick that he had erected, along with a churchand a monastic residence just outside Caesarea—as a kind of city-building,

too:Go a little outside the city (he says), and gaze on the new city: thestorehouse of piety, the common treasury for those with possessions, wherethe superfluities of wealth as well as necessities lie stored away because of his persuasion—shaking off the moths, giving no joy to thieves, escapingstruggles with envy and the onrush of time—where disease is treated byphilosophy, where misfortunes are called blessed, where compassion is heldin real esteem.2

For Gregory, Basil’s monastic hospice, his monument to “philanthropyand the care of the poor,” was a civic achievement more amazing thanthe traditional “seven wonders” of other ancient Near Eastern cities:more wonderful because it stood along a different kind of road from the

dusty highways of Cappadocia, “the short way of salvation, the easypath upwards towards heaven.”3

Gregory’s exalted evocation of Basil’s great social and monastic enter-prise was not simply inflated fourth-century rhetoric. What I would liketo argue here, at any rate, is that that large and complex welfare institu-tion on the outskirts of the Cappadocian metropolis that came to beknown as the “Basileias”4 represented a new and increasingly intentionaldrive on the part of these highly cultivated bishops and some of theirChristian contemporaries to reconstruct Greek culture and society alongChristian lines, in a way that both absorbed its traditional shape andradically reoriented it. If the fourth century was, after the rise of Con-stantine, a period of breathtakingly rapid change in the relations betweenChristian believers and the social and political world of the late RomanEmpire, that process revealed itself most dramatically—or at least revealsitself to us most dramatically today, through the existing evidence—inthe changing role and self-understanding of the Christian cultural and

1. Athanasius, Life of Antony 14 (tr. Robert C. Gregg; Paulist: New York, 1980),42f.

2. Or. 43.63 (SC 384:260f.).3. Ibid. (SC 384:260.33, 262.15f.).4. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 6.34.9.




spiritual elite: of people like Basil and Macrina and Gregory of Nyssa,their parents and brothers and other relatives, and, of course, their friendGregory of Nazianzus, all people who combined an inherited call toleadership in their cities and province, based on their social status andrigorously Hellenistic education, with the sense of another call to be bothdisciples of Christ, in a new and radical way, and leaders in thecommunity of the Church.

In this transformation of Christian self-understanding and action, theEmperor Julian’s decree of June 17, 362, prohibiting Christians fromacting as teachers of Greek culture—of grammar and rhetoric andphilosophy—in publicly supported schools seems to have had effects thatlasted far longer and reached far wider than its merely legal application.

Julian’s reasoning, as he explains in a letter, was that no one who openlyrejects as false the religious traditions embodied in Greek literatureshould be allowed to be an official interpreter of its aesthetic andintellectual values; culture, for Julian, is all of a piece, and is essentiallyreligious.5 Even though his edict may not have been enforced throughoutthe Empire with equal seriousness, and rapidly became a dead letter at

Julian’s death a year later, the impression it made on Christians whoseclassical education gave them voice and influence was clearly deep andenduring.6 Christian ownership of the Hellenic tradition had been ques-tioned. For upper-class Christian curiales like Basil and the two Gregories,as for their contemporary Ambrose in the West, and later for JohnChrysostom in Antioch and Augustine in Roman Africa, the challengenow was to take hold of the classical tradition—of Greek and Romanliterary criticism and rhetoric and philosophy, in all their manneredcomplexity—with full authority, and to shape it to the needs of theChristian faith: to retain all its techniques of analysis and embellishmentand persuasion, even to retain what one could of its understanding of theworld, the human person, and the divine realm, while replacing itsmythic repertoire with the persons and events of the biblical narrativeand centering the hope which underlay practical engagement with the

5. Julian, ep. 36 (Bidez 61c). In the words of Rowland Smith, Julian’s Gods:Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate (London:Routledge, 1995), 214, the purpose of the edict was “to reverse the progress of Christianity as a social and political force in the upper levels of society.” The brief textof the decree is preserved in the CTh 13.3.5.

6. A witness to this is Cyril of Alexandria’s enormous apologetic work against Julian’s writings, composed more than half a century after the Emperor’s death. Julianseems to have long retained his symbolic importance as the public official who hadmade the most serious attempt at culturally excommunicating educated Christians.




world’s needs on final salvation through Christ, the Word made flesh.The public importance of cultured and persuasive speech, for centuriesthe preserve of a classically educated elite,7 remained for the momentunchanged; so did the traditional role of the philosopher as a publiccritic licensed to give his ideas free expression (parrhs¤a), a wise teacher,a moral physician trained to diagnose and to heal society’s inherited ills.But now, in the hands of the men we have mentioned and others like

them, the content of both persuasive speech and philosophic teachingwas to be permanently changed; the ideals of human behavior, the éreta¤whose public cultivation had been the professed purpose of both rhetoricand philosophy, were to take on a new form that would be quiteintentionally described in terms both classical and Christian.8 Thewineskins, for the moment, were to remain largely the same, but thewine was definitely new.

I. THE IDEAL OF PHILANTHROPY

A significant part of their new role as shapers of a Christian Hellenismwas, for the Cappadocians, an active concern for the poor andmarginalized in their society, and an active attempt to use all theirpowers of thought, speech, and political leadership in persuading theirwealthy and influential fellow-citizens to expend a large portion of theirpossessions and personal energy in caring for them. The theme of philan-thropia—of active, practical love for one’s fellow human beings, ex-pressed in kindness (xrhstÒthw)—and benevolent action (eÈpoi˝a)—appears strikingly often in their letters and nondogmatic discourses, as aconstitutive part both of human justice and civility and of Christiandiscipleship. In the tradition of Hellenic ethics, the concept was hardlynew. Originally identified above all with the love of the gods for thehuman race,9 philanthropia was also most often seen, in classical litera-ture, as a quality to be praised—and thus encouraged—in tyrants andkings: in Peisistratos, for example,10 in King Agesilaos of Sparta,11 or in

7. See especially Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards aChristian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), and ThomasSchmitz, Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweitenSophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997).

8. On the formation of a distinctively Christian rhetoric and its role in theformation of a Christian state, see especially Averil Cameron, Christianity and theRhetoric of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

9. See, e.g., Aeschylus, Prometheus 28–30; Plato, Laws 4, 713d.10. Athenaion Politeia 16.11. Xenophon, Agesilaos 1.22.




Philip of Macedon.12 Dio Chrysostom, the cynic preacher and imperialrhetorician of the early second century, wrote that Zeus especially blesses“the brave king who loves humanity (tÚn filãnyrvpon)” and whostrenuously promotes virtue in his subjects, standing amid his people likea reliable old bull amid the herd—proud and noble, fierce towardsintruders, but gentle with his own.13 For the fourth-century rhetoricianThemistius of Constantinople, whose congratulatory speeches addressed

to Constantine’s imperial successors provide a fulsome portrait of whatwell-educated, philosophically literate Greeks of the time expected of their kings, philanthropia was clearly the chief royal virtue, just as it wasthe chief characteristic of Zeus. Self-control, justice, courage, and theother virtues were of course essential for good rule; “but each of theseseems to me, as I consider them for myself, to be a general humanornament, which only then becomes royal when philanthropia sets itsseal on it.”14 Society praises its emperor with titles of divinity, Themis-tius assured the Christian Theodosius, calls him “filãnyrvpow and piousone and savior,” not because he has gold or power, not because he canturn a poor person into a rich one overnight, but because “only theDivinity and the King have it in their power to bestow life.”15 The realsource of philanthropia, in Themistius’s view, was the study of literatureand ideas—filolog¤a, the love of words, and filhko˝a, a fondness forlistening to speeches—not for the sake of the words themselves, but forwhat they reveal “about the mind that speaks the words.”16 Just as some-one who admires speed will love horses, and a music-lover will be inter-ested in birds, he asks, “will not the one who admires wisdom andconstantly exalts it, and chooses it to be his companion, clearly be onewho loves the living being and makes it”—makes humanity—“hispriority?”17

Philanthropia had long been expected of gods and kings; but it was Julian, the learned and philosophical emperor who left the Christian

12. Isocrates, Philippus 48–49. For an incomplete but thoughtful survey of thedevelopment of the idea of philanthropia in Greek thought, see Glanville Downey,“Philanthropia in Religion and Statecraft in the Fourth Century after Christ,”Historia 4 (1955): 199–208. See also Demetrios J. Constantelos, Byanztine Philanthopyand Social Welfare (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1968), esp. 3–10, 43–61.

13. Second Discourse on Kingship 74–77.14. Or. 1, To Constantius, on Philanthropia 6ab; cf. Or. 11, Decennial Oration to

Valentinian and Valens 146d–147b; Or. 19, To Theodosius 226d–227a.15. Or. 19, To Theodosius 229b.16. Or. 11, Decennial Oration for Valentinian and Valens 144d.17. Ibid. 145a.




tradition behind him to return to the ideals and practice of Hellenism,who enunciated with new force, for the late fourth-century Greek world,the connection between an active, socially radical concern for humanityand all serious religious observance. Julian, too, like Themistius, re-garded philanthropia as the crowning kingly virtue;18 but his mosteloquent and extensive treatment of the virtue came in his Letter to aPriest , sent to an unknown recipient as part of his program to reform the

moral and religious image of the traditional priesthoods.You must above all exercise philanthropy (he writes), for from it resultmany other blessings, and moreover that choicest and greatest blessing of all, the good will of the gods. For . . . we must suppose that God, whonaturally loves human beings, has more kindness for those people who lovetheir fellows.19

Philanthropia takes various forms, Julian explains: moderation in pun-ishing those who transgress, a kindly concern for the betterment of one’ssubjects, but above all sharing the good things of the earth. In adigression that sounds a theme already familiar from Hellenistic ethics,especially from representatives of the Stoic tradition,20 the Emperorremarks that “it is not the gods who are to blame for the poverty [of the

poor among us], but rather the insatiate greed of us who have prop-erty”;21 even if the gods were to rain gold on us, as they are said once tohave done on Rhodes, some of us would be there first with buckets andburly slaves, to drive off the rest “so that we alone might seize upon thegifts of the gods meant for all in common!”22 The conclusion is simple: to

18. See, for example, his Encomium on the Emperor Constantius 5.24, 11.16,15.22, 21.20, 34.5, 39.25; On Kingship 31.7, 37.41; Misopogon 18.8, 28.14.

19. Fragment of Letter to a Priest 289 AB; tr. W. C. Wright, The Works of theEmperor Julian (LCL 2:299).

20. For a development of the idea that wealth originated in human greed, seeespecially Seneca, ep. 90 (to Lucilius), 18 (contrasting natural needs and the desire forluxury) and 36–43 (describing the original “Golden Age” before the existence of

private property). In the second of these passages, Seneca quotes Vergil, Georg .1.125–28, also depicting a time when the land was free for all to use, and its productsheld in common. Seneca here sees avaritia as the foundation of private property andthe cause of poverty (38), and gives a satirical description of the houses of the richthat will be paralleled in some of the Cappadocian Fathers’ works discussed below.Cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.7.21–22, where private property is also said not to belong tothe original or “natural” state of humanity; Cicero’s conclusion is that each personshould be content with what he or she already has, and be ready to use it for thecommon good. See also 1.26.92.

21. Ibid. 290A (tr. Wright 301).22. Ibid. 290B.




be true to our nature, “we ought to share our money with all people”—first of all with the good, but even with the wicked, with accusedprisoners, and above all “with the helpless and poor, so as to suffice fortheir need.”23 We must be hospitable to beggars and strangers, “becauseeveryone, whether he will or no, is akin to everyone else.” 24 Alongsidechastity of body, in fact, “kindness towards our fellow human beings” is,in Julian’s view, the heart of eÈlãbeia efiw toÁw yeoÊw—reverence towards

the gods—and thus ought to be practiced in an exemplary way bypriests.25 To him, the great irony of his own time was that the Hellenes,whose religion and philosophy unambiguously pointed them towardssuch generous humane behavior, had generally neglected it, while the“impious Galileans”—the Christians—had won a reputation for practic-ing it seriously, and so had attracted numerous members to their“atheistic” community.26 In another letter to a priest—to Arsacius, HighPriest of Galatia, the province next-door to Cappadocia—written shortlybefore his decree against the Christians of 362, Julian writes heatedly onthis same theme:

Why do we not observe that it is their [the Christians’] benevolence tostrangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of

their lives, that have done most to increase atheism? I believe that we oughtreally and truly to practice every one of these virtues. And it is not enoughfor you alone to practice them; so must all the priests in Galatia, withoutexception.27

Philanthropy was simply an indispensable part of philosophically reflectivereligion.

II. THE CAPPADOCIAN PROJECT

1. Julian’s frank challenge to the non-Christian Greeks of his time canhardly have failed to echo in Christian ears. For cultivated ChristianHellenes like Basil of Caesarea, his family and his friends—uncompro-mising in their commitment both to the Christian faith and to the use of

23. Ibid. 290D–291A (tr. Wright 303).24. Ibid. 291D (tr. Wright 305). For the widely held Hellenistic notion of the

fundamental kinship of humanity and the natural precedence of social responsibilityover private interest, see Cicero, De off. 1.44.157–45.159; De amicitia 7.24; Seneca,ep. 95.52–53.

25. Ibid. 292D–293A.26. Ibid. 305CD.27. ep. 22, 429D–430A (tr. Wright 3:69).




Greek cultural and intellectual resources—Julian’s critique of Hellenicreligious practice for failing to live up to its own philosophical andhuman ideals must have come as an encouraging reminder that noteverything in the Christian tradition of corporate behavior was a scandalto their pagan neighbors. Serious Christian living, since at least the timeof Justin, had been promoted by Christian apologists as “the truephilosophy,” as realizing the complex ancient ideal of acquired and

saving wisdom:

28

not simply because it was based on reverence for Godand included serious attention to prayer, introspection, ascetic discipline,self-control, and the guidance of others,29 but also because it had laidsuch stress on hospitality and the care of the needy—on philanthropia.30

Even Julian recognized philanthropia as the “Galileans’” strong suit. It isunderstandable, then, that as Basil, aided by the two Gregories and therest of his web of supporters, rose, in the decade after Julian’s edictbanning Christians from teaching Hellenic culture, from a life of “philo-sophic” withdrawal—of study and contemplation and curtailed con-sumption—to a position of leadership in his Church and city, part of hisplan of action should be to reaffirm the Christian version of the publicside of the philosophical and religious life that pagan Hellenism hadadmittedly failed to realize.

Like Dio and Themistius, the Cappadocians used rhetoric, the art andscience of persuasion, as their chief tool; even though Christian bishops, bythe 360s, had come to be civil magistrates, mediators in the chain of powerthat reached from the imperial bureaucracy and magistri militum down tothe local town council,31 they were, first of all, preachers—Christian publicspeakers—and their audience consisted of the gathered liturgical commu-

28. On the Christians as true philosophers, even though they are “barbarians,” see,e.g., Justin, Dial . 2.1, 8.1; I Apol . 26.6; II Apol. 15.3. Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos 31,35; Athenagoras, Legatio 2.4; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2.2. For a fulldiscussion of the history of the term philosophia, in the earlier Greek tradition andamong Christian writers, see Anne-Marie Malingrey, Philosophia: Étude d’un groupede mots dans la littérature grecque, des Présocratiques au IVe siècle après J.-C. (Paris:

Klincksieck, 1961).29. For the full range of meanings of the word in ancient authors, see Malingrey,

Philosophia. The spiritual and “ministerial” aspect of ancient philosophy, especially,has received new attention in recent years; see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Hadot devotes an illuminating chapter to earlyChristianity’s understanding of itself as “philosophy”: “Ancient Spiritual Exercisesand ‘Christian Philosophy’”: 126–44.

30. For the philanthropic practices of the Christians, see, e.g., Epistle to Diognetus5; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2.9; Origen, Contra Celsum 1.67; ClementineHomilies 9.23, 12.30.

31. See Brown, Power and Persuasion, 71–117.




nities of the cities of Asia Minor. The fuel that drove their persuasivespeech, like Themistius’s philologia, was the study of ancient sacred texts,the powerful use of examples from the community’s collective memory:now not primarily the heroes of the Hellenic tradition (though they couldalso be used, of course, with discretion, as Basil reminded his youngnephews32) but the great figures of the Christian Bible. And the “matter”of their persuasion, the great project that seems to have underlain most of

the preaching and letter-writing and political scrambling of Basil and hisfriends, could really be described as the promotion of a thoroughlyChristian version of the classical philosophical life: a life centered on rightfaith and worship in Christian terms, and aimed at growth in Christiancontemplation, supported by the indispensable practices of Christianasceticism and the acquisition of Christian virtue, and characterized on thecivic, public level in dramatically concrete ways by Christian philanthropia,specifically by the care of the poor. Such “philosophy” was the heart of Basil’s vision of the monastic life, a type of radical Christian observance33

that was best realized, in his view, in or near cities, rather than in thesilence of the desert.34 But it was also Basil’s ideal for the life of the wholeChristian body. In the end, what he aimed at was nothing less than the

32. Ad adulescentes 4–5.33. For a description of this practical side of philosophia in the understanding of

the Cappadocians, see Malingrey, Philosophia, 237–61. On the social radicality of Basil’s approach to questions of poverty and possessions, and its origin in both theStoic ideal of asceticism and the Christian Scripture, see Jean Gribomont, “Unaristocrate révolutionnaire, évêque et moine: S. Basile,” Augustinianum 17 (1977):79–191 (repr. in Gribomont, Saint Basile: Évangile et Église [Bellefontaine, 1984]1:65–77).

34. See Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 6.17; John Cassian, Conferences 18.7.Gregory of Nazianzus, in his panegyric on Basil, observes that Basil had succeeded in“reconciling the solitary and the ‘mixed’ life (i.e., a monastic life that was ‘mingled’with secular society)” by founding cells for hermits in the proximity of larger, urbancommunities, “so that the philosophical life would not be without human contactsand the active life would not be lacking in philosophy” (Or. 43.62). For a generaldescription of the kind of monastic life promoted by Basil, see the still useful

treatment of W. K. Lowther Clarke, St. Basil the Great: A Study in Monasticism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913). See also E. F. Morison, St. Basil and his Rule (London: Oxford University Press, 1912); David Amand, L’ascèse monastiquede S. Basile de Césarée (Maredsous, 1948); Jean Gribomont, “Le monachisme au seinde l’Église en Syrie et en Cappadoce,” Studia Monastica 7 (1965): 7–24 [repr. inGribomont, Saint Basile, 1:3–20]; idem, “Saint Basile et le monachisme enthousiaste,”Irénikon 53 (1980): 123–44 [Saint Basile, 1:43–64]; Thomas S +pidlik, “L’idéal dumonachisme basilien,” in P. J. Fedwick, ed., Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist,Ascetic (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), 1:360–74; andmost recently Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1994), 190–232.




formation of a new human community, a new city, on what both Julianand these cultured Cappadocian bishops had come, with differing emo-tions, to recognize as the gathering ruins of the old.

As we have already mentioned, one of Basil’s most widely recognizedachievements was the building of a complex of guest houses, shelters,and hospices for the sick, just outside Caesarea, which was known, atleast in the early fifth century, by his name: the Basileias.35 Sozomen the

historian, writing in the 440s, characterizes the establishment as apoorhouse (ptv.x«n katag≈gion), and says that it was administered in histime by “ecclesiastical philosophers”—urban monks—under the leader-ship of a chorepiscopus named Prapidius.36 Theodoret of Cyrus in hisEcclesiastical History, written at the end of the same decade, says Basilhad made the foundation on land donated by the Emperor Valens on hisfirst visit to Caesarea during Basil’s tenure as bishop, after Basil hadpleased him by a gentle put-down of the Emperor’s hostile but unlearnedchef;37 the imperial donation, according to Theodoret, was intended “forthe poor under Basil’s care,” and especially for the sick.38 Writing to

35. See Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 6.34; for a reference to the Basileias from

the third or fourth decade of the fifth century, see Firmus of Caesarea, ep. 43, toInachios (SC 350:166).36. Eccl. Hist. 6.34.37. Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 4.16; cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 43.47,

and Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium 1.139, who refer to the man under thebiblical cipher of “Nebuzaradan,” a steward of Nebuchadnezzar in II Kgs 25.8.Theodoret relates that his name was Demosthenes, and that he was chief of theimperial kitchen; he committed a linguistic solecism while verbally attacking Basilduring a visit of the Emperor Valens to Cappadocia in the early 370s, at which thebishop simply “smiled and said, ‘We see here an illiterate Demosthenes!’” He rubbedin the point, according to the historian, by adding, “Your business is to attend to theseasoning of soups; you cannot understand theology, because your ears are stoppedup.” (trans. NPNF 3:120) This may well be the same Demosthenes who later becamevicar of Pontus and apparently caused a good deal of trouble for Basil and his party,sponsoring non-Nicene bishops and authorizing Gregory of Nyssa’s removal fromepiscopal office on charges of fiscal malfeasance in 375 (see Basil, epp. 225, 237; see

also PLRE 1:249, s.v., Demosthenes 1 and 2, for full references and the possibleidentification of chef and vicar). Although Basil refers to this official as a “fleshywhale” in a letter to Amphilochius of Iconium (ep. 231) (further evidence, perhaps,that he had once been a cook), his tone is noticeably more respectful in the letter headdressed to the vicar himself during the time of Gregory’s banishment ( ep. 225).Basil may have learned by bitter experience to season his own speech.

38. The chronology of Valens’ visits to Caesarea, and so the exact date of hisdonation, are somewhat confused in the sources. Gregory of Nazianzus (Or. 43.48–53) tells of a visit in which Basil was first confronted by Modestus, the praetorianprefect, and got the best of him in a heated exchange over the Emperor’s support of the Arians. Gregory places this scene in the context of a visit from Valens and his




Elias, the provincial governor, probably in 372, two years after he hadbecome the metropolitan bishop of Caesarea,39 Basil defends himself against the charge of “injuring public interest (tå dhmÒsia)” through hisgovernment of the local church by giving a glowing account of theBasileias as something already up and running, and quite elaborate: howdoes it harm the state, he asks ironically,

to raise in honor of our God a house of prayer built in magnificent fashion,

and, grouped around it, a residence, one portion being a generous homereserved for the head of the community, and the rest subordinate quarters,all in order, for the servants of the divinity—to which there is free access,both for you magistrates and for your retinue? And whom do we wrongwhen we build hospices for strangers, for those who visit us while on ajourney, for those who require some care because of sickness, and when weextend to the latter the necessary comforts, such as nurses, physicians,beasts for traveling, and attendants?40

The origin of the project probably reached back into the last years of Basil’s work as presbyter and chief (if sometimes little-appreciated)advisor to his predecessor, the metropolitan Eusebius. Central AsiaMinor suffered a severe drought, with an acute shortage of food, in thespring and summer of 369.41 In his panegyric for Basil, Gregory of

entourage on the feast of the Epiphany, usually dated in January 372, and says thatBasil’s stance on that occasion forced the Emperor to change his own position; Basil,however, received him to communion and engaged him in personal conversation,according to Gregory, and as a result Valens first began to show “kindly feelingtowards us,” and stopped persecuting those who shared Basil’s pro-Nicene senti-ments. Gregory of Nyssa’s account of Basil’s confrontation with Modestus, in ContraEunomium 1.119–46, suggests that the prefect had come to Caesarea alone toprepare the way for an imperial visit, and hints that Basil himself may not yet havebeen a bishop at the time. In any case, hostility between the three CappadocianFathers and the imperial court continued intermittently until Valens’ death in 378.Philip Rousseau plausibly suggests that Valens visited Caesarea at least twice duringBasil’s career: once in the spring of 370, shortly before the death of Bishop Eusebius,and again at Epiphany, 372 (Basil of Caesarea, 351–53). If that is accepted as true, it

seems best to place Valens’ gift of land to Basil during his first visit in 370, after theconfrontation with Modestus, and to assume that one of Basil’s first priorties on beingelected bishop, in the following September, was to build a hostel that wouldpermanently realize the philanthropic dream he had conceived as a presbyter in 369.

39. For a discussion of the dating of this letter, and so of the foundation of theBasileias, see especially Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 140 and 351–53.

40. ep. 94; trans. R. Deferrari (altered), in Saint Basil: The Letters (LCL 2:151).41. The date of the drought is mainly established by Basil’s homily That God is not

the Author of Evil (Hom. 9), which refers both to a recent earthquake that destroyedthe city of Nicaea—datable to October 11, 368—and to the signs of beginningdrought at home. Basil’s ep. 26, to Gregory of Nazianzus’ brother Caesarius, on




Nazianzus describes the famine of that year in characteristically dramaticterms; he remarks that the hardest part of the distress was the “insensi-bility and insatiability of those who possessed supplies”—the profiteer-ing of the grain merchants at the shortage.42 Basil was not able to imitatethe biblical heroes Moses and Elijah, Gregory writes, who caused food tocome down from heaven, but he did imitate Joseph, whose philanthropiain Egypt took the form of wise management of what resources there

were;

43

more importantly, Basil’s persuasion—the power of his rhetoric—“opened the stores of those who possessed them”44 and apparentlybrought about a more equitable distribution of the local reserves. Healso opened a kind of soup kitchen, using contributed food, for the poorof all ages, and worked in it himself, along with his household servantsand fellow clergy, providing its visitors both with simple fare and—asone might expect from Basil—with “the nourishment of the Word.”45

2. It was undoubtedly in this same spring and summer of 369 that Basil,still a presbyter, delivered three blunt and powerful, if unconnectedhomilies on wealth and the use of property.46 The first of these—Homily

gratitude at escaping death, may come from the same time. See Jean Bernardi, La prédication des Pères Cappadociens (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de France,1968), 61–64; on the famine and the project of the Basileias, see also Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 136–44.

42. Or. 43.34.43. Ibid. 36.44. Ibid. 35.45. Ibid. 35, 36.46. The rhetorical structure and argument of these homilies has been carefully

studied by Carla Lo Cicero, “La struttura delle omelie sulla ricchezza di Basilio,” inBasilio di Cesarea: La sua età, la sua opera e il Basilianesimo in Sicilia (Acts of International Congress, Messina, December 3–6, 1979) I (Messina: Centro di StudiUmanistici, 1983), 425–87. On their content and its connection with Basil’s socialactivity, see Ioannes Karayannopoulos, “St. Basil’s Social Activity: Principles andPraxis,” in Fedwick, ed., Basil of Caesarea, 375–92. On Basil’s rhetoric, see George L.

Kustas, “Saint Basil and the Rhetorical Tradition,” ibid., 221–80. These homilies of Basil, along with the related homilies of the two Gregories, are studied by MarySheather, “Pronouncements of the Cappadocians on Issues of Poverty and Wealth,” inPauline Allen, Lawrence Cross, and Raymond Canning, eds., Prayer and Spirituality inthe Early Church I (Brisbane, 1998), 230–39, and Anthony Meredith, S.J., “The ThreeCappadocians on Beneficence: A Key to their Audiences,” in M. B. Cunningham andP. Allen, eds., Homilist and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and ByzantineHomiletics (Leiden, 1998), 89–104. See also the dissertation of Susan R. Holman, TheBody of the Poor in Fourth-Century Cappadocia: Seven Sermons on Hunger, Sickness,and Penury (Brown University, 1998). On the social and economic conditions formingthe background of all these homilies, see Ramon Teja, Organizacion economica y social




VI in our modern numbering—deals with the Lucan parable of the “richfool,” who must keep building larger barns to house his surplus grain(Lk 12.16–18), and is subtitled “On Greed” (Per‹ pleonej¤aw). After abrief explanation of the Gospel passage, Basil launches himself directlyinto what will be a central theme of all three of these homilies: that thegoods of this earth are given to us not for possession but for stewardship.Addressing an imagined wealthy Christian, he says:

Recall, my friend, who has given these things to you. Remember who youare, what you are asked to manage, the one from whom you receive it, andthe reason you have been privileged before so many others. You are, in fact,the steward of a good God, the household manager for your fellowservants. Do not think that all of this has been prepared simply for yourbelly. Make plans about what you hold in your hands as if it belonged toothers; you may enjoy yourself for a little while, but then it will melt andvanish, and you will be asked to give an exact accounting for all of this.47

Landowners and grain merchants should take as their model the earthitself, which bears fruit not for its own benefit but for ours,48 or a riverin flood, whose rich abundance of water overflows its banks to nourishthe surrounding fields and supply smaller springs for later use.49 Asmotivation for sharing what they have, Basil offers his propertied hearerswhat any classical epideictic orator, praising virtue or blaming vice,might promise: the honor of being a benefactor to the poor, of beingcalled “father” by innumerable new children,50 the honor of havingbeggars at one’s own doors rather than having to ask help from others.51

Yet the filotim¤a he promotes here is set in a new imaginative context:the greatest honor a grain owner can ambition is to stand before thejudgment seat of Christ, surrounded by the angels and saints, and thereto be called “nurturer” and “benefactor” and “all the other titles of philanthropy” by the people one has helped.52

Towards the end of his homily, Basil returns to the theme of privateproperty as a trust rather than a permanent possession, in a passagewhose two-fisted prophetic radicality has made it justly famous. The

de capadocia en el siglo IV, segun los Padres Capadocios (Acta Salmanticensia: Filosofiay Letras 78; University of Salamanca, 1974). For a useful review of earlier literature onBasil’s social ideas, see Gribomont, “Aristocrate révolutionnaire” (above, n. 33), 65–69.

47. Basil, Hom. 6.2 (PG 31:264c11–265A2).48. Ibid. 3 (265B13–C3).49. Ibid. 5 (272A14–B5).50. Ibid. 3 (265D3–268B1).51. Ibid. 6 (276A7–10).52. Ibid. 3 (265D8–268A11).




merchant hoarding his grain to run up the prices may simply ask, “HaveI not the right to keep what is mine?” Basil answers that the goods of theearth are like the open seating in the public theater: we take what isotherwise unoccupied, but all of it really belongs to the community.53 If each one simply took from the earth what he or she needed, leaving therest for the needs of others, clearly no one would be rich and no onepoor.

Who, then, is greedy? (Basil asks) The one who does not remain contentwith self-sufficiency. Who is the one who deprives others? The one whohoards what belongs to everyone. Are you not greedy? Are you not onewho deprives others? You have received these things for stewardship, andhave turned them into your own property! Is not the one who tears off what another is wearing called a clothes-robber? But the one who does notclothe the naked, when he was able to do so—what other name does hedeserve? The bread that you hold on to belongs to the hungry; the cloakyou keep locked in your storeroom belongs to the naked; the shoe that ismoldering in your possession belongs to the person with no shoes; the silverthat you have buried belongs to the person in need. You do an injury to asmany people as you might have helped with all these things!54

The theme is a fairly familiar one in the culturally critical tradition of

Greek philosophy, as we have seen already, and had been sounded by theEmperor Julian in his attempt at priestly reform.55 Here Basil, theChristian priest and rhetor, has put it at the service of Christianpreaching and Christian philanthropy.

The second homily from that painful summer of 369—Homily VII,entitled in the manuscripts “Against the Wealthy” (PrÚw toÁwploutoËntaw)—deals with the Gospel story of the rich young man inMatthew 19: the earnest young observer of the Law, who “went awaysad” when Jesus invited him to give away all his possessions to the poorand join the company of his disciples. Significantly, perhaps, in Basil’streatment of this passage, Jesus is presented explicitly as a philosophicalsage: “the true teacher” (ı élhyinÚw didãskalow),56 “the great physician

of souls” (ı megåw t«n cux«n fiatrÒw),57

our good and wise “advisor”(sÊmboulow), who “made himself poor for us, that we might become richby his poverty” (II Cor 8.9).58 In what follows, wealth and wisdom are

53. Ibid. 7 (276B4–9).54. Ibid. 7 (276C8–277A8).55. See above, nn. 20–22.56. Hom. 7.1 (280A15).57. Ibid. (281A4–5).58. Ibid. 9 (304C1–5).




presented as being inherently in tension, if not in open conflict. The bulkof the homily is a treatise on the vanity of pursuing wealth, with tellingrhetorical elaborations (ethopoiiai ) describing the psychology of affluenceas a spiral of mounting need,59 and pointing to the familiar humantendency to blame one’s greed on one’s spouse.60 Basil points out, too, inone passage, that the addictive power of greed leads people not only tocovet vast possessions but to seek domination over others; again, like

rivers flooding the landscape—depicted now not in their beneficial but intheir destructive role—

so those who progress to great power take on, at the expense of those theyhave already subjected, the ability to do still greater injustice; the growth of their power becomes a superabundance of wickedness. . . . Nothing canwithstand the force of wealth; everything bows to its tyranny, everythingtrembles before its lordship; each of those who has suffered unjustly is moreconcerned not to experience some new evil, than to bring the perpetrator tojustice for what has happened before. He drives away your yokes of oxen,he plows and seeds your field, he harvests what does not belong to him.And if you speak out in resistance, you are beaten; if you complain, you areheld for damages and led away to prison. . . .61

What is new, what is Christian, in this homily is not so much its

suggestion that affluence is always ill gotten, always rests on a kind of social violence, a view which we have seen espoused also by Seneca, butrather the assertion that the accumulation of wealth grows from wantingor misdirected love. The rich young man went away from Jesus sad, Basilsuggests, because his love for his possessions was stronger than his lovefor his neighbor, let alone his love for Jesus and his disciples.

If what you assert was true (Basil apostrophizes the young man in theGospel), that you have kept the command of love since your youth andhave distributed what you have as much to others as to yourself, how is ityou have this excess of wealth? For care of the needy consumes our wealth,when each person receives a small amount to meet his or her ownnecessities, and all divide up what they have equally and use it for those in

need. But you seem to have “many possessions.” How is that? Is it not clearthat you have considered your own enjoyment more precious than thecomfort of the masses? Surely the more you abound in wealth, the moreyou are lacking in love!62

59. Ibid. 5 (292B–293D).60. Ibid. 4 (288C–289C).61. Ibid. 5 (293C10–296A3).62. Ibid. 1 (281A12–B9).




Basil’s seventh Homily deals, then, primarily with the use of money;the “bottom line” of his message, sounded urgently towards the end, isfor those with a surplus of wealth to disregard even the claims of familyand status and to give generously to those in need—to give their wealthaway now, and not trust the uncertainties of courts and heirs by simplyleaving the poor a legacy in their wills.63 A modern American reader canhardly avoid admiring Basil’s aptitude for fundraising, or suspecting that

Basil was not only preaching here, but doing preliminary developmentwork for his “new city.”The eighth Homily, on the other hand—entitled “A Homily Delivered

in a Time of Famine and Drought”—is again, like Homily VI, a directappeal to those who had food supplies in that catastrophic summer tomake them available to the hungry. Here the biblical underpinning is lessthe New Testament than passages in the Hebrew prophets like Amos 3,which find in present calamities intimations of the judgment of God.Basil enriches this homily, even more than the two previous ones, with allthe effects of classical rhetorical virtuosity, powerfully depicting the hot,cloudless sky and the parched earth of a rainless season,64 and remark-ing, in an ironic reversal of the Gospel saying, that in Cappadocia “thelaborers are many, but there is not even a small harvest.”65 Offering us aglimpse of his own frustration, he describes the aimlessness of the town’sunderemployed population, their failure to take this calamity to heart asa call to conversion, and the predominance in his own congregation of women and noisy, inattentive children, while the men, free of productivelabor, simply lounge in the square.66 Then, darkening the mood of hisword-painting still further, he evokes, near the end, a terrifying picture of the effect of hunger on the human form.67 For Basil the preacher, thereason that a provident God allows such catastrophes is to make usaware of our own sinful greed, and to correct us. It is not that God hasbecome hard-hearted, or that his care for us has turned to misanthropia;“but the clear and obvious reason why we are not being treated in theusual way is that we receive, but do not share, we praise his generosity

but deprive the needy of this very thing in ourselves.”68 Finally, Basilechoes Julian and the Stoics in suggesting that human reason itself

63. Ibid. 8–9 (300B–304A).64. Hom. 8.2 (305C–308B).65. Ibid. 308 (A12–13).66. Ibid. 3 (309B–313A).67. Ibid. 7 (321BD).68. Ibid. 3 (309A11–14).




should move his hearers towards sharing what they have, and makesreverse use of Julian’s appeal to the good example of the religiousopposition:

Let us, who are endowed with reason, not appear more cruel than theirrational beasts. They use what is provided for them by nature as acommon possession. The sheep, after all, graze together on the samemountain; great herds of horses roam together over one and the same plain,

and all of them yield to each other what each may have, in the necessity of consuming together what they need. But we make private what is common,we take individual possession of what belongs to all. We should be put toshame by what is said about the philanthropy of the Greeks: among someof them philanthropic law decrees a single table, and a common meal, andthey have formed what amounts to a single household for a largepopulation.69 Let us abandon the outsiders, though, and turn to the exampleof the three thousand [in the early Christian community of Acts 2]; let usimitate the first band of Christians, when all things were held in common—when life and soul and harmony and the table all were shared, whenfraternity was undivided, and unfeigned love formed many bodies intoone. . . .70

In the tradition of classical philosophical rhetoric, Basil is here invoking

a Golden Age, an original utopia, as a motivating human model forjustice and generosity. He begins with the examples of peaceful animalsand pious pagans, but sweeps on to Scripture; in the end, it is theprimitive Christian community, the band of disciples idealistically de-picted in the Book of Acts, that provides the determining image for hisappeal. Reasoning and rhetoric are essential, he seems to suggest, butmust themselves be redeemed by the égãph énupÒkritow71 of the Chris-tian tradition.

3. Basil’s homilies of the summer of 369 deal with themes of what wewould call today social justice and economic equality. In themselves,surely, they were not intended as essays in political theory, but as

69. Basil may be thinking of reports of the common life and ideals of thePythagorean communities. See Iamblichus, De vita Pythagorica 17.71–74 (acceptanceinto the community); 18.80 (structure of the community); 21.95–100 (daily order of activities and common meals); 33.229–35 (emphasis on friendship [fil¤a] as basis of community and culture).

70. Ibid. 8 (325A2–B4).71. This is a fairly common phrase in the New Testament epistles: see Rom 12.9;

II Cor 12.6; I Pet 1.22 (filadelf¤a énupÒkritow); cf. I Tim 1.5: “love based onunfeigned faith.”




responses to a crisis: appeals to the conscience of the Christian proper-tied class in Caesarea to use their resources to alleviate the suffering allaround them, and to put an end to profiteering in the famine. 72 Yet onecan detect in them, taken together, hints of a larger scheme for theChristian, philosophical reshaping of his city: hints of an ideal of humansociety and of the dignity of the human person that had deep, if somewhat slender roots in Hellenic philosophy, but that found new

motivation and explanation in the Christian Gospels. The practicalrealization of that scheme, in institutional terms, was the collection of hospices, monastic buildings, and a Church that Basil may well havebegun planning at about the same time, perhaps as an outgrowth of therefuge and soup kitchen Gregory Nazianzen tells us he opened during thesummer of famine, and that was to be completed during his first twoyears as bishop of Caesarea. To understand the seriousness and scope of this plan, as well as the importance of rhetoric in achieving it andwinning its acceptance, we will not go wrong, I think, in consideringthree other homilies on the subject of Christian philanthropia by Basil’stwo closest theological and pastoral associates: his younger brotherGregory of Nyssa, and his lifelong friend and soul-mate, Gregory of Nazianzus.73 Although the dating and original setting of all three mustremain conjectural, I want to suggest here that both Gregory of Nyssa’stwo homilies “on loving the poor” and Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration14, on the same subject, can best be understood if we suppose they wereoriginally delivered in Caesarea during the years that Basil was develop-ing and carrying out his philanthropic program, and that both their

72. Dom Gribomont, in his article “Aristocrate révolutionnaire,” cited above(n. 33), points out clearly the difference between Basil’s social criticism and that of modern socialist and communist theory. Basil’s concern is to remind those with anabundance of external possessions (ktÆmata)—his own social equals—of theirobligations of responsible stewardship, as well as their duty in charity towards theirpoorer neighbors. His monastic writings, Gribomont points out, emphasize theimportance of work for every monk, as well as the salutary effects of limiting

individual possessions: “Ce goût du travail, cohérent avec le goût de l’austérité, naîtdu coeur; l’amour de Dieu, l’amour des frères constituent le dynamisme qui remplaceavantageusement la concupiscence et l’avarice. . . . Un corps social, diversifié,hiérarchisé, très loin du nivellement démagogique, domine la vision basilienne et, sansoublier ses origines stoïciennes, s’intègre dans la vision paulinienne du corps duChrist” (77).

73. These homilies are: Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 14, On Love of the Poor (PG35:857–909); and Gregory of Nyssa, Sermon on Benevolence and Sermon on theText, “As Often as You Have Done it to One of These, You Have Done it to Me,”edited together, with commentary, by Adrianus van Heck, Gregorii Nysseni dePauperibus Amandis Orationes Duo (Leiden: Brill, 1964).




content and their style were carefully crafted to lend persuasive force towhat Basil himself had begun. They seem unquestionably to belong tothe same project of “building a new city.”

a) Dating the works of Gregory of Nyssa is a notoriously speculativebusiness. We know that he worked as a professor of rhetoric in his nativeCaesarea from about 365 until 372, when his brother Basil—who, asbishop since 370, had been engaged in a struggle with the imperial court

to retain ecclesiastical control of the province of Cappadocia—more orless forced him to accept the bishopric of Nyssa, a small market town onthe Halys River, some sixty miles west of Caesarea. Gregory was forcedinto exile by hostile elements in his Church, on apparently trumped-upcharges of financial malfeasance, from 375 to 378, with the support of the imperial vicar Demosthenes;74 he seems not to have found his voice asa widely respected episcopal leader until after Basil’s death in 379,perhaps even after the Council of Constantinople in 381. For this reason,it seems, Jean Daniélou—who made the first modern attempts to workout a chronology of Gregory’s works75—tends to date most of his extantsermons and pastoral works after 382. Thus Daniélou, followed by JeanBernardi in his own large-scale study of the preaching of the threeCappadocians,76 suggests that Gregory delivered both sermons on

philanthropia in the 380s, possibly in Lent of 382,77 and assumes that he

74. See above, n. 37. The office of imperial vicar had been created in the reformsof Diocletian, as the administrative officer in charge of tax-collecting and theadministration of justice within a diocese, or grouping of provinces, under the generalsupervision of the praetorian prefect. Julian had curtailed their freedom to spendgovernment money, but they retained their fiscal and juridical role at least until thetime of Justinian. See A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602 (Oxford:Blackwell, 1964) 1:46, 130, 481–82, 493.

75. Jean Daniélou, “La chronologie des sermons de saint Grégoire de Nysse,”RecSR 29 (1955): 346–72; “Le mariage de Grégoire de Nysse et la chronologie de savie,” REAg 2 (1956): 71–78; “La chronologie des oeuvres de Grégoire de Nysse,”SP 7 (TU 92; Berlin, 1966): 159–69. Less speculative, and generally more reliable, isGerhard May, “Die Chronologie des Lebens und der Werke des Gregor von Nyssa,”

in M. Harl, ed., Écriture et culture philosophique dans la pensée de Grégoire de Nysse(1971), 51–66.

76. Prédication des Pères Cappadociens, 273–83.77. Daniélou, “Chronologie des sermons,” 360–61, gives what seems to me an

unusually weak reason for proposing a date of 382: a perceived echo of Gregory’ssermon Against Those Who Cannot Bear Criticism (PG 46:308A–316D), whichseems to have been delivered during the New Year revels of that year. The parallelpointed to by Daniélou is that Gregory speaks of his own role, in both sermons, asbeing that of a teacher, and refers to his congregation as “reasonable people”(logiko¤). Surely such details are far too ordinary, in the mouth of a philosophically-minded Christian rhetor, to suggest one particular epoch in Gregory’s thinking.




gave them in his own Church at Nyssa. There seems, in fact, to be littlereal evidence, internal or external, that Gregory could not have preachedthese two sermons at an earlier date, or indeed that he was even a bishopwhen he preached them. We know, in fact, from a letter written toGregory by Gregory of Nazianzus, sometime between 365 and 372, thatBasil’s younger brother, who had been educated as a rhetorician but hadworked as a lector in the Church of Caesarea for some time after his

baptism in the mid-360s, later returned to his secular profession of teaching rhetoric—perhaps as a result of the lapse of Julian’s anti-Christian decree. In his Epistle 11, Gregory Nazianzen chides hisnamesake, in a jocular but pointed way, for leaving the most preciouswork of all, even though he remains a believer, and urges him to returnto active ministry as a preacher: “One does not simply live for oneself,but also for one’s neighbor,” he writes, “and there is no profit inpersuading oneself [of the faith] if one does not also persuade others.”78

It is certainly possible, it seems to me, that Gregory heeded this admo-nition, and that he put his considerable rhetorical and intellectual skillsat the service of the Church sometime in the late 360s; it is also quitepossible (contra Bernardi79) that the younger Gregory was ordained apresbyter in Caesarea at some time before his appointment to thebishopric in 372, and that he may have preached these two homiliesthere under the sponsorship of his older brother, who became bishop inthe metropolitan city in 370. Most scholars today assume that the late360s or early 370s was the period in which the younger Gregory wrotehis treatise On Virginity, as a rhetorically elaborate, Platonizing theoreti-cal support for Basil’s efforts at organizing a new form of monastic life;it would seem at least plausible to date his two sermons On Loving thePoor, also, to the years between 369 and 372, when Basil was conceivingand promoting his great charitable enterprise as part of his new, urban“philosophy,” and to see them also as contributions to his brother’sprogram. Certainly the depiction of large numbers of wandering, home-less poor in these two homilies, and their impassioned, satirical critique

of ostentatious wealth—like that in Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration 14—seems more believeable in a provincial capital with some claim to socialand economic importance than in a small country town.

Although the themes of these two sermons of Gregory of Nyssa aresimilar, nothing in either of them suggests that they were intended as a

78. Gregory of Nazianzus, ep. 11.7 (ed. P. Gallay, Saint Grégoire de Nazianze:Lettres I [Coll. Budé: Paris: “Les Belles Lettres,” 1964], 18).

79. Prédication, 375.




pair, and in fact their manuscript traditions differ considerably. In thefirst, entitled in Greek On Beneficence (Per‹ eÈpoi˝aw), Gregory informsus that his sermon has been preceded by two homilies on temperance andfasting; now, he says, he will turn to “greater and more challengingteaching,”80 to interior asceticism, to “the bodiless fasting and immate-rial self-control” which consists in refraining from vice. From its openinglines, this sermon has a decidedly philosophical tone. Gregory begins by

remarking that “the one who presides over this Church”—the bishop,presumably, who remains in the third person here and who thereforeneed not be himself!—as well as other “teachers of unwavering piety andthe virtuous way of life (polite¤aw),” are really more like instructors inelementary grammar than purveyors of higher learning.81 Even so, hisown purpose here is to lead his audience a step further in their interioreducation, moving them on from external ascetical practices towards thepurity of soul that is their real goal. “Let a philosophical way of life,then, be our tutor in Christian living, and let the soul flee from thedestructive influence of vice.”82 Gregory then turns to the subject of beneficence, and paints the first of several dramatic scenes or ekphraseis,depicting the crowds of wretched homeless people and refugees thatcrowd the city’s streets;83 the purpose of the description, he acknowl-edges at the end, is curative: “to heal the opposing disorders (pãyh) of your surfeit and your brothers’ and sisters’ hunger,” by moving hishearers to merciful action, to use the tools of exhortation to “open thegates of beneficence (eÈpoi˝a).”84

The sermon’s explicitly Christian message then begins. “Do not lookdown on those who lie at your feet, as if you judged them worthless.Consider who they are, and you will discover their dignity: they have puton the figure (prÒsvpon) of our Savior; for the one who loves humanity(ı filãnyrvpow) has lent them his own figure, so that through it theymight shame those who lack compassion and hate the poor”—liketravelers who wear medallions of the Emperor around their necks, tointimidate bandits.85 Gregory then turns to the Christian expectation of

the last judgment of Christ, dramatically invoking the scene of Matthew25, in which the returning King, at history’s end, will ask each mortalwhat they have done for “these, the least of my brothers and sisters” (Mt

80. Van Heck, Gregorii Nysseni, 4.4–5.81. Ibid. 3.1–4.82. Ibid. 5.4–5.83. Ibid. 6.19–7.6.84. Ibid. 7.12–21.85. Ibid. 8.23–9.4.




25.40, 45). In that final trial, the poor will become advocates for thosewho have shown mercy to them, opening the doors of the Kingdom tothe generous, and shutting them on the stingy.86

In the second half of his homily, Gregory continues to interweave thisbiblical theme with a more philosophical treatment of compassion andjustice. The purpose of the Gospel’s prediction of the coming judgment,he says, is “that we might learn the goodness of beneficence (eÈpoi˝a).”87

Gregory then gives a lengthy evocation of beneficence—not, one mightobserve, the more interior virtue of philanthropia—as the chief of virtues, revealed to us by God’s own goodness in creating and sustainingall things.88 We, by contrast, who are called to imitate God, often ignorethe needs of those around us and live only for our material gratifica-tion.89 The solution Gregory offers to counteract such failure is for us touse our reason as well as to listen to the Gospel: “You, then, who havebeen created rational, who have your mind as interpreter and instructorin the things of God: do not be enticed by temporal things!” 90 A rea-sonable person will recognize that ultimately all things belong to Godand that “we are brothers and sisters, members of the same tribe.”91 If everyone cannot have an equal share of our “inheritance,” at least every-one should have some part of what God has given to all. The person whois bent on owning everything around him is a “bitter tyrant, anirreconcilable barbarian, an insatiable beast.”92 Gregory concludes hishomily with two contrasting descriptions of great dramatic power: oneof the greedy plutocrat in his splendid palace, surrounded with servantsand entertainers, whose habits of consumption mean “destruction for allkinds of living things,”93 the other of the poor, clustered at his gates likecountless reproductions of Lazarus in Luke 16, roughly kept back byporters as their cries are drowned out by the sounds of celebrationwithin.94 It is to shock such “haters of the poor” (misÒptvxoi), he ob-

86. Ibid. 9.5–11.

87. Ibid. 10.6–8.88. Ibid. 10.8–12.13.89. Ibid. 12.14–13.17.90. Ibid. 13.18f. On the theme of the enslaving effect of greed, which lessens the

full exercise of reason by clouding the mind with passion, see Epictetus, Discourse6.1.87, 1.129–30, 4.33; Enchiridion 15.

91. Ibid. 13.22–24. For the use of this theme in classical philosophy see above,n. 24.

92. Ibid. 14.1–4.93. Ibid. 14.16–15.25.94. Ibid.16.1–18.




serves, that the Gospel describes for us the prospect of judgment andhell.95 In the same spirit, Gregory urges his hearers to think about theirend.96

Gregory’s second homily on philanthropy is centered on the sameMatthaean judgment scene invoked in the first, and especially on thephrase of Jesus, “Inasmuch as you have done it to one of these least of my brothers and sisters, you have done it to me.” This has led Van Heck,

the modern editor of these works, to suggest that it, too, was delivered atthe beginning of Lent, on the grounds that this Gospel passage has beenread in the Byzantine liturgy for the third pre-Lenten Sunday—theSunday of “farewell to meat”—since at least the sixth century. 97 In thissecond homily, the atmosphere is dramatic from the start. Gregorydescribes how the Gospel passage continues to strike terror into his ownheart as he imagines the scene98 and realizes how many poor and sickpeople still surround us, calling on our compassion.99 The style andchoice of language are intentionally theatrical; so Gregory concludes along description of the sick poor in the city with the words, “Will this beenough to assure that we make no mistake about the law of our nature:that we have made a tragic depiction (tragƒde›n) of the sufferings of thisnature, and have described the disease in words and recalled its patheticdetails to our memory?”100 The allusion to tragedy suggests that his owndescriptions here are also meant to arouse “fear and pity” in his hearers,and to move them to virtuous action, rooted in a salutary awareness of the precariousness of good fortune.

The focus of this homily, in fact, is not simply the contrast betweenrich and poor, but the acute problem raised by the presence of homeless,untended lepers, begging in the streets of the city. In an extendedekphrasis that follows this opening reflection on the Gospel judgmentscene, Gregory offers a graphic description of these lepers as a “spec-tacle” (y°ama) that cannot fail to move our hearts.101 Although he doesnot use the technical terms, it is clear that he is referring—with hiscustomary well-informed interest in medical matters—to our modern

disease of leprosy, present in the Greek world since the time of Alexander

95. Ibid. 16.19–17.3.96. Ibid. 17.15–18.14.97. Ibid. 100f.98. Ibid. 21.6–8.99. Ibid. 23.22–24.2.100. Ibid. 29.16–19.101. Ibid. 24.13.




and known to Greek medical writers since the third century b.c.e. asl°pra or §lefant¤asiw.102 Gregory’s plea, throughout this homily, is thathis hearers should show their compassion for these sufferers not simplyby providing them with food and financial support, but by taking theminto their homes.103 It is not a sufficient display of mercy, he pointedlyadds, simply to make arrangements for them to be sheltered “at somedistance from our way of life (pÒrrv t∞w ≤met°raw zv∞w)”104—a detail

which suggests that at the time this homily was delivered, Basil’s hospicefor the sick poor outside the walls of Caesarea had not yet become areality.

c) Gregory’s dramatic description of the lepers in his city raises one of the most intriguing problems in all these Cappadocian homilies on

philanthropia, as well as providing us with one of the clearest hints of what their original purpose may have been. In his erudite commentaryon the two homilies of Gregory of Nyssa, Adrianus van Heck points outsome fifteen instances of direct verbal parallels between Gregory’s longekphrasis on the lepers and a similar passage in Gregory of Nazianzus’sfourteenth Oration, On Love of the Poor (Per‹ filoptvx¤aw).105 It seemsunquestionable that there is literary dependence; and because of thesomewhat more elaborate language in Gregory Nazianzen’s version, aswell as the presence there of additional pathetic details, it seems mostlikely—as Van Heck suggests—that it is he who is using and developingan existing source, rather than vice versa.106 Gregory Nazianzen’s long

102. On the known forms of the disease in the ancient world, see F. W. Beyer,“Aussatz,” RAC 1 (1950): 1023–28, and the literature cited there. Although thedisease referred to in the Hebrew Bible as “leprosy” (Hebr. Sar‘at ; LXX l°pra) wasclearly some other kind or kinds of skin disease, leprosy in the modern medical senseseems to have entered the Mediterranean world from Persia or Mesopotamia shortlyafter the expeditions of Alexander—possibly brought back by his soldiers. Accordingto Oribasius, the medical compiler and advisor of Julian, the first Greeek writer todescribe the disease was the peripatetic Straton (died ca. 287–267 b.c.e.). It is alsodescribed accurately by several later medical writers—notably Aretaeus of Cappadocia

(ca. 150–200 c.e.: ed. K. Hude, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum 2 [Berlin, 1958], 85–90)—and was known to Galen (11.142; 12.315). The consensus of ancient Greekphysicians was that leprosy could not be communicated by physical contact, and theygenerally regarded the Oriental practice of isolating lepers as superstitious andinhuman.

103. Ibid. 29.25–26.1, 30.1–4, 33.23–27.104. Ibid. 29.25–30.1.105. Ibid. 121–24.106. See Van Heck’s careful analysis of the data, ibid. 122–23. Van Heck’s other

suggestion (123f.), that both Gregories may be using a passage from a now-lost letterof Basil as their common source, seems an unnecessary conjecture.




and highly artistic oration, in fact—as Francesco Trisoglio showed inabundant detail over thirty years ago—is filled with “echoes andreminiscences” of a number of classical Greek authors;107 for a well-trained rhetor of the fourth century, this was simply an indication of thecultural heritage that formed a bond between speaker and audience, away of staking out the dimensions of the intellectual and emotionalworld in which persuasion was possible. To include direct allusions also

to a recent rhetorical effort of his younger friend, a piece that may havealready left a powerful effect on those whom he himself was nowaddressing, would be both a rhetor’s compliment and an indication thatboth Gregories were involved in the same humanitarian project. Unlesswe are to date all three of these sermons in the 380s, and suppose someother, unknown setting for their delivery, the most plausible context forGregory of Nazianzus’ Oration 14 seems, once again, to be that of Basil’scampaign to introduce a practical, “philosophically” grounded Christianapproach to social welfare at Caesarea, and the most probable settingseems to be in Caesarea itself, some time between late 369 and the springof 372.

There seems to be literary confirmation for this surmise in GregoryNazianzen’s Panegyric on Basil . In the passage we quoted earlier, whereGregory so glowingly describes Basil’s “new city” for the poor, he addsthat this institution has put an end to the awful local phenomenon of homeless lepers:

There is no longer before our eyes that terrible and piteous spectacle of humans who are corpses before their death, dead already in most of thelimbs of their bodies, driven away from their cities, their homes, the marketplaces, the sources of water, even from their nearest and dearest—recognizable by name rather than by physical appearance. . . .108

Gregory then proceeds to give yet another depiction of the wretched stateof the lepers who formerly roamed the streets, a short passage which isagain marked by five verbal echoes of Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon on

Matthew 25, as well as of his own fourteenth Oration. The need forpractical compassion that the younger Gregory had described in self-consciously “tragic” terms in his second homily, in a passage whichGregory of Nazianzus had incorporated, with added elaboration, into

107. Francesco Trisoglio, “Reminiscenze e consonanze classiche nella XIV orazionedi San Gregorio Nazianzeno,” Atti della Accademia delle Scienze di Torino II: Classedi Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche 99 (1964): 129–204.

108. Or. 43.63.




his fourteenth Oration, is presented here as having been decisively metby Basil’s own mercy and foresight:

He it was, more than all others, who persuaded us, as human beings, not todespise other humans or to dishonor Christ, the one head of us all, by ourinhumanity towards them, but through the misfortunes of others to put ourown fortunes in order, and as people who are in need of mercy ourselves tolend mercy to God. Therefore he did not consider it beneath him—he whowas well born and from a good family, who was resplendent in glory—tohonor this disease with his lips;109 but he embraced them as brothers andsisters: not, as one might suspect, out of vainglory—for who stood so farfrom that weakness?—but to give an example of drawing near themphysically in order to heal them by his own philosophy, an exhortation bothspoken and beyond words.110

Gregory’s return in this passage to the powerful, “tragic” description hehad borrowed from his younger namesake once before, now in thecontext of celebrating Basil’s great hospice as an instance of the successof his Christian “philosophy,” seems to me, at least, to confirm that bothGregories’ earlier depictions of this awful disease had themselves formedpart of a collaboratiave parainesis: oratorical contributions by twomaster rhetors of Basil’s camp to the campaign of persuasion that was

eventually to result in a new philanthropic institution.We can consider the rest of Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 14 more

briefly here: not because it is less noteworthy than the sermons we havediscussed up to now—it is, in fact, one of his most eloquent and mostperfectly constructed orations, as well as one of his longest—but becausewe have already dealt with most of its themes and theses in the works of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa. Here there is no clue to what liturgicalsetting, if any, the sermon may have had; Gregory does not anchor thework in a central biblical passage, but proceeds in the manner of aphilosophical discourse to give a comprehensive treatment of theimportance of loving the poor. Curiously, though, Gregory’s work is atthe same time the most Christian and biblical, in its way of arguing, of all

the sermons we have been discussing: the speaker tightly weaves a web of biblical allusions and examples into the texture of what is, on thesurface, a classic piece of epideictic oratory. Gregory begins by adiscussion of which virtue we might recognize as supreme; after listingsome twenty candidates for that title in the chapters that follow—faith,hope, love, hospitality, patience, gentleness, zeal, and others: each made

109. Is Gregory referring to Basil’s oratory, or to his actually kissing lepers?110. Or. 43.63.




imaginable by the example of a character in the Bible who embodies it—he concludes: “If, following the command of Paul and of Christ himself,we must suppose that love is the first and greatest of commandments, thecrowning point of the law and the prophets, I find that love of the poor,and compassion and sympathy for our own flesh and blood, is its mostexcellent form.”111 Philanthropia—a key word in this oration as in all theworks we have been discussing—finds its perfection, in Gregory’s eyes, in

philoptochia.Gregory moves, then, to suggest as a concrete occasion for exercisingthis virtue the plight of the homeless lepers we have already discussed.Before echoing, as it seems, Gregory of Nyssa’s dramatic portrait of theirwoes, he sets it in the context of the general difficulty of humanembodiment, of the complex set of relationships which the human being,as God’s image, has with the material world to which our bodies intrin-sically belong.112 Gregory’s point is not simply to echo this classical Pla-tonic and ascetic topos, present in most of his works, but to provide thesetting for his oration’s main thesis: “We must care for what is part of our nature and shares in our slavery [i.e., our body]. For even if I laycharges against it, because of its passibility, still I stand by it as a friend,because of the one who bound me in it. We must each of us care no lessfor the bodies of our neighbors than for our own. . . . And we mustconsider this to be the single way towards salvation both for our bodiesand our souls: philanthropia shown towards them [i.e., our neigh-bors].”113 Gregory goes on to depict the situation of the lepers, appar-ently drawing on the other Gregory’s graphic evocation, and then con-trasts it with a description of the careless rich that also parallels, withoutexact verbal echoes, Gregory of Nyssa’s satiric portrait of wealth in hisfirst sermon.

Gregory Nazianzen then turns to discuss the insecurity of all humanaffairs, and urges his hearers to “possess their souls in acts of mercy,” tofind true security in “giving something to God” by their generosity toothers.114 Taking up a theme dear to both Basil and the other Gregory, he

also develops the theme that all human ownership is to be understood interms of stewardship,115 and suggests that private property is really theresult of aggression and greed, sanctioned by law.116 The point is again

111. Or. 14.5.112. Ibid. 6–7.113. Ibid. 8.114. Ibid. 19–23.115. Ibid. 24–26.116. Ibid. 26. For parallels in antique philosophy, see above, n. 20.




117. Ibid. 26.118. Ibid. 27.119. Ibid. 31.120. Ibid. 39.121. Ibid. 40.

not so much theoretical as practical: “Think, I ask you, of humanity’soriginal equality, not of its final diversity; think not of the conqueror’slaw, but of the creator’s! As far as you can, support nature, honorprimeval liberty, show reverence for yourself and cover the shame of your race, help to resist sickness, offer relief to human need. . . .”117 Tobe filãnyrvpow is to imitate God, “for a human being has no moregodlike ability than that of doing good.”118

After a discussion of the unanswerable question of why God allowsour fellow men and women to suffer as so many do—a question Gregorydodges by saying that we will only understand God’s wisdom andprovidence in eternity119—he concludes by making a synthetic survey of the many passages in Scripture where God commands us to be concernedfor the poor. These texts, along with the judgment scene of Matthew 25,make it terrifyingly clear that philanthropia is not simply a graciousoption for us, but a normative obligation.120

Let us take care of Christ, then, (Gregory urges), while there is still time; letus minister to Christ’s needs, let us give Christ nourishment, let us clotheChrist, let us gather Christ in, let us show Christ honor—not just at ourtables, as some do, nor just with ointment, like Mary, nor just with a tomb,like Joseph of Arimathea. . . . But since the Lord of all things “desiresmercy and not sacrifice” (Hos 6.6; Mt 9.13), and since “a compassionateheart is worth more than tens of thousands of fat rams” (Dan 3.40), let usgive this gift to him through the needy. . . . 121

The biblical character of Gregory’s classical humanism nowhere appearsmore clearly.

III. THE NEW PHILOSOPHY

As we have mentioned before, Gregory of Nazianzus portrays Basil’scollection of hostels and monastic buildings, in his panegyric given afterBasil’s death, as a “new city” erected outside the walls of old Caesarea.One of the ironies of history, perhaps, is that this later came to be true in

a geographical sense, as well as a moral and cultural one: other buildingsbegan to cluster around the Basileias in the century or so after itsconstruction, and it became the nucleus of the city’s later development,




122. This seems to be implied in Basil’s sober reflection on the signs of urban decayin Homily 7.4: “Do you not see these walls, crumbling away through time, whoseremains jut out like rocky crags throughout the whole city? How much poverty wasthere in the city as these were being raised—poor people who were overlooked by therich of that time because of their concern for these walls? Where, then, is the splendidform of these works? Where is the one who was made much of, because of theirmagnificence? Have not these things come to ruin and disappeared, like the structureschildren love to create in the sand? And does not he lie in Hades, repenting his earnestpursuit of foolish things?” (289C4–15).

123. See above, n. 29.

underlying the modern Turkish city of Kayseri; walls were erectedaround it in Justinian’s time that served later as the foundation of Ottoman fortifications, and the old city—already crumbling, apparently,in Basil’s day122—gradually became uninhabited.

It was a city built, as in a way all Greek cities had been, on a socialideal: supported by the power of words, of rhetoric, and embodyingwhat might be called a philosophy. The philosophy and the rhetoric here

were fundamentally classical, in many ways: Basil and the two Gregoriessought to move the heart by the incantation of words, cunninglyarranged, and by the power of the imagination to elicit new resolve foraction; they invited their hearers to enter into and know themselves, bywhat Pierre Hadot has called an ancient variety of “spiritual exer-cises,”123 as well as to reflect on the universal characteristics of humannature; their aim was not simply to promote a way of living successfullyin the city, but of living well—of realizing human excellence andperfection in self-mastery and social responsibility, of acting beforeothers in the city in such a way as to win their admiration and even theirenvy. Yet for all these continuities between the Cappadocians’ philo-sophical rhetoric and that of Cicero or Julian, the heart of their civicmessage was new: a vision of Christ as the true emperor and the fullrealization of godlike humanity; a trembling yet hopeful expectation thatit was his law on which all Cappadocia’s citizens would someday bejudged, not simply the law of the Greeks; an awareness that the textswhich now defined civility and reverence and virtue were not those of Homer and the tragedians, let alone those of the philosophers, but thebooks of Holy Scripture.

Among the letters of Basil of Caesarea is one sent under the name of acertain Heracleidas—probably around 373—to his friend Amphilochius,the nephew of Gregory of Nazianzus and later bishop of Iconium,another small Cappadocian city. In it we learn that Heracleidas andAmphilochius, both trained as lawyers, have decided to give up their




124. Letters of Basil, ep. 150: ed. Deferrari 360.125. Ibid. 364.126. Ibid. 366.127. On the danger of having possessions (kt∞siw) to a person bent on acquiring

philosophical freedom, see Epictetus, Discourse 4.1.81, 1.129–30, 4.33; Enchiridion1, 39, 44.

public careers and have agreed to withdraw, as Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus had done fifteen years earlier, to pursue an austere life of contemplation together. Heracleidas has traveled to Caesarea, presum-ably to consult Bishop Basil and his friends on the best way to take upthis new life, and has tarried longer than he planned. Amphilochius,apparently, has written to express the worry that his friend has aban-doned their plan for retirement, because he is staying away so long, and

Heracleidas here answers with a kind of apology, saying that he has re-mained in Caesarea because he has begun to learn the outlines there of anew form of living:

Now public life (b¤ow dhmÒsiow) no longer holds me back. For even if I amstill the same person at heart, and have not yet put off the old man, exceptin outer form and in taking myself far from life’s business, still it seems tome that in a way I have now set out on the road of a life according toChrist (t∞w ıdoË t∞w katå XristÚn polite¤aw).124

This sense of being on a new route gives Heracleidas the confidence, hesays, that he is really not far from his friend Amphilochius, after all, for“there is only one way that leads towards the Lord, and all those who arejourneying towards him are fellow travelers with each other. . . .”125 Yet

there is something special about the community he has found in Caes-area, he tells Amphilochius, that continues to hold him there: the lifestyleBasil has formed for himself and his monastic followers, centered ontheir hostel of philanthropy:

When I came near Caesarea to learn how things were here, and refrainedfrom immersing myself in the city itself, I took refuge in the hostel for poorpeople nearby, in order to learn there what I wanted to know. There Ibrought the things your Eloquence had charged me to ask before thebishop, beloved of God, when he made his customary visit to theplace. . . .126

Heracleidas’ questions seem to have centered on how to pursue freedomfrom possessiveness (ékthmosÊnh),127 and Basil has advised him to be

content simply with owning one tunic, and to take to heart the Gospel’sadmonition to sell all one has and give it away to the poor (Mk 10.21and parr.)—though this distribution of goods, Basil has added, must be




done prudently and with good advice, to avoid giving to the wrongpersons!

And concerning how we ought to live day by day (Heracleidas continues),he had time only to say a few things, considering the size of the subject. Ireally wish you could learn these things from him directly—it would not bea good idea for me to cloud the precision of his teachings! . . . But I askedhim if I might someday visit him with you, so that you might preserve whathe said accurately in your memory and discover whatever I missed by usingyour own intelligence. One thing that I do remember, though, of the manythings I heard is this: that instruction about how a Christian must livedoesn’t so much need words as it needs daily example.128

For all his modesty, Amphilochius’ friend Heracleidas seems to havestumbled on a key element in ancient philosophy and ancient rhetoric,Christian and pagan: the Greeks knew that words and ideas, howeverbrilliant they are, need to be fleshed out in actions. It was the reasonBasil’s eloquence, along with that of the two Gregories, needed to bebuilt into the stones of a shelter and a hospital—the reason philanthropia,and not just wise and powerful words, had to take such a central role inshaping the life of their new city.

Brian E. Daley is the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame

128. Letters of Basil, ep. 150: ed. Deferrari 370.



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Daley - The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy