OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES General Editors Gillian Clark Andrew Louth THE OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES series includes schol- arly volumes on the thought and history of the early Christian centuries. Covering a wide range of Greek, Latin, and Oriental sources, the books are of interest to theologians, ancient historians, and specialists in the classical and Jewish worlds. Titles in the series include: St John Damascene Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology Andrew Louth (2002) Augustine's Commentary on Galatians Introduction, Translation (with facing Latin text), and Notes Eric Plumer (2002) The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption Stephen J. Shoemaker (2002) The Early Development of Canon Law and the Council of Serdica Hamilton Hess (2002) The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians Ronald E. Heine (2002) Grace and Christology in the Early Church Donald Fairbairn (2003) Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus Translation, Introduction, and Commentary Robert E. Sinkewicz (2003) Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith Union, Knowledge, and the Divine Presence Martin Laird (2004) The Suffering of the Impassible God The Dialectics of Patristic Thought Paul L. Gavrilyuk (2004) Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic Susan Wessel (2004) The Byzantine Christ Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St Maximus the Confessor Demetrios Bathrellos (2004) The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition Norman Russell (2004) The Body in St Maximus the Confessor Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified Adam G. Cooper (2005) Marius Victorinus' Commentary on Galatians Stephen Andrew Cooper (2005) The Asketikon of St Basil the Great ANNA M. SILVAS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Anna M. Silvas 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 978-0-19-927351-5 This book is dedicated with gratitude to the fathers in my life to my own dear father, Theodor Silvas his father, Vasile Silvas our spiritual father, Cardinal Alexandru Todea and to the brave bishops of the Greek-Catholic Church of Romania, for the true renewal of Christianity in the third millennium This page intentionally left blank PREFACE MANY were the Jewish, Christian, and para-Christian ascetic movements of the late ancient world, in which enthusiasm for celi- bacy and for spiritual endeavour assumed a wide variety of forms. Such were the ascetic and even monastic tendencies within late Hel- lenistic Judaism, the lifestyle of St John the Baptist, the ascetic and otherworldly teachings of the Gospels and the New Testament, the polity of the apostolic community in Jerusalem in the first Christian century, the eschatological sensibility encouraged by the experience of persecution and martyrdom, the various enthusiast movements of the first three or four Christian centuries. Apart from Christianity and Judaism, this ascetic Zeitgeist was abetted by economic and cul- tural distresses, the well-known taedium vitae and especially the heightened religious sensibilities of the late ancient world that can even be observed in third-century Neoplatonism, the last of the schools of pagan philosophy. During the fourth century AD Christian monasticism emerged almost spontaneously in many different parts of the Christian world. In the second half of the century, central Anatolia gave rise to its own 'home-grown' monasticism. The most important document of this nascent native monasticism is the Great Asketikon of St Basil the Great, of Caesarea (AD 329-79), the subject of this book. 'Christian monasticism' here refers to the Christian ascetic movements as they acquired definitive forms and a canonically rec- ognized 'place' in the orthodox Catholic Church. 'Orthodox' and 'Catholic' may be taken to refer at this stage to acceptance of the doctrinal parameters established by the Council of Nicaea in 325 and elaborated and confirmed in the Council of Constantinople in 381. More loosely, the terms can be used of those theological gropings in the interim that tended positively to this settlement. The present volume is dedicated to a new translation of the Great Asketikon of St Basil the Great, collated against the Small Aske- tikon (the 'first edition' of the Asketikon), as it can best be recovered from the Latin translation by Rufinus of Aquileia (c. AD 349-411). The graphic presentation endeavours to show as precisely as pos- sible how the earlier version is embedded in the later version. The introductory studies build on this exhaustive textual comparison. viii Preface They commence by outlining the complex issues of textual trans- mission; they go on to assess and compare the ascetic community as it is found in the earlier and in the later versions of the Asketikon; they continue with a chapter on the historical-geographical back- ground and they culminate in an extended study of the emergence of monasticism in central Anatolia in the mid to late fourth century AD. Technical studies of Rufinus' translation techniques and Basil's editorial techniques are postponed to the last two chapters. An original map, chronological tables, an index of scriptural citations, and seven appendices provide additional helps to this field of study. Other important contemporary documents deserve mention here. First there is the prefatory letter and the Canons of the Council of Gangra which was convened to deal with hyper-ascetic exagger- ations. Secondly there is the Life of Saint Makrina (VSM) by Gregory of Nyssa, our primary source of information about St Basil's and St Gregory's eldest sister. Questions guiding the present studies are: what were the continu- ities and changes of Basil's ascetic teaching between the two versions of the Asketikon? What are the forms of ascetic community docu- mented in the earlier and in the later versions and how do they compare? Do the concerns of Gangra find an echo only in the Great Asketikon, or are they to be detected also in the Small Asketikon? How is Basil's ascetic doctrine related to the Anatolian ascetic movement inspired by Eustathius of Sebasteia, and to the trans- formations in the family household of Basil Senior of Neocaesarea and Emmelia of Cappadocia under the ascetic leadership of their first-born, Makrina the Younger? That brings in the phenomenon of the 'domestic ascetic movement' of the fourth century. Finally, can the results of these probings help elucidate the changes in Basil's ecclesiological and theological thinking during the all-important first decade of his life as a Christian ascetic, 356-65? These studies began with an MA thesis for the University of Melbourne in 1993 on the text and transmission of Rufinus' Latin translation, the Regula Basili. This was followed up by a doctoral thesis for the University of New England in 2000: The Two Versions of St Basil's Asketikon and the Emergence of Monasticism in 4th Cen- tury Anatolia. The present volume is a revised and recast version of the latter thesis. Special thanks are due to the Vice-Chancellor of my university, Professor Ingrid Moses, from whom I received a special grant to prepare this work for publication. Warm thanks to my colleagues and mentors at UNE, Mr Alan Treloar, and Professor G. H. R. Horsley. Much appreciated encouragement also came from Preface ix Professors Stephen Mitchell and Philip Rousseau. Finally, thanks are due to Lucy Qureshi of OUP, and to Andrew Louth, OUP's painstaking reader. Perhaps something should be said of the dispositions in which these labours were undertaken. While it is true that some of the later historical inquiry takes into account various critiques of recent dec- ades (Elm, in her introduction at 4-11 provides a useful survey of the historiography in this field of early Christianity, from A. Von Har- nack to M. Foucault), the work is not based in such perspectives. It is aligned, in the main, with traditional patristic scholarship and with what one might call a sympathetic humanist approach, as shown, for example, by Philip Rousseau in Basil of Caesarea, 1994; a work of high intellectual demand, of wide reading and deep reflection, impli- citly Christian and theological and invested with the quality of a long-matured 'friendship' between the author and his subject, Basil. It is close to the ideal I would wish to follow. Use is made of such collateral disciplines as textual studies, epigraphy, and historical geography which can afford to be relatively free of passing ideological fads. Though the scope of these studies is not strictly theological, nevertheless, they are always implicitly disposed in that direction. The present author writes and thinks from 'within the tradition' of a confessional Christian faith, indeed of the Church. The idea that to dissociate oneself from a conscientious religious faith and allegiance to the Church, to diminish or even exclude a theological and spiritual teleology, to keep the Church Fathers at a distance by adopting a brashly critical or superior stance, or to adopt a confes- sionally secularist, post-Christian and reductionist analysis could possibly help elucidate the profoundly religious, believing, and ecclesially minded work of these early Christian Fathers finds no quarter here. Basil himself was vitally concerned with hermen- eutical principles and would certainly think such a project inher- ently self-contradictory and preposterous. His first major work, the Contra Eunomium, in which he engaged the famous Arian theo- logian, might well be subtitled 'An enquiry on how to do theology rightly in the Church'. This issue remained a vital concern to Basil for the rest of his short life. Thus the present work bids to be carried out in an implicit fellowship of faith, moral endeavour, spiritual life, and Church with St Basil himself. This means that the author looks to Basil affectionately and respectfully as a father or an elder brother within the household of the Church but she does so as an adult child towards a parent, not obliged to believe or obey everything that a parent says, or hold that parent above all scrutiny, but certainly to maintain family respect and love always, in the spirit of the