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| Parentage and Birth.
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Prolegomena.
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Sketch of the Life and Works of Saint
Basil.
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I. Life.
I.—Parentage and Birth.
Under the persecution of
the second Maximinus,1
| 1 Of sufferers in this supreme
struggle of heathenism to delay the official recognition of the victory
of the Gospel over the empire, the Reformed Kalendar of the English
Church preserves the memory of St. Blaise (Blasius), bishop of
Sebasteia in Armenia, St. George, St. Agnes, St. Lucy, St. Margaret of
Antioch, St. Katharine of Alexandria. | a Christian gentleman of
good position and fair estate in Pontus2
| 2 Greg. Naz., Or.
xliii. (xx.). N.B. The reff. to the orations and letters of Greg.
Naz. are to the Ordo novus in Migne. | and Macrina his
wife, suffered severe hardships.3
They
escaped with their lives, and appear to have retained, or recovered,
some of their property.4
| 4 Greg. Nyss., Vit.
Mac. 178, 191. | Of their
children the names of two only have survived: Gregory5
| 5 Bishop of an unknown
see. Of the foolish duplicity of Gregory of Nyssa in fabricating
a letter from him, see the mention in Epp. lviii., lix., lx. | and Basil.6
| 6 Βασίλειος, Basilius=royal or kingly. The name was a
common one. Fabricius catalogues “alii Basilii ultra
xxx.,” all of some fame. The derivation of
Βασιλεύς is
uncertain, and the connexion of the last syllable with
λεύς=λέως=λαός, people, almost certainly
wrong. The root may be ÖBA, with the idea that the leader
makes the followers march. With the type of name,
cf. Melchi and the compounds of Melech (e.g.
Abimelech) in Scripture, and King, LeRoy, Koenig, among modern
names. | The former
became bishop of one of the sees of Cappadocia. The latter
acquired a high reputation in Pontus and the neighboring districts
as an advocate of eminence,7
| 7 Greg. Nyss., Vit.
Mac. 392. | and as a teacher of
rhetoric. His character in the Church for probity and piety
stood very high.8
| 8 Greg. Nyss., Vit.
Mac. 186. | He married an
orphaned gentlewoman named Emmelia, whose father had suffered
impoverishment and death for Christ’s sake, and who was
herself a conspicuous example of high-minded and gentle Christian
womanhood. Of this happy union were born ten
children,9
| 9 Greg. Nyss., Vit.
Mac. 182. | five boys and five
girls. One of the boys appears to have died in infancy, for
on the death of the elder Basil four sons and five daughters were
left to share the considerable wealth which he left behind
him.10
| 10 Greg. Naz.,
Or. xliii. (xx.). | Of the nine survivors the eldest
was a daughter, named, after her grandmother, Macrina. The
eldest of the sons was Basil, the second Naucratius, and the third
Gregory. Peter, the youngest of the whole family, was born
shortly before his father’s death. Of this remarkable
group the eldest is commemorated as Saint Macrina in the biography
written by her brother Gregory. Naucratius died in early
manhood,11
about the time of
the ordination of Basil as reader. The three remaining
brothers occupied respectively the sees of Cæsarea, Nyssa,
and Sebasteia.
As to the date of St. Basil’s birth opinions
have varied between 316 and 330. The later, which is supported by
Garnier, Tillemont, Maran,12
| 12 329. Prudent Maran,
the Ben. Ed. of Basil, was a Benedictine exiled for opposing the Bull
Unigenitus. †1762. | Fessler,13
and Böhringer, may probably be accepted
as approximately correct.14
| 14 Gregory of
Nazianzus, so called, was born during the episcopate of his father,
Gregory, bishop of Nazianzus. Gregory the elder died in 373,
after holding the see forty-five years. The birth of Gregory the
younger cannot therefore be put before 328, and Basil was a little
younger than his friend. (Greg. Naz., Ep. xxxiii.)
But the birth of Gregory in his father’s episcopate has naturally
been contested. Vide D.C.B. ii. p. 748, and L. Montaut,
Revue Critique on Greg. of N. 1878. | It is true that
Basil calls himself an old man in 374,15
but he was
prematurely worn out with work and bad health, and to his friends wrote
freely and without concealment of his infirmities. There appears
no reason to question the date 329 or 330.
Two cities, Cæsarea in Cappadocia and
Neocæsarea in Pontus, have both been named as his
birthplace. There must be some amount of uncertainty on this
point, from the fact that no direct statement exists to clear it up,
and that the word πατρίς was loosely employed
to mean not only place of
birth, but place of residence and occupation.16
| 16 Gregory of Nazianzus
calls Basil a Cappadocian in Ep. vi., and speaks of their both
belonging to the same πατρίς. In his
Homily In Gordium martyrem, Basil mentions the adornment of
Cæsarea as being his own adornment. In Epp. lxxvi.
and xcvi. he calls Cappadocia his πατρίς. In
Ep. lxxiv., Cæsarea. In Ep. li. it is doubtful
whether it is Pontus, whence he writes, which is his
πατρίς,
or Cæsarea, of which he is writing. In Ep.
lxxxvii. it is apparently Pontus. Gregory of Nyssa
(Orat. I. in xl. Mart.) calls Sebaste the
πατρίς of
his forefathers, possibly because Sebaste had at one time been
under the jurisdiction of Cappadocia. So in the N.T.
πατρίς is
the place of the early life and education of our Lord. | Basil’s parents had property
and interests both in Pontus and Cappadocia and were as likely to be
in the one as in the other. The early statement of Gregory of
Nazianzus has been held to have weight, inasmuch as he speaks of
Basil as a Cappadocian like himself before there was any other
reason but that of birth for associating him with this
province.17
Assenting,
then, to the considerations which have been held to afford
reasonable ground for assigning Cæsarea as the birthplace, we
may adopt the popular estimation of Basil as one of “The Three
Cappadocians,”18
and congratulate
Cappadocia on the Christian associations which have rescued her fair
fame from the slur of the epigram which described her as
constituting with Crete and Cilicia a trinity of
unsatisfactoriness.19
| 19 Καππάδοχες,
Κοῆτες,
Κίλικες, τρία
κάππα
κάκιστα. On
Basil’s own estimate of the Cappadocian character, cf. p.
153, n. cf. also Isidore of Pelusium, i. Epp. 351,
352, 281. | Basil’s
birth nearly synchronizes with the transference of the chief seat of
empire from Rome to Byzantium. He is born into a world where
the victory already achieved by the Church has been now for sixteen
years officially recognized.20
| 20 The edict of Milan was
issued in 313. | He is born
into a Church in which the first great Council has already given
official expression to those cardinal doctrines of the faith, of
which the final and formal vindication is not to be assured till
after the struggles of the next six score of years. Rome,
reduced, civilly, to the subordinate rank of a provincial city, is
pausing before she realises all her loss, and waits for the crowning
outrage of the barbarian invasions, ere she begins to make serious
efforts to grasp ecclesiastically, something of her lost imperial
prestige. For a time the centre of ecclesiastical and
theological interest is to be rather in the East than in the
West.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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