Daley - The Cappadocian Fathers and The Rhetoric of Philanthropy

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
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v007/7.3daley.html
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DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY
431
1998 NAPS Presidential Address

Building a New City:
The Cappadocian Fathers and the
Rhetoric 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 which
daily life was governed and the religious practices through which they
approached ultimate mystery: all were experienced and imagined, since
the close of the heroic age, less in terms of ancient national or ethnic
groupings, or of the leagues and alliances that trade and war had made
necessary, than in terms of the small, self-sufficient community of
artisans and merchants, rich and poor, that was gathered visibly around
a marketplace, a citadel, or a harbor. Most of the arts, too, that were
developed most highly in the post-Homeric Greek world were arts that
suited life in a small city: public and sacred architecture, figural
sculpture, pottery and mural painting, lyric poetry and drama and
historical narrative, the arts of reasoning and persuasion, the science of
living well in a city that we have come to call philosophy. It is no
surprise, then, that when Athanasius of Alexandria, shortly after the
middle of the fourth century, set out to describe the world-transforming
impact made on his age by the new Christian philosophy of the Coptic
hermit Antony, he could do no better than depict the changes in paradoxically urban terms; from the time when his friends discovered that
Antonys withdrawal and hard penances had not twisted or dehumanized him, but had made him a perfect example of balanced, free humanity, many resolved to join him, Athanasius says, so that from then
on, there were monasteries in the mountains, and the desert was made a
city by monks, who left their own people and registered themselves for
Journal of Early Christian Studies 7:3, 431461 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press
432
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
the citizenship in the heavens.1 Nor should it surprise us that when

Gregory of Nazianzus, probably on January 1 of 382, pronounced his
celebrated funeral oration on his friend and episcopal patron, Basil of
Caesarea, now three years dead, he should describe the great material
achievement of Basils Christian philosophythe cluster of hostels for
travelers, the poor, and the sick that he had erected, along with a church
and a monastic residence just outside Caesareaas a kind of city-building,
too:
Go a little outside the city (he says), and gaze on the new city: the
storehouse of piety, the common treasury for those with possessions, where
the superfluities of wealth as well as necessities lie stored away because of
his persuasionshaking off the moths, giving no joy to thieves, escaping
struggles with envy and the onrush of timewhere disease is treated by
philosophy, where misfortunes are called blessed, where compassion is held
in real esteem.2
For Gregory, Basils monastic hospice, his monument to philanthropy

and the care of the poor, was a civic achievement more amazing than
the 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 easy
path upwards towards heaven.3
Gregorys exalted evocation of Basils great social and monastic enterprise was not simply inflated fourth-century rhetoric. What I would like
to argue here, at any rate, is that that large and complex welfare institution on the outskirts of the Cappadocian metropolis that came to be
known as the Basileias4 represented a new and increasingly intentional
drive on the part of these highly cultivated bishops and some of their
Christian contemporaries to reconstruct Greek culture and society along
Christian lines, in a way that both absorbed its traditional shape and
radically reoriented it. If the fourth century was, after the rise of Constantine, a period of breathtakingly rapid change in the relations between
Christian believers and the social and political world of the late Roman
Empire, that process revealed itself most dramaticallyor at least reveals
itself to us most dramatically today, through the existing evidencein
the changing role and self-understanding of the Christian cultural and
1.
42f.
2.
3.
4.
Athanasius, Life of Antony 14 (tr. Robert C. Gregg; Paulist: New York, 1980),
Or. 43.63 (SC 384:260f.).
Ibid. (SC 384:260.33, 262.15f.).
Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 6.34.9.
433
spiritual elite: of people like Basil and Macrina and Gregory of Nyssa,
their parents and brothers and other relatives, and, of course, their friend
Gregory of Nazianzus, all people who combined an inherited call to
leadership in their cities and province, based on their social status and
rigorously Hellenistic education, with the sense of another call to be both
disciples of Christ, in a new and radical way, and leaders in the
community of the Church.
In this transformation of Christian self-understanding and action, the
Emperor Julians decree of June 17, 362, prohibiting Christians from
acting as teachers of Greek cultureof grammar and rhetoric and
philosophyin publicly supported schools seems to have had effects that
lasted far longer and reached far wider than its merely legal application.
Julians reasoning, as he explains in a letter, was that no one who openly
rejects as false the religious traditions embodied in Greek literature
should be allowed to be an official interpreter of its aesthetic and
intellectual values; culture, for Julian, is all of a piece, and is essentially
religious.5 Even though his edict may not have been enforced throughout
the Empire with equal seriousness, and rapidly became a dead letter at
Julians death a year later, the impression it made on Christians whose
classical education gave them voice and influence was clearly deep and
enduring.6 Christian ownership of the Hellenic tradition had been questioned. For upper-class Christian curiales like Basil and the two Gregories,
as for their contemporary Ambrose in the West, and later for John
Chrysostom in Antioch and Augustine in Roman Africa, the challenge
now was to take hold of the classical traditionof Greek and Roman
literary criticism and rhetoric and philosophy, in all their mannered
complexitywith full authority, and to shape it to the needs of the
Christian faith: to retain all its techniques of analysis and embellishment
and persuasion, even to retain what one could of its understanding of the
world, the human person, and the divine realm, while replacing its
mythic repertoire with the persons and events of the biblical narrative
and centering the hope which underlay practical engagement with the
5. Julian, ep. 36 (Bidez 61c). In the words of Rowland Smith, Julians 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 text
of the decree is preserved in the CTh 13.3.5.
6. A witness to this is Cyril of Alexandrias enormous apologetic work against
Julians writings, composed more than half a century after the Emperors death. Julian
seems to have long retained his symbolic importance as the public official who had
made the most serious attempt at culturally excommunicating educated Christians.
434
worlds needs on final salvation through Christ, the Word made flesh.
The public importance of cultured and persuasive speech, for centuries
the preserve of a classically educated elite,7 remained for the moment
unchanged; so did the traditional role of the philosopher as a public
critic licensed to give his ideas free expression (parrhsa), a wise teacher,
a moral physician trained to diagnose and to heal societys 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 teaching
was to be permanently changed; the ideals of human behavior, the reta
whose public cultivation had been the professed purpose of both rhetoric
and philosophy, were to take on a new form that would be quite
intentionally described in terms both classical and Christian.8 The
wineskins, for the moment, were to remain largely the same, but the
wine was definitely new.
I. THE IDEAL OF PHILANTHROPY
A significant part of their new role as shapers of a Christian Hellenism
was, for the Cappadocians, an active concern for the poor and
marginalized in their society, and an active attempt to use all their
powers of thought, speech, and political leadership in persuading their
wealthy and influential fellow-citizens to expend a large portion of their
possessions and personal energy in caring for them. The theme of philanthropiaof active, practical love for ones fellow human beings, expressed in kindness (xrhstthw)and benevolent action (epoia)
appears strikingly often in their letters and nondogmatic discourses, as a
constitutive part both of human justice and civility and of Christian
discipleship. In the tradition of Hellenic ethics, the concept was hardly
new. Originally identified above all with the love of the gods for the
human race,9 philanthropia was also most often seen, in classical literature, as a quality to be praisedand thus encouragedin tyrants and
kings: 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 a
Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), and Thomas
Schmitz, Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten
Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997).
8. On the formation of a distinctively Christian rhetoric and its role in the
formation of a Christian state, see especially Averil Cameron, Christianity and the
Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
9. See, e.g., Aeschylus, Prometheus 2830; Plato, Laws 4, 713d.
10. Athenaion Politeia 16.
11. Xenophon, Agesilaos 1.22.
435
Philip of Macedon.12 Dio Chrysostom, the cynic preacher and imperial

rhetorician of the early second century, wrote that Zeus especially blesses
the brave king who loves humanity (tn filnyrvpon) and who
strenuously promotes virtue in his subjects, standing amid his people like
a reliable old bull amid the herdproud and noble, fierce towards
intruders, but gentle with his own.13 For the fourth-century rhetorician
Themistius of Constantinople, whose congratulatory speeches addressed
to Constantines imperial successors provide a fulsome portrait of what
well-educated, philosophically literate Greeks of the time expected of
their kings, philanthropia was clearly the chief royal virtue, just as it was
the chief characteristic of Zeus. Self-control, justice, courage, and the
other virtues were of course essential for good rule; but each of these
seems to me, as I consider them for myself, to be a general human
ornament, which only then becomes royal when philanthropia sets its
seal on it.14 Society praises its emperor with titles of divinity, Themistius assured the Christian Theodosius, calls him filnyrvpow and pious
one and savior, not because he has gold or power, not because he can
turn a poor person into a rich one overnight, but because only the
Divinity and the King have it in their power to bestow life.15 The real
source of philanthropia, in Themistiuss view, was the study of literature
and ideasfilologa, the love of words, and filhkoa, a fondness for
listening to speechesnot for the sake of the words themselves, but for
what they reveal about the mind that speaks the words.16 Just as someone who admires speed will love horses, and a music-lover will be interested in birds, he asks, will not the one who admires wisdom and
constantly exalts it, and chooses it to be his companion, clearly be one
who loves the living being and makes itmakes humanityhis
priority?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 4849. For an incomplete but thoughtful survey of the
development 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): 199208. See also Demetrios J. Constantelos, Byanztine Philanthopy
and Social Welfare (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1968), esp. 310, 43
61.
13. Second Discourse on Kingship 7477.
14. Or. 1, To Constantius, on Philanthropia 6ab; cf. Or. 11, Decennial Oration to
Valentinian and Valens 146d147b; Or. 19, To Theodosius 226d227a.
15. Or. 19, To Theodosius 229b.
16. Or. 11, Decennial Oration for Valentinian and Valens 144d.
17. Ibid. 145a.
436
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 humanity
and all serious religious observance. Julian, too, like Themistius, regarded philanthropia as the crowning kingly virtue;18 but his most
eloquent and extensive treatment of the virtue came in his Letter to a
Priest, 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 result
many other blessings, and moreover that choicest and greatest blessing of
all, the good will of the gods. For . . . we must suppose that God, who
naturally loves human beings, has more kindness for those people who love
their fellows.19
Philanthropia takes various forms, Julian explains: moderation in punishing those who transgress, a kindly concern for the betterment of ones
subjects, but above all sharing the good things of the earth. In a
digression that sounds a theme already familiar from Hellenistic ethics,
especially from representatives of the Stoic tradition,20 the Emperor
remarks 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 property;21 even if the gods were to rain gold on us, as they are said once to
have done on Rhodes, some of us would be there first with buckets and
burly slaves, to drive off the rest so that we alone might seize upon the
gifts 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 the
Emperor Julian (LCL 2:299).
20. For a development of the idea that wealth originated in human greed, see
especially Seneca, ep. 90 (to Lucilius), 18 (contrasting natural needs and the desire for
luxury) and 3643 (describing the original Golden Age before the existence of
private property). In the second of these passages, Seneca quotes Vergil, Georg.
1.12528, also depicting a time when the land was free for all to use, and its products
held in common. Seneca here sees avaritia as the foundation of private property and
the cause of poverty (38), and gives a satirical description of the houses of the rich
that will be paralleled in some of the Cappadocian Fathers works discussed below.
Cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.7.2122, where private property is also said not to belong to
the original or natural state of humanity; Ciceros conclusion is that each person
should be content with what he or she already has, and be ready to use it for the
common good. See also 1.26.92.
21. Ibid. 290A (tr. Wright 301).
22. Ibid. 290B.
437
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 accused
prisoners, and above all with the helpless and poor, so as to suffice for
their need.23 We must be hospitable to beggars and strangers, because
everyone, whether he will or no, is akin to everyone else.24 Alongside
chastity of body, in fact, kindness towards our fellow human beings is,
in Julians view, the heart of elbeia efiw tow yeowreverence towards
the godsand thus ought to be practiced in an exemplary way by
priests.25 To him, the great irony of his own time was that the Hellenes,
whose religion and philosophy unambiguously pointed them towards
such generous humane behavior, had generally neglected it, while the
impious Galileansthe Christianshad won a reputation for practicing it seriously, and so had attracted numerous members to their
atheistic community.26 In another letter to a priestto Arsacius, High
Priest of Galatia, the province next-door to Cappadociawritten shortly
before his decree against the Christians of 362, Julian writes heatedly on
this same theme:
Why do we not observe that it is their [the Christians] benevolence to
strangers, 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 ought
really and truly to practice every one of these virtues. And it is not enough
for you alone to practice them; so must all the priests in Galatia, without
exception.27
Philanthropy was simply an indispensable part of philosophically reflective

religion.
II. THE CAPPADOCIAN PROJECT
1. Julians frank challenge to the non-Christian Greeks of his time can
hardly have failed to echo in Christian ears. For cultivated Christian
Hellenes like Basil of Caesarea, his family and his friendsuncompromising in their commitment both to the Christian faith and to the use of
23. Ibid. 290D291A (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 responsibility
over private interest, see Cicero, De off. 1.44.15745.159; De amicitia 7.24; Seneca,
ep. 95.5253.
25. Ibid. 292D293A.
26. Ibid. 305CD.
27. ep. 22, 429D430A (tr. Wright 3:69).
438
Greek cultural and intellectual resourcesJulians critique of Hellenic

religious practice for failing to live up to its own philosophical and
human ideals must have come as an encouraging reminder that not
everything in the Christian tradition of corporate behavior was a scandal
to their pagan neighbors. Serious Christian living, since at least the time
of Justin, had been promoted by Christian apologists as the true
philosophy, as realizing the complex ancient ideal of acquired and
saving wisdom:28 not simply because it was based on reverence for God
and included serious attention to prayer, introspection, ascetic discipline,
self-control, and the guidance of others,29 but also because it had laid
such stress on hospitality and the care of the needyon philanthropia.30
Even Julian recognized philanthropia as the Galileans strong suit. It is
understandable, then, that as Basil, aided by the two Gregories and the
rest of his web of supporters, rose, in the decade after Julians edict
banning Christians from teaching Hellenic culture, from a life of philosophic withdrawalof study and contemplation and curtailed consumptionto a position of leadership in his Church and city, part of his
plan of action should be to reaffirm the Christian version of the public
side of the philosophical and religious life that pagan Hellenism had
admittedly failed to realize.
Like Dio and Themistius, the Cappadocians used rhetoric, the art and
science of persuasion, as their chief tool; even though Christian bishops, by
the 360s, had come to be civil magistrates, mediators in the chain of power
that reached from the imperial bureaucracy and magistri militum down to
the local town council,31 they were, first of all, preachersChristian public
speakersand their audience consisted of the gathered liturgical commu28. 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 full
discussion of the history of the term philosophia, in the earlier Greek tradition and
among Christian writers, see Anne-Marie Malingrey, Philosophia: tude dun groupe
de mots dans la littrature grecque, des Prsocratiques au IVe sicle aprs 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 early
Christianitys understanding of itself as philosophy: Ancient Spiritual Exercises
and Christian Philosophy: 12644.
30. For the philanthropic practices of the Christians, see, e.g., Epistle to Diognetus
5; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2.9; Origen, Contra Celsum 1.67; Clementine
Homilies 9.23, 12.30.
31. See Brown, Power and Persuasion, 71117.
439
nities of the cities of Asia Minor. The fuel that drove their persuasive
speech, like Themistiuss philologia, was the study of ancient sacred texts,
the powerful use of examples from the communitys collective memory:
now not primarily the heroes of the Hellenic tradition (though they could
also be used, of course, with discretion, as Basil reminded his young
nephews32) 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 his
friends, could really be described as the promotion of a thoroughly
Christian version of the classical philosophical life: a life centered on right
faith and worship in Christian terms, and aimed at growth in Christian
contemplation, supported by the indispensable practices of Christian
asceticism and the acquisition of Christian virtue, and characterized on the
civic, public level in dramatically concrete ways by Christian philanthropia,
specifically by the care of the poor. Such philosophy was the heart of
Basils 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 the
silence of the desert.34 But it was also Basils ideal for the life of the whole
Christian body. In the end, what he aimed at was nothing less than the
32. Ad adulescentes 45.
33. For a description of this practical side of philosophia in the understanding of
the Cappadocians, see Malingrey, Philosophia, 23761. On the social radicality of
Basils approach to questions of poverty and possessions, and its origin in both the
Stoic ideal of asceticism and the Christian Scripture, see Jean Gribomont, Un
aristocrate rvolutionnaire, vque et moine: S. Basile, Augustinianum 17 (1977):
79191 (repr. in Gribomont, Saint Basile: vangile et glise [Bellefontaine, 1984]
1:6577).
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, urban
communities, so that the philosophical life would not be without human contacts
and the active life would not be lacking in philosophy (Or. 43.62). For a general
description 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, Lascse monastique
de S. Basile de Csare (Maredsous, 1948); Jean Gribomont, Le monachisme au sein
de lglise en Syrie et en Cappadoce, Studia Monastica 7 (1965): 724 [repr. in
Gribomont, Saint Basile, 1:320]; idem, Saint Basile et le monachisme enthousiaste,
Irnikon 53 (1980): 12344 [Saint Basile, 1:4364]; Thomas S+pidlik, Lidal du
monachisme basilien, in P. J. Fedwick, ed., Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist,
Ascetic (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), 1:36074; and
most recently Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), 190232.
440
formation of a new human community, a new city, on what both Julian

and these cultured Cappadocian bishops had come, with differing emotions, to recognize as the gathering ruins of the old.
As we have already mentioned, one of Basils most widely recognized
achievements was the building of a complex of guest houses, shelters,
and hospices for the sick, just outside Caesarea, which was known, at
least in the early fifth century, by his name: the Basileias.35 Sozomen the
historian, writing in the 440s, characterizes the establishment as a
poorhouse (ptv.xn kataggion), and says that it was administered in his
time by ecclesiastical philosophersurban monksunder the leadership of a chorepiscopus named Prapidius.36 Theodoret of Cyrus in his
Ecclesiastical History, written at the end of the same decade, says Basil
had made the foundation on land donated by the Emperor Valens on his
first visit to Caesarea during Basils tenure as bishop, after Basil had
pleased him by a gentle put-down of the Emperors hostile but unlearned
chef;37 the imperial donation, according to Theodoret, was intended for
the poor under Basils 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, to
Inachios (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 the
biblical 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 the
imperial kitchen; he committed a linguistic solecism while verbally attacking Basil
during a visit of the Emperor Valens to Cappadocia in the early 370s, at which the
bishop simply smiled and said, We see here an illiterate Demosthenes! He rubbed
in the point, according to the historian, by adding, Your business is to attend to the
seasoning of soups; you cannot understand theology, because your ears are stopped
up. (trans. NPNF 3:120) This may well be the same Demosthenes who later became
vicar of Pontus and apparently caused a good deal of trouble for Basil and his party,
sponsoring non-Nicene bishops and authorizing Gregory of Nyssas removal from
episcopal 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 possible
identification of chef and vicar). Although Basil refers to this official as a fleshy
whale 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 he
addressed to the vicar himself during the time of Gregorys 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 his
donation, 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 praetorian
prefect, and got the best of him in a heated exchange over the Emperors support of
the Arians. Gregory places this scene in the context of a visit from Valens and his
441
Elias, the provincial governor, probably in 372, two years after he had
become the metropolitan bishop of Caesarea,39 Basil defends himself
against the charge of injuring public interest (t dhmsia) through his
government of the local church by giving a glowing account of the
Basileias as something already up and running, and quite elaborate: how
does 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 home
reserved for the head of the community, and the rest subordinate quarters,
all in order, for the servants of the divinityto which there is free access,
both for you magistrates and for your retinue? And whom do we wrong
when we build hospices for strangers, for those who visit us while on a
journey, for those who require some care because of sickness, and when we
extend 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
Basils work as presbyter and chief (if sometimes little-appreciated)
advisor to his predecessor, the metropolitan Eusebius. Central Asia
Minor suffered a severe drought, with an acute shortage of food, in the
spring 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 that
Basils 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 feeling
towards us, and stopped persecuting those who shared Basils pro-Nicene sentiments. Gregory of Nyssas account of Basils confrontation with Modestus, in Contra
Eunomium 1.11946, suggests that the prefect had come to Caesarea alone to
prepare the way for an imperial visit, and hints that Basil himself may not yet have
been a bishop at the time. In any case, hostility between the three Cappadocian
Fathers and the imperial court continued intermittently until Valens death in 378.
Philip Rousseau plausibly suggests that Valens visited Caesarea at least twice during
Basils career: once in the spring of 370, shortly before the death of Bishop Eusebius,
and again at Epiphany, 372 (Basil of Caesarea, 35153). If that is accepted as true, it
seems best to place Valens gift of land to Basil during his first visit in 370, after the
confrontation with Modestus, and to assume that one of Basils first priorties on being
elected bishop, in the following September, was to build a hostel that would
permanently 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 the
Basileias, see especially Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 140 and 35153.
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 Basils homily That God is not
the Author of Evil (Hom. 9), which refers both to a recent earthquake that destroyed
the city of Nicaeadatable to October 11, 368and to the signs of beginning
drought at home. Basils ep. 26, to Gregory of Nazianzus brother Caesarius, on
442
Nazianzus describes the famine of that year in characteristically dramatic

terms; he remarks that the hardest part of the distress was the insensibility and insatiability of those who possessed suppliesthe profiteering of the grain merchants at the shortage.42 Basil was not able to imitate
the biblical heroes Moses and Elijah, Gregory writes, who caused food to
come down from heaven, but he did imitate Joseph, whose philanthropia
in Egypt took the form of wise management of what resources there
were;43 more importantly, Basils persuasionthe power of his rhetoric
opened the stores of those who possessed them44 and apparently
brought about a more equitable distribution of the local reserves. He
also opened a kind of soup kitchen, using contributed food, for the poor
of all ages, and worked in it himself, along with his household servants
and fellow clergy, providing its visitors both with simple fare andas
one might expect from Basilwith 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 unconnected
homilies on wealth and the use of property.46 The first of theseHomily
gratitude at escaping death, may come from the same time. See Jean Bernardi, La
prdication des Pres Cappadociens (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de France,
1968), 6164; on the famine and the project of the Basileias, see also Rousseau, Basil
of Caesarea, 13644.
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, in
Basilio di Cesarea: La sua et, la sua opera e il Basilianesimo in Sicilia (Acts of
International Congress, Messina, December 36, 1979) I (Messina: Centro di Studi
Umanistici, 1983), 42587. On their content and its connection with Basils social
activity, see Ioannes Karayannopoulos, St. Basils Social Activity: Principles and
Praxis, in Fedwick, ed., Basil of Caesarea, 37592. On Basils rhetoric, see George L.
Kustas, Saint Basil and the Rhetorical Tradition, ibid., 22180. These homilies of
Basil, along with the related homilies of the two Gregories, are studied by Mary
Sheather, Pronouncements of the Cappadocians on Issues of Poverty and Wealth, in
Pauline Allen, Lawrence Cross, and Raymond Canning, eds., Prayer and Spirituality in
the Early Church I (Brisbane, 1998), 23039, and Anthony Meredith, S.J., The Three
Cappadocians on Beneficence: A Key to their Audiences, in M. B. Cunningham and
P. Allen, eds., Homilist and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine
Homiletics (Leiden, 1998), 89104. See also the dissertation of Susan R. Holman, The
Body of the Poor in Fourth-Century Cappadocia: Seven Sermons on Hunger, Sickness,
and Penury (Brown University, 1998). On the social and economic conditions forming
the background of all these homilies, see Ramon Teja, Organizacion economica y social
443
VI in our modern numberingdeals with the Lucan parable of the rich

fool, who must keep building larger barns to house his surplus grain
(Lk 12.1618), and is subtitled On Greed (Per pleonejaw). After a
brief explanation of the Gospel passage, Basil launches himself directly
into what will be a central theme of all three of these homilies: that the
goods 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 you
are, what you are asked to manage, the one from whom you receive it, and
the reason you have been privileged before so many others. You are, in fact,
the steward of a good God, the household manager for your fellow
servants. Do not think that all of this has been prepared simply for your
belly. Make plans about what you hold in your hands as if it belonged to
others; you may enjoy yourself for a little while, but then it will melt and
vanish, 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 earth
itself, which bears fruit not for its own benefit but for ours,48 or a river
in flood, whose rich abundance of water overflows its banks to nourish
the surrounding fields and supply smaller springs for later use.49 As
motivation for sharing what they have, Basil offers his propertied hearers
what any classical epideictic orator, praising virtue or blaming vice,
might promise: the honor of being a benefactor to the poor, of being
called father by innumerable new children,50 the honor of having
beggars at ones own doors rather than having to ask help from others.51
Yet the filotima he promotes here is set in a new imaginative context:
the greatest honor a grain owner can ambition is to stand before the
judgment seat of Christ, surrounded by the angels and saints, and there
to 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 private
property as a trust rather than a permanent possession, in a passage
whose two-fisted prophetic radicality has made it justly famous. The
de capadocia en el siglo IV, segun los Padres Capadocios (Acta Salmanticensia: Filosofia
y Letras 78; University of Salamanca, 1974). For a useful review of earlier literature on
Basils social ideas, see Gribomont, Aristocrate rvolutionnaire (above, n. 33), 6569.
47. Basil, Hom. 6.2 (PG 31:264c11265A2).
48. Ibid. 3 (265B13C3).
49. Ibid. 5 (272A14B5).
50. Ibid. 3 (265D3268B1).
51. Ibid. 6 (276A710).
52. Ibid. 3 (265D8268A11).
444
merchant hoarding his grain to run up the prices may simply ask, Have
I not the right to keep what is mine? Basil answers that the goods of the
earth are like the open seating in the public theater: we take what is
otherwise 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 the
rest for the needs of others, clearly no one would be rich and no one
poor.
Who, then, is greedy? (Basil asks) The one who does not remain content
with self-sufficiency. Who is the one who deprives others? The one who
hoards what belongs to everyone. Are you not greedy? Are you not one
who deprives others? You have received these things for stewardship, and
have 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 not
clothe the naked, when he was able to do sowhat other name does he
deserve? The bread that you hold on to belongs to the hungry; the cloak
you keep locked in your storeroom belongs to the naked; the shoe that is
moldering in your possession belongs to the person with no shoes; the silver
that you have buried belongs to the person in need. You do an injury to as
many 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 the
Emperor Julian in his attempt at priestly reform.55 Here Basil, the
Christian priest and rhetor, has put it at the service of Christian
preaching and Christian philanthropy.
The second homily from that painful summer of 369Homily VII,
entitled in the manuscripts Against the Wealthy (Prw tow
ploutontaw)deals with the Gospel story of the rich young man in
Matthew 19: the earnest young observer of the Law, who went away
sad when Jesus invited him to give away all his possessions to the poor
and join the company of his disciples. Significantly, perhaps, in Basils
treatment of this passage, Jesus is presented explicitly as a philosophical
sage: the true teacher ( lhyinw didskalow),56 the great physician
of souls ( megw tn cuxn fiatrw),57 our good and wise advisor
(smboulow), who made himself poor for us, that we might become rich
by his poverty (II Cor 8.9).58 In what follows, wealth and wisdom are
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
Ibid. 7 (276B49).
Ibid. 7 (276C8277A8).
See above, nn. 2022.
Hom. 7.1 (280A15).
Ibid. (281A45).
Ibid. 9 (304C15).
445
presented as being inherently in tension, if not in open conflict. The bulk

of the homily is a treatise on the vanity of pursuing wealth, with telling
rhetorical elaborations (ethopoiiai) describing the psychology of affluence
as a spiral of mounting need,59 and pointing to the familiar human
tendency to blame ones greed on ones spouse.60 Basil points out, too, in
one passage, that the addictive power of greed leads people not only to
covet vast possessions but to seek domination over others; again, like
rivers flooding the landscapedepicted now not in their beneficial but in
their destructive role
so those who progress to great power take on, at the expense of those they
have already subjected, the ability to do still greater injustice; the growth of
their power becomes a superabundance of wickedness. . . . Nothing can
withstand the force of wealth; everything bows to its tyranny, everything
trembles before its lordship; each of those who has suffered unjustly is more
concerned not to experience some new evil, than to bring the perpetrator to
justice 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 are
held 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, but
rather the assertion that the accumulation of wealth grows from wanting
or misdirected love. The rich young man went away from Jesus sad, Basil
suggests, because his love for his possessions was stronger than his love
for his neighbor, let alone his love for Jesus and his disciples.
If what you assert was true (Basil apostrophizes the young man in the
Gospel), that you have kept the command of love since your youth and
have distributed what you have as much to others as to yourself, how is it
you 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 own
necessities, 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 clear
that you have considered your own enjoyment more precious than the
comfort of the masses? Surely the more you abound in wealth, the more
you are lacking in love!62
59.
60.
61.
62.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
5
4
5
1
(292B293D).
(288C289C).
(293C10296A3).
(281A12B9).
446
Basils seventh Homily deals, then, primarily with the use of money;
the bottom line of his message, sounded urgently towards the end, is
for those with a surplus of wealth to disregard even the claims of family
and status and to give generously to those in needto give their wealth
away now, and not trust the uncertainties of courts and heirs by simply
leaving the poor a legacy in their wills.63 A modern American reader can
hardly avoid admiring Basils aptitude for fundraising, or suspecting that
Basil was not only preaching here, but doing preliminary development
work for his new city.
The eighth Homily, on the other handentitled A Homily Delivered
in a Time of Famine and Droughtis again, like Homily VI, a direct
appeal to those who had food supplies in that catastrophic summer to
make them available to the hungry. Here the biblical underpinning is less
the 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 all
the effects of classical rhetorical virtuosity, powerfully depicting the hot,
cloudless sky and the parched earth of a rainless season,64 and remarking, in an ironic reversal of the Gospel saying, that in Cappadocia the
laborers are many, but there is not even a small harvest.65 Offering us a
glimpse of his own frustration, he describes the aimlessness of the towns
underemployed population, their failure to take this calamity to heart as
a call to conversion, and the predominance in his own congregation of
women and noisy, inattentive children, while the men, free of productive
labor, simply lounge in the square.66 Then, darkening the mood of his
word-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, the
reason that a provident God allows such catastrophes is to make us
aware of our own sinful greed, and to correct us. It is not that God has
become 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 the
usual 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, Basil
echoes Julian and the Stoics in suggesting that human reason itself
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
Ibid. 89 (300B304A).
Hom. 8.2 (305C308B).
Ibid. 308 (A1213).
Ibid. 3 (309B313A).
Ibid. 7 (321BD).
Ibid. 3 (309A1114).
447
should move his hearers towards sharing what they have, and makes
reverse use of Julians appeal to the good example of the religious
opposition:
Let us, who are endowed with reason, not appear more cruel than the
irrational beasts. They use what is provided for them by nature as a
common possession. The sheep, after all, graze together on the same
mountain; 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 to
shame by what is said about the philanthropy of the Greeks: among some
of them philanthropic law decrees a single table, and a common meal, and
they have formed what amounts to a single household for a large
population.69 Let us abandon the outsiders, though, and turn to the example
of the three thousand [in the early Christian community of Acts 2]; let us
imitate the first band of Christians, when all things were held in common
when life and soul and harmony and the table all were shared, when
fraternity was undivided, and unfeigned love formed many bodies into
one. . . .70
In the tradition of classical philosophical rhetoric, Basil is here invoking

a Golden Age, an original utopia, as a motivating human model for
justice and generosity. He begins with the examples of peaceful animals
and pious pagans, but sweeps on to Scripture; in the end, it is the
primitive Christian community, the band of disciples idealistically depicted in the Book of Acts, that provides the determining image for his
appeal. Reasoning and rhetoric are essential, he seems to suggest, but
must themselves be redeemed by the gph nupkritow71 of the Christian tradition.
3. Basils homilies of the summer of 369 deal with themes of what we
would 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 the
Pythagorean communities. See Iamblichus, De vita Pythagorica 17.7174 (acceptance
into the community); 18.80 (structure of the community); 21.95100 (daily order of
activities and common meals); 33.22935 (emphasis on friendship [fila] as basis of
community and culture).
70. Ibid. 8 (325A2B4).
71. This is a fairly common phrase in the New Testament epistles: see Rom 12.9;
II Cor 12.6; I Pet 1.22 (filadelfa nupkritow); cf. I Tim 1.5: love based on
unfeigned faith.
448
responses to a crisis: appeals to the conscience of the Christian propertied class in Caesarea to use their resources to alleviate the suffering all
around them, and to put an end to profiteering in the famine.72 Yet one
can detect in them, taken together, hints of a larger scheme for the
Christian, philosophical reshaping of his city: hints of an ideal of human
society 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 practical
realization of that scheme, in institutional terms, was the collection of
hospices, monastic buildings, and a Church that Basil may well have
begun planning at about the same time, perhaps as an outgrowth of the
refuge and soup kitchen Gregory Nazianzen tells us he opened during the
summer of famine, and that was to be completed during his first two
years as bishop of Caesarea. To understand the seriousness and scope of
this plan, as well as the importance of rhetoric in achieving it and
winning its acceptance, we will not go wrong, I think, in considering
three other homilies on the subject of Christian philanthropia by Basils
two closest theological and pastoral associates: his younger brother
Gregory of Nyssa, and his lifelong friend and soul-mate, Gregory of
Nazianzus.73 Although the dating and original setting of all three must
remain conjectural, I want to suggest here that both Gregory of Nyssas
two homilies on loving the poor and Gregory of Nazianzuss Oration
14, on the same subject, can best be understood if we suppose they were
originally delivered in Caesarea during the years that Basil was developing and carrying out his philanthropic program, and that both their
72. Dom Gribomont, in his article Aristocrate rvolutionnaire, cited above
(n. 33), points out clearly the difference between Basils social criticism and that of
modern socialist and communist theory. Basils concern is to remind those with an
abundance of external possessions (ktmata)his own social equalsof their
obligations of responsible stewardship, as well as their duty in charity towards their
poorer neighbors. His monastic writings, Gribomont points out, emphasize the
importance of work for every monk, as well as the salutary effects of limiting
individual possessions: Ce got du travail, cohrent avec le got de laustrit, nat
du coeur; lamour de Dieu, lamour des frres constituent le dynamisme qui remplace
avantageusement la concupiscence et lavarice. . . . Un corps social, diversifi,
hirarchis, trs loin du nivellement dmagogique, domine la vision basilienne et, sans
oublier ses origines stociennes, sintgre dans la vision paulinienne du corps du
Christ (77).
73. These homilies are: Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 14, On Love of the Poor (PG
35:857909); and Gregory of Nyssa, Sermon on Benevolence and Sermon on the
Text, 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 de
Pauperibus Amandis Orationes Duo (Leiden: Brill, 1964).
449
content and their style were carefully crafted to lend persuasive force to
what Basil himself had begun. They seem unquestionably to belong to
the same project of building a new city.
a) Dating the works of Gregory of Nyssa is a notoriously speculative
business. We know that he worked as a professor of rhetoric in his native
Caesarea from about 365 until 372, when his brother Basilwho, as
bishop since 370, had been engaged in a struggle with the imperial court
to retain ecclesiastical control of the province of Cappadociamore or
less forced him to accept the bishopric of Nyssa, a small market town on
the Halys River, some sixty miles west of Caesarea. Gregory was forced
into exile by hostile elements in his Church, on apparently trumped-up
charges of financial malfeasance, from 375 to 378, with the support of
the imperial vicar Demosthenes;74 he seems not to have found his voice as
a widely respected episcopal leader until after Basils death in 379,
perhaps even after the Council of Constantinople in 381. For this reason,
it seems, Jean Danilouwho made the first modern attempts to work
out a chronology of Gregorys works75tends to date most of his extant
sermons and pastoral works after 382. Thus Danilou, followed by Jean
Bernardi in his own large-scale study of the preaching of the three
Cappadocians,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 reforms
of Diocletian, as the administrative officer in charge of tax-collecting and the
administration of justice within a diocese, or grouping of provinces, under the general
supervision of the praetorian prefect. Julian had curtailed their freedom to spend
government money, but they retained their fiscal and juridical role at least until the
time of Justinian. See A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284602 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1964) 1:46, 130, 48182, 493.
75. Jean Danilou, La chronologie des sermons de saint Grgoire de Nysse,
RecSR 29 (1955): 34672; Le mariage de Grgoire de Nysse et la chronologie de sa
vie, REAg 2 (1956): 7178; La chronologie des oeuvres de Grgoire de Nysse,
SP 7 (TU 92; Berlin, 1966): 15969. Less speculative, and generally more reliable, is
Gerhard May, Die Chronologie des Lebens und der Werke des Gregor von Nyssa,
in M. Harl, ed., criture et culture philosophique dans la pense de Grgoire de Nysse
(1971), 5166.
76. Prdication des Pres Cappadociens, 27383.
77. Danilou, Chronologie des sermons, 36061, gives what seems to me an
unusually weak reason for proposing a date of 382: a perceived echo of Gregorys
sermon Against Those Who Cannot Bear Criticism (PG 46:308A316D), which
seems to have been delivered during the New Year revels of that year. The parallel
pointed to by Danilou is that Gregory speaks of his own role, in both sermons, as
being 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 philosophicallyminded Christian rhetor, to suggest one particular epoch in Gregorys thinking.
450
gave them in his own Church at Nyssa. There seems, in fact, to be little
real evidence, internal or external, that Gregory could not have preached
these two sermons at an earlier date, or indeed that he was even a bishop
when he preached them. We know, in fact, from a letter written to
Gregory by Gregory of Nazianzus, sometime between 365 and 372, that
Basils younger brother, who had been educated as a rhetorician but had
worked 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 rhetoricperhaps as a result of the lapse of Julians antiChristian decree. In his Epistle 11, Gregory Nazianzen chides his
namesake, in a jocular but pointed way, for leaving the most precious
work of all, even though he remains a believer, and urges him to return
to active ministry as a preacher: One does not simply live for oneself,
but also for ones neighbor, he writes, and there is no profit in
persuading oneself [of the faith] if one does not also persuade others.78
It is certainly possible, it seems to me, that Gregory heeded this admonition, and that he put his considerable rhetorical and intellectual skills
at the service of the Church sometime in the late 360s; it is also quite
possible (contra Bernardi79) that the younger Gregory was ordained a
presbyter in Caesarea at some time before his appointment to the
bishopric in 372, and that he may have preached these two homilies
there under the sponsorship of his older brother, who became bishop in
the metropolitan city in 370. Most scholars today assume that the late
360s or early 370s was the period in which the younger Gregory wrote
his treatise On Virginity, as a rhetorically elaborate, Platonizing theoretical support for Basils efforts at organizing a new form of monastic life;
it would seem at least plausible to date his two sermons On Loving the
Poor, also, to the years between 369 and 372, when Basil was conceiving
and promoting his great charitable enterprise as part of his new, urban
philosophy, and to see them also as contributions to his brothers
program. Certainly the depiction of large numbers of wandering, homeless poor in these two homilies, and their impassioned, satirical critique
of ostentatious wealthlike that in Gregory of Nazianzuss Oration 14
seems more believeable in a provincial capital with some claim to social
and economic importance than in a small country town.
Although the themes of these two sermons of Gregory of Nyssa are
similar, nothing in either of them suggests that they were intended as a
78. Gregory of Nazianzus, ep. 11.7 (ed. P. Gallay, Saint Grgoire de Nazianze:
Lettres I [Coll. Bud: Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964], 18).
79. Prdication, 375.
451
pair, and in fact their manuscript traditions differ considerably. In the

first, entitled in Greek On Beneficence (Per epoiaw), Gregory informs
us that his sermon has been preceded by two homilies on temperance and
fasting; now, he says, he will turn to greater and more challenging
teaching,80 to interior asceticism, to the bodiless fasting and immaterial self-control which consists in refraining from vice. From its opening
lines, this sermon has a decidedly philosophical tone. Gregory begins by
remarking that the one who presides over this Churchthe bishop,
presumably, who remains in the third person here and who therefore
need not be himself!as well as other teachers of unwavering piety and
the virtuous way of life (politeaw), are really more like instructors in
elementary grammar than purveyors of higher learning.81 Even so, his
own purpose here is to lead his audience a step further in their interior
education, moving them on from external ascetical practices towards the
purity 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 the
destructive 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 that
crowd the citys streets;83 the purpose of the description, he acknowledges at the end, is curative: to heal the opposing disorders (pyh) of
your surfeit and your brothers and sisters hunger, by moving his
hearers to merciful action, to use the tools of exhortation to open the
gates of beneficence (epoia).84
The sermons explicitly Christian message then begins. Do not look
down 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 put
on the figure (prsvpon) of our Savior; for the one who loves humanity
( filnyrvpow) has lent them his own figure, so that through it they
might shame those who lack compassion and hate the poorlike
travelers who wear medallions of the Emperor around their necks, to
intimidate bandits.85 Gregory then turns to the Christian expectation of
the last judgment of Christ, dramatically invoking the scene of Matthew
25, in which the returning King, at historys end, will ask each mortal
what they have done for these, the least of my brothers and sisters (Mt
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
Van Heck, Gregorii Nysseni, 4.45.

Ibid. 3.14.
Ibid. 5.45.
Ibid. 6.197.6.
Ibid. 7.1221.
Ibid. 8.239.4.
452
25.40, 45). In that final trial, the poor will become advocates for those
who have shown mercy to them, opening the doors of the Kingdom to
the generous, and shutting them on the stingy.86
In the second half of his homily, Gregory continues to interweave this
biblical theme with a more philosophical treatment of compassion and
justice. The purpose of the Gospels prediction of the coming judgment,
he says, is that we might learn the goodness of beneficence (epoia).87
Gregory then gives a lengthy evocation of beneficencenot, one might
observe, the more interior virtue of philanthropiaas the chief of
virtues, revealed to us by Gods own goodness in creating and sustaining
all things.88 We, by contrast, who are called to imitate God, often ignore
the needs of those around us and live only for our material gratification.89 The solution Gregory offers to counteract such failure is for us to
use our reason as well as to listen to the Gospel: You, then, who have
been created rational, who have your mind as interpreter and instructor
in the things of God: do not be enticed by temporal things!90 A reasonable person will recognize that ultimately all things belong to God
and that we are brothers and sisters, members of the same tribe.91 If
everyone cannot have an equal share of our inheritance, at least everyone should have some part of what God has given to all. The person who
is bent on owning everything around him is a bitter tyrant, an
irreconcilable barbarian, an insatiable beast.92 Gregory concludes his
homily with two contrasting descriptions of great dramatic power: one
of the greedy plutocrat in his splendid palace, surrounded with servants
and entertainers, whose habits of consumption mean destruction for all
kinds of living things,93 the other of the poor, clustered at his gates like
countless reproductions of Lazarus in Luke 16, roughly kept back by
porters as their cries are drowned out by the sounds of celebration
within.94 It is to shock such haters of the poor (misptvxoi), he ob-
86. Ibid. 9.511.

87. Ibid. 10.68.
88. Ibid. 10.812.13.
89. Ibid. 12.1413.17.
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, Discourse
6.1.87, 1.12930, 4.33; Enchiridion 15.
91. Ibid. 13.2224. For the use of this theme in classical philosophy see above,
n. 24.
92. Ibid. 14.14.
93. Ibid. 14.1615.25.
94. Ibid.16.118.
453
serves, that the Gospel describes for us the prospect of judgment and
hell.95 In the same spirit, Gregory urges his hearers to think about their
end.96
Gregorys second homily on philanthropy is centered on the same
Matthaean judgment scene invoked in the first, and especially on the
phrase 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 at
the beginning of Lent, on the grounds that this Gospel passage has been
read in the Byzantine liturgy for the third pre-Lenten Sundaythe
Sunday of farewell to meatsince at least the sixth century.97 In this
second homily, the atmosphere is dramatic from the start. Gregory
describes how the Gospel passage continues to strike terror into his own
heart as he imagines the scene98 and realizes how many poor and sick
people still surround us, calling on our compassion.99 The style and
choice of language are intentionally theatrical; so Gregory concludes a
long description of the sick poor in the city with the words, Will this be
enough to assure that we make no mistake about the law of our nature:
that we have made a tragic depiction (tragden) of the sufferings of this
nature, and have described the disease in words and recalled its pathetic
details to our memory?100 The allusion to tragedy suggests that his own
descriptions 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 between
rich and poor, but the acute problem raised by the presence of homeless,
untended lepers, begging in the streets of the city. In an extended
ekphrasis that follows this opening reflection on the Gospel judgment
scene, Gregory offers a graphic description of these lepers as a spectacle (yama) that cannot fail to move our hearts.101 Although he does
not use the technical terms, it is clear that he is referringwith his
customary well-informed interest in medical mattersto our modern
disease of leprosy, present in the Greek world since the time of Alexander
95. Ibid. 16.1917.3.

96. Ibid. 17.1518.14.
97. Ibid. 100f.
98. Ibid. 21.68.
99. Ibid. 23.2224.2.
100. Ibid. 29.1619.
101. Ibid. 24.13.
454
and known to Greek medical writers since the third century b.c.e. as
lpra or lefantasiw.102 Gregorys plea, throughout this homily, is that
his hearers should show their compassion for these sufferers not simply
by providing them with food and financial support, but by taking them
into their homes.103 It is not a sufficient display of mercy, he pointedly
adds, simply to make arrangements for them to be sheltered at some
distance from our way of life (prrv tw metraw zvw)104a detail
which suggests that at the time this homily was delivered, Basils hospice
for the sick poor outside the walls of Caesarea had not yet become a
reality.
c) Gregorys 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 commentary
on the two homilies of Gregory of Nyssa, Adrianus van Heck points out
some fifteen instances of direct verbal parallels between Gregorys long
ekphrasis on the lepers and a similar passage in Gregory of Nazianzuss
fourteenth Oration, On Love of the Poor (Per filoptvxaw).105 It seems
unquestionable that there is literary dependence; and because of the
somewhat more elaborate language in Gregory Nazianzens version, as
well as the presence there of additional pathetic details, it seems most
likelyas Van Heck suggeststhat it is he who is using and developing
an existing source, rather than vice versa.106 Gregory Nazianzens long
102. On the known forms of the disease in the ancient world, see F. W. Beyer,
Aussatz, RAC 1 (1950): 102328, and the literature cited there. Although the
disease referred to in the Hebrew Bible as leprosy (Hebr. Sarat; LXX lpra) was
clearly some other kind or kinds of skin disease, leprosy in the modern medical sense
seems to have entered the Mediterranean world from Persia or Mesopotamia shortly
after the expeditions of Alexanderpossibly brought back by his soldiers. According
to Oribasius, the medical compiler and advisor of Julian, the first Greeek writer to
describe the disease was the peripatetic Straton (died ca. 287267 b.c.e.). It is also
described accurately by several later medical writersnotably Aretaeus of Cappadocia
(ca. 150200 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 Greek
physicians was that leprosy could not be communicated by physical contact, and they
generally regarded the Oriental practice of isolating lepers as superstitious and
inhuman.
103. Ibid. 29.2526.1, 30.14, 33.2327.
104. Ibid. 29.2530.1.
105. Ibid. 12124.
106. See Van Hecks careful analysis of the data, ibid. 12223. Van Hecks other
suggestion (123f.), that both Gregories may be using a passage from a now-lost letter
of Basil as their common source, seems an unnecessary conjecture.
455
and highly artistic oration, in factas Francesco Trisoglio showed in

abundant detail over thirty years agois filled with echoes and
reminiscences of a number of classical Greek authors;107 for a welltrained rhetor of the fourth century, this was simply an indication of the
cultural heritage that formed a bond between speaker and audience, a
way of staking out the dimensions of the intellectual and emotional
world in which persuasion was possible. To include direct allusions also
to a recent rhetorical effort of his younger friend, a piece that may have
already left a powerful effect on those whom he himself was now
addressing, would be both a rhetors compliment and an indication that
both Gregories were involved in the same humanitarian project. Unless
we are to date all three of these sermons in the 380s, and suppose some
other, unknown setting for their delivery, the most plausible context for
Gregory of Nazianzus Oration 14 seems, once again, to be that of Basils
campaign to introduce a practical, philosophically grounded Christian
approach to social welfare at Caesarea, and the most probable setting
seems to be in Caesarea itself, some time between late 369 and the spring
of 372.
There seems to be literary confirmation for this surmise in Gregory
Nazianzens Panegyric on Basil. In the passage we quoted earlier, where
Gregory so glowingly describes Basils new city for the poor, he adds
that 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 the
limbs of their bodies, driven away from their cities, their homes, the market
places, 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 state
of the lepers who formerly roamed the streets, a short passage which is
again marked by five verbal echoes of Gregory of Nyssas sermon on
Matthew 25, as well as of his own fourteenth Oration. The need for
practical compassion that the younger Gregory had described in selfconsciously tragic terms in his second homily, in a passage which
Gregory of Nazianzus had incorporated, with added elaboration, into
107. Francesco Trisoglio, Reminiscenze e consonanze classiche nella XIV orazione

di San Gregorio Nazianzeno, Atti della Accademia delle Scienze di Torino II: Classe
di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche 99 (1964): 129204.
108. Or. 43.63.
456
his fourteenth Oration, is presented here as having been decisively met

by Basils own mercy and foresight:
He it was, more than all others, who persuaded us, as human beings, not to
despise other humans or to dishonor Christ, the one head of us all, by our
inhumanity towards them, but through the misfortunes of others to put our
own fortunes in order, and as people who are in need of mercy ourselves to
lend mercy to God. Therefore he did not consider it beneath himhe who
was well born and from a good family, who was resplendent in gloryto
honor this disease with his lips;109 but he embraced them as brothers and
sisters: not, as one might suspect, out of vaingloryfor who stood so far
from that weakness?but to give an example of drawing near them
physically in order to heal them by his own philosophy, an exhortation both
spoken and beyond words.110
Gregorys return in this passage to the powerful, tragic description he

had borrowed from his younger namesake once before, now in the
context of celebrating Basils great hospice as an instance of the success
of his Christian philosophy, seems to me, at least, to confirm that both
Gregories earlier depictions of this awful disease had themselves formed
part of a collaboratiave parainesis: oratorical contributions by two
master rhetors of Basils camp to the campaign of persuasion that was
eventually to result in a new philanthropic institution.
We can consider the rest of Gregory Nazianzens Oration 14 more
briefly here: not because it is less noteworthy than the sermons we have
discussed up to nowit is, in fact, one of his most eloquent and most
perfectly constructed orations, as well as one of his longestbut because
we 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 liturgical
setting, if any, the sermon may have had; Gregory does not anchor the
work in a central biblical passage, but proceeds in the manner of a
philosophical discourse to give a comprehensive treatment of the
importance of loving the poor. Curiously, though, Gregorys work is at
the 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 the
surface, a classic piece of epideictic oratory. Gregory begins by a
discussion of which virtue we might recognize as supreme; after listing
some twenty candidates for that title in the chapters that followfaith,
hope, love, hospitality, patience, gentleness, zeal, and others: each made
109. Is Gregory referring to Basils oratory, or to his actually kissing lepers?
110. Or. 43.63.
457
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, the
crowning 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 most
excellent form.111 Philanthropiaa key word in this oration as in all the
works we have been discussingfinds its perfection, in Gregorys eyes, in
philoptochia.
Gregory moves, then, to suggest as a concrete occasion for exercising
this virtue the plight of the homeless lepers we have already discussed.
Before echoing, as it seems, Gregory of Nyssas dramatic portrait of their
woes, he sets it in the context of the general difficulty of human
embodiment, of the complex set of relationships which the human being,
as Gods image, has with the material world to which our bodies intrinsically belong.112 Gregorys point is not simply to echo this classical Platonic and ascetic topos, present in most of his works, but to provide the
setting for his orations 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 lay
charges 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 less
for the bodies of our neighbors than for our own. . . . And we must
consider this to be the single way towards salvation both for our bodies
and our souls: philanthropia shown towards them [i.e., our neighbors].113 Gregory goes on to depict the situation of the lepers, apparently drawing on the other Gregorys graphic evocation, and then contrasts it with a description of the careless rich that also parallels, without
exact verbal echoes, Gregory of Nyssas satiric portrait of wealth in his
first sermon.
Gregory Nazianzen then turns to discuss the insecurity of all human
affairs, and urges his hearers to possess their souls in acts of mercy, to
find true security in giving something to God by their generosity to
others.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 in
terms of stewardship,115 and suggests that private property is really the
result of aggression and greed, sanctioned by law.116 The point is again
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
Or. 14.5.
Ibid. 67.
Ibid. 8.
Ibid. 1923.
Ibid. 2426.
Ibid. 26. For parallels in antique philosophy, see above, n. 20.
458
not so much theoretical as practical: Think, I ask you, of humanitys

original equality, not of its final diversity; think not of the conquerors
law, but of the creators! As far as you can, support nature, honor
primeval liberty, show reverence for yourself and cover the shame of
your race, help to resist sickness, offer relief to human need. . . .117 To
be filnyrvpow is to imitate God, for a human being has no more
godlike ability than that of doing good.118
After a discussion of the unanswerable question of why God allows
our fellow men and women to suffer as so many doa question Gregory
dodges by saying that we will only understand Gods wisdom and
providence in eternity119he concludes by making a synthetic survey of
the many passages in Scripture where God commands us to be concerned
for the poor. These texts, along with the judgment scene of Matthew 25,
make it terrifyingly clear that philanthropia is not simply a gracious
option for us, but a normative obligation.120
Let us take care of Christ, then, (Gregory urges), while there is still time; let
us minister to Christs needs, let us give Christ nourishment, let us clothe
Christ, let us gather Christ in, let us show Christ honornot just at our
tables, 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 desires
mercy and not sacrifice (Hos 6.6; Mt 9.13), and since a compassionate
heart is worth more than tens of thousands of fat rams (Dan 3.40), let us
give this gift to him through the needy. . . .121
The biblical character of Gregorys classical humanism nowhere appears

more clearly.
III. THE NEW PHILOSOPHY
As we have mentioned before, Gregory of Nazianzus portrays Basils
collection of hostels and monastic buildings, in his panegyric given after
Basils 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 buildings
began to cluster around the Basileias in the century or so after its
construction, and it became the nucleus of the citys later development,
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
26.
27.
31.
39.
40.
459
underlying the modern Turkish city of Kayseri; walls were erected

around it in Justinians time that served later as the foundation of
Ottoman fortifications, and the old cityalready crumbling, apparently,
in Basils day122gradually became uninhabited.
It was a city built, as in a way all Greek cities had been, on a social
ideal: supported by the power of words, of rhetoric, and embodying
what might be called a philosophy. The philosophy and the rhetoric here
were fundamentally classical, in many ways: Basil and the two Gregories
sought to move the heart by the incantation of words, cunningly
arranged, and by the power of the imagination to elicit new resolve for
action; they invited their hearers to enter into and know themselves, by
what Pierre Hadot has called an ancient variety of spiritual exercises,123 as well as to reflect on the universal characteristics of human
nature; their aim was not simply to promote a way of living successfully
in the city, but of living wellof realizing human excellence and
perfection in self-mastery and social responsibility, of acting before
others in the city in such a way as to win their admiration and even their
envy. Yet for all these continuities between the Cappadocians philosophical rhetoric and that of Cicero or Julian, the heart of their civic
message was new: a vision of Christ as the true emperor and the full
realization of godlike humanity; a trembling yet hopeful expectation that
it was his law on which all Cappadocias citizens would someday be
judged, not simply the law of the Greeks; an awareness that the texts
which now defined civility and reverence and virtue were not those of
Homer and the tragedians, let alone those of the philosophers, but the
books of Holy Scripture.
Among the letters of Basil of Caesarea is one sent under the name of a
certain Heracleidasprobably around 373to his friend Amphilochius,
the nephew of Gregory of Nazianzus and later bishop of Iconium,
another small Cappadocian city. In it we learn that Heracleidas and
Amphilochius, both trained as lawyers, have decided to give up their
122. This seems to be implied in Basils sober reflection on the signs of urban decay
in Homily 7.4: Do you not see these walls, crumbling away through time, whose
remains jut out like rocky crags throughout the whole city? How much poverty was
there in the city as these were being raisedpoor people who were overlooked by the
rich of that time because of their concern for these walls? Where, then, is the splendid
form of these works? Where is the one who was made much of, because of their
magnificence? Have not these things come to ruin and disappeared, like the structures
children love to create in the sand? And does not he lie in Hades, repenting his earnest
pursuit of foolish things? (289C415).
123. See above, n. 29.
460
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, presumably to consult Bishop Basil and his friends on the best way to take up
this new life, and has tarried longer than he planned. Amphilochius,
apparently, has written to express the worry that his friend has abandoned their plan for retirement, because he is staying away so long, and
Heracleidas here answers with a kind of apology, saying that he has remained in Caesarea because he has begun to learn the outlines there of a
new form of living:
Now public life (bow dhmsiow) no longer holds me back. For even if I am
still the same person at heart, and have not yet put off the old man, except
in outer form and in taking myself far from lifes business, still it seems to
me that in a way I have now set out on the road of a life according to
Christ (tw do tw kat Xristn politeaw).124
This sense of being on a new route gives Heracleidas the confidence, he

says, 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 are
journeying towards him are fellow travelers with each other. . . .125 Yet
there is something special about the community he has found in Caesarea, he tells Amphilochius, that continues to hold him there: the lifestyle
Basil has formed for himself and his monastic followers, centered on
their hostel of philanthropy:
When I came near Caesarea to learn how things were here, and refrained
from immersing myself in the city itself, I took refuge in the hostel for poor
people nearby, in order to learn there what I wanted to know. There I
brought the things your Eloquence had charged me to ask before the
bishop, beloved of God, when he made his customary visit to the
place. . . .126
Heracleidas questions seem to have centered on how to pursue freedom

from possessiveness (kthmosnh),127 and Basil has advised him to be
content simply with owning one tunic, and to take to heart the Gospels
admonition to sell all one has and give it away to the poor (Mk 10.21
and parr.)though this distribution of goods, Basil has added, must be
124. Letters of Basil, ep. 150: ed. Deferrari 360.
125. Ibid. 364.
126. Ibid. 366.
127. On the danger of having possessions (ktsiw) to a person bent on acquiring
philosophical freedom, see Epictetus, Discourse 4.1.81, 1.12930, 4.33; Enchiridion
1, 39, 44.
461
done prudently and with good advice, to avoid giving to the wrong
persons!
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. I
really wish you could learn these things from him directlyit would not be
a good idea for me to cloud the precision of his teachings! . . . But I asked
him if I might someday visit him with you, so that you might preserve what
he said accurately in your memory and discover whatever I missed by using
your own intelligence. One thing that I do remember, though, of the many
things I heard is this: that instruction about how a Christian must live
doesnt so much need words as it needs daily example.128
For all his modesty, Amphilochius friend Heracleidas seems to have

stumbled on a key element in ancient philosophy and ancient rhetoric,
Christian and pagan: the Greeks knew that words and ideas, however
brilliant they are, need to be fleshed out in actions. It was the reason
Basils eloquence, along with that of the two Gregories, needed to be
built into the stones of a shelter and a hospitalthe reason philanthropia,
and not just wise and powerful words, had to take such a central role in
shaping 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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1998 NAPS Presidential Address Building a New City:

The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy

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

For additional information about this article

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

1998 NAPS Presidential Address

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

the citizenship in the heavens.1 Nor should it surprise us that when

For Gregory, Basils monastic hospice, his monument to philanthropy

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

Philip of Macedon.12 Dio Chrysostom, the cynic preacher and imperial

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

tradition behind him to return to the ideals and practice of Hellenism,

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

Philanthropy was simply an indispensable part of philosophically reflective

23. Ibid. 290D291A (tr. Wright 303).

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Greek cultural and intellectual resourcesJulians critique of Hellenic

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

formation of a new human community, a new city, on what both Julian

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Nazianzus describes the famine of that year in characteristically dramatic

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

VI in our modern numberingdeals with the Lucan parable of the rich

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

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

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

presented as being inherently in tension, if not in open conflict. The bulk

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

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

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

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

pair, and in fact their manuscript traditions differ considerably. In the

Van Heck, Gregorii Nysseni, 4.45.

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

86. Ibid. 9.511.

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

95. Ibid. 16.1917.3.

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

and highly artistic oration, in factas Francesco Trisoglio showed in

107. Francesco Trisoglio, Reminiscenze e consonanze classiche nella XIV orazione

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

his fourteenth Oration, is presented here as having been decisively met

Gregorys return in this passage to the powerful, tragic description he

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

imaginable by the example of a character in the Bible who embodies it

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

not so much theoretical as practical: Think, I ask you, of humanitys

The biblical character of Gregorys classical humanism nowhere appears

DALEY/BUILDING A NEW CITY

underlying the modern Turkish city of Kayseri; walls were erected

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

public careers and have agreed to withdraw, as Basil and Gregory of

This sense of being on a new route gives Heracleidas the confidence, he