The Cappadocian Fathers

Three theologians from the bleak upland province of Cappadocia in central Anatolia, working in the third quarter of the fourth century, gave the Christian doctrine of the Trinity the vocabulary it has used ever since. They also founded the first recognisable Christian hospital, wrote the monastic rule that still governs Orthodox communities, produced the finest Greek prose of their century, and left a correspondence that shows them quarrelling with one another like the friends and relations they were.

They are Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379), his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395), and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–390).

The Family

Basil and Gregory of Nyssa came from a wealthy, deeply Christian landowning family that produced an extraordinary number of significant figures: a grandmother, Macrina the Elder, who had survived persecution; ten children, of whom their elder sister Macrina the Younger was the dominant intellectual and spiritual influence on both brothers; another brother, Peter, who became bishop of Sebaste.

Macrina deserves more attention than she usually gets. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina and his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, in which she is the principal speaker and he the pupil, present her as the family’s theologian — the one who persuaded Basil to abandon a career in rhetoric, who established the ascetic community on the family estate, and who argues Gregory out of his grief at her deathbed. Whether the dialogue reports her words or uses her as a Socratic figure is debatable; that a fourth-century bishop chose to present his sister as his teacher is not. She is discussed further in women in Byzantium.

The Problem They Solved

After Nicaea in 325, the Nicene position was in trouble. Many eastern bishops were not Arians but could not accept homoousios, “of one substance,” because it seemed to abolish the distinction between Father and Son.

The confusion was largely terminological. Ousia (substance, essence) and hypostasis (subsistence, individual existence) had been used interchangeably, so that saying “one ousia” sounded to some like saying “one hypostasis” — one person, which is the modalist heresy that Father, Son and Spirit are three masks of one actor.

The Cappadocian solution was to fix the two words apart: one ousia, three hypostaseis. God is one in what he is and three in who he is. The three are distinguished not by anything in their nature but by their relations of origin — the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding.

This formulation made it possible for the anti-Arian majority who had feared homoousios to accept it, and it carried the Council of Constantinople in 381. Latin theology adopted the equivalent formula — one substantia, three personae — and the two traditions have used them since, with the differences discussed in the ecumenical councils.

They also completed the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Basil’s treatise On the Holy Spirit argues for the Spirit’s divinity partly from the church’s own practice of worship — the Spirit is glorified with the Father and the Son in the doxology, therefore the Spirit is God — an argument from liturgy to doctrine that is characteristically Greek.

Basil of Caesarea

Basil is the organiser of the three: bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia from 370, a formidable administrator and a political operator who kept his province’s church out of the emperor Valens’s Arian grip through a mixture of nerve and tactical concession.

Two achievements outside doctrine stand out.

The Basileias. On the outskirts of Caesarea he built a complex of buildings for the care of the sick, the poor and travellers — a hospital, hostel, leper house and staff quarters, large enough that Gregory of Nazianzus called it a new city. It is generally identified as the first institution in the Mediterranean world resembling a hospital in the modern sense, and it is the direct ancestor of the Byzantine xenon described in Byzantine medicine. His care for lepers was personal; he is recorded as embracing them.

The monastic rules. Basil’s Asketikon, in its longer and shorter forms, established cenobitic monasticism — communities living in obedience under a superior, with regulated work, prayer and charity — as the eastern norm, against the individualism of the Egyptian hermits. Orthodox monasticism follows Basil, as Byzantine monasticism describes, and Benedict knew and used his rule in the west.

Gregory of Nyssa

The youngest and the most philosophically adventurous. Made bishop of the insignificant town of Nyssa by his brother, apparently against his own inclination and certainly against his talents as an administrator — Basil complained that he was hopeless at practical matters.

As a thinker he is the most original of the three. His key ideas include epektasis, the doctrine that the soul’s progress into God is infinite and never completed, so that perfection consists in perpetual advance rather than arrival; a strong doctrine of apophatic theology, worked out in the Life of Moses, where the ascent into the darkness of Sinai figures the mind’s approach to an unknowable God; and a tendency toward universal restoration — the eventual salvation of all, including the devil — which he took from Origen and which has kept him under suspicion in some quarters ever since.

He also wrote the most explicit condemnation of slaveholding in antiquity, in his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, arguing that to own a human being made in God’s image is to claim ownership over God’s property — an argument no other ancient writer, Christian or pagan, made.

Gregory of Nazianzus

The stylist, and the most personally unhappy. He wanted a contemplative life and was repeatedly pushed into positions he did not want — ordained by his father against his will, consecrated bishop of a town he never visited by Basil for tactical reasons, a favour he never forgave.

His moment came in 379, when he went to Constantinople, then largely Arian, and preached in a private house chapel called the Anastasia. The five Theological Orations delivered there are the finest exposition of Trinitarian doctrine in Greek, and they earned him the title “the Theologian” — a name the Orthodox Church gives to only two others, John the Evangelist and Symeon the New Theologian.

He presided briefly over the Council of Constantinople in 381, found the politics intolerable, resigned in disgust with a farewell speech that is still bracing to read, and retired to write poetry — some 17,000 lines of it, including an autobiographical poem that is the first substantial self-portrait in Christian literature.

Their Legacy

The Cappadocians are the point at which Christian theology and Greek philosophical culture came to terms. All three had the best classical education available; all three used it; and Basil’s short address To Young Men, On How They Might Derive Benefit from Greek Literature — advising Christian students to take what is useful from pagan authors as bees take nectar from flowers — was the standard justification for classical study in Byzantium and, in Latin translation, in the Renaissance. Its role in the transmission of classical learning is hard to overstate.

Basil and the two Gregories are commemorated individually and, with John Chrysostom, Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus are honoured together as the Three Holy Hierarchs on 30 January.

Macrina’s Case

The argument that Macrina should be counted with the three is worth making explicitly, because the evidence is better than the conventional listing suggests.

Gregory of Nyssa wrote two works about her. The Life of Macrina is a biography; On the Soul and the Resurrection is a philosophical dialogue set at her deathbed, in which she is the teacher and Gregory the pupil, arguing him through the nature of the soul, the resurrection of the body and the final restoration of all things.

Gregory calls her “the Teacher” throughout and casts himself as the one being corrected. The dialogue is explicitly modelled on Plato’s Phaedo, with Macrina in the position of Socrates — a comparison a fourth-century bishop would not make carelessly about his own sister.

He also credits her with turning Basil from a career in rhetoric, with establishing the ascetic community on the family estate at Annisa that became the model for their monastic thinking, and with the household arrangement in which she and her mother lived alongside their former slaves as equals.

The sceptical reading is that Gregory used a literary device, putting his own arguments in a revered woman’s mouth for rhetorical effect. The reply is that the device only works if the audience finds it credible that this particular woman taught this particular bishop, which itself tells us something.

Either way, the Cappadocian achievement came out of a household in which she was the dominant figure, and the conventional count of three is a convention rather than a judgement. Her position is discussed further in women in Byzantium.

The Three, Compared

The differences between them are easy to lose in a joint treatment, and they matter.

	Basil	Gregory of Nyssa	Gregory of Nazianzus
Temperament	Administrator, organiser	Speculative, systematic	Poet, rhetorician, reluctant
Best at	Institutions, church politics	Philosophy, mysticism	Language, doctrine, self-portraiture
Signature idea	Cenobitic monasticism; social charity	Epektasis, infinite progress into God	Trinitarian formulation; “what is not assumed is not healed”
Signature work	On the Holy Spirit; the Asketikon	Life of Moses	Five Theological Orations
Relationship to office	Sought and used it	Poor at it	Fled it repeatedly

Their friendship was real and frequently strained. Basil consecrated Gregory of Nazianzus bishop of Sasima — a place Gregory described as a dusty staging post with no water — purely to increase Basil’s votes in a metropolitan dispute. Gregory never went, never forgave him, and said so in the funeral oration he delivered for Basil years later, which manages to be both a masterpiece of praise and a settling of accounts.

The Social Programme

Basil’s practical Christianity was more radical than is usually conveyed, and the evidence is in his sermons on wealth and famine.

During the famine of 368–369 he sold his inherited property to buy food, organised a soup kitchen, and preached the homilies To the Rich and I Will Tear Down My Barns. The arguments are direct: the bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry, the coat in your wardrobe to the naked, the shoes you are not wearing to the barefoot.

He also attacked lending at interest at length, and his position went further than the standard clerical prohibition — he argued that the practice ruins the poor structurally, not merely that it is unseemly for clergy.

The Basileias was the institutional expression: a complex outside Caesarea combining a hospital, a hostel, a leper house and quarters for staff and the poor, funded by his family’s wealth and by donations he solicited from the provincial governor. Gregory of Nazianzus called it a new city, and it is generally identified as the first institution in the Mediterranean world recognisable as a hospital — the ancestor of the tradition described in Byzantine medicine.

He staffed it himself, and the sources record him caring for lepers personally at a time when leprosy carried absolute social exclusion.

• The Church Fathers of Byzantium — the patristic tradition
• The First Council of Nicaea — the position they rescued
• Byzantine Monasticism — Basil’s rule in practice
• Byzantine Medicine — the Basileias and the hospital tradition
• Women in Byzantium — Macrina and her influence
• John Chrysostom — the third Holy Hierarch
• The Seven Ecumenical Councils — where their formula was adopted