Friendship and the Philosophic Life
An excerpt from Professor John Panteleimon Manoussakis’ “Friendship in Late Antiquity: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen and Basil the Great” in Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship, ed. Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Gary M. Gurtler (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), 181–85.
The first letters* exchanged between [Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen] record for us the beginnings of a disagreement concerning the proper way of living, what usually goes by the name of philosophia. When Gregory writes, remembering those early days in Athens, that philosophy became their study, he means only loosely and incidentally the discipline we call by that name today. As it becomes clear in the rest of the oration, philosophy for him meant something more. He goes on to explain how they embarked upon the study of philosophia more systematically when they had both left Athens and were no longer students (suggesting, perhaps, the time when Basil was touring the
monastic communities of Egypt and Palestine) and how Gregory’s care for his parents became a hindrance on his own way to philosophia. With the same aim at pursuing the philosophic life, Basil had established his study at Pontus, following Elijah (the prophet) and John (the Baptist), “the first
among the philosophers.” In his first letter to Basil, Gregory admits to having betrayed his promise to follow him in what he calls sumphilosophēsein. The same terminology is used in De Vita Sua (270 and 321). Philosophia, for him, therefore, is clearly not a branch of knowledge, but a way of life—a life lived in introspection, away from the clamour of worldly affairs. The change that Christianity had brought about to the goal and purpose of human life effected a similar change, as noted above, not only in the understanding of philia, but also in the understanding of philosophia, insofar as it is a form of philia as well. Even though we read that the model for such a philosophical life was already set by the example of Plotinus and the Neoplatonic ascetics, it was Christian monasticism, which was just at this time reaching its first bloom, that fully embodied all the nuances that the term philosophia conveyed to the Christian mind of that time.
Yet—and here lies the root of Gregory's disagreement with Basil—monasticism, especially in the form which has been known ever since and of which Basil himself is considered to be founder, did not fully coincide with what Gregory was envisioning as the proper philosophic life. He clearly explains how he felt toward the simple monasticism of his time when he writes:
But when I actually considered the divine ways
It was hard to decide which path was definitely the better.
Each thing seemed good or bad depending on the arguments,
As is often the case when action needs to be taken.
(...)
I admired Elijah the Tishbite
And the great Carmel or the strange food,
The property of the Precursor, the desert,
And the simple way of life of the sons of Jonadab.
Then again a desire for the Holy Scriptures got the upper hand
As did the light of the spirit in the contemplation of the word—
Practices not suited to the desert or a life of calm.
After swinging to and fro between these positions many times,
I at last reconciled my desires in the following way,
And giving each position its due, checked the vacillations of
my mind:
I realized that those who enjoy a practical life
Are useful to others who are in the thick of things
But do not benefit themselves; they are distracted by the wicked,
too,
Who disrupt their calm disposition. On the other hand,
Those who have withdrawn are in some way more stable
And with a tranquil mind can keep their gaze directed towards
God,
But they only benefit themselves, for their love is a narrow one
And strange and harsh is the life they lead.
So I chose a middle path between solitude and involvement,
Adopting the meditative ways of the one, the usefulness of the
other.
[De Vita Sua, 284–86 and 292–311 in Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems, edited and translated by Carolinne White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32–33.]
Basil’s ideas of the philosophic life were closer to the monasticism introduced by the heretical Eustathius of Sebaste, with whom Basil was then connected in friendship and admiration. Eustathius’ monasticism was radically ascetical: in addition to other regulations one might expect to find prescribed to monks—such as regular prayer, fasting, and continence—it also incorporated hard manual work, a demand that the noble Gregory found intolerable since “the tools of his ascesis were books, enquiring conversation, and reflection in simple solitude.” The middle path of the scholar-monk, paved by Gregory in the lines quoted above, became a royal way to be followed by other luminaries of that age, most notably St. Augustine during his retirement at Cassiciacum, and St. Paulinus of Nola, as well as by many other sensible men ever since. Eustathian monasticism, on the other hand, was condemned as radical by the Synod of Gangra (340), and Eustathian theology was condemned at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (381), over which Gregory presided briefly.
Like Athens, however, philosophia, and the debate of how one should best live according to it, became an issue that brought the two friends together as much as it kept them apart. In Athens, the philosophical life was what had brought them together and kept them united “as two bodies are by one soul.” Although the first ominous clouds had already begun to appear on the horizon of their friendship, philosophia became in Pontus the promise of reinventing their friendship at a higher level, by placing it in the service of the Church. In Caesarea, however, after Basil's election to the see of that city an election that made him ecclesiastically superior to Gregory, who now had to submit to his friend’s authority, philosophia takes on a different role: instead of providing the common ground for the friendship between the two men, it now protected friend from friend and offered a defense where their very friendship had left them unequal and vulnerable. Thus, when Basil complains, as friend and superior, that Gregory has left him alone by refusing to pay him a visit, Gregory is delighted to appeal to his engagement with the philosophic life (philosophoumen, Ep. 46) as the reason that kept him away from his friend and his newly assumed duties at the helm of the local Church. And when Basil writes alarmed by Gregory’s indifference in showing any care for his own episcopal see at Sasima, he
boldly retorts that leisure (apraxia)—in his eyes the chief characteristic of the philosophical life—has been the great work and accomplishment of his life (emoi de megistē praxis, Ep. 49).
While Basil, as Archbishop of a Metropolitan See, had a wide range of means at his disposal by which he could bring Gregory to do what he thought of as the right course of action (Gregory’s ordination as bishop of Sasima, for instance), Gregory was left with only one tactic to protect himself from Basil’s directives: the epistolary deferral of his expected engagement with Church affairs, an engagement which, at rimes, took the more explicit form of promising to join in person the Archbishop of Caesarea, a promise that was never kept. The first and the last of Gregory’s letters
addressed to Basil (Ep. I and 60) are good examples of this tactic, as is Ep. 45: “I didn’t come immediately, nor will I come, don’t demand that even yourself...You may ask me ‘when will I come and until when will I retreat?’ Until God commands me.” Gregory invoked two major reasons for denying Basil his presence: his duty to his parents and his duty to his vocation to lead a philosophic life, a vocation which they both had, after all, chosen as their common goal in life. Thus, in Gregory’s eyes, Basil’s elevation to an archbishopric had proven to be a double betrayal: a betrayal of his friendship with true wisdom (philo-sophia), since his active engagement with church affairs could not be reconciled with a quiet life of study, and a betrayal of his friend with whom the philosophical life would have been pursued and, hopefully, realized:
So much for Athens and our common efforts for education...
So much for our pledges to cast the world aside
And live a shared life dedicated to God.
Devoting our skill for words to the Word who alone is wise:
All this has been scattered, dashed to the ground,
And the winds carry off our former hopes.
Where was I to wonder? Wild beasts, will you nor welcome me?
For there is more loyalty among you, it seems to me.
[De Vita Sua, 476 and 480–85 (trans. White, 1992, 45–47, modified).]
On the other hand, Gregory too, set one friendship against another by placing his friendship with wisdom over and above his friendship with Basil. As he concludes in a letter to Basil (Ep. 46): “Are you, therefore, taking offense at my devotion to philosophy? Allow me, then, to say that it is this
alone which ranks higher even than your words.”
Following the first “betrayal,” when the friend refuses to be subsumed under one’s categories, this second “betrayal” demands that one casts a critical eye on oneself; it demands that one realizes a truth about oneself, a truth that one is not willing to ignore anymore in the hope of preserving a more idealized and less authentic friendship. Meeting the Other beyond the generalized love denoted by agapan, in the more personal space of philein, requires that one affirms one’s own being over that of the friend.
* For Gregory’s letters, see Paul Gallay’s edition Gregor von Nazianz, Briefe (1969) as reprinted in volume 60 of the Bibliotheke hellenon Pateron kai ekklesiastikon syggrapheon (1980). For Basil’s letters, see the two-volume bilingual edition of Les Belles Lettres, edited by Yves Courtonne (volume I: 1957; volume II: 1961). In both cases, the letter is denoted by the abbreviation “Ep.,” followed by the number of the letter cited.
The first letters* exchanged between [Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen] record for us the beginnings of a disagreement concerning the proper way of living, what usually goes by the name of philosophia. When Gregory writes, remembering those early days in Athens, that philosophy became their study, he means only loosely and incidentally the discipline we call by that name today. As it becomes clear in the rest of the oration, philosophy for him meant something more. He goes on to explain how they embarked upon the study of philosophia more systematically when they had both left Athens and were no longer students (suggesting, perhaps, the time when Basil was touring the
monastic communities of Egypt and Palestine) and how Gregory’s care for his parents became a hindrance on his own way to philosophia. With the same aim at pursuing the philosophic life, Basil had established his study at Pontus, following Elijah (the prophet) and John (the Baptist), “the first
among the philosophers.” In his first letter to Basil, Gregory admits to having betrayed his promise to follow him in what he calls sumphilosophēsein. The same terminology is used in De Vita Sua (270 and 321). Philosophia, for him, therefore, is clearly not a branch of knowledge, but a way of life—a life lived in introspection, away from the clamour of worldly affairs. The change that Christianity had brought about to the goal and purpose of human life effected a similar change, as noted above, not only in the understanding of philia, but also in the understanding of philosophia, insofar as it is a form of philia as well. Even though we read that the model for such a philosophical life was already set by the example of Plotinus and the Neoplatonic ascetics, it was Christian monasticism, which was just at this time reaching its first bloom, that fully embodied all the nuances that the term philosophia conveyed to the Christian mind of that time.
Yet—and here lies the root of Gregory's disagreement with Basil—monasticism, especially in the form which has been known ever since and of which Basil himself is considered to be founder, did not fully coincide with what Gregory was envisioning as the proper philosophic life. He clearly explains how he felt toward the simple monasticism of his time when he writes:
But when I actually considered the divine ways
It was hard to decide which path was definitely the better.
Each thing seemed good or bad depending on the arguments,
As is often the case when action needs to be taken.
(...)
I admired Elijah the Tishbite
And the great Carmel or the strange food,
The property of the Precursor, the desert,
And the simple way of life of the sons of Jonadab.
Then again a desire for the Holy Scriptures got the upper hand
As did the light of the spirit in the contemplation of the word—
Practices not suited to the desert or a life of calm.
After swinging to and fro between these positions many times,
I at last reconciled my desires in the following way,
And giving each position its due, checked the vacillations of
my mind:
I realized that those who enjoy a practical life
Are useful to others who are in the thick of things
But do not benefit themselves; they are distracted by the wicked,
too,
Who disrupt their calm disposition. On the other hand,
Those who have withdrawn are in some way more stable
And with a tranquil mind can keep their gaze directed towards
God,
But they only benefit themselves, for their love is a narrow one
And strange and harsh is the life they lead.
So I chose a middle path between solitude and involvement,
Adopting the meditative ways of the one, the usefulness of the
other.
[De Vita Sua, 284–86 and 292–311 in Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems, edited and translated by Carolinne White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32–33.]
Basil’s ideas of the philosophic life were closer to the monasticism introduced by the heretical Eustathius of Sebaste, with whom Basil was then connected in friendship and admiration. Eustathius’ monasticism was radically ascetical: in addition to other regulations one might expect to find prescribed to monks—such as regular prayer, fasting, and continence—it also incorporated hard manual work, a demand that the noble Gregory found intolerable since “the tools of his ascesis were books, enquiring conversation, and reflection in simple solitude.” The middle path of the scholar-monk, paved by Gregory in the lines quoted above, became a royal way to be followed by other luminaries of that age, most notably St. Augustine during his retirement at Cassiciacum, and St. Paulinus of Nola, as well as by many other sensible men ever since. Eustathian monasticism, on the other hand, was condemned as radical by the Synod of Gangra (340), and Eustathian theology was condemned at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (381), over which Gregory presided briefly.
Like Athens, however, philosophia, and the debate of how one should best live according to it, became an issue that brought the two friends together as much as it kept them apart. In Athens, the philosophical life was what had brought them together and kept them united “as two bodies are by one soul.” Although the first ominous clouds had already begun to appear on the horizon of their friendship, philosophia became in Pontus the promise of reinventing their friendship at a higher level, by placing it in the service of the Church. In Caesarea, however, after Basil's election to the see of that city an election that made him ecclesiastically superior to Gregory, who now had to submit to his friend’s authority, philosophia takes on a different role: instead of providing the common ground for the friendship between the two men, it now protected friend from friend and offered a defense where their very friendship had left them unequal and vulnerable. Thus, when Basil complains, as friend and superior, that Gregory has left him alone by refusing to pay him a visit, Gregory is delighted to appeal to his engagement with the philosophic life (philosophoumen, Ep. 46) as the reason that kept him away from his friend and his newly assumed duties at the helm of the local Church. And when Basil writes alarmed by Gregory’s indifference in showing any care for his own episcopal see at Sasima, he
boldly retorts that leisure (apraxia)—in his eyes the chief characteristic of the philosophical life—has been the great work and accomplishment of his life (emoi de megistē praxis, Ep. 49).
While Basil, as Archbishop of a Metropolitan See, had a wide range of means at his disposal by which he could bring Gregory to do what he thought of as the right course of action (Gregory’s ordination as bishop of Sasima, for instance), Gregory was left with only one tactic to protect himself from Basil’s directives: the epistolary deferral of his expected engagement with Church affairs, an engagement which, at rimes, took the more explicit form of promising to join in person the Archbishop of Caesarea, a promise that was never kept. The first and the last of Gregory’s letters
addressed to Basil (Ep. I and 60) are good examples of this tactic, as is Ep. 45: “I didn’t come immediately, nor will I come, don’t demand that even yourself...You may ask me ‘when will I come and until when will I retreat?’ Until God commands me.” Gregory invoked two major reasons for denying Basil his presence: his duty to his parents and his duty to his vocation to lead a philosophic life, a vocation which they both had, after all, chosen as their common goal in life. Thus, in Gregory’s eyes, Basil’s elevation to an archbishopric had proven to be a double betrayal: a betrayal of his friendship with true wisdom (philo-sophia), since his active engagement with church affairs could not be reconciled with a quiet life of study, and a betrayal of his friend with whom the philosophical life would have been pursued and, hopefully, realized:
So much for Athens and our common efforts for education...
So much for our pledges to cast the world aside
And live a shared life dedicated to God.
Devoting our skill for words to the Word who alone is wise:
All this has been scattered, dashed to the ground,
And the winds carry off our former hopes.
Where was I to wonder? Wild beasts, will you nor welcome me?
For there is more loyalty among you, it seems to me.
[De Vita Sua, 476 and 480–85 (trans. White, 1992, 45–47, modified).]
On the other hand, Gregory too, set one friendship against another by placing his friendship with wisdom over and above his friendship with Basil. As he concludes in a letter to Basil (Ep. 46): “Are you, therefore, taking offense at my devotion to philosophy? Allow me, then, to say that it is this
alone which ranks higher even than your words.”
Following the first “betrayal,” when the friend refuses to be subsumed under one’s categories, this second “betrayal” demands that one casts a critical eye on oneself; it demands that one realizes a truth about oneself, a truth that one is not willing to ignore anymore in the hope of preserving a more idealized and less authentic friendship. Meeting the Other beyond the generalized love denoted by agapan, in the more personal space of philein, requires that one affirms one’s own being over that of the friend.
* For Gregory’s letters, see Paul Gallay’s edition Gregor von Nazianz, Briefe (1969) as reprinted in volume 60 of the Bibliotheke hellenon Pateron kai ekklesiastikon syggrapheon (1980). For Basil’s letters, see the two-volume bilingual edition of Les Belles Lettres, edited by Yves Courtonne (volume I: 1957; volume II: 1961). In both cases, the letter is denoted by the abbreviation “Ep.,” followed by the number of the letter cited.
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