1998 NAPS Presidential Address Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy

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 Antony's 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 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 Basil's Christian "philosophy"—the cluster of hostels for travelers, the poor, and the sick that he had erected, along with a church and a monastic residence just outside Caesarea—as 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 persuasion—shaking off the moths, giving no joy to thieves, escaping struggles with envy and the onrush of time—where disease is treated by philosophy, where misfortunes are called blessed, where compassion is held in real esteem.²

For Gregory, Basil's 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

Gregory's exalted evocation of Basil's 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 "Basileias"⁴ 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 dramatically—or at least reveals itself to us most dramatically today, through the existing evidence—in the changing role and self-understanding of the Christian cultural and spiritual elite...