St. Basil finds his ground: a wooded glen with one way in

ANNESI, Pontus, 358 AD — Saint Basil the Great is twenty-eight. He studied at Athens and came home to Caesarea in 356 AD a trained rhetorician, and he taught rhetoric there with conspicuous success. Then he gave the career up. His sister St. Macrina, who was already living a strict religious life on the family estate at Annesi, changed his mind. Their brother St. Gregory of Nyssa writes that she drew him toward philosophy so fast that “he forsook the glories of this world and despised fame gained by speaking, and deserted it for this busy life where one toils with one’s hands”.

What he has done since is look for somewhere to lead that life. Bishop Dianius of Caesarea baptized him in 357 AD. He then travelled to the ascetics of the East: Alexandria and the rest of Egypt, Palestine, Coele-Syria, Mesopotamia. In the same period he gave up his share of the family property. He was back at Caesarea by the summer. This year he went north into Pontus to find ground, found it, and wrote a letter about it.

The letter, the fourteenth of his, is headed “To Gregory his friend”. St. Gregory of Nazianzus met him as a student at Athens, and wrote afterwards that the two of them “seemed to have one soul, inhabiting two bodies” and had “but one great business and name — to be and to be called Christians”. What St. Basil sends him now is a survey of a glen.

He begins by saying why he did not wait. His brother St. Gregory of Nyssa had written to say that he had long wanted to come, and added that St. Gregory of Nazianzus was of the same mind. St. Basil answers that he could not wait, “partly as being hard of belief, considering I have been so often disappointed, and partly because I find myself pulled all ways by business”. St. Basil goes on: “I must at once make for Pontus, where, perhaps, God willing, I may make an end of wandering”.

The wandering was not a figure of speech. In an earlier letter, to Eustathius the Philosopher, St. Basil set out the itinerary of a man chasing a teacher he never caught. He left Athens for him. He reached Syria after endless trouble and found that the philosopher had gone on to Egypt. “Then I must set out for Egypt, a long and weary way, and even there I did not gain my end,” St. Basil wrote. He settled at Alexandria instead. Home again, illness kept him from the meeting even then, and he wrote to Eustathius: “When God gives good things I think we must thank Him, and not be angry with Him while He is controlling their distribution”.

Now he has stopped. “I departed into Pontus in quest of a place to live in,” St. Basil tells St. Gregory of Nazianzus. He goes on: “There God has opened on me a spot exactly answering to my taste, so that I actually see before my eyes what I have often pictured to my mind in idle fancy”.

What follows reads like a surveyor’s report. There is a high mountain thick with woods, and cool, clear streams come down its north side. Below it lies a plain, fed by the water draining off the slope. Trees have grown up along its edge close enough to serve as a fence. Deep hollows cut off two sides of the ground. The river runs along the front and is, St. Basil writes, “impassable as a wall”. Behind, the mountain comes round in a crescent and closes the path at its foot. He sums it up in one line: “There is but one pass, and I am master of it”.

He ranks it as well. The trees make the plain lovely enough, he tells his friend, “even to surpass Calypso’s Island, which Homer seems to have considered the most beautiful spot on the earth”. Then he says which parts of his own description he does not count. “Another might admire the multitude of flowers, and singing birds,” St. Basil writes, “but leisure I have none for such thoughts”. The praise he does make is in the language of a farm: the place is “happily disposed for produce of every kind,” and what it grows is “what to me is the sweetest produce of all, quietness”.

He checks it from the other side too. The glen is “not only rid of the bustle of the city, but is even unfrequented by travellers, except a chance hunter”. It abounds in game — deer, wild goats and hares — “but not, I am glad to say, in bears or wolves, such as you have”. The bears and wolves belong to St. Gregory of Nazianzus’s own country, and St. Basil puts the question in his next sentence: “Does it not strike you what a foolish mistake I was near making when I was eager to change this spot for your Tiberina, the very pit of the whole earth?”

Tiberina had been the first plan. Stirred by the monks he had seen on his travels, St. Basil thought at first of setting up a monastery in that district. He chose the district of Ibora instead, across the Iris from Annesi, and has fixed the retreat in this glen, not far from the house he grew up in.

St. Basil asks his friend’s pardon for having made up his mind, and compares himself to a wanderer out of the old stories: “not Alcmæon himself, I suppose, could endure to wander further when he had found the Echinades”.