Basil of Caesarea and his View of Women in a Christian Anthropology

Abstract

In approaching the attitude of Basil of Caesarea towards women, we run up against one outstanding stumbling block: the absence in his surviving work of any explicit mention of his venerable elder sister, Macrina the Younger. This is indeed surprising and a matter of considerable regret. That such a sister and such a brother exchanged letters we can have no doubt. Consider Basil's correspondence with his brother Gregory of Nyssa, especially the period 376-378 CE, when Gregory was in hiding. The imperial authorities did not know where he was, but Basil knew and was in regular contact with him by letter, and knew his state of mind. Yet only one letter from Basil to Gregory survives, and it is not, alas, a prize testimony to their brotherly relations. Moreover, not a single letter from Gregory to Basil survives, a very remarkable and regrettable lacuna in the record. Similarly, although there was a life-long correspondence between Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, not a single letter from the younger Gregory to the elder survives. Would that we had just one of Gregory of Nyssa's news bulletins to such a correspondent as Nazianzen! These cautionary examples demonstrate how hazardous is any 'argumentum ex silentio', particularly if one wishes to use it to infer some disregard of Basil towards his sister Macrina, or towards women in general. Any number of unknown circumstances, however, might explain this gap in the surviving record. The more that one becomes aware of the importance of local letter collections in the long-term survival of letters in late antiquity, the more it seems likely that some local file of letters, such as Basil's letters to Gregory, was lost before the muster of these local collections and their inclusion in the greater corpus of Basil's letters.