St. Andrei Rublev (ca. 1360–1430)
KONSTANTIN GAVRILKIN
Little is known of the life of Russia’s greatest icon painter. The indirect evidence suggests that he was born around the 1360s and settled in the Trinity Monastery (later, the Troitse- Sergieva Lavra) near Moscow shortly after the death of its founder, St. Sergius of Radonezh (1392), presumably already as a monk. Rublev is first mentioned in the Chronicle of the Trinity Monastery under the year 1405, when he is said to have worked on the frescoes and icons of the Annunciation Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin together with Theophanes the Greek, a prominent Byzantine master who is believed to have been associated with the hesychast movement and who trained Andrei in icon painting. In this and other sources associated with the same monastery, Andrei is mentioned in later years as a man of holy life and master of remarkable talent who decorated churches in Moscow, Vladimir, and other places. The last place Rublev was known to be working was at the Moscow Andronikov Monastery, where he died around 1430. In the Soviet period this monastery was closed but has since reopened as the Andrei Rublev Museum of Early Russian Art, with a collection representing Russian works from the 15th to 17th centuries.
Although the authority of Andrei Rublev as model icon painter was recognized by the Stoglav Council of 1551, which declared that iconographers should follow the ancient standards of Greek icon painters, Andrei Rublev, and other famous masters (Lazarev 1966: 75–8), the decline of Russian iconography after the late 16th century led to a gradual loss of that knowledge and skill associated with Rublev and his school. By the 19th century virtually only the Old Believers who treasured the liturgical and spiritual traditions of the Muscovite Rus remembered his name without, however, being able to identify his works. With the beginning of the scholarly study of early Russian iconography at the beginning of the 20th century, the only starting point for the recovery of Rublev’s legacy was the Icon of the Holy Trinity in the Trinity Cathedral of the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra, which, according to all the sources, was painted by Andrei Rublev alone. Cleaned in 1904, the icon provided iconologists with the stylistic and technical clues for further research. After a century-long study of his frescoes and icons, St. Andrei Rublev is recognized today as a great master of composition, light, and color, who was able to express through his works the peace and beauty of the world transformed by grace, the vision of the human being transformed by the Spirit into the true image and likeness of God. He was officially canonized as a saint by the Russian Church in 1988.
SEE ALSO: Iconography, Styles of; Iconostasis; Icons; Russia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Alpatov, M. A. (1972) Andrei Rublev. Moscow: Iskusstvo.
Bunge, G. (2007) The Rublev Trinity. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Lazarev, V. N. (1966) Andrei Rublev i ego shkola. Moscow: Iskusstvo.
Lazarev, V. N. and Vzdornov, G. I. (eds.) (1997) The Russian Icon: From Its Origins to the Sixteenth Century. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Shchennikova, L. A. (2007) Tvoreniia prepodobnogo Andreiia Publeva i ikonopistsev velikokniazheskoi Moskvy. Moscow: Indrik.
Vzdornov, G. I. (ed.) (1989) “Troitsa” Andreia Rubleva. Moscow: Iskusstvo.
St. Antony of Egypt (the Great) (ca. 251–356)
JOHN A. MCGUCKIN
St. Antony has a symbolic stature in the Orthodox world as the “first monk” of Christian tradition, There were, of course, ascetics and hermits before him, historically speaking, and even his Vita mentions that he placed his sister in the care of the city communities of virgin ascetics before he went off to the desert as an ascetic himself. But Antony was one of the most dramatic teachers of the early Egyptian desert, who adopted a life of profound seclusion (the “eremitical” life) when this was still very rare in Christianity (the city communities of ascetics being preferred as a modus operandi or settlements just on the outskirts of villages which allowed limited communication). The Life of Saint Antony written by the great Egyptian hierarch and theologian St. Athanasius of Alexandria very shortly after Antony’s death, became one of the most popular Christian texts of Antiquity and was responsible for making Antony paradigmatic for much of subsequent monastic theory. Athanasius’ Vita sparked an interest in hagiography that would grow to immense proportions in later ages, and it set the terms of much that would follow in imitation. It is one of the earliest of all canonization narratives, and depicts the monastic life as a Christian parallel to the ancient Sophists.
The outline of Antony’s career was that by the age of 20 he had inherited his father’s wealth and became head of an Alexandrian merchant household. He experienced a dramatic conversion while hearing the gospel text read out in church: “Sell all that you have and come follow me.” Taking it to heart, he dispossessed himself for the benefit of the poor, broke his familial ties, and left Alexandria for a life of ascetical seclusion in the semi-desert around the Nile, near Fayyum, which itself later became a great monastic center. He began his first exercises in the ascetical life near fellahin settlements and with some limited guidance from other desert dwellers (and from this period come the stories of his famous “wrestling with demons” in deserted tombs), but by 285 he moved deeper into the Egyptian desert seeking a more solitary lifestyle, at a place called Outer Mountain (Pispir). Here he organized a colony of disciples under a loose form of early communal “rule” (called “coenobitic” monasticism, from the Greek term for shared lifestyle). In 305 he moved even further into the wilderness to a place called Inner Mountain (Deir Mar Antonios) by the Red Sea. Here he presided over a much looser association of senior and experienced monks living as hermits. So it is that he traditionally came to be associated with the foundation of the three basic types of Christian monastic structure: communes (koinobia) under the direction of a senior monk (abba or higumen); lavras, where scattered groups of individual hermits would inhabit neighboring valleys and meet for Sunday vigil worship, under the spiritual authority of an elder (geron); and finally the eremitical life proper, where a monk would live in more or less complete seclusion.
Plate 61 Icon of St. Antony of Egypt, father of monks. Photo by John McGuckin.
Plate 62 The tiny cave where St. Antony of Egypt spent forty years in solitary prayer. Now it is a shrine many hundreds of feet above the monastery dedicated to his name by the Red Sea in Egypt. Photo by John McGuckin.
Antony has several short letters attributed to him, which are generally regarded as genuine. His reputation as a leading “philosopher” is probably more a rhetorical topos of Athanasius’. The writings focus on the need to acquire freedom in the inner life, so that the vision of God could be sought with a focused heart. His reputation as a holy man, counselor, exorcist, and thaumaturg, even in his own lifetime, was such that the bishop of Alexandria, St. Athanasius, called on his assistance and used the power of his reputation to combat the Arian movement. Antony’s final monastic settlement, Deir Mar Antonios, passed through numerous iterations, but today still functions as a living monastic settlement. It is located at the foot of the mountain in the face of which his tiny cave is still preserved as a shrine, in which he spent more than forty years of prayer.
SEE ALSO: Coptic Orthodoxy; Monasticism
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Gregg, R. C. (1980) Athanasius: The Life of Antony.
New York: Paulist Press.
Rubenson, S. (1990) The Letters of Saint Antony: Origenist Theology, Monastic Tradition, and the Making of a Saint. Bibliotheca Historico- Ecclesiastica Lundensis, 24. Lund: Lund University Press.
St. Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 293–373)
TARMO TOOM
St. Athanasius, who is called “a pillar of orthodoxy” (festal troparion) by the Orthodox Church, is best remembered for his defense of Nicene theology and his role in promoting monastic ideals. In the writings of his friends, Athanasius is depicted as a “very dear brother” (Hilary, Adversus Valentem et Ursacium 1.3.1), but by his opponents, he was called a “villain” (ibid., 1.2.21).
Athanasius was born in Alexandria and served as a deacon and secretary of Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, whom he accompanied to the Council of Nicea in 325. In 328, after a disputed election, Athanasius was consecrated as the twentieth patriarch of Alexandria, and had to face immediately the assaults of Melitian and Arian opponents, and experience the wrath of unfriendly emperors, whose christological policy he opposed. At the Synod of Tyre in 335 Athanasius was accused of sacrilege, bribery, rape, and murder. Although none of these accusations stuck, Athanasius had to spend some fifteen years of his 46-year episcopacy in exile, where he established useful contacts with western theologians and Egyptian monks. After ordaining his successor Peter, “who followed him in all things” (Historia Acephala 13.19), Athanasius died in 373. Soon his corpus would gain a very highly authoritative status.
Athanasius’ works are preserved in Greek, Coptic, and Syriac. A twofold apology Against the Pagans and On the Incarnation contends that the incarnation of the Son of
God restored the damaged relationship between the Creator and the creation. “He was made human [both body and soul (Tom. 7)] so that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation 54). Among Athanasius’ many anti-Arian works are Orations against the Arians, Apology against the Arians, Defense of the Nicene Definition, and the History of the Arians. For Athanasius, who was applauded as the first true trinitarian theologian by St. Gregory of Nazianzus (Oration 21.33), the Son is con- substantial and co-eternal with the Father. Even his enemies called him the “mighty champion of the consubstantialist doctrine” (Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History 3.17). Athanasius also wrote many personal letters and, annually, the paschal Festal Letters. His Letters to Serapion defended the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, and his Letter to Epictetus presents an anti-Apollinarian Christology. All of these works were to gain a high authority in the next generation and to determine ecumenical conciliar Christology. His ascetical writings include the Life of Anthony, which presents the desert saint as an ideal Christian, the four Letters to Virgins, and the Letter to Marcellinus on biblical interpretation. Some fragments of his Catenae (isolated comments) on various biblical books are also extant. St. Athanasius’ feast day is January 18, and he is also celebrated with St. Cyril of Alexandria.
SEE ALSO: Alexandria, Patriarchate of; Coptic Orthodoxy; Council of Nicea I (325); Deification; Desert Fathers and Mothers; Holy Spirit; Holy Trinity
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Anatolios, K. (1998) Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought. London: Routledge.
Barnes, T. D. (1993) Athanasius and Constantins: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dragas, G. D. (2005) “Saint Athanasius: Original Research and New Perspectives,” in G. D. Dragas and D. R. Lamoureux (eds.) Patristic Theological Library vol. 1. Rollinsford: Orthodox Research Institute.
Martin, A. (1996) Athanase d’Alexandrie et l’eglise d’Egypte an IVe siecle (328–373). Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome.
Tetz, M. (1995) Athanasiana: zu leben und lehre des Athanasius, ed. W. Geerlings and D. Wyrwa. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Weinandy, T. G. (2007) Athanasius: A Theological Introduction. Aldershot: Ashgate Press.
St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430)
JOHN A. MCGUCKIN
St. Augustine, known commonly in the Orthodox Church as “the Blessed Augustine,” is perhaps the single most important Christian writer of the ancient Christian West. He came from Thagaste, near Madauros, in Roman North Africa. His father Patricius was a pagan (until his deathbed), and his mother, Monnica, a Catholic Christian who enrolled her infant son as a catechumen. Augustine’s talent was noticed early, and a wealthy patron, Romanianus, sponsored his education. He studied rhetoric at Carthage, where at the age of 19 he was powerfully attracted to the vocation of rhetor-philosopher by reading Cicero’s (lost) treatise Hortensius. His mother pressured him to enrol for baptism but Augustine had already set up house with a concubine (whom he never names) to whom he was deeply attached, and he was not willing to threaten that relationship, or to submit himself to the doctrines of the Catholics, which he had come to regard as simplistic. He attached himself to the Manichean movement (as a “Hearer”) and belonged to them for the next ten years until 387.
Augustine’s career took him from Carthage, to Rome, and eventually Milan, where he occupied the position of Rhetoric Professor, won for him by Manichean patrons. In Milan he became increasingly disillusioned with the Manicheans, and a series of crises shook his security; beginning with increasing asthmatic troubles (fatal for an ancient orator) and his agreement with his mother’s plan to dismiss his partner of fifteen years’ standing (the mother of his son Adeodatus) so that he could make a rich marriage to advance his career. His heartless agreement to her dismissal was soon followed by heartbreak at her loss, and his rapid employment of a sexual surrogate caused him to regard his philosophical aspirations with a depressed skepticism; but his increasing contact with one of the leading rhetorical and philosophical circles in the city (the group of theologians associated with the priest Simplicianus and Bishop Ambrose) opened up new vistas for him. He was greatly impressed by Ambrose, and began to consider the possibility of a similar career as ascetic philosopher. He describes his psychosexual and spiritual struggle in a famous autobiography (the Confessions) which he wrote many years later, and here he depicts the turning point of his life as occurring dramatically in a quiet Milanese garden when he abandoned his destiny to Christ and subsequently petitioned for admission to the church. For a while he stayed with Christian friends who formed a scholarly college around him. Soon, however, he returned to Rome, where Monnica died, and then he made his way back to Africa, in 388, where he intended to live with his companions (more cheaply) at Thagaste. One day in 391, while making a visit to the seaport of Hippo Regius, he was seized by local Christians and forcibly ordained priest by Bishop Valerius, so that he could help the old bishop in the church administration. He and his companions accepted the forced initiation into church administration, and by 395 Augustine was consecrated as Valerius’ episcopal assistant and, soon afterwards, his successor. Local bishops in Africa regarded his promotion as canonically dubious, and even his baptism as somewhat irregular – for the news of his early life (both his sexual liaisons and his membership of the heretical Manichees) was common gossip in a church much troubled by the rigorist dissidents the Donatists. To defend himself Augustine composed treatises against the Manichees after his priestly ordination, and after his consecration as bishop wrote the Confessions, an exercise in how self-scrutiny can be a salvific reading of the story of God’s providence in creation and in a human life. It was a brilliant answer to his episcopal colleagues who had criticized him for slipping through the rigorous baptismal “scrutinies” of the African church.
As bishop, Augustine made profound moves to resolve the schism of the Donatists, which led to his enunciation of important principles that would form the basic substructure of western Catholic ideas of sacramentality and ecclesial legitimacy. His works greatly developed the Latin Church’s understanding of itself as both a heavenly and earthly body (like Christ himself – whose body it was – a complete and perfect synthesis of flesh and divine spirit). Opposed at first to applying secular pressure on dissidents, he reluctantly came to a position by 411 that allowed for the partial legitimacy of such a policy. His immediate context was the lively Donatist threat of violence against him, but his authority seemed to have been placed behind the idea of religious compulsion when necessary, and it was an authority much evoked to justify forms of ecclesiastical oppression in later centuries. The publication of his Confessions had caused some outrage in Rome, where a moralist preacher, Pelagius, was appalled by Augustine’s apparently fatalist resignation ofhis salvation to God’s grace. Pelagius called for a more robust personal commitment and moral effort, and so began a controversy that was to mark all of Augustine’s later life, and cause him to elaborate a profound and careful doctrine of Grace that would become determinative for Western Catholicism. Augustine regarded humanity as having nothing on which it could base its salvation: all was a free gift of God. Humanity left to itself could only slip into the slavery of sin and corruption. His ideas were set out as a theology of praise for God’s merciful providence, but in some, more negative, readings of his legacy, the pessimistic tone predominated in an unbalanced way, and Augustine in a real sense has to be seen as the author of a tendency in Latin theology to focus on the notions of Original Sin, and the corruption of the material world, along with an ever-present tendency of the whole race to depravity. Most Orthodox theological writers never laid such stress on this pessimism, and never adopted as elements of the faith (unlike subsequent Western Catholicism) what they regarded as peculiarities of Augustine’s local church (theologoumena). After the sack of Rome in 410, Augustine began a work of large-scale apologetic to answer those who laid the blame for the decadence of the Western Empire at the door of the Christians. Between 412 and 427 he produced a monumental work called the City of God, where he elaborated the first extensively considered ethical and political view of what Christianity conceived of as a civilized order, in distinction to preChristian ideas. He stresses the earthly city’s (human society’s) radical dissociation from the true City of God (the eschatological realization of the kingdom), but makes a case for how the earthly city is informed and guided by heavenly ideals. Slavery is a prime symptom of the inherent corruption of the world’s affairs. In the midst of endemic violence and disorder the church has the destiny to represent mercy and reconciliation, guiding society to a perfection it might never attain, but to which it is inexorably summoned.
To stand with the Confessions and City of God, in his triad of “world classics,” we should add Augustine’s monumental work of theology On the Trinity, composed between 399 and 419. In this he constructs a major anti-Arian apologetic around the Nicene faith in Christology and pneumatol- ogy. He demonstrates from a wide variety of triadic cosmic patterns the reasonableness of the trinitarian doctrine of three divine persons subsisting in one single divine nature. Much use is made of triadic patterns of human psychology (the soul as the image of God), and he emphasized once again his deeply sensed connection between self-scrutiny and theological method (something common to Augustine and the Platonic tradition). His vast corpus of writings became, of course, his own form of ascetical exercise. The great extent of his work made him function as an encyclopedic theological authority for the next millennium in the West. But he had only a very minor influence on the Eastern Church, though translations were made of him into Greek in the medieval period, and he had a small circle of interested Greek readers. His spiritual writings gave a great impetus to monasticism as the organizing structure of the Latin Church (something which Pope St. Gregory the Great later picked up and developed). He particularly stressed the element oftrue faith leading to a deep desire of the heart for God, an affective spiritual tradition that made him an attractive and highly approachable Christian writer – aspects that still appear from engagement with his work.
Only a few treatises can be singled out for special mention, such as De Doctrina Christiana which laid out his biblical hermeneutical philosophy, or De Bono Conjugali which argued (somewhat reluctantly) for the intrinsic holiness of sexuality in marriage (against St. Jerome’s deeply hostile opinions). De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione and De Natura et Gratia both demonstrate why he thought Pelagianism so destructive of Christian religious experience. The Enchiridion is a summatic handbook of theology, composed for reference. His greatest exegetical works are perhaps his Tractatus CXXIV in Joannis Evangelium and De Genesi ad Litteram (commentaries respectively on John’s Gospel and the Book of Genesis). The commentary on the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos) demonstrates his deep love for them as prayers. There is hardly a sermon, however, that is not an exposition of scripture, or a serious theological reflection, in the manner he approaches it. Augustine’s friend and monastic companion Possidius wrote a biography soon after his death, and made an invaluable list of all his writings, most of which are still extant.
Augustine died as the Vandals were besieging his city on August 28, 430. One of his last instructions was to have his favorite psalms written in large letters around his walls so that he could read them as he died. Soon after his death, Prosper of Aquitaine began a process to lobby for Augustinian- ism as the standard theological system of the Latin West; a movement that slowly gathered momentum, culminating in Pope Gregory the Great’s enthusiastic endorsement of Augustine as preeminent Latin theologian in the late 6th century.
SEE ALSO: Grace; Holy Trinity; Original Sin
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Brown, P. (1967) Augustine of Hippo: A Biography.
Berkeley: University of California Press. Chadwick, H. (1986) Augustine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fitzgerald, A. D. (ed.) (1999) Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Schaff, P. (trans.) (1887–92) Works of St. Augustine, 8 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Smith, W. T. (1980) Augustine: His Life and Thought. Atlanta: John Knox Press. van der Meer, F. (1961) Augustine the Bishop. London: Faber and Faber.
St. Basil of Caesarea (Basil the Great)
(330–379)
JOHN A. MCGUCKIN
Known even in his lifetime as the “Great Basil” (a title ascribed to him by his friend St. Gregory of Nazianzus), Basil was the most dynamic and politically active of the Cappadocian fathers, and if not the most intellectually original of them, certainly one of the leading intelligences of the early church. He was the son of a rhetorician, from a wealthy Christian family. He studied in Cappadocia (where he first met Gregory of Nazianzus), then in Constantinople, and finally for six years at Athens, where his friendship with Gregory was deepened into a lifelong alliance (one that witnessed some strain towards its end, on Gregory’s part, though the final funeral oration Gregory delivered for Basil is one of the most famous of all Christian orations).
In 355 Basil returned to Cappadocia, expressing disillusionment with the academic life, and taught rhetoric for a restless year before he made his way (probably in the company of the radical ascetic Eustathius of Sebaste) to tour the ascetical communities of Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt. He described this encounter with Christian asceticism as like waking up after a long sleep, and from that time onwards his religious life was given precedence over all other things. Basil was baptized on his return to Cappadocia and embraced the ascetical life under the influence of Eustathius and his own sister, Macrina, who had already adapted their country estate at Annesi in Pontus as a monastic retreat. Here he invited Gregory Nazianzen, though the latter found the style of monasticism not to his taste, preferring a more scholarly seclusion on his own estates. Gregory and Basil collaborated in producing the Philocalia (a first edition of selected passages on the subject of exegesis from Origen) as well as writings about the monastic life. This early work of writing manuals for the ascetics gathered around them (especially Basil’s treatise Asceticon, though some see it as a work of Eustathius) had a historic impact in the form of the “Monastic Rules” which gave Basil the title of “Father of Eastern Monks”). The Moralia came first in 358, which was a largely traditional collection of ascetical maxims (each one attached to their suitable biblical proof text) and this work was followed by the Asceticon (ca. 363) (which is what most modern scholars refer to as the “Rule” of Basil, though it too is more in the form of generic maxim than detailed prescription).
Ordained a reader in 360 and then priest for the church at Cappadocian Caesarea in 362, Basil was actively involved in the resistance of the radical Arian party (the Heterousians or Anhomoians) led by Aetius and Eunomius. At first attached to the Homoiousian party which was dominant in Cappadocia, Basil increasingly aligned himself with the defense of the Nicene Creed (and the Homoousian party) as it had been orchestrated and aligned by the eminent figures of Athanasius in Egypt, and by Meletios of Antioch and Eusebius of Samosata in the provinces of the Orient. His attachment to Meletios was the reason Basil never quite gained Athanasius’ complete trust. He fell out with his bishop, Eusebius, who seems to have been jealous of his younger assistant’s capabilities, and to avoid rancor he retired to his estates until, in 364, the threat of an installation at Caesarea of an Arian bishop of the entourage of Emperor Valens brought him back to the service of the Caesarean church, and to the aid of his anxious bishop. Gregory Nazianzen mediated that return, and the threat from Valens was deflected. It won him friends and much popular acclaim, but also many enemies among the Caesarean clergy and the leading members of the local Curia.
In 368 he administered the church’s relief effort for a great famine in the region and won the support of the people. Gregory of Nazianzen (Oration 14) preached the need for a large hospital facility attached to the Caesarean church, and the effort was successful: the creation of philanthropic institutions staffed by monastics becoming a great innovation introduced by Basil, that would have a long subsequent history in the church. In 370 he was elected bishop of his city, despite the opposition of the town officials and many neighboring bishops. Shortly afterwards, the great civil diocese of Cappadocia was divided in two, and to offset the influence of the new ecclesiastical metropolitan, Anthimos of Tyana, Basil desperately tried to fill small towns in his remaining district with episcopal appointments drawn from his circle of friends. It elevated Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus to episcopal status, but also caused rifts among his immediate circle, who felt his machinations were chiefly squabbles about revenues dressed up as theological conflicts (Basil was anxious to retain Caesarea as a significant metropolitan see staffed by Nicene believers).
As he moved more and more, as he grew older, to become the public face ofthe Nicene party, he stood in alliance with Meletius of Antioch, one of the few remaining first- generation Nicene stalwarts. This alliance (which brought him into conflict with Athanasius and Pope Damasus) he saw as fundamental for the Nicene cause in the East, and he was faithful to it, even though it alienated his old friend and mentor, Eustathius of Sebaste, who then went on to espouse the Pneumatomachian doctrine, denying the deity of the Holy Spirit. The public breach with Eustathius was marked by Basil’s publication of a highly influential work, On the Holy Spirit (Books 1–3), where Basil affirms the deity of the Son and Spirit, and it paved the way for the full Neo-Nicene confession of the Trinity which Gregory of Nazianzus would elaborate at the Council of Constantinople in 381.
Basil died, worn out with his labors, in 379. His letters are major sources of information about the life of the church in the 4th century. His Hexaemeron, or interpretation of the creation through the Genesis account, is a masterpiece of early Christian scriptural theology, and shows him as a moderate Origenist, with a fine feel for the moral power of scripture. His treatise Against Eunomius was a major force revitalizing the Nicene resistance, and he did much in his time to persuade the Homoiousians that their position was in substance reconcilable with that of the Homoousians, something that historically speaking was a key element for the long-term success of the Nicene cause. His work in his church as teacher and public defender of his town, as well as his learned canonical writings (setting wise rules of governance that the Eastern Church formally endorsed as universal authorities at the Quinisext Council of 692), made Basil a model for future eastern bishops, and in Byzantine times he was designated along with Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom as one of the “Three Holy Hierarchs,” the most important bishop theologians of the ancient period. His reputation as one of the most important early monastic theorists also gave him a reputation among the eastern ascetics akin to the greatest of the monastic theorists, Antony, and Theodore the Studite.
SEE ALSO: Cappadocian Fathers; Monasti- cism; St. Gregory of Nazianzus (Gregory the Theologian) (329–390)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Clarke, W. K. L. (1913) St. Basil the Great: A Study in Monasticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holman, S. R. (2001) The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, B. (1989) St. Basil: Letters and Select Works.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Rousseau, P. (1994) Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press.
St. Constantine the Emperor (ca. 271–337)
JULIA KONSTANTINOVSKY
Constantine I was an enigmatic figure yet a unique saint in the Orthodox Church: the first Christian emperor (discounting the possible candidacy of Philip the Arab), Constantine abolished the persecution of Christians, making Christianity a favored state religion. His status as the benefactor of the church and Christ’s emissary on earth is reflected in his titles in Orthodoxy as “the Great” and “Equal-to-the-Apostles.”
Flavius Valerius Constantinus was born to the military officer Constantius and St. Helena, in Naissus (Nish in Serbia), on
February 27 between 271 and 273. His youth corresponded to the time his father was a junior Caesar in the First Tetrarchy. Classically and militarily educated while held as Diocletian’s hostage at the Nicomedian court, Constantine fought (in the 290s) under Diocletian and Galerius in Asia, witnessing the outbreak of the Great Persecution of Christians (303–13), though playing no role therein. Eusebius styles Constantine an early sympathizer of Christianity, while the pagan sources (notably Pan.Lat. 6.21.4–5) and coin evidence suggest his enduring links with the Apollinine Sol Invictus cult.
On his accession, which began the civil war, Constantine spent several years eliminating all of his political rivals. Assuming the purple in July 306 on the death of his father Constantius in York, Constantine defeated Maximian Daia Augustus (his father-in-law) in 310. In 312 he presided over a miraculous victory over Maxentius (Maximian’s son) in the famous battle of the Milvian Bridge at Rome. Lactantius maintains (De Mortibus Persecutorum 44.5–6) that shortly before the battle Constantine had an epiphanic dream instructing him to inscribe “the heavenly sign of God” (the Chi-Rho shaped mark of Christ, labarum) upon his soldiers’ shields. The ensuing victory convinced the emperor of Christ’s divine power and his particular gift of favor to his dominion. By 323 he had become the empire’s sole ruler.
After 312 Constantine manifested himself as a Christian and protector of the church by stopping the persecution of Christians (Edict of Milan, 313), initiating extensive construction of Christian buildings (notably Rome’s Lateran Basilica, Bethlehem, and other buildings later in Rome and Palestine), ordering that the property of North African Christians confiscated in the persecutions should be restored, and addressing the North African Donatist problem. In 325 he was requested by Alexander Bishop of Alexandria to help resolve a bitter dispute (the Arian controversy) about the status of the Second Person of the Trinity. Constantine’s response was to organize the first general church council at his palace in Nicea in 325. The resulting conciliar creed anathematized Arius, famously proclaiming the Son to be “consubstantial” (homoousion) with the Father, a mainstay of the Orthodox and many other Christian traditions. So overwhelming was the participant bishops’ banquet at the emperor’s palace that Eusebius (an eyewitness) strikingly likened it to the eschatological gathering of saints in Christ’s kingdom, and compared Constantine to Christ. Constantine died on May 22, 337, having received baptism at the hands of bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia while on a military expedition.
Despite committing acts hardly compatible with Christian precepts (having his wife Fausta and son Crispus executed, 325), Constantine’s impact on imperial Christianity was profound. By 337, Christianity had become the official state religion; public pagan sacrifices had become outlawed; Christian clergy had joined the state elite; Palestine had been reclaimed for Christianity; Constantinople, the new Christian capital named after Constantine, had replaced the old pagan Byzantium. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on May 21, together with his mother Helena.
SEE ALSO: Council of Nicea I (325); St. Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 293–373)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Edwards, M. J. (ed.) (2003) Constantine and Christendom: The Oration to the Saints. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Eusebius of Caesarea (1989) Historia Ecclesiastica, trans. G. A. Williamson. London: Penguin.
Eusebius of Caesarea (1999) The Life of Constantine, trans. A. Cameron and S. Hall. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lactantius (1886) Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died (De Mortibus Persecutorum), trans. W. Fletcher, in A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (eds.) Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing.
Lenski, N. (ed.) (2006) The Age of Constantine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
St. Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 378–444)
JOHN A. MCGUCKIN
Although he himself saw his role as a continuator of St. Athanasius, and though the ecumenical conciliar tradition later wove in much of the Cappadocian fathers and Latin patristic thought into his conceptions, St. Cyril is undoubtedly the single most important theologian of the Orthodox tradition who wrote on the person of Christ (Christology). He was the major figure, both intellectually and politically, in the great crisis of doctrine in the international church of the 5th century, and presided over the Third Ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431), where the teaching of Nestorius was condemned, and his own teaching, that affirmed the single subjectivity of the Divine Logos personally present in Jesus, the incarnate Lord, was adopted. Cyril’s teaching went on to determine the agenda of three following ecumenical councils up to the 7th century.
Cyril was a native of Egypt, and when his uncle Theophilus became the archbishop of Alexandria in 385, he brought the young man to Alexandria for advanced studies. In 403, when he was 25 years old, Cyril was ordained lector, and in the same year attended Theophilus at the notorious Synod of the Oak, which deposed John Chrysostom. At his uncle’s death in 412, after a tumultuous election, Cyril was consecrated archbishop. His early years were marked by several major conflicts between the Christians and both the pagan and Jewish factions of the city. At the same time, he was using the monastic movement to advance the Christian evangelization of a country where the old religions still held considerable sway. After 428 Cyril was increasingly drawn into conflict with the new archbishop of Constantinople, Nesto- rius, who conceived of two centers of operation simultaneously present in the life of Christ: one human and one divine, with one sometimes predominating over the other. Cyril denounced this as heretical, insisting that Jesus was wholly and completely divine, thus only one single person, and that person God. For Cyril, everything that Jesus did, whether it was a human act such as sleeping, or a powerful act such as raising the dead, was equally a work of the single divine Lord, now embodied within history. The divine power present in the humanity was also an archetype of how God had intended to “divinize” the human condition in the act of incarnation. Thus Christ is the pattern of the world’s salvation. The process of deification is best exemplified in the reception of the Eucharist, the “life-giving blessing” of the divine flesh that immortalizes the believer. It was a dynamic Christology which eventually came to represent the classical statement of the Christian East, but not without major resistance on the way, especially from theologians in Rome and Syria. The Council of Ephesus, where Cyril was judge and jury simultaneously, caused great bitterness in its aftermath, and the emperor’s negotiators had to work for several years to restore church communion, especially between Alexandria and Antioch. Eventually, in 433, a compromise was agreed on (the Formula of Reunion) where important points of the Antiochene position (Christ had two authentic natures – both human and divine) could be reconciled with Cyril’s insistence that Christ was a single reality, one divine person, but the precise ramifications of that agreement still needed much clarifying debate, and in default of this it was inevitable that the whole argument would soon break out again. It did so with great force in the following generation. St. Cyril died on June 27, 444, a little short of his seventieth year. He is known in the church as the “Seal [sphragis] of the Fathers.”
Plate 63 Contemporary icon of St. Cyril of Alexandria. By Eileen McGuckin. The Icon Studio: www.sgtt.org
SEE ALSO: Christ; Deification; Eucharist; Nestorianism; Soteriology
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
McGuckin, J. A. (1994) St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology and Texts. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Russell, N. (2000) Cyril of Alexandria. London: Routledge.