44 Chapter 1 time of Basil’s writings).148 That being said, it should be noted that some questions and answers do suppose a more organised community of people living together for spiritual purposes, including the people who asked question 36 in the Long Rules. The communal aspect will be elaborated on below. For now suffice to say that Herman’s statement that Basil introduced a principle of stability in ‘his’ monasteries is misleading, considering the gradual development of the text, the multiplicity of groups for whom Basil formulated his answers and the context of a formative period of monasticism, in which the boundaries between monks and other Christians were not yet clearly delineated. The so-called Rules were therefore not a rule: they were not designed to form the basic guidelines for a specific monastic community, such as later typika. Nor were they ever interpreted in this way in the later history of monasticism in the Eastern Roman Empire.149 As the texts take the form of answers to specific questions, they are closer, in terms of genre, to the collections of the Apophthegmata Patrum (‘Sayings of the Fathers’) than to the Rule of Benedict.150 It is therefore misleading to call Basil’s prescriptions ‘legislation’ as Herman did.151 Rather, the collection of texts seems to reflect a practice of in-person instruction and advice in different places to different people, which Basil later redacted and wrote down in various stages. Basil’s prescriptions concern community building rather than a spiritual ideal of stability Having briefly considered the context of the text’s creation and thereby established that Basil’s Long and Short Rules cannot be considered a monastic rule for a specific community, the analysis will now turn to the text itself. Although not a rule, in the so-called Long Rules Basil gives his view on how the petitioners should organise their life and the text is therefore prescriptive. While in an earlier phase of his life, Basil himself sought to live an ascetic life in (relative) solitude, over time he started to promote living in a community of likeminded spiritually oriented persons as the best form of ascetic life.152 When he came to write his answers that became part of the Long Rules, advocacy for communal living was part of it. Examples of this advocacy are his answers to questions 6 and 7, where he explains why, for devout Christians, it is necessary to live in seclusion from ordinary society (Q6) and why one should live in seclusion together with others who strive for the same goal of piety 148 The communal monastery of Pachomius was probably founded around the 320s and in the next decades others were founded as well in Egypt. Dunn (2003), pp. 25–33; Rousseau (1998), p. 196; The primacy of Pachomius and Anthony (traditionally regarded as the ‘first monk’, but this claim has now frequently been refuted) in the development of monasticism is currently being revised. A messier and more diverse picture is arising. One of the suggestions is that monastic communities may also have independently developed in Caesarea and Egypt, and influence from monastic developments in Syria might have been influential as well. Sterk (2004), pp. 42–43. Generally, the history of monasticism is a topic of debate and much is still unclear: on historiographical reflections and the current state of research, see e.g., Diem and Rapp (2020). 149 See footnote 130 above. 150 Rousseau (1998), p. 354. 151 ‘Per regione della grande autorità del Santo e dell’equilibrio delle sue prescrizioni, la sua legislazione fu praticamente ricevuta in tutta la Chiesa bizantina’. Herman (1955), p. 116. 152 Dunn (2003), pp. 34–41.
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