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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Basil of Seleucia
died c. 468Patristic
He bent under pressure, bent again, and then stood, a bishop's record through the most violent doctrinal decade in the East.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 468.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
Basil was metropolitan bishop of Seleucia in Isauria, a rugged province on the southern coast of Asia Minor, from about 440. He lived through the most violent doctrinal decade in the history of the Eastern church, and his record through it is a record of a man who bent, bent again, and then stood.
The question was how to speak about Christ. Nestorius had been condemned in 431 for so distinguishing the divine and human in Jesus that he seemed to make two persons. The reaction went too far the other way: Eutyches, an aged archimandrite in Constantinople, taught that after the union there was only one nature, and that Christ's humanity was swallowed up in his divinity.
In 448, at the standing synod in Constantinople, Basil voted with the majority to condemn Eutyches, and he stated the orthodox position plainly, one Christ acknowledged in two natures.
The next year came the assembly at Ephesus that Pope Leo called the Robber Synod. Dioscorus of Alexandria presided, soldiers and monks were on hand, Leo's letter was never read, and bishops signed under duress. Basil signed. He voted to reinstate Eutyches and to depose Flavian of Constantinople, who was manhandled and died shortly after.
Two years later the Council of Chalcedon met, and the acts of that council preserve the scene: Basil was confronted with his own signature and asked to explain it. He said he had been afraid. He recanted, was received back, and signed the Chalcedonian definition, one person in two natures, without confusion, change, division or separation. He held that ground for the rest of his life, and when the emperor Leo I polled the bishops in 457 about whether Chalcedon should stand, Basil answered that it should.
He was also a preacher, and about forty of his homilies survive. A long Life and Miracles of Thecla, celebrating the woman whose shrine at Seleucia was one of the great pilgrimage sites of the East, was long attributed to him; most scholars now doubt it.
He died some years after Chalcedon. He is remembered for a career that shows what pressure does to a man, and what it costs to come back.
Sources: The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, translated by Richard Price and Michael Gaddis; the acts of the Home Synod of 448; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Basil of Seleucia".
What was happening while he lived5 moments · AD 313–600
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
- c. 405Jerome finishes translating the Old Testament from HebrewCommissioned by Bishop Damasus in 382, Jerome worked for decades in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew so he could go behind the Greek to the original. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate, was the Bible of the West for a thousand years.
- 410Rome is sacked; Augustine begins *The City of God*Alaric's Goths took the eternal city, and pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods. Augustine answered across thirteen years (413–426) with a book about two cities, one built on love of self, one on love of God, and only one of them permanent.
- 431The Council of EphesusBishop Nestorius objected to calling Mary *Theotokos*, "God-bearer," and Cyril of Alexandria pressed the point that the title is a claim about the child, not the mother: the one she bore was God. The council agreed, though the politics around it were ugly.
- 451The Council of ChalcedonSome five hundred bishops set the boundary lines that have held ever since: Jesus is one person in two natures, truly God and truly man, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." It fenced the mystery rather than explaining it.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Basil of Seleucia at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Wavered twice in the fights over Christ's two natures, then planted himself firmly with Chalcedon.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.