BASILIAN MONKS, those who follow the rule of Basil the Great. The chief importance of the monastic rule and insti tute of St. Basil lies in the fact that to this day his reconstruction of the monastic life is the basis of the monasticism of the Greek and Slavonic Churches, though the monks do not call themselves Basilians. St. Basil's, claim to the authorship of the Rules and other ascetical writings that go under his name, has been questioned ; but the tendency now is to recognize as his, at any rate, the two sets of Rules. Probably the truest idea of his monastic system may be derived from a correspondence be tween him and St. Gregory Nazianzen at the beginning of his monastic life, the chief portions whereof are translated by New man in the Church of the Fathers, "Basil and Gregory," secs. 4, 5. On leaving Athens Basil visited the monasteries of Egypt and Palestine; in the latter country and in Syria the monastic life tended to become more and more eremitical and to run to great extravagances in the matter of bodily austerities. (See MO NASTICISM.) When (about 36o) Basil formed his monastery in the neighbourhood of Neocaesarea in Pontus, he deliberately set him self against these tendencies. He declared that the "cenobitic" or community life is superior to the "eremitic" of the isolated hermit; that fasting and austerities should not interfere with prayer or work; that work should form an integral part of the monastic life, not merely as an occupation, but for its own sake and in order to do good to others; and therefore that monasteries should be near towns. All this was a new departure in monachism. The life St. Basil established was strictly cenobitical, with com mon prayer seven times a day, common work, common meals. It was, in spite of the new ideas, an austere life, of the kind called contemplative, given up to prayer, the reading of the Scriptures and heavy field-work.
St. Basil's influence, and the greater suitability of his insti tute to European ideas, ensured the propagation of Basilian monachism; and Sozomen says that in Cappadocia and the neigh bouring provinces there were no hermits but only cenobites. How ever, the eastern hankering after the eremitical life long sur vived, and it was only by dint of legislation, both ecclesiastical (Council of Chalcedon) and civil (Justinian Code), that the Basilian cenobitic form of monasticism came to prevail through out the Greek-speaking lands, though the eremitical forms have always maintained themselves.
The other creative name in the history of Greek monachism is that of Theodore, who became abbot of the monastery of the Studium in Constantinople. He set himself to reform his monas tery and restore St. Basil's spirit in its primitive vigour. But to effect this, and to give permanence to the reformation, he saw that there was need of a more practical code of laws to regulate the details of the daily life, as a supplement to St. Basil's Rules. He therefore drew up constitutions, afterwards codified (see Migne, Patrol. Graec. xcix., 1 7 04-5 7) , which became the norm of the life at the Studium monastery, and gradually spread thence to the monasteries of the rest of the Greek empire. Thus to this day the Rules of Basil and the Constitutions of Theodore the Studite, along with the canons of the Councils, constitute the chief part of Greek and Russian monastic law.
The spirit of Greek monachism, as regenerated by Theodore, may best be gathered from his Letters, Discourses and Testament. Under the abbot were several officials to superintend the various departments; the liturgical services in the church took up a con siderable portion of the day, but Theodore seems to have made no attempt to revive the early practice of the Studium in this matter (see ACOEMETI) ; the rest of the time was divided between reading and work; the latter included the chief handicrafts, for the monks, only ten in number, when Theodore became abbot, increased under his rule to over a thousand. One kind of work practised with great zeal and success by the Studite monks, was the copying of manuscripts, so that to them and to the schools that went forth from them we owe a great number of ex isting Greek mss. and the preservation of many works of classical and ecclesiastical antiquity. In addition to this, literary and theological studies were pursued; and the life, though simple and self-denying and hard, was not of extreme austerity.
Basilian monachism spread from Greece to Italy and Russia. Rufinus had translated St. Basil's Rules into Latin (c. 400) and they became the rule of life in certain Italian monasteries. They were known to St. Benedict, who refers his monks to "the Rule of our holy Father Basil," indeed, St. Benedict owed more of the ground-ideas of his Rule to St. Basil than to any other monastic legislator. Prof. Kirsopp Lake has (19o3) written four valuable articles (Journal of Theological Studies, iv., v.) on "The Greek monasteries of South Italy"; he deals in detail with their scrip toria and the dispersal of their libraries, a matter of much inter est, in that some of the chief collections of Greek mss. in western Europe—as the Bessarion at Venice and a great number at the Vatican—come from the spoils of these Italian Basilian houses.
Of greater importance was the importation of Basilian mona chism into Russia, for it thereby became the norm of monachism for all the Slavonic lands. The monasteries are of three kinds : cenobia proper, wherein full monastic common life, with personal poverty, is observed; others wherein the monks are allowed the use of their private means and lead a generally mitigated and free kind of monastic life; and the lauras, wherein the life is semi-eremitic.
The visits of Western scholars in modern times to Greek monas teries in search of mss.—notably to St. Catherine's on Mt. Sinai, and to Mt. Athos—has directed much attention to con temporary Greek monachism, and the accounts of these expe ditions commonly contain descriptions, more or less sympathetic and intelligent, of the present-day life of Greek monks. The first such account was Robert Curzon's in parts iii. (1834) and iv. (183 i) of the Monasteries of the Levant; the most recent in Eng lish is Athelstan Riley's Athos (1887). The life is mainly given up to devotional contemplative exercises; the church services are of extreme length; intellectual study is little cultivated; and manual labour has almost disappeared.
The ecclesiastical importance of the monks in the various branches of the Eastern Orthodox Church lies in this, that as bishops must be celibate, whereas the parochial clergy must be married, the bishops are all recruited from the monks. But be sides this they have been a strong spiritual and religious influence, as is recognized even by those who have scant sympathy with monastic ideals (see Harnack, What is Christianity? Lect. xiii., end).
A number of Basilian monasteries have always been in com munion with the Roman Catholic Church : among these are the surviving houses founded in Italy and Sicily, especially the once famous monastery of Grotta Ferrata near Rome.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Abbe Marin, Les Moines de Constantinople (1897) ; Bibliography.-Abbe Marin, Les Moines de Constantinople (1897) ; Otto Zockler, Askese and Monchtum, pp. 285-309 (1897) ; Karl Holl, Enthusiasmus and Bussgewalt beim griechischen Monchtum (1898) ; Montalembert, Monks of the West, second part of bk. ii., and the chapter on St. Basil in James O. Hannay's Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism (19o3). On the history and spirit of Basilian monachism, see J. M. Bosse, Les Moines d'Orient (1900) . For general information see Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie (ed. iii.), in articles "Monchtum," "Orientalische Kirche," and "Athosberg," where copious references will be found.