Basil of Caesarea provides for the cenobitic life a solid theological grounding. In both the Longer and the Shorter Rules Basil's paramount concern was with the building and fostering of community life. He did not despise the hermit's way of solitude; indeed according to his friend Gregory of Nazianzen, he established both individual hermitages and laurae. But he was careful to place these retreats for solitary contemplation in fairly close proximity to houses of cenobites, so that men pursuing these separate paths in their quest for God might be kept in touch with each other to their mutual support and profit.
Basil saw the religious community, the cenobitical life, as the only place in which the true ideal of Christian perfection could be completely realized. Only the community could meet the insistent needs of soul and body. Only the community provided its members with the op- opportunity of ceaselessly exercising fraternal charity and humble self-sacrifice--the instruments by which the soul is freed from the tyranny of its own selfishness and its body's passions. Only the community with its diverse gifts of body and spirit could accept and be transformed by the gifts of the Holy Spirit in their fullness. Within the community the individual was to exercise his talents and let his gifts illumine his brothers, while he shared in the effects of theirs.
Basil saw the divine economy of salvation working at its most effective level within the monastic community. His Rules can be seen as an amalgam of all that was best in the development of the monastic ideal in the East.
The cenobitical and eremitical ideals of Eastern monasticism found their way to the West by a variety of routes, some of which were so unexpected as to verge on the bizarre. If illustration were needed that "God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform" the history of Western monasticism would provide a full range.
