Confessor Peter

Peter of Sebaste, commemorated in East and West as a confessor and bishop, was the youngest child of Basil the Elder and Emmelia, a Christian family of the Cappadocian and Pontic aristocracy in the eastern Roman Empire. Several of his brothers and sisters are themselves counted among the saints: Macrina the Younger, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Naucratius. The household belonged to the world of fourth-century Asia Minor, with ties to Caesarea in Cappadocia and to family estates in Pontus. No contemporary source records a precise year of birth; he was born in the mid-fourth century, after his more famous brothers, and was still young when his father died.

After Basil the Elder’s death, Peter’s education and ascetic formation were directed by his eldest sister Macrina at Annesi on the Iris River in Pontus. Under her leadership the estate became a double monastic community of men and women. Peter entered that way of life from youth and remained unmarried. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina is the principal narrative source for this period of the family’s history and presents Peter as formed in Scripture, prayer, and manual work rather than in the public rhetorical career that Basil and Gregory had followed for a time.

Peter was ordained priest by his brother Basil after Basil had become bishop of Caesarea. He assisted in the administration of the Caesarean church and in the charitable institutions associated with Basil, including the large complex for the poor and the sick often called the Basileias. The brothers shared a common defense of Nicene orthodoxy against Arian and related teachings then widespread in Asia Minor and Armenia.

About 380 Peter was made bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, a see previously associated with Eustathius of Sebaste, whose later teaching denied the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. As bishop, Peter upheld the doctrine of the Trinity taught by Basil and Gregory, especially the full deity of the Holy Spirit. He took part in the Council of Constantinople in 381, later numbered as the Second Ecumenical Council. Gregory of Nyssa dedicated the treatise On the Making of Man to him, which indicates that Peter was regarded as a competent theological interlocutor and not merely a pious younger brother.

Peter died in 391. He was venerated as a saint from an early date; his feast is kept on 9 January. There was no papal process of canonization in the fourth century, and no reliable ancient account specifies his burial place or later specialized patronages. He is remembered as a monastic bishop of the Cappadocian holy family and as a defender of Nicene and Constantinopolitan orthodoxy in Armenia.