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St Basil the Great Resources Online and in Print
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130 Pages
Page 37
In fact the appeal of Basil seems to have failed to elicit the response he desired, not so much from the independent tone of his letters, which was only in accordance with the recognised facts of the age, [275] as from occidental suspicions of Basil's orthodoxy, [276] and from the failure of men, who thought and wrote in Latin, to enter fully into the controversies conducted in a more subtle tongue. [277] Basil had taken every precaution to ensure the conveyance of his letters by messengers of tact and discretion. He had deprecated the advocacy of so simple-minded and undiplomatic an ambassador as his brother Gregory. [278] He had poured out his very soul in entreaty. [279] But all was unavailing. He suffered, and he had to suffer unsupported by a human sympathy on which he thought he had a just claim. [280]
[275] A ses yeux, l'Orient et l'Occident ne sont ils pas, deux freres, dont les droits sont egaux, sans suprematie, sans ainesse?" Fialon, Et. Hist. p. 134. This is exactly what East and West were to most eyes, and what they were asserted to be in the person of the two imperial capitals by the Twenty-Eighth Canon of Chalcedon. cf. Bright, Canons of the First Four General Councils, pp. 93, 192, and note on Theodoret in this series, p. 293.
[276] Ep. cclxvi. S: 2.
[277] cf. Ep. ccxiv. S: 4, p. 254.
[278] Ep. ccxv.
[279] See specially Ep. ccxlii.
[280] "Foiled in all his repeated demands; a deaf ear turned to his most earnest entreaties; the council he had begged for not summoned; the deputation he had repeatedly solicited unsent; Basil's span of life drew to its end amid blasted hopes and apparently fruitless labours for the unity of the faith. It was not permitted him to live to see the Eastern Churches, for the purity of whose faith he had devoted all his powers, restored to peace and unanimity." Canon Venables, D.C.B. i. 295. "He had to fare on as best he might,--admiring, courting, but coldly treated by the Latin world, desiring the friendship of Rome, yet wounded by her superciliousness, suspected of heresy by Damasus, and accused by Jerome of pride." Newman, Church of the Fathers, p. 115.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/basil/life-works.asp?pg=37
