Sketch of the Life and Works of Saint Basil the Great

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Page 39

The winter of 378-9 dealt the last blow, and with the first day of what, to us, is now the new year, the great spirit fled. Gregory, alas! was not at the bedside. But he has left us a narrative which bears the stamp of truth. For some time the bystanders thought that the dying bishop had ceased to breathe. Then the old strength blazed out at the last. He spoke with vigour, and even ordained some of the faithful who were with him. Then he lay once more feeble and evidently passing away. Crowds surrounded his residence, praying eagerly for his restoration to them, and willing to give their lives for his. With a few final words of advice and exhortation, he said: "Into thy hands I commend my spirit," and so ended.

The funeral was a scene of intense excitement and rapturous reverence. Crowds filled every open space, and every gallery and window; Jews and Pagans joined with Christians in lamentation, and the cries and groans of the agitated oriental multitude drowned the music of the hymns which were sung. The press was so great that several fatal accidents added to the universal gloom. Basil was buried in the "sepulchre of his fathers"--a phrase which may possibly mean in the ancestral tomb of his family at Caesarea.

So passed away a leader of men in whose case the epithet great' is no conventional compliment. He shared with his illustrious brother primate of Alexandria the honour of rallying the Catholic forces in the darkest days of the Arian depression. He was great as foremost champion of a great cause, great in contemporary and posthumous influence, great in industry and self-denial, great as a literary controversialist. The estimate formed of him by his contemporaries is expressed in the generous, if somewhat turgid, eloquence of the laudatory oration of the slighted Gregory of Nazianzus. Yet nothing in Gregory's eulogy goes beyond the expressions of the prelate who has seemed to some to be "the wisest and holiest man in the East in the succeeding century." [287] Basil is described by the saintly and learned Theodoret [288] in terms that might seem exaggerated when applied to any but his master, as the light not of Cappadocia only, but of the world. [289]

[287] Kingsley, Hypatia, chap. xxx.

[288] cf. Gibbon, chap. xxi.

[289] Theod., H.E. iv. 16, and Ep. cxlvi.

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