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St Basil the Great Resources Online and in Print
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130 Pages
Page 40
To Sophronius [290] he is the "glory of the Church." To Isidore of Pelusium, [291] he seems to speak as one inspired. To the Council of Chalcedon he is emphatically a minister of grace; [292] to the second council of Nicaea a layer of the foundations of orthodoxy. [293] His death lacks the splendid triumph of the martyrdoms of Polycarp and Cyprian. His life lacks the vivid incidents which make the adventures of Athanasius an enthralling romance. He does not attract the sympathy evoked by the unsophisticated simplicity of Gregory his friend or of Gregory his brother. There does not linger about his memory the close personal interest that binds humanity to Augustine, or the winning loyalty and tenderness that charm far off centuries into affection for Theodoret. Sometimes he seems a hard, almost a sour man. [294] Sometimes there is a jarring reminder of his jealousy for his own dignity. [295] Evidently he was not a man who could be thwarted without a rupture of pleasant relations, or slighted with impunity. In any subordinate position he was not easy to get on with. [296] But a man of strong will, convicted that he is championing a righteous cause, will not hesitate to sacrifice, among other things, the amenities that come of amiable absence of self-assertion. To Basil, to assert himself was to assert the truth of Christ and of His Church. And in the main the identification was a true one. Basil was human, and occasionally, as in the famous dispute with Anthimus, so disastrously fatal to the typical friendship of the earlier manhood, he may have failed to perceive that the Catholic cause would not suffer from the existence of two metropolitans in Cappadocia. But the great archbishop could be an affectionate friend, thirsty for sympathy. [297] And he was right in his estimate of his position. Broadly speaking, Basil, more powerfully than any contemporary official, worker, or writer in the Church, did represent and defend through all the populous provinces of the empire which stretched from the Balkans to the Mediterranean, from the AEgean to the Euphrates, the cause whose failure or success has been discerned, even by thinkers of no favourable predisposition, to have meant death or life to the Church. [298] St. Basil is duly canonized in the grateful memory, no less than in the official bead-roll, of Christendom, and we may be permitted to regret that the existing Kalendar of the Anglican liturgy has not found room for so illustrious a Doctor in its somewhat niggard list. [299] For the omission some amends have lately [300] been made in the erection of a statue of the great archbishop of Caesarea under the dome of the Cathedral St. Paul in London. [301]
[290] Apud Photium Cod. 231.
[291] Ep. lxi.
[292] cf. Ceillier, vi. 8, 1.
[293] Ib.
[294] cf. Ep. xxv.
[295] cf. xcviii.
[296] e.g. his relations with his predecessor.
[297] Ep. xci.
[298] e.g. T. Carlyle. "He perceived Christianity itself to have been at stake. If the Arians had won, it would have dwindled away into a legend." J. A. Froude, Life of Carlyle in London, ii. 462.
[299] In the Greek Kalendar January 1, the day of the death, is observed in honour of the saint. In the West St. Basil's day is June 14, the traditional date of the consecration. The martyrologies of Jerome and Bede do not contain the name. The first mention is ascribed by the Bollandists to Usuard. (Usuard's martyrology was composed for Charles the Bold at Paris.) In the tenth century a third day was consecrated in the East to the common commemoration of SS. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom.
[300] 1894.
[301] Basil lived at the period when the relics of martyrs and saints were beginning to be collected and honoured. (e.g. Ep. cxcvii.) To Damasus, the bishop of Rome, whose active sympathy he vainly strove to win, is mainly due the reverent rearrangement of the Roman catacombs. (Roma Sotteranea, Northcote and Brownlow, p. 97.) It was not to be expected that Basil's own remains should be allowed to rest in peace; but the gap between the burial at Caesarea and the earliest record of their supposed reappearance is wide. There was a Church of St. Basil at Bruges founded in 1187, which was believed to possess some of the archbishop's bones. These were solemnly translated in 1463 to the Church of St. Donatian, which disappeared at the time of the French revolution. Pancirola (d. 1599) mentions a head, an arm, and a rib, said to be Basil's, among the treasures of Rome.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/basil/life-works.asp?pg=40
