St. Basil the Great was born about the year 329, of a Christian family, whose high religious character and sacrifices for the cause of truth had been for generations widely known in Asia Minor. It seems probable that the place of his birth was Caesarea, in Cappadocia, the town of which he afterwards became bishop; but his father’s connections were more with Pontus than with Cappadocia, and some authorities place Basil’s birth in the former province. He him­self calls each of these countries in turn his native land.

Basil the elder—for father and son were named alike—was a teacher of rhetoric, and an advocate in large practice. He was a Christian of the best and most earnest type, and when Gregory of Nazianzus addressed his panegyric of the younger Basil to a large audience he was able to assume that the reputation of the father would be known to them all. But the future saint owed his earliest religious education to his grandmother Macrina, who brought him up with his brothers, and formed them upon the doctrine of the great Origenist and saint of Pontus, Gregory Thaumaturgus.

Macrina had not only been taught by the best Christian instructors, but had herself with her husband suffered for the faith. In the persecutions of Maximin she and her family were driven from their home and forced with a few companions to take refuge in a forest among the mountains of Pontus, where they spent nearly seven years, and were wont to attribute to the special interposition of God the supplies of food by which they were maintained at a distance from all civilization.

It must not be supposed that the charge of Basil’s childhood thus committed to his grandmother indicated any deficiency in love or piety on the part of his mother. Her name was Emmelia, and Gregory describes her as fitly matched with her husband. They had ten children. Of the five sons three became bishops—Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste. The four youngest daughters were happily married, but Macrina, the eldest, devoted herself to the religious life, and exercised over Basil himself a most salutary influence at a very critical period in his career. In how great love and honour she was held by the whole family we know from the eulogium pronounced upon her by her younger brother, Gregory Nyssen.

Thus Basil was brought up under the most favourable circumstances as regards religion; nor was his education of a narrow type. He enjoyed from the instructions of his father, to which he passed while still a boy, very rich opportunities of classical culture, and his writings prove how willingly he profited by these, and by the university education to which they led, and how deeply he always valued them. We can, in fact, imagine few periods or places until we come to quite modem times which could have given to Basil’s genius fairer development or wider exercise than did those which fell to his lot. But when we come to describe the condition of public affairs we must acknowledge that few periods could have prepared for him greater difficulties and disappointments. He was born four years after the orthodox faith had been formulated at the Council of Nicaea. His education and his own deepest tendencies of mind and soul responded to his early teaching in the Catholic belief. The slightest study of his works will convince us that it was no mere habit of profession which placed him among the defenders of the Nicene Creed, but a conviction so thorough that the slightest infringement of it would have been to him falsehood of the deepest dye.

For a mind so framed and furnished the times promised very badly. While Constantine lived Basil was but a boy; his youth and early manhood were passed under the reign of the Arian Constantius, to whom, after the brief episode of the reigns of Julian and Jovian, the Arian Valens succeeded in the dominion of the East. Thus for more than thirty years Arianism wielded the whole civil authority in the regions with which Basil was connected, save for a short three years, which were chiefly occupied by a heathen reaction, too weak and brief to do the truth the service of severe persecution. We have, perhaps, no right to complain that Arianism availed itself of the aid of the temporal power, seeing that the Catholics did the same when opportunity offered. Such, however, was the fact. The whole of Basil’s mature life is to be passed under governments which will only vary from unfriendly opposition to actual persecution.

Two cities, Caesarea in Cappadocia and Neocaesarea in Pontus, have both been named as his birthplace. There must be some amount of uncertainty on this point, from the fact that no direct statement exists to clear it up, and that the word patris was loosely employed to mean not only place of birth, but place of residence and occupation. Basil’s parents had property and interests both in Pontus and Cappadocia, and were as likely to be in the one as in the other. The early statement of Gregory of Nazianzus has been held to have weight, inasmuch as he speaks of Basil as a Cappadocian like himself before there was any other reason but that of birth for associating him with this province. Assenting, then, to the considerations which have been held to afford reasonable ground for assigning Caesarea as the birthplace, we may adopt the popular estimation of Basil as one of “The Three Cappadocians,” and congratulate Cappadocia on the Christian associations which have rescued her fair fame from the slur of the epigram which described her as constituting with Crete and Cilicia a trinity of unsatisfactoriness. Basil’s birth nearly synchronizes with the transference of the chief seat of empire from Rome to Byzantium. He is born into a world where the victory already achieved by the Church has been now for sixteen years officially recognized. He is born into a Church in which the first great Council has already given official expression to those cardinal doctrines of the faith, of which the final and formal vindication is not to be assured till after the struggles of the next six score of years. Rome, reduced, civilly, to the subordinate rank of a provincial city, is pausing before she realises all her loss, and waits for the crowning outrage of the barbarian invasions, ere she begins to make serious efforts to grasp, ecclesiastically, something of her lost imperial prestige. For a time, the centre of ecclesiastical and theological interest is to be rather in the East than in the West.

II.

Education.

The place most closely connected with St. Basil’s early years is neither Caesarea nor Neocaesarea, but an insignificant village not far from the latter place, where he was brought up by his admirable grandmother, Macrina. In this neighbourhood his family had considerable property, and here he afterwards resided. The estate was at Annesi, on the river Iris (Jekil-Irmak), and lay in the neighbourhood of scenery of romantic beauty. Basil’s own description of his retreat on the opposite side of the Iris matches the reference of Gregory of Nazianzus to the narrow glen among lofty mountains, which keep it always in shadow and darkness, while far below the river foams and roars in its narrow precipitous bed.

There is some little difficulty in understanding the statement of Basil in Letter CCXVI, that the house of his brother Peter, which he visited in 375 and which we may assume to have been on the family property was “not far from Neocaesarea.” As a matter of fact, the Iris nowhere winds nearer to Neocaesarea than at a distance of about twenty miles, and Turkhal is not at the nearest point. But it is all a question of degree. Relatively to Caesarea, Basil’s usual place of residence, Annesi is near Neocaesarea. An analogy would be found in the statement of a writer usually residing in London, that if he came to Sheffield he would be not far from Doncaster.

At Annesi his mother Emmelia erected a chapel in honour of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, to which their relics were translated. It is possible that Basil was present at the dedication services, lasting all night long, which are related to have sent his brother Gregory to sleep. Here, then, Basil was taught the rudiments of religion by his grand-mother, and by his father, in accordance with the teaching of the great Gregory the Wonder-worker. Here he learned the Catholic faith.

At an early age he seems to have been sent to school at Caesarea, and there to have formed the acquaintance of an Eusebius, otherwise unknown, Hesychius, and Gregory of Nazianzus, and to have conceived a boyish admiration for Dianius the archbishop.

From the instructions of his father Basil passed to Caesarea, a place of much literary eminence, where there were at the time excellent schools. Nazianzen, who here, if not before, began to know him, informs us that he gained the highest reputation even at that early period, as well for intellectual eminence as for religious character. He was a philosopher among philosophers, an orator among orators, even before he had passed the regular course in those branches of instruction; above all, a priest among Christians so long before assuming the order of the priesthood. Thus early did his wonderful versatility impress observers.

The education which he received was altogether Greek. There is the best reason to think that he did not even know the Latin language. Certainly the classic authors whom he quotes with so much appreciation are uniformly Greek. The records which we have of the education of his contemporary Julian assure us that it was upon Homer and Hesiod, upon the great dramatists of Athens and her historians and orators, that the youthful genius of Basil was fed. Although Gregory commends his Christian character at this period, the custom of the age allows little doubt that he was still, and for many years afterwards, unbaptized.

From Caesarea he proceeded to Byzantium for further improvement in learning. We know little of his progress there, save that it was in Constantinople that he came in contact with the great sophist Libanius, if indeed the tradition of their intercourse and the letters which are said to have afterwards passed between them are genuine at all. In 351 Basil proceeded to Athens, the step which in those days corresponded to entering a university among ourselves. Of this part of his life we have a full and very interesting record in the oration of Gregory Nazianzen, who was at Athens some time before his countryman’s arrival, and had entered into the spirit of the place with more enthusiasm than the less imaginative Basil was at first able to feel.

There is no corroboration of a sojourn of Basil of Caesarea at Antioch. Libanius was at Constantinople in 347, and there Basil may have attended his lectures.

From Constantinople the young Cappadocian student proceeded in 351 to Athens. Of an university town of the 4th century we have a lively picture in the writings of his friend, and are reminded that the rough horse-play of the modern undergraduate is a survival of a very ancient barbarism. The lads were affiliated to certain fraternities, and looked out for the arrival of every new student at the city, with the object of attaching him to the classes of this or that teacher. Kinsmen were on the watch for kinsmen and acquaintances for acquaintances; sometimes it was mere good-humoured violence which secured the person of the freshman. The first step in this grotesque matriculation was an entertainment; then the guest of the day was conducted with ceremonial procession through the agora to the entrance of the baths. There they leaped round him with wild cries, and refused him admission. At last an entry was forced with mock fury, and the neophyte was made free of the mysteries of the baths and of the lecture halls. Gregory of Nazianzus, a student a little senior to Basil, succeeded in sparing him the ordeal of this initiation, and his dignity and sweetness of character seem to have secured him immunity from rough usage without loss of popularity. At Athens the two young Cappadocians were noted among their contemporaries for three things: their diligence and success in work; their stainless and devout life; and their close mutual affection. Everything was common to them. They were as one soul. What formed the closest bond of union was their faith. God and their love of what is best made them one. Himerius, a pagan, and Proceresius, an Armenian Christian, are mentioned among the well-known professors whose classes Basil attended. Among early friendships, formed possibly during his university career, Basil’s own letters name those with Terentius 20 and Sophronius.

If the Libanian correspondence be accepted as genuine, we may add Celsus, a pupil of Libanius, to the group. But if we except Basil’s affection for Gregory of Nazianzus, of none of these intimacies is the interest so great as of that which is recorded to have been formed between Basil and the young prince Julian. One incident of the Athenian sojourn, which led to bitter consequences in after days, was the brief communication with Apollinarius, and the letter written “from layman to layman,” which his opponents made a handle for much malevolence, and perhaps for forgery. Julian arrived at Athens after the middle of the year 355.

Gregory informs us that Basil’s reputation had preceded him to Athens, and that he was eagerly expected by many youths ready to compete for his friendship. It was the custom that the freshman should be received upon his first appearance with a torrent of jokes and banter, rough or refined accord­ing to his character, and designed, Gregory supposes, to take down his pride; he used then to be conducted in solemn procession to the bath, where the assembled youth were wont to burst into a horrible din of shouting, and beat at the doors in a frantic manner, to the great confusion of the raw lad whom they were conducting; from the bath he was escorted home with similar solemnity, and thenceforth considered to be free of the place. Basil alone, either because of his dignity of manner or the influence of his fellow­countryman, was spared the ordeal. But he did not entirely escape: for certain Armenian youths of senior standing got up a disputation with him, in which Gregory, not comprehending their insidious designs, was inclined at first to give aid to them rather than to Basil, who was already proving too strong for them. But presently perceiving the real state of the case, he threw his weight upon the side of his countryman, to the discomfiture of the assailants.

These circumstances drew the two Cappadocians together, and their acquaintanceship speedily deepened into the affection which, with one partial breach, was to last till death. They lived together, and aided one another in exhausting all the opportunities of learning which the place afforded. The discipline of university life at Athens was extremely lax. Town and gown riots not unfrequently took place, and contests between the pupils of rival teachers were very common. The pupils of different nations severally banded together and obnoxious authorities suffered severely at their hands; and misbehaviour, even at lecture, was often complained of. It was doubtless possible, as in other places, for an idle student to gain nothing whatever from the place, and for a diligent one to gain a great deal. The instruction was entirely professorial. The youths repaired to the house of their professor in the morning hours, at­tended sometimes by short-hand writers to take down his lecture. They brought with them their themes for correction, and they disputed in the presence of the teacher in order to train themselves for public speaking. When he spoke, they made no scruple of applauding; and the practice may surprise us less when we remember that the like was done by the congregations in the churches while listening to a sermon. The chief teachers of Basil and Gregory were Proceresius, a Christian of Armenia, and Himerius of Bithynia, a heathen.

The two friends abstained wholly from the amusements which prevailed among the youth. Two paths alone, as Gregory informs us, were known to them, —that which led to the lecture-room of the teachers, and that which led to church. Gregory confesses what indeed we can well understand that the heathen traditions of Athens and the magnificent remains of the fallen religion with which it was filled, brought no slight temptation to a young man’s faith. But during the four years of Basil’s sojourn no relaxation of his religious strictness took place; rather was it confirmed by resistance to the prevailing tone of his surroundings.

A frequent partner of their studies was Julian, the nephew of the reigning emperor Constantius. This young prince was on very friendly terms with Basil, with whom he was wont to read the Bible, and search out the relation between its lessons and those of their heathen teachers. Different indeed were the conclusions which in after-life the two students were to draw from these researches. Gregory declares himself to have disliked and distrusted Julian from the first, on account of his uneasiness, his self-consciousness, and his vanity. Julian, however, caressed the two friends, and may have seen in them, even at this time, possible instruments for the reactionary designs which he was already planning. He must have known that if they declined to serve him for such a purpose, they were capable of becoming the most formidable impediments to a restoration of heathenism, as knowing the best it had to give, and yet perfectly ready to go rejoicing to death in opposing it.

Gregory’s account of the student life of his friend is very glowing; and yet it is too well supported by the results in Basil’s after-years, and too similar to what has been observed in the college days of other great men, to allow us to call it an undiscriminating eulogy. He says that Basil’s industry and concentration were such that he could have succeeded even without talent, and his quickness of intellect such that he could have succeeded without great labour. Uniting both he became so brilliant a scholar that in each of many branches of study he was as proficient as if he had studied it alone. His favourite subjects were rhetoric,—which taught to speak with force and fire, though in the use of this endowment his ethical purpose was absolutely different from that of the rhetoricians of the time; grammar,—which “hellenized” his language to the most exquisite degree, and taught him to observe the true style of history, the canons of metre, and the laws of poetry; philosophy,—that lofty science, in both its departments, the moral speculation which has to do with human conduct, and the dialectical which trains to argument. In this latter he became so skilled that there was no escaping from the force of his logic when he cared to use it. Astronomy, geometry, and the science of numbers he studied only so far as to be able to hold his own among those acquainted with these branches of study. But in medicine, which his own delicacy of health rendered peculiarly interesting to him, he went so far as to acquire the practice of the art. But all his intellectual eminence was a small matter when compared with the purity of his life.

Indeed the philosophy which Basil imbibed at Athens, though not Christian, had the deepest connexions with the morality of the Gospel. It was the Neo-Platonic and we know from the remains of Julian what was its scope. It included three parts: logic, which was called demonstrative, persuasive, or sophistic according as it regarded the true, the probable, or the apparent; physics which comprehended theology, mathematics, and the theory of ideas; morals, or practical philosophy, which was denominated ethics, economics, or politics when applied respectively to the direction of the individual, of the family, or of the State. All this vast system formed a science of being, which taught the mind of man first how to know and, guide itself and to find God within; secondly, to know God and the world without; thirdly, to discern the end of man and the means of attaining it.

At last “the ship had been loaded with a cargo of learning,” and the time arrived for Basil and Gregory to carry out the design long arranged between them of returning to their native land, there to pursue the religious life with greater strictness than was possible at Athens. The day of departure came, and with it the usual accompaniments, last words, seeing off the parting friend, attempts to retain him, lamentations, embraces, and tears. For there is nothing so sad in life, says Gregory, as for those who have been brought up together at Athens to be parted at once from each other and from her. Gregory suffered himself for the present to be prevailed on by the entreaties of fellow collegians and masters, who crowded round them to hinder their departure. But Basil, as we should expect, held by his purpose. He explained to his friends the causes of his departure, and left them very sadly; but he went, nor did Gregory remain long behind.

 

CAESAREA AND ANNESI : ASCETIC LIFE.

 

On Basil’s return to Caesarea (a.d. 355) the designs of religious life which he and his friend had formed at Athens appear to have been for a while forgotten amidst the admiration which his accomplishments excited in the world. His father was dead; his mother settled at Annesi, the place of his own early training, near to Neocaesarea. He practised rhetoric at Caesarea with great success, and Neocaesarea contended for his presence. It has been inferred from a letter from Gregory, written to Basil at this period, that the strict morality of his life at Athens had given way, and that he was entangled in the pleasures of the world. It is hazardous to build such an impeachment upon the banter, probably rather exaggerated, of this letter. But we have the best reason for believing that Basil was at this period excessively vain and self-conceited. It is Gregory Nyssen, his brother, and devoted admirer as well, who is our authority for this statement. And the same truthful panegyrist relates to us the process of his cure. It was effected by his elder sister Macrina; she found him puffed up beyond measure with literary pride, despising all dignities, and looking down from his eminence upon those who held places of high worldly power. Macrina pressed him to embrace the life of a solitary, and at last succeeded in inducing him, like a new Moses, says his brother, to prefer the Hebrews to the treasures of Egypt.

 

III.

Life at Caesarea. Baptism; and Adoption of Monastic Life.

 

When Basil overcame the efforts of his companions to detain him at Athens, Gregory prevailed on to remain for a while longer. Basil therefore made his rapid journey homeward alone. His Letter to Eustathius alleges as the chief reason for his hurried departure the desire to profit by the instruction of that teacher. This may be the language of compliment. In the same letter he speaks of his fortitude in resisting all temptation to stop at the city on the Hellespont. This city I hesitate to recognise, with Maran, as Constantinople. There may have been inducements to Basil to stop at Lampsacus, and it is more probably Lampsacus that he avoided. At Caesarea he was welcomed as one of the most distinguished of her sons, and there for a time taught rhetoric with conspicuous success. A deputation came from Neocaesarea to request him to undertake educational work at that city, and in vain endeavoured to detain” him by lavish promises. According to his friend Gregory, Basil had already determined to renounce the world, in the sense of devoting himself to an ascetic and philosophic life. His brother Gregory, however, represents him as at this period still under more mundane influences, and as showing something of the self-confidence and conceit which are occasionally to be observed in young men who have just successfully completed an university career, and as being largely indebted to the persuasion and example of his sister Macrina for the resolution, with which he now carried out the determination to devote himself to a life of self-denial. To the same period may probably be referred Basil’s baptism.

It would be quite consonant with the feelings of the times that pious parents like the elder Basil and Emmelia should shrink from admitting their boy to holy baptism before his encountering the temptations of school and university life. The assigned date, 357, may be reasonably accepted, and shortly after his baptism he was ordained to the office of Reader by Dianius, the bishop of Caesarea, the revered friend of his youth.

Gregory Nazianzen makes this incident in the life of his friend the text for a lamentation over the hasty ordinations of his time by which so many were introduced into the priesthood without due training in the minor offices that there was a danger lest the order most sacred of all should become the most ridiculous. Nobody, he says, is called a physician or a painter until he has learnt the nature of diseases or the mixing of colours and drawing of forms. But priests are manufactured off hand;—conceived and born simultaneously, like the giants in the fable. We make saints in a day, and bid men be holy and learned who have had no preparation and contribute nothing to the priesthood except a desire to enter it. Not so Basil, who was content to exercise the humble office of reading the Scriptures to the people long before he proceeded forward to the priesthood and episcopate.

He himself has given us in a letter, unwillingly written to Eustathius of Sebaste, an account of more than one disenchantment which he experienced at this period of his life. He had spent, he confesses, many years in vanity, and had devoted a laborious youth to the wisdom of this world, which God has made foolish; expressions which we need not indeed accuse of the least exaggeration but must balance by the remembrance of the constant use which the saint continued to make of his classical acquirements. At last, awaking as from a dream, he looked to the glorious light of the Gospel, and saw the uselessness of the wisdom of this world, which comes to nought. Lamenting his wretched life, he looked every way for some guidance to introduce him into the ways of piety. First, he was eagerly desirous of making a change in his practical lifelong perturbed by intercourse with the wicked. “therefore,” he says, with a touching simplicity, “reading my Bible, and finding there that it is a great assistance to perfection that we should sell our goods and distribute to the poor brethren, and be entirely without care for the things of this life, and suffer our soul to be distracted by no affection towards things here, I wished to find some brother who had chosen this way of life, that with him I might pass the brief waves of this world.” Repairing to Egypt, he found in Alexandria and other parts of that land, in Palestine, Coele-Syria and Mesopotamia, many persons whose extra­ordinary abstinence, not only from food, but from sleep, whose constant labours and prayers moved his astonishment, since they treated their own flesh as if it was some strange residence in which they were sojourning. These holy men he deeply desired to imitate.

It was about this time that he visited monastic settlements in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Coele Syria, and Egypt, though he was not so fortunate as to encounter the great pope Athanasius. Probably during this tour he began the friendship with Eusebius of Samosata which lasted so long.

It was natural, then, that he should be greatly attracted by those who in his own country were already practising the ascetic life, and of whom Eustathius was the most eminent. In his simplicity, he thought their rough garments and girdles, and sandals of undressed hide, to be a sufficient proof of their genuine humility. And when others warned him, he would listen to nothing against the monks, but defended them against accusations of false doctrine. Experience undeceived him; and he found afterwards in these monks of the school of Eustathius (who was himself first a semi-Arian and afterwards a denier of the deity of the Spirit) opponents of his work, so turbulent and so deceitful, that a true account of their conduct must appear either incredible, or, if believed, a reason for hating the human race.

Now, the support of orthodoxy was an important part of the object for which Basil valued the ascetic life. There was the most urgent need of an organization for this purpose. The bishops and clergy of the time were, some of them, ignorant, and some deeply tainted with semi-Arianism. Even the best of them had made concessions in the things of faith to the difficulties of the time. Basil did not judge them hardly; his own revered old friend Dianius was of their number. But he chose a different course for himself, and proceeded to enlist a little army to fight the battle, whose whole fife should be founded and organized upon Scriptural truth. 

To the same period we may also refer his renunciation of his share of the family property. Maran would appear to date this before the Syrian and Egyptian tour, a journey which can hardly have been accomplished without considerable expense. But, in truth, with every desire to do justice to the self-denial and unworldliness of St. Basil and of other like­minded and like-lived champions of the Faith, it cannot but be observed that, at all events in Basil’s case, the renunciation must be understood with some reasonable reservation. The great archbishop has been claimed as a “socialist”, whatever may be meant in these days by the term. But St. Basil did not renounce all property himself, and had a keen sense of its rights in the case of his friends. From his letter on behalf of his foster-brother, placed by Maran during his presbyterate, it would appear that this foster-brother, Dorotheus, was allowed a life tenancy of a house and farm on the family estate, with a certain number of slaves, on condition that Basil should be supported out of the profits. Here we have landlord, tenant, rent, and unearned increment. St. Basil can scarcely be fairly cited as a practical apostle of some of the chapters of the socialist evangel of the end of the nineteenth century. But ancient eulogists of the great archbishop, anxious to represent him as a good monk, have not failed to foresee that this might be urged in objection to the completeness of his renunciation of the world, in their sense, and, to counterbalance it, have cited an anecdote related by Cassian. One day a senator named Syncletius came to Basil to be admitted to his monastery, with the statement that he had renounced his property, excepting only a pittance to save him from manual labour. “You have spoilt a senator,” said Basil, “without making a monk.” Basil’s own letter represents him as practically following the example of, or setting an example to, Syncletius.

Great as was the wonder with which he viewed the solitary asceticism of Egypt and Palestine, the practical good sense of Basil revolted against a life whose end was centred in itself. His idea was to combine the ascetic life with the advantages of union and mutual aid. And he counted upon the assistance of his friend Gregory in carrying out this purpose. It was in the year 358 that Basil returned to Caesarea, resolved to live a life in which absolute superiority to all indulgence should, instead of estranging him from refined enjoyment and the interests of his fellow men, aid him in the pursuit of both. In this design Gregory was pledged from the time of their college days to accompany him. But Gregory’s father, the bishop of Nazianzus, was old, and his son unwilling to leave him. Basil appears, therefore, for a short time to have followed his friend to Nazianzus; but he soon abandoned this place for Annesi, the home of his childhood, hard by the place where his mother and sister were residing. What the method of his existence at Annesi was we learn from the pressing letters in which he urges Gregory to share his retreat.

Stimulated to carry out his purpose of embracing the ascetic life by what he saw of the monks and solitaries during his travels, Basil first of all thought of establishing a monastery in the district of Tiberina. Here he would have been in the near neighbourhood of Arianzus, the home of his friend Gregory. But the attractions of Tiberina were ultimately postponed to those of Ibora, and Basil’s place of retreat was fixed in the glen not far from the old home, and only separated from Annesi by the Iris, of which we have Basil’s own picturesque description. Gregory declined to do more than pay a visit to Pontus, and so is said to have caused Basil much disappointment. It is a little characteristic of the imperious nature of the man of stronger will, that while he would not give up the society of his own mother and sister in order to be near his friend, he complained of his friend’s not making a similar sacrifice in order to be near him. Gregory good-humouredly replies to Basil’s depreciation of Tiberina by a counter attack on Caesarea and Annesi.

At the Pontic retreat Basil now began that system of hard ascetic discipline which eventually contributed to the enfeeblement of his health and the shortening of his life. He complains again and again in his letters of the deplorable physical condition to which he is reduced, and he died at the age of fifty. It is a question whether a constitution better capable of sustaining the fatigue of long journeys, and a life prolonged beyond the Council of Constantinople, would or would not have left a larger mark upon the history of the Church. There can be no doubt, that in Basil’s personal conflict with the decadent empire represented by Valens, his own cause was strengthened by his obvious superiority to the hopes and fears of vulgar ambitions. He ate no more than was actually necessary for daily sustenance, and his fare was of the poorest. Even when he was archbishop, no flesh meat was dressed in his kitchens. His wardrobe consisted of one under and one  over garment. By night he wore haircloth; not by day, lest he should seem ostentatious. He treated his body, says his brother, with a possible reference to St. Paul, as an angry owner treats a runaway slave. A consistent celibate, he was yet almost morbidly conscious of his unchastity, mindful of the Lord’s words as to the adultery of the impure thought. St. Basil relates in strong terms his admiration for the ascetic character of Eustathius of Sebaste, and at this time was closely associated with him. Indeed, Eustathius was probably the first to introduce the monastic system into Pontus, his part in the work being comparatively ignored in later days when his tergiversation had brought him into disrepute. Thus the credit of introducing monasticism into Asia Minor was given to Basil alone. A novel feature of this monasticism was the Coenobium, for hitherto ascetics had lived in absolute solitude, or in groups of only two or three. Thus it was partly relieved from the discredit of selfish isolation and unprofitable idleness.

The idea of their author is not to purchase heaven by the renunciation of all earthly delights; on the contrary, the picture which they present is designedly inviting to a man willing to mortify the sensual desires. There was indeed but one meal in the day and little sleep; manual labour, the reading of Holy Scripture, prayer, conversation, and psalmody, which imitated on earth the concert of the angels, divided the day. But the description of the natural beauties of the place which Basil lays before his friend has ever been counted one of the most charming specimens of his eloquence. Gregory was prevailed upon to come, but found the life by no means equal to the description, and very little to his taste. Never, he declares, will he forget the soup and the bread, which his poor teeth had much ado to pierce, and out of which they had to drag themselves upwards as if getting out of the mud. If Basil’s good mother had not taken pity on his hard case, he would no longer be in the land of the living. And how can he omit to mention those gardens, unworthy of the name, which grew no vegetables, and for manuring which they had to cast out of the house filth enough to have filled the Augean stable, or that wagon which the two accomplished university men used together to draw when they were levelling a hill,—exertions which had left upon Gregory’s poor hands marks which they still bear? But this is not to be taken too seriously. Gregory’s succeeding letter expresses an eager longing to return to a life of such spiritual benefit.

The joint studies of Basil and Gregory were devoted to the sacred Scriptures, and it was at this period that they compiled the selection from the works of Origen which they called Philocalia. Origen was the most suggestive writer upon Bible subjects then accessible, certainly not the author who would have been chosen if the friends had been losing their intellectual vigour or spirit of free inquiry in a dull asceticism. But neither study nor prayer hindered Basil from evangelic labours. We learn from Gregory Nyssen that so many disciples congregated around him as to give his retreat the appearance of a town. And from thence he issued to conduct missions in Pontus and Cappadocia, rousing the indolent souls of a people little occupied with future hopes. He softened hard hearts, and brought many to repent­ance. He taught them to renounce the world, to form communities and build monasteries, to devote themselves to psalmody and preaching, to provide for the poor, constructing asylums for their accommodation, to take care of them when there, and to establish convents of women. Thus he uplifted the ideal of the spiritual life through all the province. In a word, Basil commenced, during his retreat at Annesi the many-sided work of religion and philan­thropy, which he carried on as bishop to the last day of his life.

The example set by Basil and his companions spread. Companies of hard-working ascetics of both sexes were established in every part of Pontus, every one of them an active centre for the preaching of the Nicene doctrines, and their defence against Arian opposition and misconstruction. Probably about this time, in conjunction with his friend Gregory, Basil compiled the collection of the beauties of Origen which was entitled Philocalia. Origen’s authority stood high, and both of the main divisions of Christian thought, the Nicene and the Arian, endeavoured to support their respective views from his writings. Basil and Gregory were successful in vindicating his orthodoxy and using his aid in strengthening the Catholic position

An episode in Basil’s life, in which there was nothing to look back on with satisfaction, and which his enemies even made a reproach to him in after­days, was his visit to Constantinople with Basil of Ancyra, and Eustathius of Sebaste, to communicate the conclusions of the Council of Seleucia. In a council which followed at Constantinople in the succeeding year, 360, the worldly Acacius succeeded in carrying everything for the cunningly veiled form of Semi-Arianism, which he favoured at the time. Basil was afterwards accused by Eunomius of cowardice in failing to oppose these disastrous con­clusions; but his subordinate position probably deprived him of all power. And he retired from Constantinople when the heretical creed of Ariminum was presented by Constantius for signature. He proceeded to Caesarea, but the Arian emissaries followed thither; and to his intense grief his bishop, Dianius, was induced to sign the formula. Basil had done his best to preserve the old man, for whom he entertained the sincerest affection, from this step, too much in harmony with the weak facility which had always accompanied his gentleness. And when the deed was done, Basil retired from Caesarea to avoid the painful step of making public that inability to communicate with the bishop, to which the interests of truth constrained him. But he afterwards disclaimed with great energy the charge of having anathematized the old man, who had but fallen into a snare, in which well-nigh all the bishops of the East, including the elder Gregory of Nazianzum, were caught. And when, two years afterwards, amidst the troubles of Julian’s heathen reaction, Dianius felt his end approaching, he recalled to his side the man upon whom his spirit leant for guidance, and died in Basil’s arms, declaring with his last breath that he had acted in the simplicity of his heart, and never meant to cast doubt upon the creed of Nicaea, with whose authors he desired to dwell in heaven. Such were the difficulties which in those evil times overcame all but the clearest and the most steadfast minds.

 

IV. 

Basil and the Councils, to the Accession of Valens.

 

Up to this time St. Basil is not seen to have publicly taken an active part in the personal theological discussions of the age; but the ecclesiastical world was eagerly disputing while he was working in Pontus. Aetius, the uncompromising Arian, was openly favoured by Eudoxius of Germanicia, who had appropriated the see of Antioch in 357. This provoked the Semiarians to hold their council at Ancyra in 358, when the Sirmian “Blasphemy” of 357 was condemned. The Acacians were alarmed and manoeuvred for the division of the general council which Constantius was desirous of summoning. Then came Ariminum, Nike, and Seleucia, in 359, and “the world groaned to find itself Arian.” Deputations from each of the great parties were sent to a council held under the personal presidency of Constantius at Constantinople, and to one of these the young deacon was attached. The date of the ordination to this grade is unknown. On the authority of Gregory of Nyssa and Philostorgius, it appears that Basil accompanied his namesake of Ancyra and Eustathius of Sebaste to the court, and supported Basil the bishop. Philostorgius would indeed represent the younger Basil as championing the Semiarian cause, though with some cowardice. It may be concluded, with Maran, that he probably stood forward stoutly for the truth, not only at the capital itself, but also in the neighbouring cities of Chalcedon and Heraclea. But his official position was a humble one, and his part in the discussions and amid the intrigues of the council was only too likely to be misrepresented by those with whom he did not agree, and even misunderstood by his own friends. In 360 Dianius signed the creed of Ariminum, brought to Caesarea by George of Laodicea; and thereby Basil was so much distressed as henceforward to shun communion with his bishop. He left Caesarea and betook himself to Nazianzus to seek consolation in the society of his friend. But his feelings towards Dianius were always affectionate, and he indignantly repudiated a calumnious assertion that he had gone so far as to anathematize him. Two years later Dianius fell sick unto death and sent for Basil, protesting that at heart he had always been true to the Catholic creed. Basil acceded to the appeal, and in 362 once again communicated with his bishop and old friend.16 In the interval between the visit to Constantinople and this death-bed reconciliation, that form of error arose which was long known by the name of Macedonianism, and which St. Basil was in later years to combat with such signal success in the treatise Of the Spirit. It combined disloyalty to the Spirit and to the Son. But countervailing events were the acceptance of the Homoousion by the Council of Paris,1and the publication of Athanasius’ letters to Serapion on the divinity of the two Persons assailed. To this period is referred the compilation by Basil of the Moralia.

The death of Dianius occurred at a critical time. Julian was approaching; and the faithful of Caesarea were greatly divided in their choice of a successor to the archbishopric. At the prompting of friendship, or from motives of piety, some proposed one candidate, some another. The election was finally carried by a popular impulse by no means without example in those days. Eusebius, one of the chief civil officials of the town, a man of high character but as yet unbaptized, was seized by the crowd, with the assistance of the soldiers, and hurried in spite of his own resistance to the bishops to be baptized and proclaimed elect. The bishops were forced to yield. But on the retirement of the crowd, they desired to annul the election on the ground of violence. From this they were deterred by Gregory of Nazianzus the elder, who reminded them that in throwing doubt upon the election they were convicting themselves of cowardice.

Thus the choice of Eusebius stood; but this forcible transfer to the Church’s service of a valuable civil official added to the irritation which Julian already felt toward Caesarea for a tumult which had occurred there, and in which a temple of Fortune had been destroyed. The governor demanded of the bishops, under threat of the Emperor’s wrath, the recall of the election. But Gregory answered firmly for his brethren that this was not one of the questions in which they could in conscience permit the civil power to interfere.

Basil was at Caesarea during these transactions, and there is reason to believe that the course which things took may have been due to his influence. His birth and literary fame, increased at this time by the publication of his work against Eunomius, pointed him out as a leader, and himself a very probable selection for the vacant throne; and the monks were a compact and influential army of supporters to him. Thus it seems very likely that the choice of Eusebius was suggested by him. And, indeed, the decision with which the aged Gregory behaved was not much in harmony with his character and makes it probable that he was prompted by a stronger will. Basil was incapable, it is true, of planning to set up a puppet for any selfish ends. But he had a nature capable of ruling, and the desire for rule which accompanies the capacity; and it is by no means impossible that he may have expected to be able to wield for the excellent ends which he had in view the authority of a bishop who, having no ecclesiastical experience, must be guided by someone.

And at first it seemed that such was to be the event. Early in his episcopate, Eusebius ordained Basil to the priesthood. There was at that time a fashion, doubtless a reaction of the higher minds against the eager and hasty ordinations which were so common, but sometimes partaking of affectation, to accept orders only upon compulsion. Such had been the case in Eusebius’s own consecration. Gregory of Nazianzus had shortly before been ordained a priest in the same way, and now Basil was made a presbyter by force, and his whole time became so occupied with preaching and with business as to leave him no leisure even to write to his friends. It is not surprising that the bishop should have become jealous. He was a good man and a brave one, but by no means accustomed to see himself eclipsed. And his behaviour to Basil became exceedingly offensive. Whether a taint of pride in the presbyter may have had its share in producing the misunderstanding we know not, but his conduct when it had arisen was admirable. Many circumstances combined to render it perfectly easy for him to have made a schism. The party of Eusebius was discredited on account of his tumultuous election; the character of Basil was enthusiastically reverenced, and the more pious party of the city was on his side; and lastly, there were present at the time some Western bishops perfectly ready to consecrate him at a sign. Many a man would have yielded to the temptation, for indeed the election of Eusebius was not above just suspicion. But Basil resisted, and withdrew at the advice of Gregory to the Pontic retreat, whither his friend accompanied him; and the succeeding period was spent in study and in the rule and direction of the great monastic and mis­sion work already on foot.

A part of the care of the two friends was devoted to the composition of works against Julian, whose Hellenic reaction took place at this period. That prince, on coming to the throne, had proceeded to set on foot the restoration of heathenism, on which his mind had been set ever since his Athenian days, and he fixed his eye upon his Cappadocian college friends as fit instruments in such a work. They certainly were richly equipped by knowledge of both heathen and Christian literature, for the part of learned foes to the faith, had conviction not stood in the way, just as we might easily imagine Julian himself, had not the mistakes of an education conducted by unworthy Christians prejudiced him against the faith, taking his proper place by the side of his old acquaintances in the great cause of culture with self-denial. The fact of Julian’s advances to Basil and his friend we know from the writings of Gregory against him. But of the correspondence between Julian and Basil, contained among the letters of the latter, all is doubtful, and part almost certainly spurious. And after the catastrophe of Julian, Basil observed towards his memory a dignified silence, which is certainly more attractive than the vehement and exultant reproaches heaped on it by Gregory.

The brief reign of Julian would affect Basil, in common with the whole Church, in two ways: in the relief he would feel at the comparative toleration shown to Catholics, and the consequent return of orthodox bishops to their sees; in the distress with which he would witness his old friend’s attempts to ridicule and undermine the Faith. Sorrow more personal and immediate must have been caused by the harsh treatment of Caesarea and the cruel imposts laid on Cappadocia. What conduct on the part of the Caesareans may have led Gregory of Nazianzus to speak of Julian as justly offended, we can only conjecture. It may have been the somewhat disorderly proceedings in connexion with the appointment of Eusebius to succeed Dianius. But there can be no doubt about the sufferings of Caesarea, nor of the martyrdom of Eupsychius and Damas for their part in the destruction of the Temple of Fortune.

The precise part taken by Basil in the election of Eusebius can only be conjectured. Eusebius, like Ambrose of Milan, a layman of rank and influence, was elevated per saltum to the episcopate. Efforts were made by Julian and by some Christian objectors to get the appointment annulled by means of Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus, on the ground of its having been brought about by violence. Bishop Gregory refused to take any retrogressive steps, and thought the scandal of accepting the tumultuary appointment would be less than that of cancelling the consecration. Gregory the younger presumably supported his father, and he associates Basil with him as probable sufferers from the imperial vengeance. But he was at Nazianzus at the time of the election, and Basil is more likely to have been an active agent.

To this period may be referred Basil’s receipt of the letter from Athanasius, mentioned in Letter CCIV. On the accession of Jovian, in June, 363, Athanasius wrote to him asserting the Nicene Faith, but he was greeted also by a Semiarian manifesto from Antioch, of which the first signatory was Meletius.

Valentinian and Valens, on their accession in the following year, thus found the Church still divided on its cardinal doctrines, and the lists were marked in which Basil was henceforward to be a more conspicuous combatant.

 

V.

The Presbyterate.

 

Not long after the accession of Valens, Basil was ordained presbyter by Eusebius. An earlier date has been suggested, but the year 364 is accepted as fitting in better with the words of Gregory on the free speech conceded to heretics. And from the same Letter it may be concluded that the ordination of Basil, like that of Gregory himself, was not wholly voluntary, and that he was forced against his inclinations to accept duties when he hesitated as to his liking and fitness for them. It was about this time that he wrote his Books against Eunomius; and it may possibly have been this work which specially commended him to Eusebius. However this may be, there is no doubt that he was soon actively engaged in the practical work of the diocese, and made himself very useful to Eusebius. But Basil’s very vigour and value seem to have been the cause of some alienation between him and his bishop. His friend Gregory gives us no details, but it may be inferred from what he says that he thought Basil ill-used. And allusions of Basil have been supposed to imply his own sense of discourtesy and neglect. The position became serious. Bishops who had objected to the tumultuary nomination of Eusebius, and had with difficulty been induced to maintain the lawfulness of his consecration, were ready to consecrate Basil in his place. But Basil showed at once his wisdom and his magnanimity. A division of the orthodox clergy of Cappadocia would be full of danger to the cause. He would accept no personal advancement to the damage of the Church. He retired with his friend Gregory to his Pontic monasteries, and won the battle by flying from the field. Eusebius was left unmolested, and the character of Basil was higher than ever.

The threat of a new persecution recalled Basil to Caesarea. Valens had, after the short reign of Jovian, succeeded to the throne of Constantinople. He is said to have possessed the merit of simplicity of life, and to have imposed some check on the waste of the court. But his elevation was not due to personal qualities, but to the favour of his brother Valentinian. The latter prince established religious toleration in the West; but Valens, baptized by the Arian Eudoxius, patriarch of Constantinople, fell into the hands of that party, and lent them the whole in­fluence of the empire for the advancement of their belief. His own character, in spite of the fact that he had kept his faith under Valens, was very weak. In the words of Gibbon, “he derived his virtues as well as his vices from a feeble understanding and a pusillanimous temper”; and the contemptuous excuse of the same historian, that the ecclesiastical ministers of Julian may have exceeded the orders or even the intentions of their master, is probably true. But from the second year of his reign we find him traversing the East with a band of Arian courtiers, reducing the orthodox everywhere to subjection.

Gregory gives a sombre picture of the consternation which this invasion of heretics diffused. It was a hailstorm roaring frightfully and crushing all the churches upon which it fell; an emperor loving gold and hating Christ; who arose after the apostate Julian, not indeed himself an apostate, but none the kinder for that reason to the orthodox, who declined “to weigh duty as in a balance, and to separate the one and indivisible nature in itself, and to cure the impious restrictions of Sabellius by a more impious diffusion and dismemberment.” Eusebius felt himself unequal to the encounter, and invited to his aid Gregory of Nazianzus, the only ecclesiastic whom he thought able to supply the place of the man whom he had driven from his side. But Gregory, as might be anticipated, was entirely indisposed to accept advances at the expense of his friend. “To honour me,” he said, “while you insult him, is to caress me with one hand and strike me with the other. Believe me, if you treat him as he merits, the credit will return to yourself, and I shall come after him as the shadow after the body.” At first the bishop was offended by this frankness; but at last he softened, and an inter­view with Gregory took place, which formed the basis of a successful mediation on the part of the latter. Basil, he informs us, was very easily prevailed upon. He admitted at once that the time was not one for maintaining a private grudge and returned to Caesarea. Probably both Eusebius and he had derived valuable lessons from what had occurred: the former had seen his own need of support, and the latter had learnt prudence in the exercise of his influence. Certain it is that from this time forward the whole rule of the diocese fell into the hands of the presbyter, without any further symptom of jealousy in the bishop. Basil was his counsellor upon all occasions but made it his first care to honour the prelate before his flock. If there was any instinct of a courtier in this, it was exercised for ends that were perfectly pure and true.

During the years that Basil exercised authority under the name of Eusebius he effected a vast amount of good. To preaching and the charge of a parish were added a multitude of other cares: the maintenance of the rights of the Church against the civil magistrates; the reconciliation of differences; the succour of those who were in need, always with spiritual aids, often also with temporal; the support of the poor; the entertainment of strangers ; the care of virgins; monastic rules, delivered by writing or by word of mouth; arrangement of the prayers p decoration of the sanctuary. Finally, when, in 370, a terrible famine occurred, especially severe in Cappadocia on account of its distance from the sea, Basil crowned his services by preserving the lives of a great number of people. He devoted to this purpose the whole remains of his property, long since, indeed, unused for his personal wants, but subject still to his control, and the gifts which, by the most fervid appeals, he was able to extract from the rich.

In the same year. 370, Eusebius died, and Basil received his last breath, as he had that of his predecessor. It will be readily conceived that Basil was pointed out for successor by the voice of the best people in the town, of the clergy and monks; but the opposition was very strong, including, as it did, the bishops of the province, the civil magistrates, the rich, who revolted against his unceasing claims of charity, and the loose livers of the place. According to the canons, the bishops of the province were to assemble on the vacancy of a see and appoint a successor by the suffrages of the clergy and people. But in point of fact their hands were constantly forced by the influence of the rich and the tumultuous cries of the populace. Thus a severe contest was to be faced; and Basil was convinced, probably with perfect correctness, that the cause of genuine religion depended upon his election. It was natural that he should desire the assistance of his friend; but he knew the fastidious temper of Gregory, and took the doubtful step of feigning sickness as the ground for the summons. His state of health was, indeed, never so strong as to deprive such a statement of some colour; but the pretence failed of its effect, for Gregory met the bishops assembling, and, guessing the condition of things, returned hastily to Nazianzus, whence he wrote to reproach Basil and to advise retirement from the city during the election. But the bishop, his father, took a more practical view of the necessities of the case. And at his prompting, his son, though still unwilling to repair to Caesarea himself, wrote to that church in favour of his friend, and (a still more effectual measure) sent for Eusebius of Samosata, the most eminent bishop of the country. Eusebius, in spite of the wintry season, made haste to the scene of action, where his weight decided in favour of Basil all parties except the bishops. The bishops tried every device to escape; they wrote to Bishop Gregory suggesting that he need not trouble himself to come. They maintained that while Basil’s claims to elevation could not be denied, his health was unequal to the duties of the episcopate. And finally, when they were obliged to yield, only two of them were found willing to join in the consecration. Now the canons required three. But if, as seems to have been the case, it was hoped in this way to nullify the election, the plan was disappointed. For the aged Gregory of Nazianzus, though scarce able to stand, had himself lifted from his bed and carried in a litter to Caesarea, where he presided over the election and consecration of the new bishop, and returned home restored, as his son informs us, to the strength of youth by the good work in which he had been engaged. The election was heard of at the court of Constantinople as a severe check; but the orthodox churches everywhere received the news with exultation, and Athanasius of Alexandria made it matter of special thanksgiving to God that a bishop should have been given to Cappadocia such as every province might wish for itself.

The seclusion of Basil in Pontus seemed to afford an opportunity to his opponents in Cappadocia, and according to Sozomen, Valens himself, in 365, was moved to threaten Caesarea with a visit by the thought that the Catholics of Cappadocia were now deprived of the aid of their strongest champion. Eusebius would have invoked Gregory, and left Basil alone. Gregory, however, refused to act without his friend, and, with much tact and good feeling, succeeded in atoning the two offended parties. Eusebius at first resented Gregory’s earnest advocacy of his absent friend, and was inclined to resent what seemed the somewhat impertinent interference of a junior. But Gregory happily appealed to the archbishop’s sense of justice and superiority to the common unwillingness of high dignitaries to accept counsel, and assured him that in all that he had written on the subject he had meant to avoid all possible offence, and to keep within the bounds of spiritual and philosophic discipline. Basil returned to the metropolitan city, ready to cooperate loyally with Eusebius, and to employ all his eloquence and learning against the proposed Arian aggression. To the grateful Catholics it seemed as though the mere knowledge that Basil was in Caesarea was enough to turn Valens with his bishops to flight, and the tidings, brought by a furious rider, of the revolt of Procopius,’ seemed a comparatively insignificant motive for the emperor’s departure.

There was now a lull in the storm. Basil, completely reconciled to Eusebius, began to consolidate the archiepiscopal power which he afterward wielded as his own, over the various provinces in which the metropolitan of Caesarea exercised exarchic authority. In the meantime the Semiarians were beginning to share with the Catholics the hardships inflicted by the imperial power. At Lampsacus in 364 they had condemned the results of Ariminum and Constantinople, and had reasserted the Antiochene Dedication Creed of 341. In 366 they sent deputies to Liberius at Rome, who proved their orthodoxy by subscribing the Nicene Creed. Basil had not been present at Lampsacus, but he had met Eustathius and other bishops on their way thither, and had no doubt influenced the decisions of the synod. Now the deputation to the West consisted of three of those bishops with whom he was in communication, Eustathius of Sebasteia, Silvanus of Tarsus, and Theophilus of Castabala. To the first it was an opportunity for regaining a position among the orthodox prelates. It can hardly have been without the persuasion of Basil that the deputation went so far as they did in accepting the homoousion, but it is a little singular, and indicative of the comparatively slow awakening of the Church in general to the perils of the degradation of the Holy Ghost, that no profession of faith was demanded from the Lampsacene delegates on this subject. In 367 the council of Tyana accepted the restitution of the Semiarian bishops, and so far peace had been promoted. To this period may very probably be referred the compilation of the Liturgy which formed the basis of that which bears Basil’s name. The claims of theology and of ecclesiastical administration in Basil’s time did not, however, prevent him from devoting much of his vast energy to works of charity. Probably the great hospital for the housing and relief of travellers and the poor, which he established in the suburbs of Caesarea, was planned, if not begun, in the latter years of his presbyterate, for its size and importance were made pretexts for denouncing him to Elias, the governor of Cappadocia, in 372, and at the same period Valens contributed to its endowment. It was so extensive as to go by the name of Newtown, and was in later years known as the “Basileiad.” It was the mother of other similar institutions in the country-districts of the province, each under a Chorepiscopus. But whether the Ptochotrophium was or was not actually begun before Basil’s episcopate, great demands were made on his sympathy and energy by the great drought and consequent famine which befell Caesarea in 368. He describes it with eloquence in his Homily On the Famine and Drought. The distress was cruel and widespread. The distance of Caesarea from the coast increased the difficulty of supplying provisions. Speculators, scratching, as it were, in their country’s wounds, hoarded grain in the hope of selling at famine prices. These Basil moved to open their stores. He distributed lavishly at his own expense, and ministered in person to the wants of the sufferers. Gregory of Nazianzus gives us a picture of his illustrious friend standing in the midst of a great crowd of men and women and children, some scarcely able to breathe; of servants bringing in piles of such food as is best suited to the weak state of the famishing sufferers; of Basil with his own hands distributing nourishment, and with his own voice cheering and encouraging the sufferers.

About this time Basil suffered a great loss in the death of his mother, and sought solace in a visit to his friend Eusebius at Samosata.11 But the cheering effect of his journey was lessened by the news, which greeted him on his return, that the Arians had succeeded in placing one of their number in the see of Tarsus. The loss of Silvanus was ere long followed by a death of yet graver moment to the Church. In the middle of 370 died Eusebius, breathing his last in the arms of Basil.

 

VI.

Basil as Archbishop.

 

The archiepiscopal throne was now technically vacant. But the man who had practically filled it, “the keeper and tamer of the lion,” was still alive in the plenitude of his power. What course was he to follow? Was he meekly to withdraw, and perhaps be compelled to support the candidature of another and an inferior? The indirect evidence has seemed to some strong enough to compel the conclusion that he determined, if possible, to secure his election to the see. Others, on the contrary, have thought him incapable of scheming for the nomination. The truth probably lies between the two extreme views. No intelligent onlooker of the position at Caesarea on the death of Eusebius, least of all the highly capable administrator of the province, could be blind to the fact that of all possible competitors for the vacant throne Basil himself was the ablest and most distinguished, and the likeliest to be capable of directing the course of events in the interests of orthodoxy. But it does not follow that Basil’s appeal to Gregory to come to him was a deliberate step to secure this end. He craved for the support and counsel of his friend; but no one could have known better that Gregory the younger was not the man to take prompt action or rule events. His invention of a fatal sickness, or exaggeration of a slight one, failed to secure even Gregory’s presence at Caesarea. Gregory burst into tears on receipt of the news of his friend’s grave illness, and hastened to obey the summons to his side. But on the road he fell in with bishops hurrying to Caesarea for the election of a successor to Eusebius, and detected the unreality of Basil’s plea. He at once returned to Nazianzus and wrote the oft-quoted letter, on the interpretation given to which depends the estimate formed of Basil’s action at the important crisis. 

Basil may or may not have taken Gregory’s advice not to put himself forward. But Gregory and his father, the bishop, from this time strained every nerve to secure the election of Basil. It was felt that the cause of true religion was at stake. “The Holy Spirit must win.” Opposition had to be encountered from bishops who were in open or secret sympathy with Basil’s theological opponents, from men of wealth and position with whom Basil was unpopular on account of his practice and preaching of stern self-denial, and from all the lewd fellows of the baser sort in Caesarea Letters were written in the name of Gregory the bishop with an eloquence and literary skill which have led them to be generally regarded as the composition of Gregory the younger. To the people of Caesarea Basil was represented as a man of saintly life and of unique capacity to stem the surging tide of heresy. To the bishops of the province who had asked him to come to Caesarea without saying why, in the hope perhaps that so strong a friend of Basil’s might be kept away from the election without being afterwards able to contest it on the ground that he had had no summons to attend, he expresses an earnest hope that their choice is not a factious and foregone conclusion, and, anticipating possible objections on the score of Basil’s weak health, reminds them that they have to elect not a gladiator, but a primate. To Eusebius of Samosata he sends the letter included among those of Basil in which he urges him to cooperate in securing the appointment of a worthy man. Despite his age and physical infirmity, he was laid in his litter, as his son lays like a corpse in a grave, and borne to Caesarea to rise there with fresh vigour and carry the election by his vote. All resistance was overborne, and Basil was seated on the throne of the great exarchate.

The position in which Basil was placed by this election was magnificent if the reality of power had accompanied the name. He was Archbishop of Caesarea, Metropolitan of Cappadocia, and Exarch of the diocese of Pontus. In the latter character his jurisdiction extended over half Asia Minor, but the authority was very indefinite. The exarchate was weakened by the institution of metropolitans, and was on the way to be absorbed in the patriarchate of Constantinople. His position as archbishop and metropolitan of Cappadocia was scarcely more satisfactory. For the suffragans who had refused to take part in his election continued their insubordination; and, wonderful to say, an uncle of Basil was among the malcontents. The difference was aggravated by a silly attempt at reconciliation devised by Gregory (Nyssen) Basil’s younger brother. He was a very loyal soul, but not very wise; a com­parison of his panegyric on his great brother with that of Gregory Nazianzen suffices to show alike his affection and his poverty of mind. And upon this occasion he conceived the notable plan of writing a letter to Basil in the name of his uncle; the well-intended forgery was of course at once discovered. But in about a year the breach was closed by a kindly and sub­missive letter from Basil himself to his uncle, little consistent with the pride which is attributed to him. And it was followed by a reconciliation on the part of the other bishops, both with Basil and the elder Gregory, who had taken so vigorous a part in the election. There is reason, however, to think that this submission of the bishops was merely a measure to which they were driven by the public opinion of the religious people and the monks among their flocks, and implied very little cordial co-operation.

The success of the Catholics roused, as was inevitable, various feelings. Athanasius wrote from Alexandria to congratulate Cappadocia on her privilege in being ruled by so illustrious a primate. Valens prepared to carry out the measures against the Catholic province, which had been interrupted by the revolt of Procopius. The bishops of the province who had been narrowly outvoted, and who had refused to take part in the consecration, abandoned communion with the new primate. But even more distressing to the new archbishop than the disaffection of his suffragans was the refusal of his friend Gregory to come in person to support him on his throne. Gregory pleaded that it was better for Basil’s own sake that there should be no suspicion of favour to personal friends, and begged to be excused for staying at Nazianzus. Basil complained that his wishes and interests were disregarded, and was hurt at Gregory’s refusing to accept high responsibilities, possibly the coadjutor-bishopric, at Caesarea. A yet further cause of sorrow and annoyance was the blundering attempt of Gregory of Nyssa to effect a reconciliation between his uncle Gregory, who was in sympathy with the disaffected bishops, and his brother. He even went so far as to send more than one forged letter in their uncle’s name. The clumsy counterfeit was naturally found out, and the widened breach not bridged without difficulty. The episcopate thus began with troubles, both public and personal. Basil confidently confronted them. His magnanimity and capacity secured the adhesion of his immediate neighbours and subordinates, and soon his energies took a wider range. He directed the theological campaign all over the East, and was ready alike to meet opponents in hand to hand encounter, and to aim the arrows of his epistolary eloquence far and wide. He invokes the illustrious pope of Alexandria to join him in winning the support of the West for the orthodox cause. He is keenly interested in the unfortunate controversy which distracted the Church of Antioch. He makes an earnest appeal to Damasus for the wonted sympathy of the Church at Rome. At the same time his industry in his see was indefatigable. He is keen to secure the purity of ordination and the fitness of candidates. Crowds of working people come to hear him preach before they, go to their work for the day. He travels distances which would be thought noticeable even in our modern days of idolatry of the great goddess Locomotion. He manages vast institutions eleemosynary and collegiate. His correspond­ence is constant and complicated. He seems the personification of the active, rather than of the literary and scholarly, bishop. Yet all the while he is writing tracts and treatises which are monuments of industrious composition, and indicative of a memory stored with various learning, and of the daily and effective study of Holy Scripture.

Nevertheless, while thus actively engaged in fighting the battle of the faith, and in the conscientious discharge of his high duties, he was not to escape an unjust charge of pusillanimity, if not of questionable orthodoxy, from men who might have known him better. On September 7th, probably in 371, was held the festival of St. Eupsychius. Basil preached the sermon. Among the hearers were many detractors. A few days after the festival there was a dinner-party at Nazianzus, at which Gregory was present, with several persons of distinction, friends of Basil. Of the party was a certain unnamed guest, of religious dress and reputation, who claimed a character for philosophy, and said some very hard things against Basil. He had heard the archbishop at the festival preach admirably on the Father and the Son, but the Spirit, he alleged, Basil defamed. While Gregory boldly called the Spirit God, Basil, from poor motives, refrained from any clear and distinct enunciation of the divinity of the Third Person. The unfavourable view of Basil was the popular one at the dinner-table, and Gregory was annoyed at not being able to convince the party that, while his own utterances were of comparatively little importance, Basil had to weigh every word, and to avoid, if possible, the banishment which was hanging over his head. It was better to use a wise “economy”  in preaching the truth than so to proclaim it as to ensure the extinction of the light of true religion. Basil showed some natural distress and astonishment on hearing that attacks against him were readily received.

It was at the close of this same year 371 that Basil and his diocese suffered most severely from the hostility of the imperial government. Valens had never lost his antipathy to Cappadocia. In 370 he determined on dividing it into two provinces. Podandus, a poor little town at the foot of Mt. Taurus, was to be the chief seat of the new province, and thither half the executive was to be transferred. Basil depicts in lively terms the dismay and dejection of Caesarea. He even thought of proceeding in person to the court to plead the cause of his people, and his conduct is in itself a censure of those who would confine the sympathies of ecclesiastics within rigidly clerical limits. The division was insisted on. But, eventually, Tyana was substituted for Podandus as the new capital; and it has been conjectured that possibly the act of kindness of the prefect mentioned in Ep. LXXVIII may have been this transfer, due to the intervention of Basil and his influential friends.

But the imperial Arian was not content with this administrative mutilation. At the close of the year 371, flushed with successes against the barbarians, fresh from the baptism of Eudoxius, and eager to impose his creed on his subjects, Valens was travelling leisurely towards Syria. He is said to have shrunk from an encounter with the famous primate of Caesarea, for he feared lest one strong man’s firmness might lead others to resist. Before him went Modestus, Prefect of the Praetorium, the minister of his severities, and before Modestus, like the skirmishers in front of an advancing army, had come a troop of Arian bishops, with Euippius, in all probability, at their head. Modestus found on his arrival that Basil was making a firm stand, and summoned the archbishop to his presence with the hope of overawing him. He met with a dignity, if not with a pride, which was more than a match for his own. Modestus claimed submission in the name of the emperor, Basil refused it in the name of God. Modestus threatened impoverishment, exile, torture, death. Basil retorted that none of these threats frightened him: he had nothing to be confiscated except a few rags and a few books; banishment could not send him beyond the lands of God; torture had no terrors for a body already dead; death could only come as a friend to hasten his last journey home. Modestus exclaimed in amazement that he had never been so spoken to before. “Perhaps,” replied Basil, “you never met a bishop before.” The prefect hastened to his master, and reported that ordinary means of intimidation appeared unlikely to move this undaunted prelate. The archbishop must be owned victorious, or crushed by more brutal violence. But Valens, like all weak natures, oscillated between compulsion and compliance. He so far abated his pretensions to force heresy on Cappadocia, as to consent to attend the services at the Church on the Festival of the Epiphany. The Church was crowded. A mighty chant thundered over the sea of heads. At the end of the basilica, facing the multitude, stood Basil, statue-like, erect as Samuel among the prophets at Naioth, and quite indifferent to the interruption of the imperial approach. The whole scene seemed rather of heaven than of earth, and the orderly enthusiasm of the worship to be rather of angels than of men. Valens half fainted, and staggered as he advanced to make his offering at God’s Table. On the following day Basil admitted him within the curtain of the sanctuary, and conversed with him at length on sacred subjects.

The surroundings and the personal appearance of the interlocutors were significant. The apse of the basilica was as a holy of holies secluded from the hum and turmoil of the vast city. It was typical of what the Church was to the world. The health and strength of the Church were personified in Basil. He was now in the ripe prime of life, but bore marks of premature age. Upright in carriage, of commanding stature, thin, with brown hair and eyes, and long beard, slightly bald, with bent brow, high cheek bones, and smooth skin, he would shew in every tone and gesture at once his high birth and breeding, the supreme culture that comes of intercourse with the noblest of books and of men, and the dignity of a mind made up and of a heart of single purpose. The sovereign presented a marked contrast to the prelate. Valens was of swarthy complexion, and by those who approached him nearly it was seen that one eye was defective. He was strongly built, and of middle height, but his person was obese, and his legs were crooked. He was hesitating and unready in speech and action. It is on the occasion of this interview that Theodoret places the incident of Basil’s humorous retort to Demosthenes, the chief of the imperial kitchen, the Nebuzaradan, as the Gregories style him, of the petty fourth century Nebuchadnezzar. This Demosthenes had already threatened the archbishop with the knife, and been bidden to go back to his fire. Now he ventured to join in the imperial conversation, and made some blunder in Greek. “An illiterate Demosthenes!” exclaimed Basil; “better leave theology alone, and go back to your soups.” The emperor was amused at the discomfiture of his satellite, and for a while seemed inclined to be friendly. He gave Basil lands, possibly part of the neighbouring estate of Macellum, to endow his hospital.

But the reconciliation between the sovereign and the primate was only on the surface. Basil would not admit the Arians to communion, and Valens could not brook the refusal. The decree of exile was to be enforced, though the very pens had refused to form the letters of the imperial signature. Valens, however, was in distress at the dangerous illness of Galates, his infant son, and, on the very night of the threatened expatriation, summoned Basil to pray over him. A brief rally was followed by relapse and death, which were afterwards thought to have been caused by the young prince’s Arian baptism. Rudeness was from time to time shown to the archbishop by discourteous and unsympathetic magistrates, as in the case of the Pontic Vicar, who tried to force an unwelcome marriage on a noble widow. The lady took refuge at the altar, and appealed to Basil for protection. The magistrate descended to contemptible insinuation, and subjected the archbishop to gross rudeness. His ragged upper garment was dragged from his shoulder, and his emaciated frame was threatened with torture. He remarked that to remove his liver would relieve him of a great inconvenience.

Nevertheless, so far as the civil power was concerned, Basil, after the famous visit of Valens, was left at peace. He had triumphed. Was it a triumph for the nobler principles of the Gospel? Had he exhibited a pride and an irritation unworthy of the Christian name? Jerome, in a passage of doubtful genuineness and application, is reported to have regarded his good qualities as marred by the one bane of pride, a “leaven” of which sin is admitted by Milman to have been exhibited by Basil, as well as uncompromising firmness. The temper of Basil in the encounter with Valens would probably have been somewhat differently regarded had it not been for the reputation of a hard and overbearing spirit which he has won from his part in transactions to be shortly touched on. His attitude before Valens seems to have been dignified without personal haughtiness, and to have shown sparks of that quiet humour which is rarely exhibited in great emergencies except by men who are conscious of right and careless of consequences to self.

 

VII.

The Breach with Gregory of Nazianzus.

 

Cappadocia, it has been seen, had been divided into two provinces, and of one of these Tyana had been constituted the chief town. Anthimus, bishop of Tyana, now contended that an ecclesiastical partition should follow the civil, and that Tyana should enjoy parallel metropolitan privileges to those of Caesarea. To this claim Basil determined to offer an uncompromising resistance, and summoned Gregory of Nazianzus to his side. Gregory replied in friendly and complimentary terms, and pointed out that Basil’s friendship for Eustathius of Sebaste was a cause of suspicion in the Church. At the same time he placed himself at the archbishop’s disposal. The friends started together with a train of slaves and mules to collect the produce of the monastery of St. Orestes, in Cappadocia Secunda, which was the property of the see of Caesarea. Anthimus blocked the defiles with his retainers, and in the vicinity of Sasima there was an unseemly struggle between the domestics of the two prelates. The friends proceeded to Nazianzus, and there, with imperious inconsiderateness, Basil insisted upon nominating Gregory to one of the bishoprics which he was founding in order to strengthen his position against Anthimus. For Gregory, the brother, Nyssa was selected, a town on the Halys, about a hundred miles distant from Caesarea, so obscure that Eusebius of Samosata remonstrated with Basil on the unreasonableness of forcing such a man to undertake the episcopate of such a place. For Gregory, the friend, a similar fate was ordered. The spot chosen was Sasima, a townlet commanding the scene of the recent fray. It was an insignificant place at the bifurcation of the road leading northwards from Tyana to Doara and diverging westward to Nazianzus. Gregory speaks of it with contempt, and almost with disgust, and never seems to have forgiven his old friend for forcing him to accept the responsibility of the episcopate, and in such a place. Gregory resigned the distasteful post, and with very bitter feelings, the utmost that can be said for Basil is that just possibly he was consulting for the interest of the Church, and meaning to honour his friend, by placing Gregory in an outpost of peril and difficulty, in the kingdom of heaven the place of trial is the place of trust. But, unfortunately for the reputation of the archbishop, the war in this case was hardly the Holy War of truth against error, and of right against wrong. It was a rivalry between official and official, and it seemed hard to sacrifice Gregory to a dispute between the claims of the metropolitans of Tyana and Caesarea.

Gregory the elder joined in persuading his son. Basil had his way. He won a convenient suffragan for the moment. But he lost his friend. The sore was never healed, and even in the great funeral oration in which Basil’s virtues and abilities are extolled, Gregory traces the main trouble of his chequered career to Basil’s unkindness, and owns to feeling the smart still, though the hand that inflicted the wound was cold.

With Anthimus peace was ultimately established. Basil vehemently desired it. Eusebius of Samosata again intervened. Nazianzus remained for a time subject to Caesarea, but was eventually recognised as subject to the Metropolitan of Tyana.

The relations, however, between the two metropolitans remained for some time strained. When in Armenia in 372, Basil arranged some differences between the bishops of that district, and dissipated a cloud of calumny hanging over Cyril, an Armenian bishop. He also acceded to a request on the part of the Church of Satala, that he would nominate a bishop for that see, and accordingly appointed Poemenius, a relation of his own. Later on a certain Faustus, on the strength of a recommendation from a pope with whom he was residing, applied to Basil for consecration to the see, hitherto occupied by Cyril. With this request Basil declined to comply, and required as a necessary preliminary the authorisation of the Armenian bishops, specially of Theodotus of Nicopolis. Faustus then betook himself to Anthimus, and succeeded in obtaining uncanonical consecration from him. This was naturally a serious cause of disagreement. However, by 375, a better feeling seems to have existed between the rivals. Basil is able at that date to speak of Anthimus as in complete agreement with him.

 

VIII.

St. Basil and Eustathius.

 

It was Basil’s doom to suffer through his friendships. If the fault lay with himself in the case of Gregory, the same cannot be, said of his rupture with Eustathius of Sebaste. If in this connexion fault can be laid to his charge at all, it was the fault of entering into intimacy with an unworthy man. In the earlier days of the retirement in Pontus the austerities of Eustathius outweighed in Basil’s mind any suspicions of his unorthodoxy. Basil delighted in his society, spent days and nights in sweet converse with him, and introduced him to his mother and the happy family circle at Annesi. And no doubt under the ascendency of Basil, Eustathius, always ready to be all things to all men who might be for the time in power and authority, would appear as a very orthodox ascetic. Basil likens him to the Ethiopian of immutable blackness, and the leopard who cannot change his spots. But in truth his skin at various periods showed every shade which could serve his purpose, and his spots shifted and changed colour with every change in his surroundings. He is the patristic Proteus. There must have been something singularly winning in his more than human attractiveness. But he signed almost every creed that went about for signature in his lifetime. He was consistent only in inconsistency. It was long ere Basil was driven to withdraw his confidence and regard, although his constancy to Eustathius raised in not a few, and notably in Theodotus of Nicopolis, the metropolitan of Armenia, doubts as to Basil’s soundness in the faith. When Basil was in Armenia in 373 a creed was drawn up, in consultation with Theodotus, to be offered to Eustathius for signature. It consisted of the Nicene confession, with certain additions relating to the Macedonian controversy. Eustathius signed, together with Fronto and Severus. But, when another meeting with other bishops was arranged, he violated his pledge to attend. He wrote on the subject as though it were one of only small importance. Eusebius endeavoured, but endeavoured in vain, to make peace. Eustathius renounced communion with Basil, and at last, when an open attack on the archbishop seemed the paying game, he published an old letter of Basil’s to Apollinarius, written by “layman to layman,” many years before, and either introduced, or appended, heretical expressions of Apollinarius, which were made to pass as Basil’s. In his virulent hostility he was aided, if not instigated, by Demosthenes the prefect’s vicar, probably Basil’s old opponent at Caesarea in 372. His duplicity and slanders roused Basil’s indignant denunciation. Unhappily they were not everywhere recognized as calumnies. Among the bitterest of Basil’s trials was the failure to credit him with honour and orthodoxy on the part of those  from whom he might have expected sympathy and support. An earlier instance of this is the feeling shown at the banquet at Nazianzus already referred to. In later days he was cruelly troubled by the unfriendliness of his old neighbours at Neocaesarea, and this alienation would be the more distressing inasmuch as Atarbius, the bishop of that see, appears to have been Basil’s kinsman. He was under the suspicion of Sabellian unsoundness. He slighted and slandered Basil on several apparently trivial pretexts, and on one occasion hastened from Nicopolis for fear of meeting him. He expressed objection to supposed novelties introduced into the Church of Caesarea, to the mode of psalmody practised there, and to the encouragement of ascetic life. Basil did his utmost to win back the Neocaesareans from their heretical tendencies and to their old kindly sentiments towards himself.

The clergy of Pisidia and Pontus, where Eustathius had been specially successful in alienating the district of Dazimon, were personally visited and won back to communion. But Atarbius and the Neocaesareans were deaf to all appeal, and remained persistently irreconcilable. On his visiting the old home at Annesi, where his youngest brother Petrus was now residing, in 375, the Neocaesareans were thrown into a state of almost ludicrous panic. They fled as from a pursuing enemy. They accused Basil of seeking to win their regard and support from motives of the pettiest ambition, and twitted him with travelling into their neighbourhood uninvited.

 

IX.

Unbroken Friendships

 

Brighter and happier intimacies were those formed with the older bishop of Samosata, the Eusebius who, of all the many bearers of the name, most nearly realised its meaning, and with Basil’s junior, Amphilochius of Iconium. With the former, Basil’s relations were those of an affectionate son and of an enthusiastic admirer. The many miles that stretched between Caesarea and Samosata did not prevent these personal as well as epistolary communications. In 372 they were closely associated in the eager efforts of the orthodox bishops of the East to win the sympathy and active support of the West. In 374 Eusebius was exiled, with all the picturesque incidents so vividly described by Theodoret. He travelled slowly from Samosata into Thrace, but does not seem to have met either Gregory or Basil on his way. Basil contrived to continue a correspondence with him in his banishment. It was more like that of young lovers than of elderly bishops. The friends deplore the hindrances to conveyance, and are eager to assure one another that neither is guilty of forgetfulness.

The friendship with Amphilochius seems to have begun at the time when the young advocate accepted the invitation conveyed in the name of Heracleidas, his friend, and repaired from Ozizala to Caesarea. The consequences were prompt and remarkable. Amphilochius, at this time between thirty and forty years of age, was soon ordained and consecrated, perhaps, like Ambrose of Milan and Eusebius of Caesarea, per saltum, to the important see of Iconium, recently vacated by the death of Faustinus. Henceforward the intercourse between the spiritual father and the spiritual son, both by letters and by visits, was constant. The first visit of Amphilochius to Basil, as bishop, probably at Easter 374, not only gratified the older prelate, but made a deep impression on the Church of Caesarea. But his visits were usually paid in September, at the time of the services in commemoration of the martyr Eupsychius. On the occasion of the first of them, in 374, the friends conversed together on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, now impugned by the Macedonians, and the result was the composition of the treatise De Spiritu Sancto. This was closely followed by the three famous canonical epistles, also addressed to Amphilochius. Indeed, so great was the affectionate confidence of the great administrator and theologian in his younger brother, that, when infirmities were closing round him, he asked Amphilochius to aid him in the administration of the archdiocese.

If we accept the explanation given of Letter CLXIX. in a note on a previous page, Gregory the elder, bishop of Nazianzus, must be numbered among those of Basil’s correspondents letters to whom have been preserved. The whole episode referred to in that and in the two following letters is curiously illustrative of outbursts of fanaticism and folly which might have been expected to occur in Cappadocia in the fourth century, as well as in soberer regions in several other centuries when they have occurred. It has been clothed with fresh interest by the very vivid narrative of Professor Ramsay, and by the skill with which he uses the scanty morsels of evidence available to construct the theory which he holds about it. This theory is that the correspondence indicates a determined attempt on the part of the rigidly orthodox archbishop to crush proceedings which were really “only keeping up the customary ceremonial of a great religious meeting,” and, as such, were winked at, if not approved of, by the bishop to whom the letter of remonstrance is addressed, and the presbyter who was Glycerius’ superior. Valuable information is furnished by Professor Ramsay concerning the great annual festival in honour of Zeus of Venasa (or Venese), whose shrine was richly endowed, and the inscription discovered on a Cappadocian hill-top, “Great Zeus in heaven, be propitious to me.” But the “evident sympathy” of the bishop and the presbyter is rather a strained inference from the extant letters; and the fact that in the days when paganism prevailed in Cappadocia Venasa was a great religious centre, and the scene of rites in which women played an important part, is no conclusive proof that wild dances performed by an insubordinate deacon were tolerated, perhaps encouraged, because they represented a popular old pagan observance. Glycerius may have played the patriarch, without meaning to adopt, or travesty, the style of the former high priest of Zeus. Cappadocia was one of the most Christian districts of the empire long before Basil was appointed to the exarchate of Caesarea, and Basil is not likely to have been the first occupant of the see who would strongly disapprove of, and endeavour to repress, any such manifestations as those which are described. That the bishop whom Basil addresses and the presbyter served by Glycerius should have desired to deal leniently with the offender individually does not convict them of accepting the unseemly proceedings of Glycerius and his troupe as a pardonable, if not desirable, survival of a picturesque national custom.

Among other bishops of the period with whom Basil communicated by letter are Abramius, or Abraham, of Batnae in Osrhoene, the illustrious Athanasius, and Ambrose, Athanasius of Ancyra; Barses of Edessa, who died in exile in Egypt; Elpidius, of some unknown see on the Levantine seaboard, who supported Basil in the controversy with Eustathius; the learned Epiphanius of Salamis; Meletius, the exiled bishop of Antioch; Patrophilus of Aegae; Petrus of Alexandria; Theodotus of Nicopolis, and Ascholius of Thessalonica.

Basil’s correspondence was not, however, confined within the limits of clerical clan­ship. His extant letters to laymen, both distinguished and undistinguished, show that he was in touch with the men of mark of his time and neighbourhood, and that he found time to express an affectionate interest in the fortunes of his intimate friends.

Towards the later years of his life the archbishop’s days were darkened not only by ill-health and anxiety, but by the death of some of his chief friends and allies. Athanasius died in 373, and so far as personal living influence went, there was an extinction of the Pharos not of Alexandria only, but of the world. It was no longer “Athanasius contra mundum” but “Mundus sine Athanasio.” In 374 Gregory the elder died at Nazianzus, and the same year saw the banishment of Eusebius of Samosata to Thrace. In 375 died Theodotus of Nicopolis, and the succession of Fronto was a cause of deep sorrow.

At this time some short solace would come to the Catholics in the East in the synodical letter addressed to the Orientals of the important synod held in Illyria, under the authority of Valentinian. The letter which is extant is directed against the Macedonian heresy. The charge of conveying it to the East was given to the presbyter Elpidius. Valentinian sent with it a letter to the bishops of Asia in which persecution is forbidden, and the excuse of submission to the reigning sovereign anticipated and condemned. Although the letter runs in the names of Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian, the western brother appears to condemn the eastern.

 

X.

PERSONAL TRAITS.

 

We shall commence our examination of these works by endeavouring to gather from them some personal traits which may help us better to know the man. It has been alleged by his detractors that his bosom fault was pride; even friends have admitted that there was ground for the charge, and he was accused of it in his lifetime, though as he thinks very unjustly. The charge may have been, however, in some sense true, but it must be observed that one of the principal pieces of evidence for this defect is almost certainly imaginary. It consists of a passage in the Chronicon of Jerome, which all the MSS. but one refer, not to Basil at all, but to Photinus, the mention of whom stands in the preceding sentence. Vossius, for the purpose of depreciating Jerome as a detractor, eagerly adopted the reading which refers the words to Basil, and Gibbon grasped at it in order to sneer at the Church for concealment of Basil’s defects. But there is little doubt that Jerome never applied the description to him at all. Gregory Nazianzen repels the charge by alleging Basil’s care for the sick and poor, an answer which would be indeed very insufficient if it referred to mere passing acts of humi­liation, such as the Papal washing of poor men’s feet. But it will, perhaps, be considered that the persistent and long-continued work of a bishop in personal attendance on the most repulsive diseases in an hospital is no such very bad reply to the charge of pride.

If Basil was naturally of a proud spirit, as perhaps he was, he deserves the praise of having forced himself to face the humiliations which his ceaseless struggles for orthodoxy brought upon him. He might have intrenched himself in his diocese, where his popularity was so great, and persuaded himself that it was not his business to interfere with the rest of the East, or that there was nothing which he could do. This is the species of pride which he had to complain of in the bishops of the West. He certainly did not display it himself. Nor when he is insulted and repelled either by heretics, or, as sometimes happened, by orthodox fanatics, does he either preserve the silence or display the resentment of a proud spirit. As for his treatment of the vulgar courtiers of Valens, it is very difficult to blame him for the contempt he displayed towards them. It was not merely an ebullition of natural temperament, but the most truthful tone which he could have taken, and by far the most wholesome for them: there is a time for all things, and this was what that time required. He slighted them at the time of their power and his weakness; but there is no record of his ever behaving in like fashion to anyone who was poor, or in need of his aid. While, then, we do not deny that pride may have been natural to Basil, we cannot allow it to have assumed the proportions of a vicious habit: rather it was used for good, with only such taint of defect remaining as necessarily belongs to human nature.

One passage in Basil’s life has caused this charge to be entertained by some churchmen otherwise well disposed to admire him: his relations to Pope Damasus. There is no doubt a singular absence in Basil of that “dropping-down deadness” of manner (if we may borrow Sydney Smith’s phrase), which the bishops of Rome have been accustomed to demand. It is, of course, futile to accuse him of pride for the non-recognition of claims on the part of the Pope, which it never entered Basil’s mind to conceive, but there is no doubt that he shows himself unwilling to concede even that degree of submissiveness which the bishops of Rome at that time thought their due. The reason is to be found in the careless and even heart­less neglect with which he conceived the troubles of the East to have been treated by the Western bishops living at ease. Some writers, recognizing the absence of early evidence for the papacy, have seen a proof of the hand of Providence upon it in the constant readi­ness of the popes to give at every emergency the aid that was required of them. Certainly the treatment of Basil’s appeals to the West is no mean proof to the contrary. A great opportunity was here missed, and a distinctly anti-papal character was impressed upon the writings of that father, whom, perhaps beyond all others, the East reveres. It should be also remarked, however, that the adoption of an independent tone towards Rome was a kind of tradition in the see of Caesarea. S. Firmilian, whose letter to S. Cyprian in relation to the controversy about re-baptism has been ever a great stumbling-block to the supporters of the Papacy, was, at an interval of a century, Basil’s predecessor as bishop at Caesarea, and the latter calls him “our Firmilian.”

If Basil displayed any pride towards men, he certainly did not allow it to intrude into his relations to God. It may seem strange to some that an ascetic and a follower after perfection should show a deep sense of sin; but so it is. He is thoroughly sincere when he declares that he is so far from claim­ing to be sinless that he knows his life to be full of innumerable faults, and pours forth continual tears for his sins, if perchance he may obtain favour of God, or when he attributes his misfortunes to his sins. “Pray,” he begs his friend, “for my miserable life, that, freed from these temptations, I may begin to serve God.”

But he is very sensitive to desertion and unkindness. He cannot think, though he broods over it constantly, why such things should be believed against him. He knows that nothing is more hated among the religious people of the time than his name. Those who take the middle course, as they think, and setting out from the same principles as he, decline to follow them to their logical conclusions, because these are hateful to the ears of the populace; these “moderate” persons are all against him. How can he but feel it? His only comfort lies in his bodily infirmity, which assures him that he will not live long,¹ and when he recovers for a time, he is sorry for it, knowing the evils to which he returns. May God give you, he prays, the blessings of Jerusalem above, because you did not believe falsehoods about me.

The fault which we should consider most obvious in Basil’s letters is despondency and readiness to complain, due, probably, to the disease of the liver with which he had to contend all his life through. No doubt his low spirits make the indomitable energy more remarkable, which never allowed his work to grow slack through despair. But knowing what we do of the effect which that work had, both in his own diocese and in the churches of the East, it seems strange that he should say, “I seem to myself for my sins to succeed in nothing.”

His health was, indeed, wretched all his life through, “from his earliest youth.” When in health, he was weaker than other people when their recovery is despaired of. In sickness he complains that his body has failed him altogether. Fifty days has he been sick of a fever, which not finding material enough in his poor body to nourish it, remained in his dried-up flesh as in a burnt-out wick, and wore him out utterly. And then his old plague of the liver coming in besides, deprived him of food, deprived him of sleep, and kept him on the borders of life and death, allowing him only just enough of life to feel his pains. He is reduced to the condition of being actually thinner than himself, and is only so far alive that he breathes. And even when he has grown a little better, he remains so weak that the exertion of visiting the Church of the Martyrs in a carriage throws him back nearly into the same condition again. After a journey into Pontus he is afflicted with intolerable sickness; but in the midst of all this he is taking care for the churches of Lycia, and making out a list of well-disposed persons in that quarter with whom a representative of orthodoxy, if sent into the country, is to place himself in communication.

Basil, if proud, was certainly not independent of love; the practice of asceticism had not the result of deadening his affections. Although his monastic rule demands so much renunciation of the ties of blood, yet he laments for his mother as “his only comfort in life,” and in the alienation from his uncle (for which he was not to blame) he shows the strongest repugnance to disputes among relations. “Honoured brother,” he writes to a friendly bishop, “we feel an exceeding hunger for love.” “We want brothers more than one hand wants the other.” He declares that the reception of a letter from a friend is to him like water to a tired racehorse. He entertains a most affectionate remembrance of those who had been kind to him in youth. Thus he repels, with the utmost vehemence, the charge of having anathematized “the most blessed Dianius.” Rather is he conscious of having been brought up from his earliest years in love for Dianius, and been accustomed to reverence his venerable priestly air, and as he grew older to delight in his company, for his simplicity, and nobleness, and freedom of manners, his magnanimity and mildness, together with his good temper, his gaiety and accessibility, combined with dignity. A corresponding affection Basil felt for Neocaesarea, the place to which he was accustomed from his boyhood, where he was brought up by his grandmother. How dearly would he love to see his friend Eusebius and return with him in memory to boyhood, when they had the same home, and fireside, and teacher, the same amusements and studies, and pleasures, and wants. If he could but meet his friend, he might brush away this weight of age and seem young instead of old. And his love for the friends of his own youth naturally drew with it that love for young people which is so attractive in the old. He has had with him the two sons of a friend for a festival day, and sends back “our” sons safe to their father, telling him that their love of God has helped him to spend the holy day in a perfect manner, and praying to the God who loves mankind that the angel of peace may be given them for a helper and companion of their way. And when the two sons of Olympius have brought him letters from their father, they so comfort his afflicted soul that he forgets the poison which his enemies are scattering to his injury. A like delight he expresses in Icelium, the daughter of his friend Magninianus. He is assured that a rich reward must wait the father from the Lord for such an education of his children. And his affection for Gregory of Nazianzus, during boyhood, youth, and mature age, may be called one of the celebrated friendships of the world. It was one of the great moulding facts of life for both of them.

He knew, of course, what it was to find a friend capricious or mistrustful, or to lose him amidst the sad disputes of the times. If you remain in our com­munion, he says to such a one, this were the best thing that could happen, and worth the most earnest prayer. If others, however, have drawn thee to them, that were sad indeed, for why should not the loss of such a brother be so? but if I have no other consolation, I have at least, by the instrumentality of the same persons, been well exercised in such losses. To him it seems that one who thinks of casting off a friend should first reflect long and anxiously, spend many a sleepless night, and seek, with many tears, God’s guidance to the truth. But when calumny attempts to injure him with his friend, he can write that the calumniator injures three persons,—the subject of his slander, and the person to whom it is addressed, and himself. Of the injury done to himself as the subject he will say nothing his friend knows well that Basil is not indifferent to his opinion; but of the three persons injured, it is Basil who is injured least.

He can very well accept a reproof from a friend. He is not so absurd as to be offended at the chidings of a brother. Far from being offended, he well-nigh laughs that when there were so many things which seemed to strengthen and unite their friendship, his correspondent should write that he has been so thunder­struck at small matters, and he is not in the least inclined to stand upon his dignity, but will receive with the most perfect submission any one who may be sent to investigate his supposed misdeeds.

Like many other eminent men, Basil found a friend in his physician and held the highest opinion of the profession. Humanity is the very business of those who practise the healing art, and that man who places their science first among all the pursuits of life, appears to Basil to judge rightly. But his doctor is not only perfectly accomplished in his healing art, but extends his benefits beyond the body and ministers to the mind. Basil gratifies his affection for his friends by little presents, and they do the same by him. Wax candles and dry fruits seem to have been common gifts. But Basil cannot use his teeth upon the latter: they are gone, through time and disease.

We can well understand what misery the distracted condition of the Church must have brought to a soul so full of piety and love. It was no spirit of proselytism that impelled Basil to work for Catholic unity, but a spirit of love. He can assert that there is in his heart such a longing for the peace of the churches, that he could willingly shed forth his own life to extinguish the flames of a hatred which the evil one has kindled. So bitterly did the misconduct of many who should have known better weigh upon him, that he more than once confesses that a temp­tation to misanthropy had come over him, if the mercy of God, and the affection of a few stanch friends had not preserved him.

Although it is laid down among Basil’s monastic rules that it is beneath the dignity of a Christian man to laugh heartily, yet he himself was not at all devoid of a sense of humour. The theory of transmigration moves him to a gentle satire, perhaps not inapplicable to our own times, when he says that some philosophers declare themselves to have been once the men, women, or fishes of a far-back time; whether they were fishes or no he will not undertake to say, but that when they wrote these things they were more unreasoning than fishes he will very constantly affirm. Nor could any writer devoid of this faculty have given us the description of the avaricious usurer swearing to the needy borrower that he has no money at all, and is himself looking out for some one to lend him a little; but when the other mentions the interest and the name of the security, then he smoothes his brow and smiles, and somehow comes to a remembrance of their family friendship, and says he will see if he can find some cash. “A friend, indeed, left a sum with me to be lent out in usury, but he requires very high interest.” The debtor, on the other hand, has neither the wealth of the rich nor the careless freedom of the poor. He is constantly estimating the value of his own property, or of the plate and furniture of anybody with whom he happens to dine. “Were these mine,” he says to himself, “I could sell them for so much and be free of my interest.” If there is a knock at the door, he creeps under the bed. If anyone runs up to him quickly, it gives him a palpitation of the heart. If a dog barks, he bursts into a perspiration. Why is interest called tokoq, that is, breeding ? It must be called so from its immense fecundity of evil, or from the pangs which it brings on the poor people who endure it. Basil can even exercise a grim humour upon his own misfortunes, as when the vicar of Pontus threatened to tear out his liver, he replied, “Many thanks: where it is it has given a great deal of trouble.” Nor is he above describing a disturber of the peace of the Church as the fat whale of Doara, who troubles the waters there. And it is thus that his friend Gregory describes his social character:—“Who made himself more amiable than he to the well-conducted? or more severe when men were in sin? Whose very smile was many a time praise, whose silence a reproof, punishing the evil in a man’s own conscience. If he was not full of talk, nor a jester, nor a holder forth, nor generally acceptable from being all things to all men and showing good nature, what then? Is not this to his praise, not to his blame, among sensible men? Yet, if we ask for this, who so pleasant as he in social intercourse, as I know who have had such experience of him? Who could tell a story with more wit? Who could jest so playfully? Who could give a hint more delicately, so as neither to be over strong in his rebuke nor remiss through his gentleness?”

But his kindness to the poor and sorrowful is un­failing. The insensibility of the rich moves his bitter indignation. People lavish their money on unworthy objects; but if a poor man, scarce able to speak from hunger, comes into our sight, we turn from him as if he were of a different nature from us; we shudder at him, we pass by as if we feared that if we walked more slowly we might catch the infection of his misery. And if he looks upon the ground, filled with shame at his wretched state, we say that he is a hypocrite; and if he looks us boldly in the face, under the spur of his hunger, we call him an impudent and violent fellow. And if he happens to be clad in whole garments, given him by somebody or other, we send him away as insatiable, and swear that his poverty is all a pretence; if he is covered with rotten rags, we hunt him off as evil-smelling; and though he asks us for God’s sake, we will not be moved. Yet Basil shows no weak pity. A helper who gives way to the impulse of mere feeling seems to him like a pilot, who, when he ought to be directing the crew and fighting against winds and waves, is himself sea-sick. We must use our reason, and help people as we can. Do not therefore aggravate sorrow by your presence. Whoever wants to raise up the afflicted, must be above them: he who falls along with them, requires himself the same aid which he is attempting to bring.

Basil’s recommendatory letters to his powerful friends on behalf of the needy are often very moving and graceful. Here is one on behalf of Leontius, who apparently desires to escape some imposition of the government. “There is no one closer to me, or who, if he were in prosperity, would do more to aid me, than my dear brother Leontius. Take care of his house just as you would of myself, if you found me not in that condition of poverty in which, by the Divine goodness, I am now, but possessing some property. I know well that in that case you would not make me poor, but would preserve to me what I had, or increase it.” Again, he begs that the valuation of the property of a presbyter may not be increased for higher taxation; “for he toils perseveringly for the support of my life, because I, as you know, have nothing of my own, but am supported by the re­sources of my friends and relations.”

A similar description of Basil’s mode of subsistence is given in the succeeding letter, written on behalf of his foster-brother, on whom he is dependent. But the explanation is added, that Basil’s parents have given to this man most of the slaves whom he possesses, as a fund for the support of their son. These letters appear to have been written before his episcopate; afterwards he had resources at his command, though never for his own benefit. He is much dis­appointed that a community of monks, when burnt out, have not resorted to him as the most natural refuge prepared for them.

His own celibate life did not hinder him from sympathy with family troubles. He has received a letter from a bishop, which tells of the death of Urctarius’s only son. The heir of a great house, the prop of his race, the hope of his country, the issue of pious parents, brought up among a thousand prayers, in the very flower of his age is snatched away from his father’s arms. But it is the bidding of God that they who have faith in Christ should not sorrow for the dead; for they believe in the resurrection. Some cause there is, inscrutable to man, why some are carried soon away, and some left longer to endure pain in this world of troubles; we are not deprived of our son, but have restored him to the Lender. Nor was life extinguished, but changed; nor did the earth cover him, but heaven received him. Only may we resemble his purity, that we may learn that innocence which obtains the rest of children in Christ.¹ And he knows how to comfort the bereaved mother under the same loss. He was unwilling to write, lest, even though he should give some comfort, yet he might appear to intrude on her grief. But when he reflected that he had to do with a Christian woman, long since schooled in religion and prepared for troubles, he thought it not right that he should be wanting in his duty. A son she has lost, whom when he was alive all mothers blessed, and wished their own to be like him; and when he was dead lamented him as their own. We are sad because he is taken away before his time. But how do we know that it was not full time? We know not how to choose what is most profitable for souls, and define the bounds of human life. “Regard the whole world in which we dwell and consider that all things that we see are destined to corruption. Beware of measur­ing your calamity by itself: considered thus, it will seem unendurable. Compare it with all human things, so will you find comfort. And besides, I have something to say which is the strongest thing of all. Spare your husband. Be a comfort to one another. Do not make his trouble harder by wearing yourself out with grief. But, indeed, I do not imagine that words can bring comfort; prayer is what is needed for such a time. And I pray the Lord Himself to touch your heart with His unspeakable power, to bring light into your soul by holy thoughts, that you may have the spring of consolation within.”¹

Basil in one of his discourses alleges, by way of excuse for recurring to a subject left unfinished the day before, a characteristic point in his own mental disposition. He is by nature an enemy to anything unfinished. This extreme love of completeness is the secret of his persevering labour, and of the many­sided activity which struck Gregory of Nazianzus, and which, indeed, has rarely been exceeded. Among us, if a man be a student and a scholar, we do not at the same time expect him to take a ruling share in the practical affairs of the Church, and fight for her against the secular power; if a man be a philanthropist and a founder of hospitals, we do not wonder that he is not a great leader of religious thought or a popular preacher. But Basil displayed all these forms of activity in the highest degree. Add to all his asceticism. Though we are, perhaps, not very strict in applying the Apostle’s prohibition, “if any will not work, neither shall he eat,” we at least use without stint the positive permission implied by his words and if any is willing to work for us. we think it only his right that he should eat abundantly of the very best. But Basil did all his work of studying, preaching, travelling, visiting, hospital-building and hospital nursing, and contending with governors, emperors, and heretics, upon one meal of vegetables and water in the day; and that, too, in spite of con­stant ill health hanging about him from youth to age. We feel compelled to believe that there never has been an age of the world so rich in great intellects and great hearts that Basil would not have justified his title to a high place among them, nor are there many life-histories to which we should more confidently point as examples of the triumph of mind over matter, the spirit over the flesh.

 

X

A PICTURE OF THE TIMES.

 

The idea which we derive from Basil’s works of the condition of the government in the Eastern Empire is by no means favourable. The sentiment of patriotism, as applied to the Empire at large, does not appear to have existed in his mind. The misfortunes of the Imperial arms under Julian, the threatening inroads of barbarians under Valens, are alluded to much in the same way as we should men­tion troubles of foreign powers; they are warnings of the uncertainty of human things, and lamentable events in themselves. Conquering armies, he tells us, have been conquered in their turn, and become spectacles of misery; great and victorious cities have been reduced to slavery. The age just past has afforded examples of every kind of calamity which the history of the world records. But the writer shows no sense of personal connection with them. He does love his country; but it is Pontus, Cappadocia, or even Caesarea, to which he applies the term. It is well known that the Greek race never extended its idea of political union above the city; and certainly there was nothing in such governments as those of Constantius and Valens to enlist either the imagination or interest of the people in a wider conception of patriotism.

Basil had not, perhaps, personally very much to endure under Valens. But the failure to harm was, as the history of the affair proves, an example of the weakness and timidity of the Emperor and his officers rather than of their justice. And when his relations to them became amicable, the subjects of his letters to them give a very low notion of the equity and regularity of the administration. Now he writes to Aburgius on occasion of the division of the province, begging him by all his love for his native country of Cappadocia to assist her in her distress, which is such that no one who had visited her in former times would know her again. Now he intercedes for an unfortunate old man who has been exempted by an imperial order from public service on account of age, but finds the boon imme­diately undone when the prefect claims his orphan grandson, aged four years, for some service or other to the council. Now it is a request that oaths may not be demanded of the rural population in the exaction of the tribute, since it is a mere compulsion to perjury. Now the restoration is requested of some corn taken from a poor presbyter by some officer of the government, either on his own account or acting under orders. And now time is requested for getting in by a general subscription the gold which is to be paid as a tax for equipping the military. Or the widow Julitta is condoled with for the oppressions exercised on her by some official who has cast off all shame in his dealings with Christians, and she is informed that though Basil is afraid to take the liberty of writing directly to such a great man as the prefect, he has written to Helladius, a confidential member of his household, to make interest for her. Or Modestus, the prefect, Basil’s former opponent, is urgently pressed in the name of a poor down-trodden population to have the tribute of iron required from the miners of Mount Taurus reduced, that they may not be so utterly overwhelmed with poverty as to be rendered useless citizens to the State.

It is not to be wondered at that under such a government the misery of the people should be very great. Basil writes, on occasion of the division of the province, that the order of society is quite broken up, that on account of the treatment dealt out to the magistrates the members of the civic administration have fled to the country, and their town, which formerly had been the resort of learned men as well as a place of wealth, had become a lamentable spectacle of decay. It must, however, we may remark, have recovered under succeeding emperors, for Caesarea, when sacked by Sapor the Persian, possessed 400,000 inhabitants. For the present the distress was widespread. Individuals met with reverses which reduced them from affluence to an abject condition; among whom Maximus, a man of great ability, and formerly prefect, having lost his whole paternal property and all that he had acquired by his own exertions, had become a beggar. Basil is afraid, when writing to Eusebius in his exile, to entrust the messenger with anything of value, lest it should be the cause of his murder at the hands of some of the robbers and deserters by whom the roads are infested. We shall hereafter read Basil’s de­scription of the horrors of the famine which afflicted this unfortunate country; and he also describes a grievous flood 'which has taken place in consequence of a sudden thaw after a great fall of snow.

Amid these miseries of the poor, we find the greatest excesses of luxury and selfishness among the rich. There was, as usual in such states of society, the ill-omened trade of keeping back corn till prices should rise to famine point; and Basil warns the rich against being “traffickers in human misery.” The legitimate methods of trade were not developed. Basil mentions that he has known of bankers in Alexandria who received money and gave interest; plainly implying that such a system did not exist in Cappadocia. The methods of investment, which in modern times are so close at hand, being wanting, rich people were left,—if they did not execute public works, or strive for popularity by shows of wild beasts,—to squander their money in luxury, or to lay it out at usurious interest by lending it to their needy or extravagant neighbours. And we shall see, in several quotations from Basil’s sermons, how prolific a source of sin and misery was the recklessness of his people in incurring debt. He compares the usurers with their monthly demands of interest, to the demons who inflict periodic attacks of epilepsy. Meanwhile, others spend their money upon numberless carriages or litters borne by men, and covered with gold and silver. Innumerable horses are kept, and their pedi­grees are esteemed according to the nobility of their ancestors, just as those of men. Some are for riding about town, some for hunting, some for journeys. Their reins, and bits, and collars are of silver, adorned with gold. Purple saddle-cloths deck the horses, like bridegrooms; there are multitudes of mules paired according to their colours, and their drivers in order one after another. Troops of servants of all kinds— overseers, stewards, gardeners; skilled workmen of every trade, whether of necessity or luxury; cooks, confectioners, cupbearers, huntsmen, statuaries, painters; artists of every species of pleasure. Troops of camels, some for burdens, some for pasture; troops of horses, herds of cows, flocks of sheep and of swine, and their keepers; lands enough to feed all these, and render a revenue to increase the riches of their master. Baths in the city, and baths in the country. Houses shining with marbles of all kinds; one encrusted with Phrygian stone, another with Laconian or Thessalian; and some of their houses arranged to keep you warm in winter, others to keep you cool in summer. Pavements floored with mosaic, ceilings covered with gold; and whatever part of the walls is not inlaid with marbles is adorned with pictures. And we may be sure that the living was not inferior to the magnificence of the houses. Sea and land were traversed in the search for cooks and table ­attendants, who were brought like a kind of tribute to the great people, and suffered miseries in no way more endurable than the torments in Hades, con­stantly stirring the furnace, bearing water, and pouring it into a cask with holes; for there is no end to their toil. The ladies required jewels of all kinds —pearls, emeralds, jacinths, gold lace, and gold orna­ments, and spent upon these things not a passing hour, but nights and days. But sometimes Basil was able to gather from among these luxurious rich such converts as the two deaconesses, daughters of the Count Terentius.

Among the multitude, the barbarous practice of exposing children to perish if the parents thought them too expensive to rear was by no means extinct; and boys were frequently sold to slavery for their father’s debts. The common talk of the people in the forum was of the most corrupting character. The religion of the common people was largely mixed with astrology and belief in charms. Basil re­proaches even Christians as having recourse in the sickness of their children to some magician, who will hang a talisman round the patient’s neck.

No wonder that amidst such corruptions in general society the morality of the Church should have been far below the Gospel standard. The mass of the Christian population is represented to us as strangely alternating between self-denial and excess. The restraint of Church fasts is submitted to with a strict­ness scarcely known among ourselves; but it is succeeded by disgraceful outbreaks of drunkenness and impurity. Even in the midst of the fast Basil gives as a reason for protracting his sermon, that many of the congregation, when they are dismissed, will at once resort to the gaming-table, where they will experience all those alternations of fortune and all those exhibitions of passion which high play calls out. To what purpose, he asks, is it to fast if your soul be filled with such sinful impulses as these? Nay, even in the churches themselves, miserable men but ill reflect the meaning of that glorious verse, which says that “in His temple doth every man speak of His honour.” Instead of remembering and confessing their sins in God’s house, they smilingly greet one another, and shake hands, and turn the house of prayer into a place of immoderate loquacity.

 

XI

THE CLOSING YEARS

 

The expulsion of Gregory Nyssen from his see by the eunuch Demosthenes, and the substitution for him of “a slave worth a few oboli,” draws from Basil the vehement statement that the episcopate is fallen into the hands of born slaves. Indeed, one extraordinary case is on record, in which a bishop was literally a slave. We have a portion (though unhappily not the conclusion) of Basil’s correspondence with Simplicia, a great lady, who having been a large benefactress to the Church, became so proud as to maintain a claim to the ownership of a man, who, though belonging to a family of servile origin attached to her house, had been advanced to the episcopate.

Even among the clergy the greatest abuses prevail; and such a thing is known as a bishop going about without either clergy or people. One case in the lower clergy gives us a notion of the class of people with whom Basil had sometimes to deal. A certain Glycerius had been ordained deacon by him. His qualifications were not high, yet he had considerable aptitude for routine work. But after ordination he wholly neglected his duty, “just as if none whatever had been assigned to him.” Worse still, he collected together a number of poor girls, some unwilling and some of their own accord; gave himself the airs of a patriarch, adopted this leadership as a way of making a livelihood, and caused the greatest dis­turbance in the Church, despising the commands of his presbyter, a man of age and character, of his chorepiscopus, and even of Basil himself. And when he was threatened with punishment for the bad example of disobedience which he was setting to several young men, he took to flight with his band. Certainly it was a most scandalous exhibition, when in the midst of a great crowd of persons this choir of young women was introduced dancing alternately with the youths, to the dismay of the pious and the amusement of the evil-disposed. And when the parents attempted to rescue these unhappy girls out of his hands, they were assailed with insult by this hopeful youth. Basil writes to Gregory, in whose diocese this worthy had fixed himself for the time being, begging that he may be induced to return, or at least send back such of the maidens as might wish to come back: if he declines, he is to be degraded from the ministry. The next letter is to Glycerius himself; by no means too sharp a rebuke for the occasion, and encouraging him to return, with the promise of a kind reception if he repents. Another letter to Gregory follows: the girls have not yet re­turned, and we know not the conclusion of the affair.

Two epistles to Amphilochius, Bishop of Iconium, give us a conception of the steps by which church order was attempted to be restored in a district where everything had gone to confusion. It would be better if bishops could be appointed to all the sees in the district; but if good men cannot be found for all, the best plan will be to send one bishop to preside over the whole province, provided that he be a man of resolution and courage, and one who, if he finds himself unable for all the work, will engage others to his aid. If this cannot be done, it will be wiser to commence with the small towns and villages and work upwards from them, than to appoint a bishop of the province who might possibly be jealous of the restora­tion of the minor sees, when such a measure should become possible.

In his own diocese Basil found most serious abuses prevalent. The chorepiscopi were wont to accept money for ordination, cloaking their simony under the pretext that they did not receive the fee until after the ordination had been performed. Basil makes no parley with such persons; they are roundly informed that they shall be excommunicated in case of per­sistence. We find our saint lamenting the decay of primitive discipline in terms which we ourselves might use, and with reason even greater than we possess. According to the ancient canons, no one should be ordained except after examination into his character, had by the presbyters and deacons of his neighbourhood, and reported through the chorepiscopi to the bishop of the diocese. But now the chorepiscopi were themselves accustomed to ordain whomsoever the presbyters chose to send forward, without ex­amination of character, and often simply for the purpose of escaping military service. So that there were in many villages a multitude of clergy, not one of them all fitted for his office: this is to be absolutely altered for the future, and none to be ordained without submission of his name to Basil. We have a severe letter to a presbyter reproving him for having a female dwelling in the house; it was not indeed a bad case, for the priest was seventy years of age, and Basil does not suspect anything wrong. We perceive plainly, in such cases, that the mulier subintroducta may have been often only a servant whom the priest employed for household convenience; but the rule against it was stringent and needful for the protection of the celibate life against suspicion, and she must be dismissed and placed in a convent on pain of anathema.

When Basil takes a general view of the condition of the whole Church, it is gloomy indeed. Sometimes he compares it to a ship driven about by the fiercest storms, while the crew are quarrelling with one another; and sometimes to an old robe, which it is very easy to tear wherever you touch it, but impossible to restore to its primitive strength and soundness. And yet we must by no means suppose that discipline was altogether extinct, or that church punishments were either unused or lightly regarded. On the contrary, Basil speaks of the ecclesiastical penalties as being equally effectual with those of the State. What the corporal punishments of the tribunals could not perform, he has known to be effected by the tremendous judgments of God. And we find an example of this in a case of abduction, where Basil gives direction for the excommunication not only of the guilty man, but of the whole village which has harboured him. The penances which are prescribed in the canonical letters of Basil are of much severity. For fornication four years’ penance is to be undergone: for one year the offender is to be expelled from the prayers, and to weep at the church door; in the second he is to be classed among the “hearers”; in the third among the “penitents”; and during the fourth he is to stand with the people but abstain from the oblation; finally, he is to be admitted to communion. The extreme comparative severity to women in the case of such sins which modern society displays, is observed in these canons: the man who has sinned is to be received back by his wife on re­pentance, the wife by her husband, never. Basil gives these directions from the ancient authorities but confesses that he cannot see the reason of them. A widow who marries again is by the apostle’s pre­scription to be despised; but no law against re­marriage is imposed upon men. For them the punishment of digamy suffices: that is to say, a penance of one year. While second marriages are thus marked with a certain stigma, third marriages are regarded as unlawful by the canons; Basil speaks of them as existing but only as blots upon the Church. A presbyter who unknowingly involves himself in an unlawful marriage is to retain his seat among the clergy, but not to be permitted to give the benediction. This canon of itself implies that the marriage of the clergy, though doubtless frowned upon, and in the case of bishops becoming constantly less usual, was neither prohibited nor unused. The allusions in the epistles of St. Basil would lead us to suppose that the present practice of the East—marriage for the parish priests and celibacy for the bishops—represents pretty nearly the state of things in his time. The question of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister is carefully argued by Basil in an epistle to Diodorus, who had accused him of authorizing these unions. He decides against them on the sufficient ground that the voice of the Church is against them. The law of Moses does indeed say nothing applicable to marriage with the sister of a wife after the latter’s death. But the principle that by marriage you acquire the same re­lations as your wife is decisive.

In one point Basil increases the stringency of the ancient canons. The elder fathers had directed that a virgin who, after dedicating herself to God and professing a life of chastity, should marry, might be received after penance of a year. But in Basil’s time, the monastic tendency having made a large advance, it seemed both possible and needful to go further; he directs that the marriage is to be counted as adultery, and the offender not to be admitted to com­munion until she has ceased to live with her husband. Professions of celibacy are not to be accepted from girls of tender years, nor from children brought by their parents or brothers, without any deliberate choice of their own. Sixteen or seventeen is the earliest age at which such self-dedication is to be accepted. No vows of celibacy by men are known, save of those who enrol themselves among monks, in whose case such an engagement is tacitly implied: and Basil is of opinion that it would be better to require of them a categorical profession clear and explicit, in order that if they marry they also may be punished as adulterers. This is an interesting canon, as showing the steps by which monastic vows became usual, but the monastic system of Basil must be treated at large. Something of a passion for vows must have prevailed, since we find a prohibition of ridiculous ones, such as not to eat swine’s flesh.

For murder we find prescribed in another epistle of this class the penance of twenty years’ prohibition from communion: for adultery, that of fifteen; for apostasy, a man was to be repelled his whole life through, save that he might be communicated at death. But when we read of these very lengthened periods, we cannot but doubt whether they can have been in all cases really imposed and submitted to. And there are indications in the epistles of St. Basil that the system of discipline as it existed in his time must have admitted large modifications in practice. The Church by her canons marked her sense of the enormity of the sin; but in case of earnest repentance the Nicene council allowed the bishop to relax the rigour of the law. “If any one of those who have fallen into the prementioned crimes is very earnest and diligent in his repentance, he who is intrusted by God with the power of binding and loosing will not be to blame or without Scripture precedent if he regards the seriousness of the repentance as a reason for abridging the period of penance.” And this was Basil’s own practice. He “lays down these rules in order that the fruits of repentance may be well tested; but he is used to judge such matters not merely by time, but by the manner in which the penance is performed.” In truth, the state of the Church was daily making the ancient canons more and more difficult to maintain; and in writing to Peter, bishop of Alexandria, Basil considers it matter of thankfulness to find that in that place at all events some remains of the primitive discipline still existed.

In circumstances so sad it cut Basil to the heart that the Western bishops should show so little interest in the case of their unhappy brethren. Not indeed but that the list of churches with which Basil was in communion and correspondence included the best part of the Christian world. Sanctissimus on one occasion even brought from the West assurances of friendship; but this was all. For thirteen long years the contest against heresy had lasted, during which period Basil declares that more evils had happened than were recorded to have taken place since the foundation of the Christian Church. The people had abandoned their houses of prayer and assembled together in desert and solitary places; women and little children were exposed to storms and snows, winds and wintry ice, and heats of summer; and this they had done that they might not be partakers in the evil leaven of Arianism. The ministries of the Church were in many places wholly in Arian hands. Baptisms, the conducting forth of those going on journeys, the visitation of the sick, the consolation of the sorrowing, the teaching of the young; all these duties, which then as now constituted the staple employment of the Christian ministry, were exercised by the Arians, leaving little hope that the succeeding generation of Christian people brought up under such influences would be better than the present. How comes it then that no letters of consolation, no brotherly visit, none of those things which the law of Christian kindness demanded, should have come from the Western bishops? The miserable condition of the East is known to all the world, and he writes to the Italians as already aware of the miseries which assailed their brethren. They should inform their emperor of the troubles, or if this were impossible, they should send some delegates who should visit and console the afflicted. We have seen in the narrative of Basil’s life that Valentinian did in fact interpose by promoting a council in Illyria. But it had no decisive effect in favour of the distracted East, in which peace was not restored until Basil, who had striven for it so earnestly and longed for it so passionately, was in his grave.

The decree of that Illyrian council, while implying the duty of the civil power to interfere for the maintenance of truth, yet lays down, as we have seen, with much stringency, the limits which the law of God imposes upon that interference. The same principles are expressed in the epistles of St. Basil. On the one hand we have a letter to the magistrates of an Armenian town, congratulating them that, amid their occupation with public cares, they do not forget or undervalue matters ecclesiastical, but are each as anxious about them as about their own concerns and the occupations on which their lives depend; and begs them to excuse the bishops for having been obliged in the difficulty of the times to take a course which might seem doubtful. But at the same time the principle is laid clearly down, that ecclesiastical administration is conducted by those who are intrusted with the government of the Church, and is confirmed by the people.

Amid all defects we find that the worship of the Church was very hearty. If the sea be a beautiful thing, is not this crowded congregation more so, in which the mingled voice of men, women, and children follows our prayer to God? At the feast of a martyr strangers from all sides were wont to assemble at his grave and wait from over-night to midday beguiling the time with hymns; indeed, the antiphonal method of chanting used under the influ­ence of Basil, who seems to have been very fond of music, was a subject of suspicion and accusation to churches where different methods prevailed. The good old custom was still observed of using at the lighting of the lamps the form, We praise the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The constant tradition of the Church has been that large reforms, not only musical but liturgical, were due to Basil himself. M. de Broglie is of opinion that the general character of these reforms was a separation of the offices in which all the faithful took part from those especially reserved for priests. And he believes that the extremely long form in which the Liturgy of St. Basil has reached us is that which was intended for the clergy. The character of that liturgy may perhaps be thus roughly described for the English reader. He must suppose a service far too long to be used in combination with any other or with a sermon. He must suppose the sacrificial idea which is expressed in the first of our post-communion collects to be transferred to the ante-communion, applied distinctly to the elements as representing the sacrifice of Christ, and made the centre for intercessions, supplications, memorials, and ritual of a rich variety. He must suppose that an invocation of the Holy Spirit, uttered at a point subsequent to the recital of the words of Institution, effects the consecration, which with us is performed by those words alone. And he must suppose the sacramental idea of participation to come in at the conclusion, as the feast upon the completed sacrifice, instead of being, as with us, the first and leading idea of the service.

 

XII

THE END

 

It is of a piece with Basil’s habitual silence on the general affairs of the empire that he should seem to be insensible of the shock caused by the approach of the Goths in 378. A letter to Eusebius in exile in Thrace does show at least a consciousness of a disturbed state of the country, and he is afraid of exposing his courier to needless danger by entrusting him with a present for his friend. But this is all. He may have written letters showing an interest in the fortunes of the empire which have not been preserved. But his whole soul was absorbed in the cause of Catholic truth, and in the fate of the Church. His youth had been steeped in culture, but the work of his ripe manhood left no time for the literary amusement of the dilettante. So it may be that the intense earnestness with which he said to himself, “This one thing I do,” of his work as a shepherd of souls, and a fighter for the truth, and his knowledge that for the doing of this work his time was short, accounts for the absence from his correspondence of many a topic of more than contemporary interest. At all events, it is not difficult to descry that the turn in the stream of civil history was of vital moment to the cause which Basil held dear. The approach of the enemy was fraught with important consequences to the Church. The imperial attention was diverted from persecution of the Catholics to defence of the realm. Then came the disaster of Adrianople, and the terrible end of the unfortunate Valens. Gratian, a sensible lad, of Catholic sympathies, restored the exiled bishops, and Basil, in the few months of life yet left him, may have once more embraced his faithful friend Eusebius. The end drew rapidly near. Basil was only fifty, but he was an old man. Work, sickness, and trouble had worn him out. His health had never been good. A chronic liver complaint was a con­stant cause of distress and depression.

In 373 he had been at death’s door. Indeed, the news of his death was actually circulated, and bishops arrived at Caesarea with the probable object of arranging the succession. He had submitted to the treatment of a course of natural hot baths, but with small beneficial result. By 376, as he playfully reminds Amphilochius, he had lost all his teeth. At last the powerful mind and the fiery enthusiasm of duty were no longer able to stimulate the energies of the feeble frame.

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.” Basil is described by the saintly and learned Theodoret in terms that might seem exaggerated when applied to any but his master, as the light not of Cappadocia only, but of the world. To Sophronius he is the “glory of the Church.” To Isidore of Pelusium, he seems to speak as one inspired. To the Council of Chalcedon he is emphatically a minister of grace to the second council of Nicaea a layer of the foundations of orthodoxy. 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. Sometimes there is a jarring reminder of his jealousy for his own dignity. 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. But a man of strong will, convinced 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. 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. 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. For the omission some amends have lately been made in the erection of a statue of the great archbishop of Caesarea under the dome of the Cathedral of St. Paul in London.