Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Troubles of the Closing Years.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
X.—Troubles of
the Closing Years.
The relief to the Catholic East was brief.
The paroxysm of passion which caused Valentinian to break a
blood-vessel and ended his life,260
| 260 Nov. 17,
375. Amm. Marc. xxx. 6. Soc. iv. 31. | ended also
the force of the imperial rescript. The Arians lifted their
heads again. A council was held at Ancyra,261
| 261 Mansi, iii.
499. Hefele, § 90. | in which the homoousion was condemned, and
frivolous and vexatious charges were brought against Gregory of
Nyssa.262
At Cyzicus a
Semiarian synod blasphemed the Holy Spirit.263
Similar proceedings characterized a
synod of Antioch at about the same time.264
Gregory of Nyssa having been
prevented by illness from appearing before the synod of Ancyra,
Eustathius and Demosthenes persisted in their efforts to wound Basil
through his brother, and summoned a synod at Nyssa itself, where
Gregory was condemned in his absence and deposed.265
He was not long afterwards
banished.266
| 266 Greg.,
Vit. Mac. ii. 192. | On the other
hand the Catholic bishops were not inactive. Synods were held
on their part, and at Iconium Amphilochius presided over a gathering
at which Basil was perhaps present himself, and where his treatise
on the Holy Spirit was read and approved.267
| 267 Ep.
ccii., cclxxii. Hefele, § 90. Mansi, iii.
502–506. There is some doubt as to the exact date of
this synod. cf. D.C.A. i. 807. | The Illyrian Council was a result
incommensurate with Basil’s passionate entreaties for the help
of the westerns. From the midst of the troubles which beset
the Eastern Church Basil appealed,268
as he had
appealed before,269
| 269 Ep. lxx.,
addressed in 371 to Damasus. | for the sympathy
and active aid of the other half of the empire. He was
bitterly chagrined at the failure of his entreaties for support, and
began to suspect that the neglect he complained of was due to
coldness and to pride.270
It has
seemed to some that this coldness in the West was largely due to
resentment at Basil’s non-recognition of the supremacy of the
Roman see.271
| 271 cf.
D.C.B. i. 294: “C’est esprit,
conciliant aux les orientaux jusqu’à soulever
l’intolérance orientale, est aussi inflexible avec les
occidentaux qu’avec le pouvoir impérial. On sent
dans ses lettres la révolte de l’orient qui réclame
ses prérogatives, ses droits d’ancienneté;
l’esprit d’indépendance de la Grèce, qui, si
elle supporte le joug matériel de Rome, refuse de reconnaitre
sa suprématie spirituelle.” Fialon, Et.
Hist. 133. | In truth the
supremacy of the Roman see, as it has been understood in later
times, was hardly in the horizon.272
No
bishop of Rome had even been present at Nicæa, or at Sardica,
where a certain right of appeal to his see was conceded. A
bishop of Rome signed the Sirmian blasphemy. No bishop of Rome
was present to save ‘the world’ from the lapse of
Ariminum. Julian “might seem to have forgotten that
there was such a city as Rome.”273
| 273 Milman,
Lat. Christ. i. 85. | The great intellectual Arian war was
fought out without any claim of Rome to speak. Half a century
after Basil’s death great orientals were quite unconscious of
this supremacy.274
| 274 cf.
Proleg to Theodoret in this series, p. 9, note. | At Chalcedon
the measure of the growing claim is aptly typified by the wish of
Paschasinus of Lilybæum, one of the representatives of Leo, to
be regarded as presiding, though he did not preside. The
supremacy is hardly in view even at the last of the four great
Councils.
In fact the appeal of Basil seems to have failed
to elicit the response he desired, not so much from the independent
tone of his letters, which was only in accordance with the recognised
facts of the age,275
| 275 A ses yeux,
l’Orient et l’Occident ne sont ils pas, deux
frères, dont les droits sont égaux, sans suprématie,
sans aînesse?” Fialon, Et. Hist.
p. 134. This is exactly what East and West were to most eyes,
and what they were asserted to be in the person of the two imperial
capitals by the Twenty-Eighth Canon of Chalcedon. cf.
Bright, Canons of the First Four General Councils, pp. 93,
192, and note on Theodoret in this series, p. 293. | as from occidental
suspicions of Basil’s orthodoxy,276
and
from the failure of men, who thought and wrote in Latin, to enter fully
into the controversies conducted in a more subtle tongue.277
| 277 cf. Ep.
ccxiv. § 4, p. 254. | Basil had taken every precaution to
ensure the conveyance of his letters by messengers of tact and
discretion. He had deprecated the advocacy of so simple-minded
and undiplomatic an ambassador as his brother Gregory.278
He had poured out his very soul in
entreaty.279
| 279 See
specially Ep. ccxlii. | But all was
unavailing. He suffered, and he had to suffer unsupported by a
human sympathy on which he thought he had a just claim.280
| 280
“Foiled in all his repeated demands; a deaf ear turned
to his most earnest entreaties; the council he had begged for not
summoned; the deputation he had repeatedly solicited unsent;
Basil’s span of life drew to its end amid blasted hopes and
apparently fruitless labours for the unity of the faith. It
was not permitted him to live to see the Eastern Churches, for the
purity of whose faith he had devoted all his powers, restored to
peace and unanimity.” Canon Venables, D.C.B. i.
295.
“He had to fare on as best he
might,—admiring, courting, but coldly treated by the Latin world,
desiring the friendship of Rome, yet wounded by her superciliousness,
suspected of heresy by Damasus, and accused by Jerome of
pride.” Newman, Church of the Fathers, p.
115. |
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 shew 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.281
| 281 Ep.
cclxviii. So Fialon, Ét. Hist. p. 149:
“On n’y trouve pas un mot sur la désastreuse
expédition de Julien, sur le honteux traité de Jovien, sur
la révolte de Procope.” At the same time the
argument from silence is always dangerous. It may be unfair to
charge Basil with indifference to great events, because we do not
possess his letters about them. | He may have written letters shewing
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,282
and the terrible
end of the unfortunate Valens.283
| 283 Theod. iv.
32. Amm. Marc. xxxi. 13. |
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 Cæsarea with the probable object of arranging the
succession.284
He had
submitted to the treatment of a course of natural hot baths, but with
small beneficial result.285
By 376, as he
playfully reminds Amphilochius, he had lost all his teeth.286
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 Cæsarea.
So passed away a leader of men in whose case the epithet
‘great’ is no conventional compliment. He shared with
his illustrious brother primate of Alexandria the honour of rallying
the Catholic forces in the darkest days of the Arian depression.
He was great as foremost champion of a great cause, great in
contemporary and posthumous influence, great in industry and
self-denial, great as a literary controversialist. The estimate
formed of him by his contemporaries is expressed in the generous, if
somewhat turgid, eloquence of the laudatory oration of the slighted
Gregory of Nazianzus. Yet nothing in Gregory’s
eulogy goes beyond the
expressions of the prelate who has seemed to some to be
“the wisest and holiest man in the East in the succeeding
century.”287
| 287 Kingsley,
Hypatia, chap. xxx. | Basil is
described by the saintly and learned Theodoret288
| 288 cf.
Gibbon, chap. xxi. | in terms that might seem exaggerated
when applied to any but his master, as the light not of
Cappadocia only, but of the world.289
| 289 Theod.,
H.E. iv. 16, and Ep. cxlvi. | To Sophronius290
| 290 Apud Photium
Cod. 231. | he is the “glory of the
Church.” To Isidore of Pelusium,291
he seems to speak as one
inspired. To the Council of Chalcedon he is emphatically a
minister of grace;292
| 292 cf.
Ceillier, vi. 8, 1. | to the second
council of Nicæa a layer of the foundations of
orthodoxy.293
His death
lacks the splendid triumph of the martyrdoms of Polycarp and
Cyprian. His life lacks the vivid incidents which make the
adventures of Athanasius an enthralling romance. He does
not attract the sympathy evoked by the unsophisticated simplicity
of Gregory his friend or of Gregory his brother. There does
not linger about his memory the close personal interest that
binds humanity to Augustine, or the winning loyalty and
tenderness that charm far off centuries into affection for
Theodoret. Sometimes he seems a hard, almost a sour
man.294
Sometimes
there is a jarring reminder of his jealousy for his own
dignity.295
Evidently
he was not a man who could be thwarted without a rupture of
pleasant relations, or slighted with impunity. In any
subordinate position he was not easy to get on with.296
| 296 e.g. his
relations with his predecessor. | But a man of strong will,
convicted that he is championing a righteous cause, will not
hesitate to sacrifice, among other things, the amenities that
come of amiable absence of self-assertion. To Basil, to
assert himself was to assert the truth of Christ and of His
Church. And in the main the identification was a true
one. Basil was human, and occasionally, as in the famous
dispute with Anthimus, so disastrously fatal to the typical
friendship of the earlier manhood, he may have failed to perceive
that the Catholic cause would not suffer from the existence of
two metropolitans in Cappadocia. But the great archbishop
could be an affectionate friend, thirsty for sympathy.297
And he was right in his estimate
of his position. Broadly speaking, Basil, more powerfully
than any contemporary official, worker, or writer in the Church,
did represent and defend through all the populous provinces of
the empire which stretched from the Balkans to the Mediterranean,
from the Ægean to the Euphrates, the cause whose failure or
success has been discerned, even by thinkers of no favourable
predisposition, to have meant death or life to the
Church.298
| 298 e.g.
T. Carlyle. “He perceived Christianity itself to
have been at stake. If the Arians had won, it would have
dwindled away into a legend.” J. A. Froude, Life of
Carlyle in London, ii. 462. | St. Basil
is duly canonized in the grateful memory, no less than in the
official bead-roll, of Christendom, and we may be permitted to
regret that the existing Kalendar of the Anglican liturgy has not
found room for so illustrious a Doctor in its somewhat niggard
list.299
| 299 In the Greek
Kalendar January 1, the day of the death, is observed in honour of
the saint. In the West St. Basil’s day is June 14, the
traditional date of the consecration. The martyrologies of
Jerome and Bede do not contain the name. The first mention is
ascribed by the Bollandists to Usuard. (Usuard’s
martyrology was composed for Charles the Bold at Paris.) In
the tenth century a third day was consecrated in the East to the
common commemoration of SS. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John
Chrysostom. | For the
omission some amends have lately300
been made in the erection of a statue of the great archbishop of
Cæsarea under the dome of the Cathedral St. Paul in
London.301
| 301 Basil
lived at the period when the relics of martyrs and saints were
beginning to be collected and honoured. (e.g. Ep.
cxcvii.) To Damasus, the bishop of Rome, whose active sympathy
he vainly strove to win, is mainly due the reverent rearrangement of
the Roman catacombs. (Roma Sotteranea, Northcote and
Brownlow, p. 97.) It was not to be expected that Basil’s
own remains should be allowed to rest in peace; but the gap between
the burial at Cæsarea and the earliest record of their supposed
reappearance is wide. There was a Church of St. Basil at
Bruges founded in 1187, which was believed to possess some of the
archbishop’s bones. These were solemnly translated in
1463 to the Church of St. Donatian, which disappeared at the time of
the French revolution. Pancirola (d. 1599) mentions a head, an
arm, and a rib, said to be Basil’s, among the treasures of
Rome. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
