Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop who gave the Greek church its words for one God in three persons, argued the Holy Spirit into the creed, and built a town for the sick outside his own gates. + Christians who have never heard of Basil use his work every Sunday. When a congregation says that the Holy Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son, it is repeating the conclusion of an argument he spent the last decade of his life making, mostly against fellow Christians who thought he was going too far. When a theologian says that God is one being in three persons and means something precise by the two words, the precision is his. And when a hospital treats a patient who cannot pay, it is running, at a very long remove, on an idea he put up in brick on a scale nobody had tried before. He was born in Cappadocia, a bleak upland province in what is now central Turkey, around 330, though the year is a reconstruction from scattered remarks and the sources allow 329 or a little later. He died on the first of January in 379, worn out, at about forty-nine. In those years he made himself the most formidable churchman in the eastern half of the Roman empire, and he did it while running a diocese, the whole body of churches under one bishop, in a province the emperor had deliberately cut in half to weaken him. The signature fact about Basil is not a book. Outside the walls of Caesarea he laid out a complex of buildings for travellers, the destitute and the sick, with staff, physicians and workshops attached, and the name that stuck to the place was the Basileias, Basil’s place. His friend Gregory of Nazianzus, preaching a memorial for him three years after his death, called it a new city. Nothing on that scale had stood anywhere before.

(●) c. 330 AD: He was born into a Christian family that had kept the faith through a persecution, and that produced three bishops and a saint out of one household. + His father, also called Basil, taught rhetoric at Neocaesarea in Pontus, on the Black Sea coast; his mother Emmelia came from a wealthy family and, by the tradition the household kept, was the daughter of a martyr. They had somewhere around ten children, and the household is one of the strangest in Christian history for the sheer concentration of what came out of it. Basil became archbishop of Caesarea. His brother Gregory became bishop of Nyssa and one of the finest speculative minds the Greek church ever produced. Another brother, Peter, became bishop of Sebaste. Their eldest sister, Macrina, turned the family estate into a monastic community and taught all of them. The faith he was raised in had recently cost the family something. His grandmother Macrina the Elder had lived through the persecutions of the previous generation, and Basil, defending himself decades later against the charge that he had invented a novel theology, wrote that the teaching about God which he had received as a boy from his mother and his grandmother Macrina he had only held more firmly since (Letter 223). It is worth pausing on that. The most sophisticated Greek theologian of the fourth century said that what he believed about God he learned from two women at home, before he ever saw a lecture hall. He was also ill for most of his life, and he wrote about it. His letters describe his own health with the weary precision of a man who has stopped expecting to feel well, and that long acquaintance with being unwell may be part of why he understood the sick as well as he did.

(●) c. 351 AD: Athens made him a celebrated rhetorician and gave him the friendship he would keep for life and one day wound. + A wealthy provincial boy in the fourth century was educated by travelling, and Basil travelled a long way for it: schools at Caesarea in Cappadocia, then Constantinople, then Athens, still the most prestigious address in the Greek-speaking world for a young man who intended to make his living by speech. He stayed there something like five years. Athens gave him two people. One was a fellow Cappadocian named Gregory, from the small town of Nazianzus, a shy and literary man temperamentally his opposite, who later wrote that the two of them seemed "to have one soul, inhabiting two bodies" (Oration 43.20). It is one of the most quoted descriptions of friendship in ancient literature, and it was written after the friendship had been badly damaged, which is part of what makes it worth reading. The other was a fellow student Gregory says he took the measure of at the time and did not trust: a nephew of the emperor Constantine named Julian, who was quietly leaving the Christianity he had been raised in and would spend his short reign trying to restore the old gods. Three young men in the same Athenian schools in the same year, and one of them would go on to try to undo what the other two spent their lives building. Basil came home to Cappadocia a success, and by his own later account insufferable with it. He took a teaching post and he was admired for it. He was also, in the phrase he used about himself afterwards, a man who had spent his youth on a wisdom that God had shown up as foolishness.

(●) c. 356 AD: His sister told him what his education had cost him, and he went looking for monks. + Macrina had by then given up a planned marriage, persuaded her widowed mother to live on a footing of equality with the household’s maids, sharing the same food and the same bedding, and turned the family property at Annisa in Pontus into a community living in common. When her celebrated younger brother came home from Athens full of himself, she went to work on him. Their brother Gregory of Nyssa, writing her life, says plainly that she drew him over to the philosophic life. He does not mean the professor’s life. He means the ascetic one: a life stripped down on purpose, little food, few possessions, long hours of prayer, and no career. Something took. Basil was baptized, which in that century was often postponed for years, and then he did an odd and very characteristic thing: instead of theorizing about the ascetic life he went to look at it. He travelled through Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia to find the men who had gone into the desert, and he watched how they lived. He came back convinced of one thing above all, and it was not what most people brought back from the desert. He decided that the solitary life was a mistake. Then he settled on the far side of the river Iris from his sister’s community, and wrote to Gregory of Nazianzus a letter urging him to come, describing the place with a real estate agent’s enthusiasm: a high wooded ridge, a plain below, a river, wildflowers, no road worth mentioning (Letter 14). Gregory came, and the two of them spent a few years reading, praying and, by tradition, compiling an anthology of the great third-century scholar Origen. Gregory looked back on those years for the rest of his life as the best he had known, and wrote to Basil afterwards asking who would give him back the psalmodies and the vigils (Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 6).

(●) 368 AD: Famine came to Cappadocia, and the priest sold his inheritance and served in the food line himself. + He had been ordained a priest at Caesarea in the early 360s, quarrelled with his bishop almost at once, and gone back to Pontus rather than fight it out. It was Gregory of Nazianzus who eventually talked him into coming back, and who patched up the relationship between the two men. Then, in 368, the rains failed. What followed is the part of his life that everyone who knew him seems to have remembered first. Grain was in the province, in private stores, and the men who held it were waiting for the price to climb. Basil preached at them, in sermons that still survive and are still uncomfortable to read, and then he sold the property he had inherited and used the money to buy food. Gregory of Nazianzus, who had no reason to flatter him on this point and every reason to be honest about a friend he sometimes resented, describes him gathering the starving of every kind, men and women, infants and the old, and setting out food, and then not standing back from it: he attended to their bodies and their souls himself, treating them with respect as well as feeding them (Oration 43.35). Notice what he was not. He was not yet a bishop, and a priest had no formal authority over the province’s grain at all; he could not requisition a single sack of it. What he had was a pulpit and land of his own to sell, and with those two things he shamed a district into opening its barns.

(●) 370 AD: Made archbishop, he told the emperor’s prefect that he had probably never met a bishop before. + Basil was consecrated archbishop of Caesarea in the summer of 370, in a contested election, and inherited a fight. The emperor Valens held that the Son is not God in the full sense, and was travelling his eastern provinces bringing bishops into line by the ordinary imperial means: exile for the stubborn, promotion for the agreeable. In the winter of 371 to 372 his praetorian prefect, Modestus, reached Caesarea and sent for Basil. A praetorian prefect was the emperor’s senior civil officer over one of the great regional divisions of the empire, and Modestus held the eastern one, which covered every province Valens ruled: the man a provincial bishop would ordinarily see once in a lifetime and hope not to. Gregory of Nazianzus tells what happened, at second hand and years afterwards (Oration 43.48 to 50). Modestus ran through the threats in order: confiscation of property, exile, torture, death. Basil answered them in order. Confiscation is nothing to a man who owns a few worn-out books and the clothes he stands in. Exile is impossible for a man who is confined by no limit of place. Torture would not last, given the body he had. Death would only send him the sooner to God. Modestus said that no one had ever spoken to him like that. Basil replied that perhaps he had never met a bishop before. The prefect went back to the emperor and, according to Gregory, told him this was a man who would not be moved. Valens attended the liturgy at Caesarea and left Basil in his see, the city and territory a bishop holds. The revenge came later, and it came through the filing system rather than the sword. Basil was not merely bishop of Caesarea; he was metropolitan, the bishop of a provincial capital, which meant that every other bishop in the province came under his oversight. So in 372 Valens split the province of Cappadocia in two. At a stroke, half the bishops who had answered to Basil answered to somebody else instead, and no soldier had to be sent anywhere to do it. Basil’s answer was to make more bishops. He created new sees along the new border and filled them with men he trusted, which is how his brother Gregory became bishop of Nyssa and his best friend became, very unwillingly, bishop of a dusty road junction called Sasima.

(●) c. 372 AD: He built a settlement for the sick and the homeless outside Caesarea, and the name that stuck to it was Basil’s place. + Somebody in the provincial government complained that the archbishop was building on a scale that was the government’s business, and Basil wrote back to the governor, a man named Elias, in a tone of injured innocence that is very hard to read with a straight face. He admits to putting up a fine church, with a house for the bishop and quarters for the clergy, all of which, he points out helpfully, the governor and his staff are welcome to use. And then comes the real business of the letter, put as a question: what harm, he asks, is anyone doing by putting up a house where strangers can be received, travellers and the sick alike, and where they are given what they actually need, physicians, nursing, transport and someone to see them on their way? (Letter 94) What he had built was a compound: church, hospice, quarters for the poor, buildings for the sick with medical staff attached, workshops where people could learn a trade, and housing for those who ran it. Gregory of Nazianzus, describing it three years after his death, tells his hearers to go a little way out of the city and look at the new city (Oration 43.63). Its most striking feature was a ward for lepers, people the ancient world put outside the walls and left there, and Gregory says Basil went among them and greeted them as brothers. Nothing in the pagan world matched it. Rome had military hospitals for soldiers and slaves, and temples where the sick slept hoping for a cure, but a permanent institution built to nurse anyone who arrived, funded by the church and staffed on purpose, is a Christian invention. Basil was not the first Christian to try it, and his old mentor Eustathius had opened a hostel for the sick at Sebaste years earlier, but the Basileias was the first on anything like that scale and the first we can describe in detail. Basil’s own word for it was ptochotropheion, a place where the poor are fed. The name that stuck, and that later generations used, was the Basileias.

(●) 379 AD: He died at about forty-nine, two years before the council that gave him what he had asked for. + He died on the first of January in 379, having been a bishop for eight and a half years and ill for most of them. Gregory of Nazianzus did not come to the funeral, and gave his health as the reason. Three years later he stood up at Caesarea and delivered a memorial oration for him that runs to eighty-two sections and is one of the finest pieces of prose in the Greek language. Both of those facts belong to the same friendship. The doctrinal war he had spent his whole time as bishop fighting was still going on when he died. The emperor Valens had been killed at Adrianople the previous August, which changed everything, but Basil did not live long enough to see what the change would produce. In 381 the emperor Theodosius called a council at Constantinople. It is counted as the second ecumenical council, meaning a council summoned to speak for the whole church rather than for one region, and it added to the creed of Nicaea a clause about the Holy Spirit that says, in substance, exactly what Basil had spent six years arguing. His friend Gregory presided over part of it. His brother Gregory of Nyssa was there. Within a generation his letters were being collected, his rules were being translated into Latin, and his name in the Greek church had acquired the word it has carried ever since: ho megas, the Great.

What He Taught

(T1) God is one what and three whos, and confusing those two questions is where the arguments go wrong. + Think about how you would answer two different questions about the man at the next desk. What is he? A human being, the same answer you would give about anybody in the room. Who is he? Andrew, and there is exactly one of him. The two questions do not compete, and nobody thinks it is a contradiction that the office contains one human nature and forty distinct people. That is the distinction Basil made, and the reason he had to make it was a fifty-year mess about words. Greek had two terms that had been used more or less interchangeably. Ousia means being or essence, what a thing is. Hypostasis literally means what stands underneath, and had been used to mean roughly the same thing. The Council of Nicaea in 325 had even treated them as equivalent in a passing sentence, and the result was fifty years of Christians accusing each other of heresy while meaning the same thing. Say "three hypostaseis" to a man who heard it as "three beings" and you had just confessed three gods. Say "one hypostasis" to a man who heard it as "one person" and you had just erased the distinction between the Father and the Son. Basil gave the two words a fixed division of labour and pressed it until the Greek church took it up. Ousia is the general: what is common, what all three share, and there is one of it. Hypostasis is the particular: the distinguishing marks that make this one this one and not another, and there are three. So: one ousia, three hypostaseis. Latin theology, arriving at the same place by another road, said one substantia, three personae, and English says one being, three persons. None of this explains the Trinity, and Basil never claimed it did. What it does is stop the two questions from being answered with the same word, which is a smaller achievement that made the larger one discussable. Greek theology has been talking about God on the grammar he settled ever since.

(Q) "The distinction between οὐσία and ὑπόστασις is the same as that between the general and the particular; as, for instance, between the animal and the particular man." + Source: Basil, Letter 236.6 (Blomfield Jackson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The two Greek words the translator leaves untranslated are ousia and hypostasis. Basil is writing to Amphilochius, the young bishop of Iconium who kept sending him hard questions, and he answers this one the way a good teacher does, with an example anyone can check: animal is what a thing is, and this particular man is who (T1).

(T2) The Holy Spirit is not God’s servant but is ranked with the Father and the Son, and the church’s own prayers had been saying so all along. + The fight over the Son was more or less won by the 370s. The fight over the Spirit was not, and it produced a party its opponents called the Pneumatomachi, the Spirit-fighters, who were happy to say the Son is fully God and then drew the line: the Spirit, they held, is the highest of created ministering spirits, a servant rather than the Lord. Many of them were serious and devout, which is what made the argument painful. Basil’s own former mentor Eustathius of Sebaste ended up on that side. The quarrel came to a head over two small words in a prayer. Every service closed with a doxology, the short formula of praise that sends a congregation home, and Basil had begun ending his with glory to the Father with the Son with the Holy Spirit, alongside the older form, glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. You may well be thinking that nobody could start a war over a preposition. But listen to the older form again: it can be heard as a chain of command, God at the top, the Son the route his gifts travel, the Spirit the medium they arrive in. The newer one cannot be heard that way at all, because things named alongside each other are being treated as equals. People objected, and in 375 Amphilochius asked him to justify himself, so Basil wrote a book. On the Holy Spirit argues the case from what Christians already do rather than from a proof text. Jesus commanded baptism into one name held by three (Matthew 28:19), and no one is baptized into the name of a creature. The Spirit does what only God does: he sanctifies, he searches the depths of God, he distributes gifts as he wills (1 Corinthians 12:11), and lying to him is lying to God (Acts 5:3-4). Above all, the Spirit is worshipped, and the church has always worshipped him, which is either idolatry or an admission. Notice one thing Basil does not do. He never writes the flat sentence "the Spirit is God," and he never applies to the Spirit the word homoousios, of the same being, that Nicaea had applied to the Son. He argued instead that the Spirit is to be ranked with the Father and the Son and given the same honour, and let readers draw the obvious conclusion. He thought a sentence that would harden the moderates against him was a sentence badly spent. Not everyone agreed, then or later, and the question of whether he was right to hold his tongue is a real charge against him.

(Q) "For if our Lord, when enjoining the baptism of salvation, charged His disciples to baptize all nations in the name ‘of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,’ not disdaining fellowship with Him, and these men allege that we must not rank Him with the Father and the Son, is it not clear that they openly withstand the commandment of God?" + Source: Basil, On the Holy Spirit 10.24 (Blomfield Jackson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). "These men" are the Spirit-fighters. The argument is that Christ himself put the three names together in the one sentence every convert hears at the font, and that a Christian who then refuses to put them together in prayer is contradicting the person he is being baptized into (T2).

(T3) Nobody can practise Christian love alone, so the monk belongs in a household and not in a cave. + By the time Basil went looking for them, the desert fathers of Egypt had made the solitary life the prestige form of Christian seriousness: a man alone in a cell, fasting, praying, wrestling with himself. Basil admired the courage and came home unconvinced, and his objection was not that solitude is too hard but that it makes most of Christianity impossible to do. Run through the commands and see for yourself. Wash one another’s feet. Bear one another’s burdens. Be patient. Be humble. Every one of them takes two people, and a man by himself cannot obey a single one of them; he can only sit in his cell and think warmly about obeying them. Worse, the hermit has no one to tell him he is wrong, so the one sin he is guaranteed to keep is the belief that he has no sins left. And the practical commands break down in the same way: alone, you cannot both sit with the sick and take in the traveller, so one of them goes undone. So Basil wrote rules for communities, and the form he chose tells you a good deal about the man. Not a legal code, but a set of questions with answers, fifty-five longer ones and over three hundred shorter, most of them built out of Scripture rather than out of his own authority. His communities worked, ate and prayed together at fixed hours, kept their property in common, took in orphans, ran the guest-houses and the hospitals, and stayed attached to the ordinary church under the bishop rather than floating off into the desert as a spiritual elite. Manual labour was expected of everyone. Extreme fasting was discouraged, on the ground that a man who has wrecked his health cannot work. That last point is the whole difference in miniature. For Basil the ascetic life is not a spiritual sport. It is a way of getting the commandments actually done, and a monk who has fasted himself into uselessness has missed the point twice over.

(Q) "For how shall he manifest his humility, when he has no one to whom he can show himself the inferior? How shall he manifest compassion, cut off from the society of many? How will he exercise himself in patience, if no one opposes his wishes?" + Source: Basil, The Longer Rules, Question 7.4 (translation in J. C. Ayer, A Source Book for Ancient Church History, 1913). The Rules are written as questions put by monks and answered by Basil, and Question 7 asks whether a man who withdraws from the world should live alone or with others. This is the end of the answer: three questions Basil expects nobody to be able to answer (T3).

(T4) What you keep beyond your own need is not charity withheld but theft, because the bread in the store already belongs to the hungry. + Basil preached on the parable of the rich man whose land produced so well that he decided to pull down his barns and build bigger ones (Luke 12:16-21), and he did something with it that his hearers plainly did not expect. He did not attack the man for being rich. He attacked him for his pronouns. Read the parable again and count them: my grain, my goods, my barns, a whole speech delivered to himself in which no other human being ever appears. The man is not called a fool for owning things. He is called a fool because in a hungry province he could not think of one other person worth spending a sentence on. From there Basil takes a step that startled the fourth century and still startles readers. Bread kept in a store while a man goes hungry is not the owner’s bread, it is the hungry man’s; the coat in the chest while a man is cold is his coat; the shoes rotting unworn belong to the barefoot. Failing to give is not a shortfall in charity. It is theft, and the goods are already someone else’s (Homily 6, "I Will Tear Down My Barns," and Homily 7, "To the Rich"). He preached this in the famine, to men who could have opened their stores that afternoon. Then he did the thing that makes him hard to dismiss as a scold. He sold what he had inherited, and when he became archbishop he put up the Basileias with the money of a church he had persuaded, and staffed it, and went into the leper ward himself. The reasoning behind it is not complicated and does not depend on any economic theory. God gave the world’s goods for the world’s use; the sick and the stranger have a claim on the church as of right, not as a favour; and a bishop who preaches that and then hands the sick a coin at the door has not understood his own sermon.

(Q) "But to whom do we do any harm by building a place of entertainment for strangers, both for those who are on a journey and for those who require medical treatment on account of sickness, and so establishing a means of giving these men the comfort they want, physicians, doctors, means of conveyance, and escort?" + Source: Basil, Letter 94, to Elias, governor of the province (Blomfield Jackson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Somebody had reported the building works to the provincial administration, and Basil is answering the complaint by describing what is actually going up. The sentence is the earliest detailed description we have of a Christian hospital, written by the man who was paying for it (T4).

(T5) The universe had a beginning, and it was made as a school. + One Lent, apparently preaching morning and evening to a congregation of working men before they went to their jobs, Basil took the first chapter of Genesis a phrase at a time and produced nine sermons that are still read, the Hexaemeron, a title that just means the six days. They are full of the natural history of his day, sea urchins and cranes and the way a vine takes hold, and they are the reason he is one of the few fourth-century theologians a modern reader can pick up and enjoy. The first sermon takes on the position nearly every educated Greek held: that the visible universe has always been here. Aristotle had argued the world is eternal, and to a cultivated audience "in the beginning God created" sounded not so much false as naive. Basil’s reply is that a thing which is always changing and always coming to be is not the sort of thing that can have been here forever, and that the philosophers who reason otherwise have quietly made the world into the God they say they cannot find. Do not imagine, he tells his congregation, that the visible world is without a beginning (Hexaemeron 1.3). Time itself began when the world did, and the maker is outside it. The other half of the argument is what the world is for, and here he refuses to be merely cosmological. This world was made as a place where souls are taught and learn to know God: not a machine that happens to contain us, and not a prison the soul must escape, but a training ground, deliberately built, temporary on purpose. A reader who knows Plato will hear an answer to him. Plato’s craftsman shaped material that was already lying there. Basil’s God makes the material too, and makes it good, and gives it a beginning and a purpose (Genesis 1:1; Hebrews 11:3).

(Q) "To this world at last it was necessary to add a new world, both a school and training place where the souls of men should be taught and a home for beings destined to be born and to die." + Source: Basil, Hexaemeron 1.5 (Blomfield Jackson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Basil has just described the timeless order that existed before the material universe, and this is the sentence in which the visible world arrives. It is a striking way to say what a cosmos is for: the place where creatures who begin and end are taught (T5).

(Q) "To what then shall I liken our present condition? It may be compared, I think, to some naval battle which has arisen out of time old quarrels, and is fought by men who cherish a deadly hate against one another." + Source: Basil, On the Holy Spirit 30.76 (Blomfield Jackson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). He is describing the state of the churches in his own lifetime, and the picture runs on for pages: rival fleets in a rising storm, the crews fighting each other while the sea takes them all, the din so great that no signal can be heard. It is the honest verdict of a man who spent his episcopate in that noise and died before it lifted.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The clause about the Spirit that congregations still recite is the conclusion of his book, reached two years after he was dead. + The creed most churches say on a Sunday is not the creed of Nicaea in 325. That one dealt with the Son at length and disposed of the Spirit in a single short clause, "and in the Holy Spirit," because in 325 nobody was arguing about him yet. The creed in use now is the one the Council of Constantinople put out in 381, and its expanded paragraph on the Spirit says that he is the Lord and giver of life, that he proceeds from the Father, and that together with the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. Read that last phrase beside On the Holy Spirit and the debt is plain. Worshipped and glorified together with is Basil’s argument in the council’s words: not a definition of the Spirit’s nature, which is the sentence he declined to write, but a ruling about honour, which is the ground he chose to fight on. The council reached his conclusion by his route. He was not there. He had died in January 379, and the bishops who carried the argument into the council were the two men closest to him: his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, who presided over part of it and who did say flatly that the Spirit is God, and his brother Gregory of Nyssa. The three of them are known together as the Cappadocian Fathers, and it is fair to say that Basil built the vocabulary (T1), Gregory of Nyssa worked out its metaphysics, and Gregory of Nazianzus preached it into the creed.

(†) His rule and his hospital became two institutions the Christian world has never stopped using. + Eastern monasticism has essentially one rule, and it is his. Monks of the Greek, Slavic and Middle Eastern churches still live under the Longer and Shorter Rules or under later codes built on them, which is a continuity of about sixteen hundred years. In the West the influence came by translation: Rufinus of Aquileia put the ascetic works into Latin around 397, less than twenty years after Basil died, and they circulated widely enough that when Benedict of Nursia closed his own Rule in the sixth century by pointing his monks to further reading, the one other rule he named, after Scripture and the conferences and lives of the desert fathers, was the rule of our holy father Basil (Rule 73). The hospital travelled the same way. What Basil built at Caesarea was copied at Constantinople, at Antioch, in the Latin West by the fifth century, and eventually in the monastic infirmaries that were the only medicine most of medieval Europe had. Historians of medicine are careful here, and so should anyone be: Rome had infirmaries for soldiers and for slaves, and there were healing shrines. What did not exist before was a permanent, staffed institution whose reason for existing was that the sick poor have a claim on it. That idea is Christian, and the Basileias is where it first took a shape we can describe in detail. There is a reason the two travelled together. In Basil’s hands they were the same project: a community organised so that the commandments can actually be carried out (T3), with the hungry and the sick at the door as the test of whether they are (T4).

(†) He told Christian boys to go on reading the pagans, and a thousand years later the humanists took him at his word. + Late in life Basil wrote a short address to his nephews and other young men about how to profit from Greek literature, and it settled a question that had been genuinely open. Christians were reading Homer, Plato and the tragedians in school because that is what school was, and many serious believers thought this was a scandal, since the poets are full of gods behaving worse than the men who worship them. Basil’s answer is calm and practical. Take what is useful and leave the rest, the way you gather roses and avoid the thorns, or the way bees work a field, settling on the flowers that serve and passing over the others. Read the pagans for what they get right about courage, self-control and truthfulness, treat their poetry as training for the harder reading that is Scripture, and refuse the parts that are simply bad. A man who had studied at Athens, and had never pretended otherwise, was giving Christian permission for exactly the education he had received. The little book had an afterlife nobody could have predicted. Leonardo Bruni translated it into Latin at the start of the fifteenth century, and it became one of the most copied and printed texts of the Renaissance, the standard answer handed to anyone who objected that Christians had no business with pagan authors. Erasmus and the humanist schoolmasters leaned on it. For anyone arguing that faith and learning are not enemies, it is one of the load-bearing texts in the tradition, and a bishop who was up to his neck in a doctrinal war found time to write it.

(†) He would not say the plain sentence about the Spirit, and he handled his closest friend the way an administrator handles a resource. + Two charges, and both were made against him while he was alive by people who loved him. - The silence. Basil never wrote "the Spirit is God" and never called the Spirit homoousios with the Father, and he knew people had noticed. He defended the omission as prudence: a phrase that would drive the waverers into the opposing camp costs more than it gains, and the ground of honour and worship carried the same conclusion with fewer casualties. A monk at a dinner party said in front of Gregory that Basil’s words were a betrayal of the faith, and Gregory wrote and told him so (Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 58). Even Gregory, defending him in the memorial oration, has to defend him, which tells you the criticism was standing (Oration 43.68 to 69). Gregory’s own answer was that Basil was buying time for a church that would have lost the Spirit altogether if its best defender had been deposed, and there is force in that. But the case against is not trivial either, and Christians who think a true sentence is owed plainly whatever the cost have a real quarrel with him here. - Sasima. When Valens split the province in 372, Basil created new sees along the border and staffed them with men he could trust, and he pushed Gregory of Nazianzus into one of them. Sasima was a road junction with three highways, no water worth drinking and nothing else. Gregory did not want it, said so, was consecrated anyway under pressure from Basil and from his own father, and by his own account never took up residence. He wrote about it bitterly for the rest of his life. Basil got a diocese held and lost the trust of the person who had known him longest, and the primary sources do not offer any way of reading it in which he comes out well. Neither charge touches what he taught, and both are worth stating, because the alternative is a bishop with the interesting parts filed off. The man who faced down Modestus and the man who used his best friend as a piece on a board are the same man, and the record has both.