Basil the Great, born at Caesarea in Cappadocia A. D. 329, was one
of the leading orators of the Christian Church in the fourth
century. He was a friend of the famous Gregory of Nazianzus, and
Gregory of Nyssa was his brother.
The spirit of his time was one of change. The foundations of the
Roman world were undermined. The old classical civilization of
beauty and order had reached its climax and reacted on itself; the
Greek worship of the graceful; the Roman love of the regular, the
strong, the martial, the magnificent, had failed to save the world
from a degradation which, under the degeneracy of the later Caesars,
had become indescribable. The early Christians, filled with a
profound conviction of the infernal origin of the corruption of the
decaying civilization they saw around them, were moved by such a
compelling desire to escape it as later times can never realize and
hardly imagine. Moved by this spirit, the earnest young men of the
time, educated as Basil was in the philosophy, the poetry, and the
science of the classical times, still felt that having this they
would lose everything unless they could escape the influences of the
world around them. They did not clearly discriminate between what
was within and without themselves. It was not clear to them whether
the corruption of an effete civilization was not the necessary
corruption of all human nature including their own. This doubt sent
men like Basil to the desert to attempt, by fasting and scourging,
to get such mastery over their bodies as to compel every rebellious
nerve and stubborn muscle to yield instant obedience to their
aspirations after a more than human perfection. If they never
attained their ideal; if we find them coming out of the desert, as
they sometimes did, to engage in controversies, often fierce and
unsaintly enough, we can see, nevertheless, how the deep emotions of
their struggle after a higher life made them the great orators they
were. Their language came from profound depths of feeling. Often
their very earnestness betrays them into what for later ages is
unintelligibility. Only antiquarians now can understand how deeply
the minds of the earlier centuries of the New Order, which saved
progress from going down into the bottomless pit of classical
decadence, were stirred by controversies over prepositions and
conjunctions. But if we remember that in all of it, the men who
are sometimes ridiculed as mere ascetics, mere pedants, were moved
by a profound sense of their duty to save a world so demoralized, so
shameless in the pursuit of everything sensual and base, that
nothing short of their sublime enthusiasm, their very madness of
contempt for the material and the sensual, could have saved it.
After studying in Constantinople and in Athens, the spirit of the
Reformers of his time took hold on Basil and, under the ascetic
impulse, he visited the hermits of Arabia and Asia Minor, hoping to
learn sanctity from them. He founded a convent in Pontus, which his
mother and sister entered. After his ordination as "Presbyter." he
was involved in the great Arian controversy, and the ability he
showed as a disputant probably had much to do with his promotion to
the bishopric of Caesarea. In meeting the responsibilities of that
office, his courage and eloquence made him famous. When threatened
by the Emperor Valens, he replied that having nothing but a few
books and his cloak, he did not fear confiscation of his goods; that
he could not be exiled, since the whole earth was the Lord's; that
torture and death would merely put an end to his labors and bring
him nearer to the God for whom he longed. He died at Caesarea
A. D. 379. Such men must be judged from their own standpoints. It is
worth much to understand them.
The sermon 'To the Fallen,' here used from Fish's translation, was
greatly admired by Fenelon, who calls it a masterpiece. It was
occasioned by a nun's breaking a vow of perpetual virginity.