PROLEGOMENA.

purity of ordination and the fitness of candidates.¹ Crowds of working people come to hear him preach before they go to their work for the day.² He travels distances which would be considered remarkable even in our modern age, which idolizes the great goddess Locomotion. He manages vast charitable and collegiate institutions. His correspondence is constant and complex. He seems to be the personification of the active, rather than the scholarly, bishop. Yet, all the while, he is writing tracts and treatises that are monuments to his industry, indicative of a memory stored with diverse learning, and of a daily, effective study of Holy Scripture.

Nevertheless, while thus actively engaged in fighting the battle of the faith and conscientiously discharging his high duties, he did not escape unjust accusations of cowardice—if not questionable orthodoxy—from men who should have known him better. On September 7th, likely in 371,³ the festival of St. Eupsychius was held. Basil preached the sermon, and among his listeners were many detractors.⁴ A few days after the festival, there was a dinner party at Nazianzus where Gregory was present, along with several distinguished friends of Basil. Among the guests was an unnamed man of religious dress and reputation who claimed to be a philosopher and spoke very harshly of Basil. He had heard the archbishop preach admirably at the festival regarding the Father and the Son, but he alleged that Basil slandered the Spirit.⁵ While Gregory boldly called the Spirit God, Basil, due to poor motives, refrained from any clear and distinct declaration of the divinity of the Third Person. This unfavorable view of Basil was the popular one at the dinner table, and Gregory was annoyed at his inability to convince the party that, while his own statements were of little importance, Basil had to weigh every word to avoid, if possible, the banishment hanging over his head. It was better to use a wise "economy"⁶ in preaching the truth than to proclaim it in such a way as to ensure the extinction of the light of true religion. Basil⁷ showed some natural distress and astonishment upon hearing that attacks against him were so readily accepted.⁸

It was at the close of this same year, 371,⁹ that Basil and his diocese suffered most severely from the hostility of the imperial government. Valens had never lost his antipathy toward Cappadocia. In 370, he decided to divide it into two provinces. Podandus, a poor little town at the foot of Mt. Taurus, was to be the capital of the new province, and half the administration was to be transferred there. Basil depicts in vivid terms the dismay and dejection of Cæsarea.¹⁰ He even considered traveling in person to the court to plead the cause of his people, and his conduct itself serves as a censure of those who would confine the sympathies of churchmen within rigid, clerical limits. The division was insisted upon, but eventually, Tyana was substituted for Podandus as the new capital; and it has been conjectured¹¹ that the act of kindness from the prefect mentioned in Ep. LXXVIII may have been this transfer, achieved through 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 barbarians¹² and fresh from the baptism of Eudoxius, Valens was eager to impose his creed on his subjects as he traveled leisurely toward Syria. It is said he shrank from an encounter with the famous primate of Cæsarea, fearing that one strong man's firmness might lead others to resist.¹³ Before him went Modestus, Prefect of the Prætorium, the minister of his severities,¹⁴ and before Modestus, like skirmishers in front of an advancing army, came a troop of Arian

¹ Ep. liii.
² Hex. Hom. iii. p. 65.
³ Maran, Vit. Bas. xviii. 4.
⁴ Greg. Naz., Ep. lviii.
⁵ original: "παρασύρειν." (to sweep away/slander/misrepresent)
⁶ original: "οἰκονομήθηναι." (to use economy/discretion)
⁷ Ep. lxxi.
⁸ Mr. C. F. H. Johnston (The Book of St. Basil the Great on the Holy Spirit), in noting that St. Basil in the De Sp. Sancto refrained from directly using the term "God" for the Holy Ghost, remarks that he also avoided the term "homoousion" (consubstantial) for the Son, "in accordance with his own opinion expressed in Ep. ix." In Ep. ix., however, he gives his reasons for preferring the homoousion. The epitome of the essay by C. G. Wuilcknis (Leipzig, 1724) on the economy or reserve of St. Basil is a valuable summary of the best defense for such reticence. It is truly pointed out that the only possible motive for Basil was the desire to serve God, for no one could suspect him of ambition, fear, or greed. If he avoided a particular phrase, he did not compromise doctrine. As Dr. Swete (Doctrine of the H. S., p. 64) puts it: "He knew that the opponents of the Spirit's Deity were watching their opportunity. Had the actual name of God been used in reference to the Third Person of the Trinity, they would have risen, and, on the plea of resisting blasphemy, expelled St. Basil from his see, which would then have been immediately filled by a Macedonian prelate. In private conversations with Gregory, Basil not only asserted again and again the Godhead of the Spirit, but even confirmed his statement with a solemn imprecation... [vowing] to be cut off from the Spirit himself if he did not worship the Spirit with the Father and Son as consubstantial and equal in honor." (Greg. Naz., Or. xliii.) In Letter viii. § 11 he distinctly calls the Spirit God. In the De S. Scto. (p. 12) Basil uses the word "economy" in the patristic sense, nearly equivalent to "incarnation."
⁹ Maran, Vit. Bas. xx. 1.
¹⁰ Epp. lxxiv., lxxv., lxxvi.
¹¹ Maran, Vit. Bas. xix. 3.
¹² Greg. Nyss., C. Eunom. i.
¹³ Theod. iv. 16.
¹⁴ Soc. iv. 16.