Loyola Press has posted full text of my introduction to the Loyola Classics edition of Hilda Prescott’s brilliant romance Son of Dust, set in eleventh-century Normandy. My friend Jim Manney (the original acquisitions editor for my book The Fathers of the Church) also blogged his insights on the novel.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review sizes up a couple of new books for patristics nerds …

The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship, by Megan Hale Williams (reviewed here).

Tradition and Theology in St John Cassian (Oxford Early Christian Studies), by A.M.C. Casiday (reviewed here).

Hat tip on the reviews: Rogue Classicism.

Jason Adkins, an attorney from St. Paul, Minnesota, interviewed me for The Catholic Servant newspaper. Here’s his article, titled “Always Timely Witnesses: Pope Benedict Highlights the Church Fathers.”

By dedicating his recent Wednesday audiences to the Apostles and the Church Fathers, Pope Benedict XVI has indicated to the Church that sometimes the “who” of the Faith is just as important to the “what” of the Faith.

The Holy Father regularly returns to the theme that Christianity is an event—an encounter with the person of Christ. It seems rather appropriate then that the Church and her members often come to know the person of Christ through other persons, particularly His “co-workers of the truth”—the Apostles and their successors. (Incidentally, this is the papal motto.)

In singling out the Church Fathers for deeper reflection, the Holy Father is encouraging the Church to re-encounter these great teachers that we may come to know our Lord in deeper friendship, and enter into the Trinitarian life of God.

For a closer look at the Church Fathers, The Catholic Servant turned to noted apologist Mike Aquilina. Aquilina is vice-president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, and has hosted six television series on EWTN. He is author or editor of more than a dozen books on Catholic history, doctrine and devotion including The Fathers of the Church (Our Sunday Visitor, 2006) and The Resilient Church (Word Among Us, 2007).

The Catholic Servant: Pope Benedict has dedicated his recent Wednesday audiences to the Church fathers. Who are the Church fathers, and why is the pope pointing us in their direction?

Aquilina: The Fathers are the important teachers of the earliest centuries of Christianity—from the time of the Apostles until about a century after the rise of Islam. Most of the Fathers are venerated as saints.

Hans Urs von Balthasar noted a certain youthfulness and freshness in their works. The pope certainly recognizes those qualities, and he surely hopes we’ll all catch the spirit.

Pope Benedict is also an experienced teacher, and he knows that the ancient world casts a spell on modern minds. People are fascinated by Christian antiquity. That’s why there’s so much interest in The Da Vinci Code, and the Gospel of Judas, and the alleged tomb of Jesus’ family.

Antiquity is attractive, appealing, and it always has been. Savvy marketers know that, and so do savvy teachers like the pope.

The Catholic Servant: On what aspects of the Church fathers has the pope particularly focused?

Aquilina: In general, he seems most interested in their biblical interpretation and spiritual counsel, especially regarding prayer. He also highlights each Father’s contribution to the development of doctrine and theology. But it’s not all heady stuff. He’s careful to tease out what is distinctive and attractive in the personality of each man.

The Catholic Servant: Are the Church Fathers notable as great theologians and significant historical figures, or are they in some way authoritative as well?

Aquilina: Yes, the Fathers are important theologians, historical figures and even great intercessors. But the works of the Fathers, unlike the books of the Bible, are neither inspired nor inerrant; and, unlike the popes, the Fathers do not teach infallibly.

In fact, they often disagree with one another, and some of them didn’t get along very well. St. Jerome argued against St. John Chrysostom; St. Jerome argued with St. Augustine; St. Jerome accused St. Ambrose of plagiarism. In fact, St. Jerome had disagreements with almost everyone he met.

But the Council of Trent declared that, when there is a “consensus of the Fathers” on a particular doctrine or interpretation of Scripture, then the position of the Fathers must be held as true.

Cardinal Newman described the Fathers as “honest informants” who bear authority, but not a sufficient authority in themselves. Their words bear testimony to something that precedes them, something greater than them, a patrimony that they wanted to safeguard for the next generation.

For the earliest Fathers, like Polycarp, that inheritance was the living voice of the Apostles. Polycarp heard the Gospel from John the Evangelist and passed it directly to Irenaeus, who passed it to Hippolytus, and so it has come down to us.

The Fathers witness to a living, teaching Church — the magisterium that they recognized then, we do today.

The Catholic Servant: What is the connection between the Church fathers and Sacred Tradition?

Aquilina: The Catechism (n. 688) describes the Fathers as “always timely witnesses” to Tradition. We don’t say that their writings “are” the Tradition. Their writings witness to the Gospel that is unwritten, but passed down in the Church. They’re witnesses in the court of history.

For example, we want to be faithful and to worship in the way that Christians have always worshipped. Well, how do we know anything about ancient Christian worship? And how do we know that it was anything like our worship today? We know because the Fathers bear witness to it.

The same goes for the way we divide up labor and recognize authority within the Church. We want to be faithful and live as our ancestors did, going all the way back to the apostles.

So how do we know that they had bishops, priests, deacons, and a pope? Because the Fathers, from the very first generations, bear witness to the Church’s hierarchical order. St. Clement of Rome wrote it up in some detail before the year 96 A.D. St. Ignatius confirmed it in 107 A.D. And the same teaching recurs in every generation afterward.

The later Fathers—many of whom were bishops themselves—often made appeals to the Pope. Athanasius did, and so did Basil, Chyrsostom, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria.

Tradition isn’t merely a collection of antiques. The faith of our Fathers is living still. The Fathers bear witness to it, just as we bear witness for future generations.

The Catholic Servant: What can the Church fathers teach us about the task of the theologian?

Aquilina: To desire always to teach what the Catholic Church teaches. Some of the Fathers were speculative theologians, and some of them—especially early in history—stated important doctrines imprecisely or even erroneously.

Origen is a prime example. This prolific author was among the first to employ the terms of Greek philosophy in his reflection on the truth of revelation. His work was full of trial and occasional error.

But he repeatedly emphasized his desire to teach only what the Catholic Church taught, and he urged his students and readers to look first to the Church. Origen labored through a long life. In his old age, he was tortured for the faith, and he died from the injuries.

Some later Fathers considered him an arch-heretic, and councils even condemned some propositions attributed to him. But other Fathers—especially the Cappadocians Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen—revered Origen’s teaching. Christian thinkers continued to find inspiration in his work, and his memory was somewhat rehabilitated in the last century. Recent popes have taken to quoting him.

I think it is significant that Pope Benedict dedicated not one, but two of his Wednesday audiences to the life and work of Origen; and in doing so he uttered not a single critical word, but rather held him up as an intellectual and spiritual master. How can that be? Because Origen wanted only to think in the Church, and think with the Church.

Theologians may speculate, but they must also be held accountable. If they’re teachers or writers, they should, like Origen, make clear distinctions between the Church’s teachings and their own opinions.

The Catholic Servant: Which Church fathers have been particularly influential on Pope Benedict and why?

Aquilina: The Holy Father is a biblical theologian, and he often returns to the great biblical interpreters and preachers. His doctoral dissertation was on Augustine, and he has never strayed far from the bishop of Hippo.

But he also shows eclectic interests in other figures from antiquity: Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian and Gregory of Nyssa. He has a profound knowledge of the ancient liturgies and the commentators on the liturgy. He has even written rather movingly of the Church’s enemies, such as Julian the Apostate.

For Pope Benedict, the ancient Fathers are teachers and, in a very real sense, contemporaries. Now he’s helping us to acquire that same sense of the Fathers.

He said: “The acquisition of Christian books is necessary for those who can use them. For the mere sight of these books renders us less inclined to sin, and incites us to believe more firmly in righteousness.”

I’m not making this up just to justify my expenses to my wife. It’s in this wonderful book, on page 58.

Thanks to Gretchen the book addict, who sent me off in search of that quote.

Today’s my twenty-second wedding anniversary. What follows are the words of St. John Chrysostom that I used to dedicate my book The Fathers of the Church to my wife Terri. I published them here on Valentine’s Day, but I never tire of repeating some things.

An intelligent, discreet, and pious young woman is worth more than all the money in the world. Tell her that you love her more than your own life, because this present life is nothing, and that your only hope is that the two of you pass through this life in such a way that, in the world to come, you will be united in perfect love.

Danny Garland has posted his excellent paper on The Church Fathers’ Marian Interpretation of the Old Testament.

The Wall Street Journal ran a fine appreciation of Hagia Sophia, A Beautiful Confusion. Excerpts:

The great Byzantine Emperor Justinian — who smote the barbarians, codified the laws and secured the empire’s borders — built the church from 532 to 537. (Actually, he rebuilt on the site of one recently destroyed by riots and fire.) He fully purposed that it stand as a formidable emblem of faith and power, proclaiming Eastern Orthodoxy as the inheritor of the mantle of Rome in the city of Constantine…

Justinian manifestly never intended Hagia Sophia to have a human scale and informally user-friendly feel. The main communicants, after all, were monks, priests, bureaucrats, noblemen and the royal retinue. He did, however, envision it as magnificently monumental, which is precisely how it feels even today in its deracinated, tourist-infested incarnation. In our time, we often see lofty atriums around us in hotels and office buildings, but the size and height of Justinian’s dome was unprecedented, remained unparalleled for a millennium until Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s, and still seems astonishing at some 15 stories high.

One’s first impression upon entering the central nave (the main space) is of Rembrandt-hued cavernous gloom paneled by shades of marble and studded with huge looming pillars, some borrowed from pagan sites. Veined gray marble, pocked greenish marble, pietra dure in walls and floors, pillars whose marble seems to have flowed with time like thick antique glass, surround the onlooker. Airy radiance dissipates the gloom as the eye travels up past the windowed galleries to the gold-painted ceiling, to the great dome raised on semidomes and arches, finally to the sun-trap of the cupola. One contemporary observed that it all seemed “not illuminated by the sun from outside, but by glow generated from within, so great an abundance of light bathes this shrine all about.” Light symbolized holy wisdom and celestial truth and was intentionally curated into the design, one of the Almighty’s own special effects.

Gold mosaic covered the entire dome-face in Justinian’s time, multiplying the shimmer. An earthquake later shook off much of that mosaic. Also, silver sheeting covered numerous surfaces, such as the bishop’s pulpit, while high officials wore gold ceremonial garb — so one imagines how exquisitely light scintillated about during Byzantine services.

The Way of the Fathers, of course, was way out front on this story, which also crops up in my book The Resilient Church: The Glory, the Shame, and the Hope for Tomorrow.

Touchstone has posted my review of Adrian Murdoch’s two recent histories.

The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World
by Adrian Murdoch
Sutton, 2005
(260 pages, $29.95, hardcover)

The Last Roman: Romulus Augustulus and the Decline of the West
by Adrian Murdoch
Sutton, 2006
(190 pages, $29.95, hardcover)

reviewed by Mike Aquilina

Julian, known as “the Apostate” (who ruled from 361–363), was arguably the last Roman emperor to cling to Rome’s classical heritage. Romulus Augustulus (475–476) was simply the last Roman emperor. The Scottish historian Adrian Murdoch’s two most recent books, The Last Pagan and The Last Roman, examine these two very different emperors, both of whom ruled after Christianity’s “triumph.”

A member of the British Royal Historical Society, Murdoch is also a prominent journalist, covering international affairs and economics in the mainstream press, and he brings to his books the depth of a professional historian and the readability of a newspaper’s front page. His books are not confessionally Christian histories—not in the least—but neither are they the hatchet jobs Christians have come to expect from secular historians in recent centuries.

A Puny Rome

Hollywood has just released its own version of the story of Romulus, The Last Legion, so perhaps it is best to begin with a discussion of The Last Roman.

Barely pubescent, Romulus ruled for only ten months as a mouthpiece for his father, a power-brokering general in the Roman army. The child-emperor, easily removed by a barbarian warlord, is an apt image of the empire at its end. Even his nickname—Augustulus, “little Augustus”—suggests the puniness of fifth-century Rome compared to its first-century glory.

Murdoch traces Romulus’s movements through the rest of his probably long life. The former emperor seems to have retired to a monastery well stocked with books, ending his life as “an old man in a library in Campania, corresponding with leading intellectuals of the day, his early life and elevation to power becoming an increasingly indistinct memory.”

Since so little is known about Romulus, Murdoch must sketch his life in chiaroscuro, finding the boy’s life, and then the man’s, in the shadows of the barbarian conquerors Odovacer and Theoderic. And the shadows are dark indeed. Against recent historians who argue that the transition from Roman to barbarian rule went fairly smoothly for common folk, Murdoch counters that it was close to catastrophic, beginning with pillage and ending in lawlessness.

Murdoch is at his best when describing battles, raids, campaigns, and diplomatic missions. Religion he declares beyond the scope of his study, though he does touch lightly on the differences between the Arian barbarians and the Catholic Romans, and how these played out in the decades after the fall. Along the way he tells the tragic story of Boethius, the most famous victim of Theoderic’s growing suspicion of Nicene Christians.

All the ancient voices in this book sound human, a rare quality attributable to Murdoch’s ease with ancient languages and his ability to turn a phrase in English. He manages even to replicate wordplay: “Cattily, the poet Martial wrote that women would arrive in the region as a Penelope, the famously chaste wife of Odysseus, and leave a Helen, the much chased wife of Menelaus.”

The Potent Apostate

The Last Roman is an important book for its development of the symbol of Rome’s fall in the boy-emperor Romulus. But the more potent book by far is the biography of the more potent ruler, Julian, The Last Pagan.

Though he ruled for less than three years, Julian looms colossal in memory and imagination. He was born in 331 (or 332) into a brutal family and a bloody business. His father was Emperor Constantine’s half-brother. Murdoch notes that, after Diocletian’s retirement in 305, “Julian’s family spent a great deal of the next fifty years developing ingenious ways to kill each other.” The motive was usually intrigue, plots for accession, or just the suspicion bred by such an atmosphere.

In 326, one year after the Council of Nicaea, Constantine ordered the execution of his wife and eldest son. The three remaining sons succeeded their father in 337 and rather quickly dispatched almost all their male relatives. Two young boys were spared, five-year-old Julian and his teenage brother Gallus. Julian was too young to be a threat and Gallus too sickly.

Though Julian continued to live the privileged life of the imperial family, he kept the memory of that purge, whose victims included his own father. The imperial family was officially Christian by this time, and the hypocrisy was not lost on Julian, who was himself raised a Christian, and was a schoolmate of St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen. His cousin the emperor Constantius, the murderer of his family, professed the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

Julian learned to keep his thoughts to himself. Constantius was his patron, and alienation from him meant certain death. Julian studied philosophy and rhetoric at Athens and secretly investigated the “old religion,” the pagan mysteries. Though he kept up his exterior practice of Christianity, his mind and heart belonged to the old gods.

Appointed to leadership in the military, he rose rapidly with some stunning campaigns in the western provinces and barbarian lands. He gained a reputation for toughness; for, unlike other generals, he shared the hardships of his troops and rewarded them handsomely. All this made for tenacious loyalty. Not surprisingly, in 360 they declared him emperor.

Julian’s Mirror Image

Julian began his march toward Byzantium to confront Constantius. But Constantius died in 361, before their forces could meet.

Then began the reign that gave Julian his place in history. Murdoch notes that Julian did some things extremely well—tax reform, for example, and military leadership. But no one remembers Julian as a tax reformer or even much as a general.

He is remembered as “the Apostate,” and Murdoch gives a fascinating analysis of his religious ideas and practical reforms. He made vast sums available to restore temples that had fallen into disrepair over a generation of Christian hegemony. He promoted pagans to prominent positions in the capital and boosted the wages of the pagan priesthoods.

He tried, at least in the beginning, to include Christians in his dawning era of toleration, but the Church’s big names were wary. Pagan restoration became the keynote of Julian’s rule.

Yet, as Murdoch makes clear, Julian’s paganism was not really the old religion. It was, rather, a mirror image of Christianity. It was an anti-Church, a reactionary project.

Julian himself recognized Christianity’s influence on his ideas. You can take the emperor out of the Church, but you can’t take the Church out of the emperor. Murdoch says: “Julian’s attempts at creating a pagan doctrine betray his Christian upbringing. . . . By the very fact of his early education, he was already, as he would have put it, polluted.”

Whereas the old religion had been a riot of gods, cults, and feasts, Julian strove, in a very Roman way, to impose unity and uniformity on worldwide polytheism. It was the religious equivalent of herding cats.

In Julian’s schema, the emperor himself served as a sort of pope over a hierarchy that mirrored the Catholic structure of metropolitans, bishops, and priests. He set up pagan philanthropies in imitation of Catholic charities. He urged his clergy to lead lives of virtue and preach philosophy to the people. Julian himself had chosen to lead a celibate life after the death of his wife. As Murdoch puts it: “He wanted the pagans to out-Christian the Christians.”

Julian’s Coming Out

His pagan “coming out” climaxed during an extended stay in Syrian Antioch, a city of a half-million people situated en route to the battlegrounds where he would meet the Persians.

While in Antioch, he renewed the pagan practices, though he was hardly satisfied with the priests’ performance and showed himself to be as prissy and uptight as the most over-educated diocesan liturgist. And if the pagans were tepid in their response to Julian, the Christians were downright contemptuous. Murdoch does not miss the irony of a pagan prig enraged by his encounter with a city full of Christian sensualists.

Julian’s experience in Antioch led to harsher strictures on Christians. He banned believers from teaching grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. This, says Murdoch, was Julian’s “master stroke.” Banished from the public square, Christianity could be minimized as a cultural force. He “had marginalised Christianity to the point where it could potentially have vanished within a generation or two, and without the need for physical coercion.”

It was not to last, however. As Julian shook the dust of Antioch from his feet, he marched his troops to their devastating defeat at the hands of Shapur II of Persia. Murdoch is superb in his systematic yet suspenseful narrative of that miserable campaign.

On that battlefield at the Persian frontier, Julian fell, and with him the eastern empire began to crumble. Some (Christian) histories portray the emperor struck by a spear and crying out, “Thou hast won, O Galilean!”

Yet Julian the Apostate lives in our collective memory. For some, he is the archetype of the ideological dictator, the bloodless wonk whose ideas justify his bloodletting. For others, he is a romantic anti-hero—the rebel against the inevitable.

He survives in spite of his utter lack of the qualities that make Nero and Caligula—and even Constantine—perennial subjects of potboiler novels and gory flicks. In contrast to other emperors, Murdoch says, Julian’s story usually bogs down with “an excess of philosophy and too little sex.” To Murdoch’s credit, the story never bogs down in his telling.

For Murdoch, Julian’s death was—like the deposition of Romulus—a critical moment in the fall of the empire: “To all intents and purposes we can say that paganism died as a credible political and social force in the last days of June 363.”

In ends such as these, Christians found their beginnings.

Adrian Murdoch’s weblog is Bread and Circuses.

Roger Pearse is inviting those of you who know a bit of Latin or German to join his online collaboration to translate Eusebius’s Chronicle into English. Once complete, this will be a valuable online resource. Do your part!

Now this look’s fascinating: Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea, by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams. Here’s the review in Bryn Mawr.

Yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI continued his series of addresses on the Church Fathers, with this little number on St. Basil the Great. Here’s the Zenit translation:

Dear Brothers and Sisters!

Today we remember one of the great Fathers of the Church, St. Basil, defined by Byzantine liturgical texts as a “light of the Church.” He was a great bishop of the fourth century, to whom the Churches of the East and West look with great admiration because of his sanctity of life, the excellence of his doctrine and the harmonious synthesis of his speculative and practical skills.

He was born around the year 330 to a family of saints, “a true domestic Church,” who lived in an atmosphere of profound faith. He carried out his studies with the best teachers of Athens and Constantinople. Unfulfilled by his worldly successes, and aware of having lost much time in vain pursuits, he himself confesses: “One day, waking up from a deep sleep, I turned to the wonderful light of the truth of the Gospels … and cried over my miserable life” (cf. Letters 223: PG 32, 824a). Attracted by Christ, I began to look to him and listen to him alone (cf. “Moralia” 80, 1: PG 31, 860bc).

He dedicated himself with determination to the monastic life in prayer, meditation on the sacred Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and to the exercise of charity (cf. Letters 2 and 22), following the example of his sister, St. Macrina, who was already living monastic asceticism. He was later ordained a priest and then, in 370, bishop of Caesarea of Cappadocia in what is present day Turkey.

Through preaching and writing, he carried out intense pastoral, theological and literary activities. With wise balance, he was able to blend service to souls with dedication to prayer and meditation in solitude. Taking advantage of his own personal experience, he favored the foundation of many “fraternities” or Christian communities consecrated to God, which he frequently visited (cf. Gregory of Nazianzus. “Oratio 43,29 in Laudem Basilii”: PG 36,536b). Through his words and his writings, many of which still exist today (cf. “Regulae Brevius Tractatae, Proemio”: PG 31,1080ab), he exhorted them to live and to grow in perfection. Many drew from his writings to establish norms of ancient monasticism, including St. Benedict, who considered St. Basil his teacher (cf. “Regula” 73:5).

In reality, St. Basil created a special kind of monasticism, not closed off from the local Church, but open to it. His monks were part of the local Church, they were its animating nucleus. Preceding others of the faithful in following Christ and not merely in having faith, they showed firm devotion to him — love for him — above all in works of charity. These monks, who established schools and hospitals, were at the service of the poor and showed Christian life in its fullness. The Servant of God, John Paul II, speaking about monasticism, wrote: “Many believe that monasticism, an institution so important for the whole Church, was established for all times principally by St. Basil — or that, at least, the nature of monasticism would not have been so well defined without Basil’s decisive contribution” (“Patres Ecclesiae,” 2).

As bishop and pastor of his vast diocese, Basil constantly worried about the difficult material conditions in which the faithful lived; he firmly condemned evils; he worked in favor of the poor and marginalized; he spoke to rulers in order to relieve the sufferings of the people, above all in moments of disaster; he looked out for the freedom of the Church, going up against those in power to defend the right to profess the true faith (cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Oratio 43: 48-51 in Laudem Basilii”: PG 36,557c-561c). To God, who is love and charity, Basil gave witness by building hospitals for the needy (cf. Basil, Letters 94: PG 32,488bc), much like a city of mercy, that took its name from him “Basiliade” (cf. Sozomeno, “Historia Eccl.” 6,34: PG 67, 1387a). It has been the inspiration for modern hospital institutions of recovery and cure of the sick.

Aware that “the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows” (“Sacrosanctum Concilium,” 10), Basil, though he was concerned with charity, the sign of faith, was also a wise “liturgical reformer” (cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Oratio 43,34 in Laudem Basilii”: PG 36,541c). He left us a wonderful Eucharistic prayer (or anaphora) which is named after him, and helped to organize the prayer and the psalmody:

Because of him the people loved and knew the Psalms, and came to pray them even during the night (cf. Basil, “In Psalmum” 1,1: PG 29,212a-213c). In this way we can see how liturgy, adoration and prayer come together with charity, and depend upon each other.

With zeal and courage, Basil opposed heretics, who denied that Jesus Christ is God like the Father (cf. Basil, Letters 9,3: PG 32,272a; “Ep.” 52: 1-3: PG 32,392b-396a; “Adv. Eunomium” 1,20: PG 29,556c). In the same way, contrary to those who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, he taught that the Spirit is also God, and “must be numbered and glorified with the Father and the Son” (cf. “De Spiritu Sancto”: SC 17bis, 348). Because of this, Basil is one of the great Fathers that formulated the doctrine of the Trinity: one God, because he is love, he is God in three persons, who form the most profound unity in existence, divine unity.

In his love for Christ and his Gospel, the great Cappadocian also worked to heal the divisions within the Church (cf. Letters 70 and 243), working so that all might be converted to Christ and his word (cf. “De Iudicio” 4: PG 31,660b-661a), a unifying force, which all believers must obey (cf. ibid. 1-3: PG 31,653a-656c).

In conclusion, Basil spent himself completely in faithful service to the Church in his multifaceted episcopal ministry. According to the program laid out by him, he became “apostle and minister of Christ, dispenser of the mysteries of God, herald of the kingdom, model and rule of piety, eye of the body of the Church, pastor of Christ’s sheep, merciful physician, father and nurturer, cooperator with God, God’s farmer and builder of God’s temple” (cf. “Moralia” 80: 11-20: PG 31: 864b-868b).

This is the program that the holy bishop gives to those who proclaim the word — yesterday like today — a program that he himself generously put into practice. In 379, Basil, not yet 50 years old, consumed by hard work and asceticism, returned to God, “in the hope of eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ” (“On Baptism” 1,2,9). He was a man who truly lived with his gaze fixed on Christ, a man of love for his neighbor. Full of the hope and the joy of faith, Basil shows us how to be real Christians.

See also Zenit’s news coverage.