Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 42.21–43.10

[21] … as there is also a barbarian one: how shall I join and bring into one these who sit on rival thrones and shepherd against one another, and the people torn apart with them and set against each other, as in the clefts of earthquakes what is neighbouring and close, or as in pestilential diseases the attendants and the household, the sickness passing easily from some to others? And not only so, but even the regions of the world have shared the sufferings of the factions, so that East and West have now been divided into opposing parts, and are in danger of becoming divided no less in opinion than in boundaries. For how long “mine” and “yours”, the old and the new, the more learned and the more spiritual, the nobler and the lowlier, the richer in followers and the poorer? I am ashamed for my old age, being called, after being saved by Christ, by the names of others. [22] I cannot bear your horse races and your theatres, and this evenly balanced madness in expenditure and zeal. We change teams, we yoke against each other, we neigh at each other, we almost beat the air like them and throw dust towards heaven, like men beside themselves, and under other persons we satisfy our own rivalries, becoming bad umpires of ambition and unfair judges of affairs. Today sharing the same thrones and the same opinions, if those who lead us carry us that way; tomorrow on rival thrones and with rival opinions, if the wind blows the other way. With enmity and friendship the names change too; and, most terrible of all, we are not ashamed to use the same words before hearers of opposite views; nor do we stand on the same ground, our love of contention making us now one thing, now another, like the changes of the Euripus or the ebb tides. As, then, if boys were playing in the middle of the marketplace, it would be very shameful and unworthy of us to leave our own pursuits and join in with them (for children's toys do not become old age), so neither, while the others are carried hither and thither, would I, who know something better than the many, choose to be one of them rather than to be, as I am, free in obscurity. For besides other things I feel this too: I do not for the most part go along with the many, nor walk the same road … I feel it nevertheless: the pleasures of others grieve me, and I take pleasure in what grieves others. So I would not wonder even at this, if I were put in bonds as a nuisance and thought foolish by the many, as one of the Greek philosophers is said to have suffered, being charged with madness for his good sense, because he laughed at everything, seeing that what the many take seriously is worthy of laughter; or I might be thought full of new wine, as Christ's disciples later were, when they spoke in tongues, people not knowing that it was the power of the Spirit, not a derangement of mind. [23] Consider the charges against us too. “So long a time,” someone says, “since you have led the church, with the turn of the times and the zeal of the ruler in your favour, so great an advantage: what sign of the change have you given us? How many have insulted us in the past? What terrible thing have we not suffered? Not insults? Not threats? Not exiles? Not plunder of money? Not confiscations? Not presbyters burnt at sea? Not temples defiled with the blood of saints and turned into charnel houses instead of temples? Not the public slaughter of aged bishops, or, more properly, patriarchs? Not every place made inaccessible to the pious alone? Not everything terrible one could name? And which of these have we returned to those who did them, though the power to act was turned round, and the insulters ought to have been disciplined? I pass over the rest; but as for ourselves, not to speak of you, have we not been persecuted? Not insulted? Not driven out of churches, houses, even the deserts themselves, which is most terrible of all? Did we not bear a raging populace? Insulting prefects? Emperors insulted, edicts and all? And then what? We have become stronger, and the persecutors have escaped.” For me the power to retaliate is sufficient punishment of wrongdoers; but they do not think so, for they are very exact and just about requital, and so they demand what the times allow. “What prefect,” it says, “has been fined? What people chastised? What instigators of the people? What fear have we secured for ourselves for the future?” [24] … and the dignity of dress, the processions, the haughtiness towards those who meet us. For I did not know that our rivalry was to be with consuls and prefects and the most illustrious generals, who do not know where to throw away their wealth; and that we must make our bellies groan, revelling on the goods of the poor, using necessities for superfluities, and belching over the altars; ride on fine horses, be lifted up splendidly in carriages, be escorted and applauded, with everyone making way for us as for wild beasts and parting on either side, or that we must be seen from afar as we come. If these have been terrible omissions, they are past: forgive me this injustice. Set over yourselves another who will please the many; but give me solitude and the countryside and God, whom alone I shall please even by my plainness. It is a terrible thing to be deprived of speeches and assemblies and festivals and these applauses that give us wings, and of relatives and friends and honours, and of the beauty and greatness of the city, and of the brilliance that flashes on every side on those who gaze at such things and do not look within; but not so terrible as to be troubled and defiled by the disturbances and tossings in the midst, and by bending to the many. For they do not seek priests but orators; not stewards of souls but guardians of money; not pure sacrificers but powerful patrons. I will make one defence for them: we ourselves have trained them so, becoming all things to all, I do not know whether to save all or to destroy them.

What do you say? Shall we persuade you by these words, and have we won? Or do we need stronger words to persuade you? Yes, by the Trinity itself, which we honour and you honour, by our common hope and the unity of this people: grant me this favour; send me away with your prayers; let this be the proclamation of my contest; give me the letter of discharge, as emperors give it to soldiers; and, if you will, with a testimony in my favour, that I may have that honour; but if not, as you wish. I will make no difficulty about this, until God sees how my affairs stand. Whom, then, shall we bring in instead? The Lord will provide for himself a shepherd for leadership, as he provided a sheep for a whole burnt offering. This one thing alone I ask: let him be one of the envied, not one of the pitied; not one who pleases everybody in everything, but one who knows how to give offence too for the sake of what is better; for the one is sweetest here, the other most profitable there. You, then, prepare your speeches of send-off for me, and I will give you my farewell. [26] Farewell, my Anastasia, named for piety; for you raised up our doctrine when it was still despised; the place of our common victory, the new Shiloh, where we first pitched the tabernacle that had been carried about and wandering for forty years in the wilderness. Farewell, you too, this great and renowned temple, our new inheritance, which has now received its greatness from the Word; you were Jebus before, and we made you Jerusalem. And you others next to it in beauty, each occupying a different part of the city, like ligaments binding the neighbouring parts together, which, in spite of my weakness, not we but grace with us filled when they had been despaired of. Farewell, Apostles, fine settlers here, my teachers in the contest, even if I have not often kept festival with you, carrying about in my body, perhaps for my good, the Satan of your Paul, because of which I am now removed from you. Farewell, my throne, this envied and dangerous height; council of high priests, honoured by the dignity and age of the priests; and all the rest who minister to God around the holy table and draw near to God who draws near. Farewell, choirs of Nazirites, harmonies of psalmody, all-night vigils, modesty of virgins, decorum of women, companies of widows and orphans, eyes of the poor turned towards God and towards us. Farewell, hospitable and Christ-loving houses, helpers of my weakness. Farewell, lovers of my discourses, and the running and the crowding, and the pens visible and hidden, and this railing pressed by those who thrust forward to hear the word. Farewell, emperors and palace, and all the court and household of the emperor: whether faithful to the emperor I do not know, but for the most part unfaithful to God. Clap your hands, shout aloud, lift your orator on high: the wicked and talkative tongue has fallen silent for you. Yet it will not be wholly silent, for it will fight with hand and ink; but for the present it is silent. [27] Farewell, great and Christ-loving city (for I will bear witness to the truth, even though your zeal is not according to knowledge; our separation makes us kinder). Draw near to the truth; be changed, if only late; honour God more than custom. Change has nothing shameful in it; but holding on to evil brings destruction. Farewell, East and West, for whom and by whom we are fought against; he is witness who will make peace among you, if a few imitate my withdrawal. For those who withdraw from thrones do not lose God as well, but will have the seat above, which is much higher and safer than these. Last of all and before all I will cry: Farewell, angels, guardians of this church, and of my presence and my departure, if indeed our affairs are in the hand of God. Farewell, O Trinity, my meditation and my glory; may you be kept by these, and may you keep them, my people (for they are mine, even if I am otherwise disposed of); and may I always hear that you are exalted and increased, both in doctrine and in life. My little children, keep for me the deposit; remember my stonings. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

So it was to be: the great Basil, who always offered me many subjects for discourses (for he took pride in my discourses as no one ever did in his own), was now to set himself before me as the greatest subject of contest for those devoted to oratory. For I think that, if someone were testing his power in oratory and then wished to judge it by a standard, setting up one subject out of all, as painters set up their model pictures, he would set aside this one alone as beyond speech and choose the first of the others. So great a task is the praise of this man, not only for us, who long ago gave up all ambition, but even for those whose life is oratory and who have devoted themselves to this one thing alone, to win fame in such subjects. This is my view of the matter, and very rightly, as I persuade myself. But I do not know for what else I would use eloquence, if not now; or how I could better gratify myself, or the praisers of virtue, or eloquence itself, than by admiring this man. For me this will be a debt sufficiently discharged; and a debt, if anything is, owed to good men, in other things and especially in eloquence, is eloquence. For them the discourse would be at once a pleasure and an exhortation to virtue; for where I know the praises, I clearly know the progress also … And for eloquence itself the matter would turn out well either way: if it came near his worth, it would have shown its own power; if it fell far short (which all who praise him must needs suffer), it would have shown by the deed its defeat, and that the one praised is beyond the power of speech. [2] These, then, are the reasons that have moved me to speak, and for which I have entered this contest. If I have come so late for the occasion, and after so many who have extolled him in private and in public, let no one wonder. But let that divine soul forgive me, venerable to me in all things, now as before. For as, when he was with us, he corrected much of mine by the rule of friendship and a higher law (for I am not ashamed to say this, since he was a law of virtue to all), so too, now that he is above us, he will be indulgent to what is ours. And let those of you also forgive who are more ardent praisers of the man, if anyone is more ardent than another and not all equal in this one thing, his praise. For it was not from negligence that we fell short of what was fitting (may we never so neglect either virtue or the duty of friendship), nor from thinking that his praise belonged to others more than to us. But first, I shrank from the discourse (for the truth shall be told), like those who approach holy things before being purified in voice and mind. Next, I will remind you, though you know it, how in the meantime we were occupied with the true doctrine, which was in danger, rightly compelled, and perhaps by God's will away from home, and not against the mind of that noble champion of the truth, who breathed nothing but pious doctrine, saving for the whole world. For of the things of the body perhaps one should not even dare to speak to a man noble and above the body, before he departed from here, who thought none of the goods of the soul harmed by its bond …

Let the defence, then, rest here. For I do not think we shall need a longer one, speaking as we do to him and to those who know our affairs clearly. Now we must turn to the praise itself, setting his God before our discourse, that we may not insult the man by our praises, nor come far behind the others; even if we all fall equally short of him, as those who look at the heaven and the sun's ray fall short of them.

If I saw him priding himself on his family and on what comes from family, or on any of the small things valued by those who look at the ground, another catalogue of heroes would appear. How many things of those before him in time could we contribute to his honour! And we would not concede to the histories any advantage over us, having this advantage at least, that we take pride not in fictions or myths but in facts themselves, of which there are many witnesses. For Pontus offers us many stories from his father's side, no less than any of the ancient wonders about that country, with which all history and poetry is full; and so does this land of mine, the noble Cappadocians, no less a nurse of youths than of good horses; so that we can match his mother's family against his father's. Generalships and governorships, and power in imperial courts; and besides, wealth, lofty thrones, public honours, splendour of eloquence: if we wished to speak of them, more and greater than any, the Pelopidae and Cecropidae and Alcmaeonidae and Aeacidae …

… and Heraclidae, and those than whom nothing is higher, would be nothing to us; who, having nothing they can speak of openly from their own, take refuge in the obscure, ascribing demons and gods and myths to their ancestors, of which the most venerable part is unbelievable and what is believed is an insult. [4] But since our discourse concerns a man who held that nobility should be judged man by man, and that, while shapes and colours, and the noblest or meanest of horses, are tested by themselves, we should not be painted by external things, I will mention one or two of the things that belonged to him from the beginning, and these proper to his life, which he would most delight to hear told, and then turn to himself. One man has one distinction and story of his family or of himself, small or great, which, like a paternal inheritance, beginning from far or near, passes down to those who come after; but for him piety was the distinction of both his families, as my discourse will now show.

There was a persecution, of persecutions the most terrible and severe (I speak to those who know): that of Maximin, who, coming upon those shortly before him, made them all seem humane, flowing with great boldness and eager to bind on himself the crown of impiety. Many of our champions overcame him, contending even to death, or to a little short of death, left behind only so far as to survive the victory and not depart with their struggles, but to remain for others as trainers in virtue, living martyrs, breathing monuments, silent proclamations. Among the many who are counted were also his father's parents, on whom, having practised every way of piety, that time set a fine crowning. For they were so prepared and minded as to bear easily all those things for which Christ crowns those who imitate his contest for us.

And since their contest too had to be lawful (and the law of martyrdom is neither to go to the contest of one's own accord, out of consideration for the persecutors and for the weaker, nor to shrink back when one is present; for the one is rashness and the other cowardice; and in this too they honoured the lawgiver), what do they contrive? Or rather, whither are they carried by the providence that guided all their affairs? They flee to a thicket on the mountains of Pontus (there are many such there, deep and extending very far), with very few companions of their flight and servants for their food. Let others admire the length of time (for their flight was prolonged, they say, very long, to about the seventh year and a little more), and the narrow and unaccustomed way of life, as one would expect, for well-born bodies, and the hardship of frost and heat and rain in the open air, and the solitude in the wilderness, without fellowship or company, for those who had been escorted and honoured by many. I am coming to tell what is greater and more wonderful than these; and no one will disbelieve it except someone who thinks persecutions and dangers for Christ nothing great, judging wrongly and very dangerously.

The noble ones longed for something pleasant, wearied by the length of time and sated with bare necessities. They did not utter the words of Israel (for they were not grumblers like those who suffered in the wilderness after the flight from Egypt, as though Egypt were better for them than the wilderness, supplying abundance of pots and meat and the other things they had left there; for the brickmaking and the clay counted for nothing with them then in their folly), but other words, more pious and faithful. “What is unbelievable,” they said, “if the God of wonders, who fed a strange and fugitive people richly in the desert, so as to rain bread and pour out birds, feeding them not only with necessities but also with luxuries; who divided the sea and stopped the sun and cut off a river”—and they added the other things he had done (for in such matters the soul loves to recount history and to hymn God with many wonders)—“this God,” they said, “should feed us too today, the champions of piety, with delicacies? Many beasts that have escaped the tables of the rich, such as we once had, lurk in these mountains; many edible birds fly over us who long for them: which of them could not be caught, if only you will?” So they spoke, and the game was there, a meal that came of itself, a feast without effort: deer appearing all at once from somewhere over the hills. How large! How fat! How ready for slaughter! One could almost guess that they were annoyed at not having been called sooner. Some drew others by signs; others followed. Who chased them or forced them? No one. What horsemen? What dogs? What barking or shouting, or young men seizing the outlets according to the laws of hunting? They were bound by prayer and a just request. Who has known such a catch, of those now or of any time?

O the wonder! They themselves were the stewards of the catch: as much as was enough was taken at will; what was over was sent back to the thickets for another meal. The cooks were improvised, the dinner fitting, the guests grateful, having already in the present wonder a prelude of what they hoped for. And from this they became more eager for the contest for which these things were granted them. Such are my stories. But you, my persecutor, who admire myths, tell me of your huntress goddess and your Orions and Actaeons, those ill-fated hunters, and the deer substituted for the maiden, if you have anything so great to boast of, even granting that the story is not a myth. For what follows in the tale is very shameful. What good was the substitution, if it saves a maiden only that she may be taught to kill strangers, learning inhumanity as the return for humanity? This, then, is one story out of many and in place of many, as I see it. And I have told it, not to add anything to his glory (for neither does the sea need the rivers that flow into it, however many and great, nor does the one now praised need anything contributed to his praise), but to show what he had from the beginning, and how far he outstripped the example he looked to. For if it is a great thing for others to receive some distinction from their forebears, it is greater for him to add something of his own to those before him, like a stream flowing back upward.

Of his parents' union, joined no less by equality in virtue than by their bodies, there are many other marks: care of the poor, hospitality to strangers, purity of soul through self-control, a portion of their property consecrated to God (a thing not yet much practised then, as it is now, grown and honoured since those first examples), and the other things which, shared between Pontus and Cappadocia, were enough to fill many ears. But to me the greatest and most conspicuous seems their good fortune in children. That the same people should have many and fine children is perhaps to be found in myths; but experience has shown us these, who were themselves such that, even if they had not been parents of such children, they would have sufficed for their own glory; and who were shown to be parents of such children that, even if they had not been so outstanding in virtue themselves, they would surpass all by their children. For that one or two children should be praised one might credit to nature; but excellence in all is a clear tribute to those who brought them up. This is shown by the blessed number of priests and virgins, and of those in marriage who did not allow their wedlock to hinder them from equal renown in virtue, but made the difference one of manner of life rather than of conduct. [10] … they praise him with … voice. For he himself is both a splendid subject for those who praise him, and alone worthy of the subject by the power of his eloquence. Beauty, strength and stature, in which I see most people delight, I will concede to those who wish; not that he fell short of anyone in these, among the petty who wallow in the body, while he was still young and had not yet subdued the flesh by philosophy; but so that I may not suffer the same as inexperienced athletes, who spend their strength in random and incidental bouts and are found weaker in the decisive contests from which victory comes and crowns are proclaimed. What no one, I think, would consider superfluous to mention, or wide of the mark, that I will praise.

I think it is agreed by all men of sense that education is the first of our goods; not only this nobler education, which is ours, and which, disdaining all the elegance and ambition of eloquence, holds only to salvation and the beauty of what is contemplated, but also that from outside, which many Christians spurn as treacherous and dangerous and leading far from God; wrongly. For as we must not despise heaven and earth and air and all that is in them because some have wrongly understood them, worshipping the things of God instead of God, but, reaping from them what is useful for life and enjoyment, we avoid what is dangerous, not setting the creation against the Creator, as the foolish do, but apprehending the Maker from his works, and, as the divine Apostle says, taking every thought captive to Christ; and as we know that of fire, food, iron and the rest, nothing by itself is most useful or most harmful, but as it seems good to those who use it; and as we have mixed even things from reptiles into saving medicines: so also from these studies we have received what serves inquiry and contemplation, but have spat out all that leads to demons and error and the depth of destruction. Indeed, we have been helped by them towards piety, learning the better from the worse and making their weakness the strength of our doctrine. Education, then, is not to be dishonoured because some think so; rather, those so disposed must be considered boorish and uneducated, who would like everyone to be as they are, so that their own condition may be hidden in the general one and they may escape exposure for their lack of education. Since we have posited and agreed on this, come, let us look at his life.