NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works - Holy Bible Institute

Homiletical.health if he be sick. Let your supplications be made with the martyrs. Let young men imitatetheir fellows. Let fathers pray to be fathers of like sons. Let mothers learn from a goodmother. The mother of one of these saints saw the rest overcome by the cold, and her son,from his strength or his constancy, yet alive. The executioners had left him, on the chanceof his having changed his mind. She herself lifted him in her arms, and placed him on thecar in which the rest were being drawn to the pyre, a veritable martyr’s mother. 692692 The name of this youngest of the Forty is given as Melito (D.C.B. s.v.). They are commemorated onMarch 9 in the Roman Kalendar of Gregory XIII. and the Menology of Basil; on March 10 in the Roman Mart.of Bened. XIV.; on the 11th in the old Roman Kal., and on March 16 in the Armenian. The legend of the discoveryof some of their relics is given in Sozomen ix. 2. Others were obtained for the church built in their honour atAnnesi. (cf. p. xiv.) Two doctrinal points come out in this homily, (a) The officer who took the place of Melitois said to have been baptized, not in water but in his own blood (§ 7). Here is martyrdom represented as theequivalent of baptism. (b) The stage arrived at in the progress of Christian sentiment towards the invocationof departed saints is indicated. Garnier, the Jesuit, writes in the margin of the passage quoted above, Invocanturmartyres; and Ceillier notes, Il reconnait que les prieres des martyrs peuvent beaucoup nous aider auprés de Dieu.But in this particular passage the idea of “fleeing to the Forty” seems to be not fleeing to them to ask for theirprayers, but fleeing to the shrine to pray in company with them. It is rather the fellowship than the intercessionof the saints which is sought. μετὰ μαρτύρων γιγνέσθω τὰ αἰτήματα ὑμῶν. Let your requests be made not tobut with the martyrs. In the Homily on St. Mamas, the next in order, the expressions are less equivocal. At thesame time it must be remarked that with St. Basil the invocation and the intercession are local. In the De Sp.Scto. (chap. xxiii. p. 34) a significant contrast is drawn between the ubiquity of the Holy Ghost and the limitedand local action of angels. And if of angels, so of saints. The saints who have departed this life are thought ofas accessible at the shrines where their relics rest, but, if we apply the analogy of the De Sp. Scto., not everywhere.It has been said that this is the period when requests for the prayers of the holy dead begin to appear, andArchbishop Ussher (Address to a Jesuit, chap. ix.) cites Gregory of Nazianzus for the earliest instance within hisknowledge of a plain invocation of the departed. But, as bishop Harold Browne points out, his invocation israther rhetorical than supplicatory. Gregory “had even a pious persuasion that they still continued as much asever to aid with their prayers those for whom they had been wont to pray on earth (Orat. xxiv. p. 425). And heventures to think if it be not too bold to say so (εἰ μὴ τολυηρὸν τοῦτο εἰπεῖν), that the saints, being nearer toGod and having put off the fetters of the flesh, have more avail with Him than when on earth (Orat. xix. p. 228).In all these he does not appear to have gone further than some who preceded him, nor is there anything in suchspeculations beyond what might be consistent with the most Protestant abhorrence of saint worship and Mariolatry”(Bp. Harold Browne in Art. xxii.). Romish authorities in support of a yet earlier development, point toIrenæus (Adv. Hær. v. 19), wherein a highly rhetorical passage the Virgin Mary is said to have become the “advocate”of the Virgin Eve, and to Origen, who “invoked” his guardian angel (Hom. i. in Ezek. 7). The latermediæval invocation Bp. Jeremy Taylor (vol. vi. Eden’s ed. p. 489) ingeniously shews to be of a piece rather withearly heresy than with early Catholicity: “It pretends to know their present state, which is hid from our eyes;and it proceeds upon the very reason upon which the Gnostics and Valentinians went; that is, that it is fit to124