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

Troubles of the Closing Years.was hardly in the horizon. 272 No bishop of Rome had even been present at Nicæa, or atSardica, where a certain right of appeal to his see was conceded. A bishop of Rome signedthe Sirmian blasphemy. No bishop of Rome was present to save ‘the world’ from the lapseof Ariminum. Julian “might seem to have forgotten that there was such a city as Rome.” 273The great intellectual Arian war was fought out without any claim of Rome to speak. Halfa century after Basil’s death great orientals were quite unconscious of this supremacy. 274At Chalcedon the measure of the growing claim is aptly typified by the wish of Paschasinusof Lilybæum, one of the representatives of Leo, to be regarded as presiding, though he didnot preside. The supremacy is hardly in view even at the last of the four great Councils.In fact the appeal of Basil seems to have failed to elicit the response he desired, not somuch from the independent tone of his letters, which was only in accordance with the recognisedfacts of the age, 275 as from occidental suspicions of Basil’s orthodoxy, 276 and fromthe failure of men, who thought and wrote in Latin, to enter fully into the controversiesconducted in a more subtle tongue. 277 Basil had taken every precaution to ensure the conveyanceof his letters by messengers of tact and discretion. He had deprecated the advocacyof so simple-minded and undiplomatic an ambassador as his brother Gregory. 278 He hadpoured out his very soul in entreaty. 279 But all was unavailing. He suffered, and he had tosuffer unsupported by a human sympathy on which he thought he had a just claim. 280xxxi272 cf. note. on § ix.273 Milman, Lat. Christ. i. 85.274 cf. Proleg to Theodoret in this series, p. 9, note.275 A ses yeux, l’Orient et l’Occident ne sont ils pas, deux frères, dont les droits sont égaux, sans suprématie,sans aînesse?” Fialon, Et. Hist. p. 134. This is exactly what East and West were to most eyes, and what they wereasserted to be in the person of the two imperial capitals by the Twenty-Eighth Canon of Chalcedon. cf. Bright,Canons of the First Four General Councils, pp. 93, 192, and note on Theodoret in this series, p. 293.276 Ep. cclxvi. § 2.277 cf. Ep. ccxiv. § 4, p. 254.278 Ep. ccxv.279 See specially Ep. ccxlii.280 “Foiled in all his repeated demands; a deaf ear turned to his most earnest entreaties; the council he hadbegged for not summoned; the deputation he had repeatedly solicited unsent; Basil’s span of life drew to its endamid blasted hopes and apparently fruitless labours for the unity of the faith. It was not permitted him to liveto see the Eastern Churches, for the purity of whose faith he had devoted all his powers, restored to peace andunanimity.” Canon Venables, D.C.B. i. 295. “He had to fare on as best he might,—admiring, courting, but coldlytreated by the Latin world, desiring the friendship of Rome, yet wounded by her superciliousness, suspected ofheresy by Damasus, and accused by Jerome of pride.” Newman, Church of the Fathers, p. 115.48