Feast of St Basil Great and St Gregory of Nazianzen
Charlotte Russe
St Basil was highly thought of both in his time and later by John Henry Cardinal Newman amongst others….he was ranked with Athansius as a theologian and his panegyric his friend and devoted disciple Gregory of Nazianzen was studied as a document in its own right. St Basil fitting shared his feast with this St Gregory..
He was distinguished by living in poverty and caring for the poor. He never preached at the poor but rather made the rich the target of his sermons….
Amongst other things, he founded an institution that became known as the Basileiad, a house for the care of friendless strangers, the medical treatment of the sick poor, and the industrial training of the unskilled. Built in the suburbs, it attained such importance as to become practically the centre of a new city with the name of he kaine polis or “Newtown”. It was the motherhouse of like institutions erected in other dioceses and stood as a constant reminder to the rich of their privilege of spending wealth in a truly Christian way. The social obligations of the wealthy were so plainly and forcibly preached by St. Basil that modern sociologists have ventured to claim him as one of their own…
Given Mr Cameron’s assumption of the mantle of Christian Prince it comes as a surprise he hasn’t stumbled over St Basil’s teachings… although they will not quite fit in with the Prime Minister’s idea of a ‘big society’….the big society as St Basil envisaged was one where the richest had the greatest obligations and the poorest the greatest need. That doesn’t quite sit easily with the purpose of making recipients of benefits work for less than the hourly rate of the minimum wage….in order they may continue to receive them…
But all our modern politicians think…if indeed think is a judicious work to apply to them…of social obligations in purely electoral and political terms…and would never conceive that those who hold public office have an obligation to set out the ethics of mutuality and defend it rather than pandering to the injustices of the lowest common denominator in the name of social justice. But the Prime Minister’s efforts to colonise Christian philosophy without troubling himself with regular church attendance demonstrates at best a shallow acquaintance with moral ethics and at worse the vanity born of privilege….
In our carol of the twelve days we’ve now reached nine ladies dancing….which depending upon your confessional belief is either the nine orders of Angels…mentioned in an earlier entry on Michaelmas…or the nine gifts of the Holy Spirit which obviously included such wonders a Speaking in Tongues and Prophecy….I’ll stick with the angels…but nine ladies may refer to the ‘gay branle’ which was often preformed in churches in a circle of women and men and was meant to be danced faster and faster until the dancers were breathless…the carol tune ding dong merrily on high is a corruption of such a dance …..