ANTHONY ESOLEN How the Church Has Changed theWorld
Publisher: Romain Lizé Editor-in-Chief: Rev. Sebastian White, o.p. Managing Editor: David Wharton Iconography: Isabelle Mascaras Layout: Julia Pateu Cover: Gauthier Delauné Proofreading: Samuel Wigotow Front cover: The Holy Spirit (detail of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1432), Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441), Saint-Bavon Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. © akg-images. Copyright © 2020 by Magnificat Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in 2023 in France by Sepec – 11355220119 First edition: March 2020 ISBN: 978-1-949239-30-0 No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Magnificat, PO Box 834, Yonkers, NY 10702. www.magnificat.com The trademark Magnificat depicted in this publication is used under license from and is the exclusive property of Magnificat Central Service Team Inc., A Ministry to Catholic Women, and may not be used without its written consent.
ANTHONY ESOLEN How the Church Has Changed theWorld Volume II January 2016 – December 2017 MAGNIFICAT Paris • New York • Oxford • Madrid
contents Foreword..................................................................... 5 The Reckoning of the Times................................... 7 A Map of Mankind ������������������������������������������������� 14 The Joy of the Martyrs ������������������������������������������� 21 They Brought Their Sick to Him ������������������������� 28 Melodies Everlasting ����������������������������������������������� 35 Boethius in Prison ��������������������������������������������������� 41 Journeying to the Truth ���������������������������������������� 48 Ramon Llull, Missionary to the Muslims ���������� 55 Mother of Universities ������������������������������������������� 62 Europe Set Free �������������������������������������������������������� 69 There Was a Soldier Sent from God �������������������� 77 The Playwright the Professors Have Rejected ���� 85 Beloved Physician and Teller of Truth… ������������ 93 The Rising of the Vendée ��������������������������������������� 99 Viva Cristo Rey! �����������������������������������������������������106 Grave, Where Is Thy Sting?… �����������������������������113 Hildebrand the Great �������������������������������������������120 Traveling to Unknown Shores ����������������������������127 Whom You Must Resist, Firm in the Faith �����134 Measure, Weight, and Number ��������������������������141 Slave of the Ethiopian Slaves ������������������������������148 Speaking the Painful Truth ���������������������������������155 A Giant Among Men �������������������������������������������162 He Has Lifted up the Lowly �������������������������������169
5 Foreword At the end of Saint John’s Gospel, after twenty-one chapters relating the miracles, teaching, and saving mysteries of the life of Our Lord, the Evangelist issues the following caveat: “There are many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written” ( Jn 21:25). The statement invites us to marvel at the plenitude of what our Savior accomplished two thousand years ago, in the course of the thirty-three years he dwelt among us. However, as the Catechism declares, even “when his visible presencewas taken fromthem, Jesus did not leave his disciples orphans. He promised to remain with them until the end of time; he sent them his Spirit” (CCC 788; cf. Jn 14:18; 20:22; Mt 28:20; Acts 2:33). Accordingly, Catholic tradition refers to the Christus totus, the “whole Christ.” Christ the Head, dwelling in glory, is one with and continues to act in his Body, the Church. How this is so has been the subject of many scholarly books. But “a reply of Saint Joan of Arc to her judges sums up the faith of the holy doctors and the good sense of the believer: ‘About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter’” (Acts of the Trial of Joan of Arc; cf. CCC 795).
6 This second volume of essays by Professor Anthony Esolen offers twenty-four more examples of the redeeming presence of the Church in the world. You will see that the Church, far from fearing science and rational inquiry, has been the force behind some of our greatest advances. You will learn of statesmen who were moved by the faith in their courageous pursuit of a just social order. You will be inspired by the heroic efforts of missionaries, who traveled far and wide to draw more souls into the embrace of the Church. You will read of artists and thinkers who have left us some of civilization’s greatest treasures. And you will see that saints and men and women of faith, far from having their freedom diminished or personalities muted by union with Christ and obedience to the Church, stand out as history’s most free and vibrant figures. Though we could never adequately express the ineffable goodness of Our Lord and his Church— please God, we will contemplate it for all eternity as members of the Church triumphant!—we may still do our part to make it better known while we remain in via. Thus, it is with great pleasure that we publish one more book exploring how the Church has changed the world. Rev. Sebastian White, o.p. Editor-in-Chief, Magnificat Yonkers, New York Solemnity of Saint Joseph, 2020
7 The Reckoning of the Times By the time you turn to this page, gentle reader,millions of people will have gathered in Times Square as usual to watch the great Secular Odometer turn from 99999 to 100000, as the new year begins, very like the old year, progressing on in the secular imagination toward some longed-for oasis of earthly delights, between the deserts of nothing before and nothing to come. Little do the feasters know that, were it not for Pope Gregory XIII, they would have arrived two weeks too late. The Church teaches us that time springs from and returns to its origin in the providence of God the Creator. Or we might say that time is the rich soil wherein the wheat is sown for the harvest; or it is the arena for the heroic story of man’s salvation, with its fixed center in Calvary, where Christ triumphant pierces the heart of hell with the cross. Or it is the meter of the epic of faith, as we fight the good fight or run the race to the finish. So the Church does not brush time aside. She sanctifies time and elevates it, giving us far more yearly feasts to celebrate than modern man, always a-bustle and always late, knows what to do with.
8 How the Church Has Changed the World But she has also always wanted to get the time right. And here we run into difficulties. When a baby boy was born to Augustine and Mary Washington on the shores of the Potomac River, they recorded his birthday as February 11, 1731. Many of us are familiar with the phenomenon of “losing” an hour or two as we travel by air from west to east, but that was nothing like what George Washington lost. For he was later to affirm, correctly, that he was born on February 22, 1732, giving Americans the date for the celebration of his birthday, and prompting the striking of the Washington quarter dollar in 1932, the year of its bicentennial. What happened? Were his parents so far behind the times? It’s one thing to be off by a day or two. But eleven? And a whole year? A small error in the beginning We turn then to Rome. The year is 1580, and a tireless old bulldog of a man, Gregory XIII, has succeeded Pope Saint Pius V to the Chair of Peter. Gregory founded or expanded about three hundred schools and universities. He appointed men like Saint Charles Borromeo to undertake a thorough reform of Catholic seminaries. He sent missionaries to all parts of the world, receiving emissaries from Japan to thank him for sowing the faith there. He founded the English college
9 The Reckoning of the Time in Douai, France for the education of priests who then returned to their native land to celebrate Mass in hiding and confer the sacraments, until such time as the priest-hunters of Queen Elizabeth should seize them and subject them to torture and a gruesome and protracted execution. It is said that Gregory sang the Te Deum when he heard about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestant Huguenots in Paris, but there was no Internet in those days, and all that the Pope knew of it was that a political revolt against a legitimate ruler had been put down. He wept when he learned at last what had really happened. The times were also quite literally out of joint. If you ask a hundred people what a year is, you might get half of them to say that it is the time it takes for the earth to make one complete revolution about the sun. The next question is obvious. “How do you know when the earth has done that?” “Well, you look at the calendar.” “And where did the calendar come from? If you didn’t have a calendar, how would you know?” Silence falls, and crickets chirp from the woods. The sun has two apparent motions about the earth. The one is its daily journey from east to west. It is especially long in the summertime, when Mister Apollo the charioteer sweats at high noon, and his steeds long for their watering hole at the border of night.
10 How the Church Has Changed the World The other movement is attributable to the tilt of the earth, of about twenty-three degrees. The tilt makes it so that the sun’s path changes from day to day as the rotating earth moves in its yearly course. In England and North America, the sun rises higher and higher in its meridian as the days grow longer, until at one point it seems to “stop”—hence we have the word solstice, sun-stop. Then its noon is lower and lower in the sky, until at another point it stops again. We can measure our years according to the regular patterns of that path. The problem is that the year is a little longer than 365 days. Julius Caesar tried to account for that by putting in “leap year” days for every fourth year, but that turned out to be a little too many. People began to notice it. Dante, in the Middle Ages, was well aware that the calendar had been lagging. Eventually, Beatrice says, the “neglected hundredths of your years” would cause spring to begin in January! Not to worry, old ladies tending your flower gardens: that did not mean that snow would kill your daffodils, no more than Daylight Savings Time would fade your curtains. Days would be days and years would be years, but your computation would be off.
11 The Reckoning of the Time The keys to the calendar So Gregory summoned one of his advisors, a German priest named Christopher Clavius (Christoph Klau), called the “Euclid of the 16th century.” Clavius was that sort of Renaissance man who was really most prominent in the Middle Ages: born and raised in Bavaria, professor in Portugal, and papal mathematician and astronomer in Rome. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler esteemed him highly, and he was a lifelong friend of Galileo. His voluminous works were translated into various languages; these included Chinese, so that his fellow Jesuits, such as his student Matteo Ricci, the great missionary to China, could take them to that land of clockmakers and stargazers and seekers of the Order of Heaven. The most obvious need was to get rid of the ten “extra” days that had intruded. But Gregory and Clavius wanted more than calendrical duct tape. They wanted a solution that would, for all practical purposes, settle matters once and for all. That required excruciatingly precise astronomical observation and measurement and computation. What Clavius came up with was perfect, and was implemented in Catholic nations by papal decree in 1582. That year, if your birthday fell between October 5 and 14 inclusive, well, you might as well
12 How the Church Has Changed the World have been born on February 30, because those ten dates for that year were cut out. But the problem would have arisen again, had not Clavius hit upon the notion of omitting leap-year days for three out of four century years. So we had a February 29 in 2000, divisible by 400, but there was none in 1900, and there will not be another one in a century year until 2400. That will keep our calendars in trim for the next thirty thousand years, if the Lord does not wind things up here sooner, as we hope he will. Had Christendom not been divided, little George Washington would have been born on February 22 and not February 11 (you see, an eleventh extra day had wriggled in already). But for a long time the Protestant nations resisted adopting a “Catholic” calendar. That finally changed for England and her colonies in 1752—another year of vanishing dates—and now the Gregorian calendar is pretty much universal. The true new year? “But wait a moment,” you say. “That explains the dates in February, but it doesn’t explain the year.” Quite correct. You see, the convention of setting the beginning of the New Year as January 1 derives from Julius Caesar himself, but it wasn’t the only candidate. Christians in England, for example,
13 The Reckoning of the Time before the Norman Conquest in 1066 and then between 1155 and 1752, reckoned the New Year as beginning on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation. Other Christian countries counted Christmas, December 25, as beginning the new year. And why not? For on that day when the angel appeared unto Mary, the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and on that day nine months later we first beheld his glory, as he lay wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And so the revelers in Times Square have a pope to thank, if they only knew it. ••
14 A Map of Mankind An old man, dressed in a loose red robe, bows his head in respect, one scholar to another. His skin is a kind of dark amber, and his eyes glitter behind lids that sometimes make them look half shut. He is a storehouse of ancient lore. He knows the paths of the stars and the planets, what makes for a wise and useful minister, and what sacrifices are to be offered in honor of one’s ancestors. He can tell the virtues of the good emperors and the vices of the bad. He is master of the multitudinous and labyrinthine pictograms of his written language. “Honorable Father,” he says, “I am ready to see the map.” The other scholar, a man in his prime, is dressed in the same manner, but he wears a cross around his neck. His flesh is permanently sun-darkened, and gleams with a tinge of bronze. His hair is black, with that wave in it that signifies foreigner. He responds to his visitor with the intimation of a smile, and rolls out a large parchment upon the table. It is covered with impossible shapes, like those of fabulous beasts, shaded in various colors, all of them lurking or peering beneath a grill of arcs and parallel lines. “Here it is,” says the young man.
15 A Map of Mankind They remain silent for a while. The old scholar touches the parchment here and there with his fingertips. “I do not see my land, Father.” “We are here, my good friend Pao,” says the young man, pointing to a spot near the Great Sea. “All of this land, from the cold wasteland of the Mongol here, to Ton-kin in the south, and from the sea westward to the mountains of Tibet, all of this great land is yours.” “I had thought we were almost the whole world,” said Pao, shaking his head a little sadly. “Master Pao,” the Jesuit Matteo Ricci replied, laying a hand upon the old man’s shoulder, “that is a fond dream to which all men are prone.” Meeting people in Love When Matteo Ricci traveled to the Far East as a missionary in 1580, he knew he had to learn everything he could about the Chinese culture, in order to bring them the Good News most effectively. He understood that the Chinese were an ancient and proud people, with long and venerable traditions. He spent several years in the Portuguese colony of Macao, mastering Mandarin Chinese, a language as different from any in Europe as it is possible to be. He had already studied mathematics and astronomy in Italy under the famous Father Christopher Clavius, with an eye to using those studies to earn the esteem and the friendship of the Chinese, who
16 How the Church Has Changed the World believed that the moral task of mankind on earth was to reflect the beautiful, silent Order of Heaven. In other words, Matteo Ricci was what we now would call an anthropologist, as were so many others among his brother missionaries. I have heard people pride themselves on being “multicultural” who read at most two languages, and whose idea of culture seems to be limited to what comes out of the oven and what flag flies from the eaves. They have much to learn from the Catholic missionaries. You cannot bring the Good News to a people, or really any news at all, unless you know them, but to know human beings to the core you must love what is lovable in them, honor what is honorable, and forgive what is foolish or wicked. So the missionaries observed the peoples to whom they ministered, and their letters and diaries are invaluable sources of information. But more than information. It is one thing to be aware that the Chinese believed that their land took up almost the whole globe, and to know that they would be surprised and dismayed to learn otherwise. It is quite another to be able to disentangle that pride and folly from their admirable sense of order and tradition, spanning many centuries. Matteo Ricci, like Junípero Serra, and Isaac Jogues, and Jean de Brébeuf, learned from the inside what the people were whom he loved. And we must insist upon the fact of this love.
17 A Map of Mankind Love that seeks truth Consider what happens when the depth of Christian love is not there. Margaret Mead, the queen of anthropology, went to the South Seas and studied the mating habits of the natives, resulting in the too-influential and now-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa. She had something of a liberal agenda; the natives caught on to it, and played their cards accordingly. The people under the microscope flipped the lens the other way around. I’m not saying that Mead despised the Samoans; she liked them very much. But Father Ricci had to love the Chinese, with the charity that hopes all things, believes all things, and endures all things. Father Ricci had to love them with a love that would defy one disappointment after another, unto death. He was not martyred, but he would never return to his native land. He never enjoyed the accolades due to a celebrated scholar. I think that the Catholic missionaries had to be most discerning, precisely because the articles of our faith are of ultimate concern. They could not simply say, “The people of China leave food offerings for their deceased ancestors, so they must be worshiping them as deities.” Maybe they were, and maybe they weren’t. Father Ricci determined that the most learned among them considered it an act of filial piety. Since they brought food to their elders
18 How the Church Has Changed the World in life, they thought that the best demonstration of their honor would be to “bring” food to them after their death. The common people, however, had mingled the practice with a good deal of superstition, and that, too, had to be taken into account. Father Ricci sought out the wisest sages among the Chinese, and determined that the most ancient Chinese deity of all was the T’ien-Chu ShihI—“heavenly Lord” or “Lord of heaven.” That Lord was the one in whom all things had their origin, and whom all things in heaven and earth obeyed. So after long observation and careful study of the old texts, he wrote The True Doctrine of God, a short and brilliant catechism of the Catholic faith, filled with citations from the venerated words of such ancient wise men as Confucius and Mencius. For we believe that God does not leave any of his beloved people entirely in darkness. Love of God, the bond of friendship After many years of patient labor, Matteo Ricci was accorded the rarest of privileges. He, a mandarin from the West, was allowed entrance to the Forbidden City, the abode of the emperor himself. It was a momentous occasion. For we are not talking about slick operators, buying land from indigenous peoples by paying them nuggets of glass, or rotting out their virtue by soaking them with firewater. Matteo Ricci came
19 A Map of Mankind alone, with the best that his world had to offer, as a gift to the best of the people to whom he was both preacher and servant. What a sight that must have been, in the early weeks of 1601, when Father Ricci, summoned at last by the Emperor Wan-Li himself, walked along the stately courtyards of the imperial grounds! I imagine him escorted by a parade of counselors and scholars and priests, while porters carry upon a litter the most fitting of gifts—maps and clocks and the astrolabe about which Father Ricci’s teacher Clavius had written with so much precision and admiration. There before them rises the many-colored palace itself, its tiers of roofs curled in the style of the East, where dwelt the emperor, the North Star upon earth, whose duty was to rule his people with the same constancy as the North Star above ruled the heavens. The man of God met a man who longed for God. Is that not the profoundest thing we can say about our fellow men, in whatever culture we may find them—that in the recesses of their hearts they long for God? If so, then only someone whose heart and mind are turned to God can ever really understand the hearts and minds of others. I will not enter into the disputes that arose, the most bitter of them long after Father Ricci had died, between the Jesuits on one side and Dominicans and Franciscans on the other, regarding whether
20 How the Church Has Changed the World the mode of worship the Chinese Catholics had adopted was licit, or whether their continuing to honor their dead in the traditional way smacked too much of paganism. It is a tangled affair, ending in defeat for the Jesuit position. But Matteo Ricci has not been forgotten. The best of that noble culture, which the methodical and murderous Mao Zedong tried to sweep from the face of the earth, survives yet, and the moral seriousness of the Chinese, their natural piety, and their love of the beauty and order of the universe will someday, I firmly trust, find their fulfillment in Christ. Yet another reason to turn in prayer to the east. ••
21 The Joy of the Martyrs Winston Smith, drinking oily gin in a drab little tavern called The Chestnut Tree, hears a song over the television that reminds him of something— what was it again?—that happened to him in a dungeon, in the bowels of the Ministry of Love: Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me; There lie you and here lie we, Under the spreading chestnut tree. Yes, that was it. They had gotten inside him, prying open his heart. They had let loose the rats and spiders of his nightmares. They had made him betray Julia, the woman he loved. She had betrayed him also. Now all that was left of their love was like the cauterized knob of an amputated limb. His eyes welled up with tears, as the waiter brought him another bottle. He had wanted to be a witness to the truth, but he had failed. If Big Brother said that two and two made five, then you had to think your way into agreeing with it. You had not merely to lie, but to believe your lie. Winston Smith was now too weary to go over it all again. They had won. And now they jeered from the screen. Smith didn’t know it, because poetry had been buriedmany
22 How the Church Has Changed the World fathoms deep under the sludge of all-in-all government, but the song was itself a parasite. A poet named Longfellow, many years before, had used that first line to honor a simple hard-working Christian man, a man of hope and integrity, who would sit among his boys on a Sunday in church, and hear his daughter singing. These were its first words: Under a spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands, And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands. But who can hold out against the father of lies, without the grace of God? George Orwell’s defeated “hero” in Nineteen Eighty-Four had no faith. Another dungeon The scene is almost two thousand years ago. A fiery preacher from the desert sits in chains in a dank and vermin-ridden cell, beneath the palace of a puppet king. Years later, a man named John who once followed him would write that he, also named John—God is gracious—had come as a witness, to bear witness to the Light. The word he used was martyria: witness, testimony, and, in the end, what we know as martyrdom.
23 The Joy of the Marty Sounds of the flute and tambourine, and dancing in sensuous abandon, reach him from above. Consider the contrast. In the halls ofHerodAntipas we have wealth, good repute among the Roman occupiers, rich food and drink, and a young woman dancing before her stepfather, while her mother looks on, calculating. Below, the nearly naked John the Baptizer, and filth. It seems like all the world to nothing. Not to the mother Herodias, though. Her husband, the brother-in-law with whom she is guilty of incest, fears John because he bears witness to the truth. She hates John for the same reason. So when the weakling king, ingratiated by the girl, promises her anything she desires, the girl, instructed by her mother, says, “Bring me the head of John the Baptizer on a platter.” At which point truth and justice yield to face-saving and vengeance. Down below, John hears the heavy door swing open, and knows it is time. He need not have told a lie to save his life. All he had to do was to stop telling the truth. If you had collared a Roman soldier or even priest and held a knife to his throat, he’d have abjured the whole pantheon of pagan gods in a heartbeat. Why, the gods themselves were traitors and liars when it suited them. Not the God of Israel.
24 How the Church Has Changed the World What is truth? It is a year later. The man for whom John came to witness, the true Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world, is being tried for insurrection. The charges are baseless. They are lies. The Roman procurator, an intelligent but ruthless and cunning man, knows very well that they are lies. “Are you a king?” he asks, not suppressing a smirk. Again the contrast is stunning. The accused man has been beaten bloody. He owns nothing in the world but the clothes on his back. Behind the procurator stand all the colossal and bullying symbols of Roman authority. “Are you the king of the Jews?” The man replies. He is a king, but his kingdom is not of this world. “So then you are a king?” says the procurator, wavering between contempt and fear. He had been hoping for a decent night’s rest. The last thing he’d wanted was to have to deal with these Jews and their mad religion, their mad belief in the one true God. He had thought he could dispose of this matter without having to think. Thought is dangerous. Thought can bring you to the door of truth. There are all kinds of reasons for wanting that door to stay shut. Men cannot endure the light. “You say that I am a king,” says the accused. “For this reason I was born and came into the
25 The Joy of the Marty world,” he says, speaking the common language of the east, “hina martyreso tei aletheiai,” that he might be a witness, a martyr, to the truth. Without truth to witness to, there is no martyrdom. Without God to give us the grace and the courage, there is no martyrdom, because on our own we have no strength to hold out against the lie. “What is truth?” asked Pontius Pilate, washing his mind before he washed his hands. We are martyrs to the Resurrection It is a few weeks later, at Solomon’s portico. Many thousands of Jews fromall over the world have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Passover—the great jubilee day. It is a feast of gratitude and rejoicing. But a sudden wind has swept the city, and people are shouting and crying out in their many tongues—What has happened? What is going on? A man of broad shoulders, in the ordinary clothing of a workman, stands forth on a balcony above. He is speaking. There was a night when he did not speak. His master had been arrested and put on trial for his life. On that night this man, Simon, christened “Rock” by the master in one of his moments of sublime command or irony or both, had refused to witness to the truth. “I tell you,” he snapped at the serving woman, trying to muffle his Galilean accent, “I don’t know
26 How the Church Has Changed the World the man!” Cunning strategy, that. But Jesus glanced his way, and “Rock,” Peter, left the area andwandered into the night, weeping bitterly. Now he stands and speaks. “Men of Israel, do not be amazed,” he cries. For the promised Messiah had come, and they had put to death the Lord of life, but God has raised him from the dead, “and of this we are martyres!” Thousands of repentant sinners would be baptized on that day, says Saint Luke. But Peter knew what kind of final witness, what martyrdom, awaited him. The risen Lord had told him there would come a time when men would bind him and take him where he did not want to go. He would be crucified upside down, on the Vatican hill, outside the walls of Rome. God is the ultimate witness The history of the Christian faith is the story of that great cloud of martyrs which surrounds us all. Some of them, like Saint Sebastian, his body riddled with arrows, died violent deaths at the hands of Roman persecutors. Others journeyed into pagan lands, like Saint Boniface, and toiled to bring the truth, knowing that eventually it would cost them their lives. Others, like Saint Damien of Moloka’i, accepted a permanent exile from their
27 The Joy of the Marty homelands—for Damien, imprisonment in a colony of lepers, to bring to his fellow men healing in body and soul. Sometimes the father of lies is not so bloody. Then our martyrdom may be the laughter and scorn of the world; for who but a fool would live in the alleys of Calcutta, or who but someone obsessed and mad would shut himself up in a cave in Egypt, to spend his life in prayer? But in the end the same question is posed to everyone. And it is a question the world never has really understood. The world may kill, and often does kill, for glory or wealth or ambition or vengeance or fear. But to set your very life on the line for truth, to be slaughtered like a lamb for truth—well, what the pagan world got from Socrates, the history of the Church has gotten from hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women and even children, and in our supposedly enlightened time more than ever. These bear witness to the world, against the world, for the sake of the world, and the world, because its ways are evil, stops up its ears against the truth that would set it free. None of this could ever come to pass, except by faith in the ultimate martyr, the God who will stand witness for us. “Martyro ego,” says the Lord to John at the end of his mysterious and resplendent vision: He shall bear witness to all who hear the words of truth.
28 They Brought Their Sick to Him The preacher stands before the crowds, sparing no one’s complacency. “You array your bodies and your homes with luxury,” he cries, “but the most glorious creature that God ever made, your fellow man, you allow to go in tatters! Hear what the rich man in the parable says. He will pull down his barns and erect a great granary, a monument to his pride, and then he will live at his ease. Fool! That very night the Lord will require of him his life.” His name is Basil, “king.”That name is both apt and deeply ironic. You’d never look upon his spare form and think of royalty. For clothing he owns but a cloak and sandals. He lives mainly on bread and water. But by his very poverty and piety he gains an authority over his congregation that kings can never know, in all their regalia and their trailing retinues of favorites and flatterers. For Basil, poverty was not merely a social problem, to be addressed by distant and impersonal measures. The poor man who borrows as a last resort, and who then scrambles under his bed when he hears his creditor’s knock on the door—that is your brother. The boy who survives in the street by stealing, he is your own son. Other preachers might
29 They Brought Their Sick to Hi be content with general principles of Christian charity. Not Basil. The Mass ends, and the people return to their homes in the swarming city of Caesarea, named for the emperor Augustus on his death in 14 a.d. For the Roman armies had reduced the vast high plateau of Cappadocia to the liberty of a Roman province. To the north, the great River Halys bends on its course to the Black Sea. To the south a great snowy volcanic cone, Mount Argaeus, rises more than a mile and a half above the surrounding country. If you are poor or sick in this land, so much the worse for you. It’s not the honey-sweet land of the Greek isles, near to the swell of the wine-dark sea. It is far inland, brutally hot in summer, icy in winter. The harvests have been poor, and the people are hungry. And the armies of the Arian emperor Valens have been doing bloody work. In that place, at that time, Saint Basil came to a decision. “We need a new city,” he said. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven “Beggars and strangers come from Zeus,” went the old Greek proverb, for the gods would come down to put arrogant men to the test, showing up at their gates with a walking stick and in rags. There was no sense that the poor should be loved. Hospitality is one thing, but love is quite another. Maybe we
30 How the Church Has Changed the World can translate the proverb in this way: “People who cringe and who don’t belong here might be sent by that master of justice—and cunning. We’d better watch out.” But Jesus the journeying preacher from dusty Palestine had changed all that forever, at least for those who profess to follow him. “Blessed are the poor,” he said, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” And if you’re too rich to beg, your well-laden camel might find entry into its gates a bit tight. The pagans understood, deep down, that there was something at least uneasy about riches. Menelaus, in the Odyssey, is a very rich man—but not much of a man. Socrates didn’t own much, but he did cadge dinners at the homes of his rich young patrons. Yes, the pagans understood it, somewhere, somehow, just as pagans nowadays understand it. Such understanding is cheap. Basil had long been doing thework of Christian charity. Here’s how his dear friend, Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, described it: "He gathered together the victims of the famine with some who were but slightly recovering from it, men and women, infants, old men, every age which was in distress, and obtaining contributions of all sorts of food which can relieve famine, set before them basins of soup and such meat as was found preserved among
31 They Brought Their Sick to Hi us, on which the poor live. Then, imitating the ministry of Christ, who, girded with a towel, did not disdain to wash the disciples’ feet, using for this purpose the aid of his own servants, and also of his fellow servants, he attended to the bodies and souls of those who needed it, combining personal respect with the supply of their necessity, and so giving them a double relief." See how they love one another! How to bring personal care to the thousands who needed it—that was the problem. Nothing like it had been done in the history of the world. A new city indeed was needed. So Basil acquired some land outside of Caesarea, and there he began to build. The ancients had no true hospitals for everyone. The Romans had built infirmaries for veteran soldiers, or for the valued slaves of the wealthy, but in general, if you were a sick man and had no patron, you were out of luck. You might go to the temple of the healer-god, Asclepius, and pray that he might lift the curse from your body. That was about it. Christians, however, had been commanded to tend the sick, in body and spirit, and this duty fell most of all upon the bishop, the priests, and in particular the servants, that is, the deacons. The
32 How the Church Has Changed the World bishop’s very home was to be open to all travelers. That was the command, and the practice lived up to it. The apostate emperor Julian famously wrote, in envy, that the Christians put his fellow pagans to shame, because they did a better job taking care of pagans than the pagans themselves did! The Christians did so in homage to Christ the Healer, of whom Asclepius was but a shadowy allegory, as Saint Justin had said almost two hundred years before. Jesus had gone about Galilee and Judea healing the sick, and his disciples and Apostles would do the same, and if someone was dying, said Saint James, then the priest should lay his hands upon him and anoint him, and confer healing, if not of the body, then of the sin-sick soul. We remember the Samaritan in Jesus’ parable, who went down into the ditch by the roadside to take up the man who had fallen among thieves, to clean his flesh with wine and oil, and to bind up his wounds with his own hands. Hands—not mere money, but hands. The city rises Basil called it the Ptochotrephion, the House for Care of the Poor, but others soon called it the Basiliad, or simply the New City. Imagine separate buildings for those who were afflicted by the plague, for those who were recovering, for the lepers whom no self-respecting pagan
33 They Brought Their Sick to Hi would go near, for women in childbirth, and for people nearly starved with the famine. Imagine hospices for travelers, and chapels for all of us wayfarers on the road to the last things. Imagine schools—especially shops where a young man with no money and no prospects might learn a gainful trade, to be a mason, a tanner, a potter, a carpenter. Imagine monks, hundreds of them, for whom this entire city is their monastery. One monk washes the purulent sores of a dying man. Another is showing a boy how not to gouge the wood with the plane. Another plies his hoe in a large field of vegetables. Another brings the Body of Christ to a child too sick to move. Another digs a grave. All of them are working and praying. In his eulogy for Basil’s requiem Mass, Saint Gregory Nazianzen praised this wonder of love, greater in real glory than “seven-gatedThebes…and the pyramids, and the immeasurable bronze of the Colossus,” and all those other wonders of the world, which gained their founders nothing but a little brief fame. “Go forth a little way from Caesarea,” he said, “and behold the new city, the storehouse of piety, the common treasury of the wealthy, in which the superfluities of their wealth, yes, and even their necessaries, are stored, in consequence of [Basil’s] exhortations, freed from the power of the moth, no longer gladdening the eyes of the thief, and escaping both the emulation of envy, and the
34 How the Church Has Changed the World corruption of time: where disease is regarded in a religious light, and disaster is thought a blessing, and sympathy is put to the test.” Even the lepers are welcome there, “composers of piteous songs, if any of them have their voice still left to them.” If only we had one now Such were the hospitals, which the Church bequeathed to the world. And now our sick are cared for in buildings twenty stories high, with medicines and machines that Saint Basil could never have imagined. Yet I have a fond hope that someday, amid the un-music of monitors, within the icy white walls, beyond the reach of accountants and executive officers, something of the human, something of the love that touches the soul of man, will return. We all must die, medicine or no. It would be a good thing at least to die among friends, strengthened and cheered by good men of God, and given that last sweet nourishment for the journey; to be with Christ, to receive Christ, on the way to Christ. ••
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