Recently I had stumbled across a quote from Saint Basil of Caesarea that I found very interesting. I looked up the source and found that it was from his Letters, namely letter XCII (92), with the translation found in Nicene Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II, Volume VIII. In his letter, Basil laments the current state of the church and describes how bad the situation has gotten. Here is the relevant passage:
“The doctrines of true religion are overthrown. The laws of the Church are in confusion. The ambition of men, who have no fear of God, rushes into high posts, and exalted office is now publicly known as the prize of impiety. The result is, that the worse a man blasphemes, the fitter the people think him to be a bishop. Clerical dignity is a thing of the past. There is a complete lack of men shepherding the Lord’s flock with knowledge. Ambitious men are constantly throwing away the provision for the poor on their own enjoyment and the distribution of gifts. There is no precise knowledge of canons. There is complete immunity in sinning; for when men have been placed in office by the favour of men, they are obliged to return the favour by continually showing indulgence to offenders. Just judgment is a thing of the past; and everyone walks according to his heart’s desire. Vice knows no bounds; the people know no restraint. Men in authority are afraid to speak, for those who have reached power by human interest are the slaves of those to whom they owe their advancement. And now the very vindication of orthodoxy is looked upon in some quarters as an opportunity for mutual attack; and men conceal their private ill-will and pretend that their hostility is all for the sake of the truth. Others, afraid of being convicted of disgraceful crimes, madden the people into fratricidal quarrels, that their own doings may be unnoticed in the general distress. Hence the war admits of no truce, for the doers of ill deeds are afraid of a peace, as being likely to lift the veil from their secret infamy. All the while unbelievers laugh; men of weak faith are shaken; faith is uncertain; souls are drenched in ignorance, because adulterators of the word imitate the truth. The mouths of true believers are dumb, while every blasphemous tongue wags free; holy things are trodden under foot; the better laity shun the churches as schools of impiety; and lift their hands in the deserts with sighs and tears to their Lord in heaven.”
Basil of Caesarea, Letter XCII
Basil wrote this letter in 372 AD – that’s around 1,650 years ago. But what he describes sounds familiar, doesn’t it? If I didn’t know any better, I would assume this was describing the state of Christianity today in the 21st century. Confusion, ignorance, impiety, greed, vice and many more all plague the church, and honest Christians are too afraid and too small to do anything. Then again, as Ecclesiastes puts it, “there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1.9 KJV) – we shouldn’t be too surprised.
Basil describes the time as marked by confusion and ignorance, namely ignorance of the law of the church – he says “There is a complete lack of men shepherding the Lord’s flock with knowledge”. Now we see few people ever read the Bible, and even when they do they don’t understand what it means. Even fewer are the ones who read ancient or professional books on the Bible. A worrying number of those teaching are as clueless as the people they teach; as a result “souls are drenched in ignorance”.
What is the origin of this ignorance? Basil sums up the bad situation in one sentence – “All the while unbelievers laugh; men of weak faith are shaken; faith is uncertain; souls are drenched in ignorance, because adulterators of the word imitate the truth”. All of this is because, as he puts it, “adulterators of the word imitate the truth” – by this he means people who distort Christianity are also claiming to do so in the name of Christianity. The people who twist and mangle the faith are the ones who claim to represent it. This problem was not new in the 4th century; Saint Peter noted about false teachers that “because of them [false teachers] the way of truth will be blasphemed” (II Peter 2.2 ESV). Saint Paul warned the church of Colossae about people who “have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body” but teach nothing more than “commandments and doctrines of men” (Colossians 2.22-23 KJV), and to the heretics in Rome he said “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you” (Romans 2.24 ESV). Also we should never forget how the Lord Jesus Christ himself warned that false prophets “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7.15 KJV).
So we ought not be surprised that nothing has changed since either the 4th or 1st centuries. Saint Basil lamented what was caused by the false teachers, namely that “unbelievers laugh; men of weak faith are shaken; faith is uncertain; souls are drenched in ignorance”. It is because of the evil work of fake Christians that, as Peter and Paul warned, Christianity is blasphemed. The truth of the gospel is thrown into question when those who claim to act in it’s name are bad people. Around the turn of the 21st century, there was an antireligious movement known as New Atheism that led to a large-scale apostasy in the Western world. In the USA for instance, the number of self-professed Christians is declining at a rapid pace (Pew Research Center, 17 Oct. 2019). Christians were confused: why were people leaving? People blamed anything from secular education, to television, to people just wanting to sin, but 1,650 years ago Basil knew the right answer – “souls are drenched in ignorance”. It is worth noting that (in the USA at least) it is actually the non-religious who know more about religion than religious people (Pew Research Center, 21 Aug. 2019). That would be a strange thing – if not for the fact that most atheists these days are apostates. All across the Western world, people are raised in so-called ‘Christian’ households with poor understandings of the faith, reinforced by people who too (whether clergy, parents, or whoever else) have poor grasps on the gospel. So they get a little older and try to figure out things more, and when they see something unpleasant or have a bad experience with Christianity, they decide they’ve seen enough and leave. Maybe you’ve heard someone say that they became an atheist after reading the Bible – I know I have. But how could they not when raised in a world of confusion? “Men of weak faith are shaken”, after all.
Fret not. There is hope at the end of the tunnel. Remember that Basil wrote this in the 4th century – the church may have had these problems before, but that means it has survived these problems before. In his own time the “adulterators of the word” were the Arians (disciples of a priest named Arius), and it is these heretics in particular that Basil is writing about. But where are the Arians today? Sure, there are some today who have the same creed, but the ancient Arians themselves are gone. Arius, Eusebius Nicomedian, George Cappadocian, and Emperor Constantius II are obscure names in dusty history books. Meanwhile Saint Basil is venerated in multiple major churches across the world. His works were archived, copied, spread about, and then translated; then those translations were archived, spread about, and uploaded online where I can stumble across them by accident and write this post. Likewise, Saints Peter and Paul had to deal with Gnostics, Judaizers, and more. Yet those groups are gone while you can find the translated letters of Peter and Paul in any Bible, and you can find said Bible in a hotel room, or by a desk, or anywhere else. The church survived the tumults of the 1st century, it survived the tumults of the 4th century, it survived all centuries afterwards, and it will survive whatever trouble the 21st century has to offer. It will survive all the way to the “that Blessed Hope” (Titus 2.13 KJV) – the ultimate light at the end of the tunnel – when Christ returns to vanquish every foe.
The church will survive, yes, but be weary of which side of church history you wind up on. Basil didn’t just complain about ignorance and outright evil – no, he also complained that nobody was doing anything about it. “The mouths of true believers are dumb”, and thus “There is a complete lack of men shepherding the Lord’s flock with knowledge”. He lamented that “now the very vindication of orthodoxy is looked upon in some quarters as an opportunity for mutual attack”. It was thanks to true believers opening their mouths that the church survived, and it needs true believers still now. God will rescue the church regardless of us, yes, but what shape the church will be in when it is rescued is up to us. The problem is that very few are shepherding the flock with knowledge – the solution is to gain knowledge and to give it to the flock. Jesus our Lord asked Saint Peter, “do you love me?”, and when Peter answered “you know that I love you”, Jesus replied “Tend my sheep” (John 21.16 ESV). Do you love Jesus? Tend his sheep.
Nikaea 325 
