Basil the Great: Why Everyone Needs to Read This NOW
I suspect the majority of those reading these words have not the faintest idea who Basil the Great is. I didn't either until yesterday, when a remarkable little book landed in my lap, almost literally from the sky.
Address to Young Men on Reading Greek Literature is a short, delightful treatise by a saint at the end of his life, instructing young men to seek out the good things in the pagan culture around them and pass over the rest.
It sounds deceptively common sense, yet almost daily I find Christians with the total opposite view under many names: fideism, puritanism, acesticism, the Lifeway culture. There are unbelievably large groups of Christians that truly believe anything that does not bear a prominent endorsement from a Christian institution is filthy.
Quite frankly, I have been fighting this attitude for years, from defending my interest in mythology and fairy tales to defiantly reading The Golden Compass, Harry Potter, Dan Brown, and Twilight on campus at one of the most conservative Christian schools this side of Liberty University (though in our credit we did not have blue and pink sidewalks). Why? Because these were the things that the culture was interested in, and if I wanted to have an intelligent voice in the culture, I needed to know what they were talking about.
On the more negative side, I detest "Christian" movies, pop music ,and especially fiction because of the shameless, blatant misuse of secular themes. Example of one of the worst: Christian vampires (he sparkles with the Holy Spirit!).
I resist that insular, inward-focused culture that, like Nietszche's sheep, follow one trend after another 5 years behind, ignoring the lost around them and doing no one any good. Rather than appreciate the good in secular music, art, movies and literature, mainstream Christian entertainment rips off the hook and add Jesus' name for profit. Instead, I want to embrace without fear those things in the world which can provoke thought, create beauty, and foster virtue, while overlooking those aspects of it that promote cynicism, lust, and greed. Of course, this usually means me watching "The Office" and not getting my panties in a wad over pre-marital sex; in other words, not avoiding something with both good and bad traits. Sometimes it means watching something with almost no good in it in order to be equipped to have an intelligent dialogue with someone. And I don't think any of this makes me a bad Christian.
Basil addresses all of this in his short essay. He encourages young men to seek out things that aid our souls "wherever they may be found", and uses this great metaphor: just as a tree has both leaves and the greater object, fruit, so the Christian should have a knowledge of secular things and the truth. Furthermore, the leaves/secular things can be appreciated in their own right as things of beauty or pleasure, as long as that is not the highest aim.
I wish this were more common sense and rampant in our culture, but it really isn't. So that's why I'm urging people to read this and recover it. Basil is one of those great Christian fathers who has completely fallen through the cracks in our society, and it is only by personal rediscovery that we can, in a sense, ressurrect him.
Nota Bena: other books on this topic are out there. See for example Louis Markos' From Achilles to Christ and John Reynold's From Jersualem to Athens.
Address to Young Men on Reading Greek Literature is a short, delightful treatise by a saint at the end of his life, instructing young men to seek out the good things in the pagan culture around them and pass over the rest.
It sounds deceptively common sense, yet almost daily I find Christians with the total opposite view under many names: fideism, puritanism, acesticism, the Lifeway culture. There are unbelievably large groups of Christians that truly believe anything that does not bear a prominent endorsement from a Christian institution is filthy.
Quite frankly, I have been fighting this attitude for years, from defending my interest in mythology and fairy tales to defiantly reading The Golden Compass, Harry Potter, Dan Brown, and Twilight on campus at one of the most conservative Christian schools this side of Liberty University (though in our credit we did not have blue and pink sidewalks). Why? Because these were the things that the culture was interested in, and if I wanted to have an intelligent voice in the culture, I needed to know what they were talking about.
On the more negative side, I detest "Christian" movies, pop music ,and especially fiction because of the shameless, blatant misuse of secular themes. Example of one of the worst: Christian vampires (he sparkles with the Holy Spirit!).
I resist that insular, inward-focused culture that, like Nietszche's sheep, follow one trend after another 5 years behind, ignoring the lost around them and doing no one any good. Rather than appreciate the good in secular music, art, movies and literature, mainstream Christian entertainment rips off the hook and add Jesus' name for profit. Instead, I want to embrace without fear those things in the world which can provoke thought, create beauty, and foster virtue, while overlooking those aspects of it that promote cynicism, lust, and greed. Of course, this usually means me watching "The Office" and not getting my panties in a wad over pre-marital sex; in other words, not avoiding something with both good and bad traits. Sometimes it means watching something with almost no good in it in order to be equipped to have an intelligent dialogue with someone. And I don't think any of this makes me a bad Christian.
Basil addresses all of this in his short essay. He encourages young men to seek out things that aid our souls "wherever they may be found", and uses this great metaphor: just as a tree has both leaves and the greater object, fruit, so the Christian should have a knowledge of secular things and the truth. Furthermore, the leaves/secular things can be appreciated in their own right as things of beauty or pleasure, as long as that is not the highest aim.
I wish this were more common sense and rampant in our culture, but it really isn't. So that's why I'm urging people to read this and recover it. Basil is one of those great Christian fathers who has completely fallen through the cracks in our society, and it is only by personal rediscovery that we can, in a sense, ressurrect him.
Nota Bena: other books on this topic are out there. See for example Louis Markos' From Achilles to Christ and John Reynold's From Jersualem to Athens.