In fact the appeal of Basil seems to have failed
to elicit the response he desired, not so much from the independent
tone of his letters, which was only in accordance with the recognised
facts of the age, 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 were asserted 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. as from occidental
suspicions of Basil’s orthodoxy, Ep.
cclxvi. § 2. and
from the failure of men, who thought and wrote in Latin, to enter fully
into the controversies conducted in a more subtle tongue. cf. Ep.
ccxiv. § 4, p. 254. Basil had taken every precaution to
ensure the conveyance of his letters by messengers of tact and
discretion. He had deprecated the advocacy of so simple-minded
and undiplomatic an ambassador as his brother Gregory. Ep.
ccxv. He had poured out his very soul in
entreaty. See
specially Ep. ccxlii. But all was
unavailing. He suffered, and he had to suffer unsupported by a
human sympathy on which he thought he had a just claim.
“Foiled in all his repeated demands; a deaf ear turned
to his most earnest entreaties; the council he had begged for not
summoned; the deputation he had repeatedly solicited unsent;
Basil’s span of life drew to its end amid blasted hopes and
apparently fruitless labours for the unity of the faith. It
was not permitted him to live to see the Eastern Churches, for the
purity of whose faith he had devoted all his powers, restored to
peace and unanimity.” Canon Venables, D.C.B. i.
295.
“He had to fare on as best he
might,—admiring, courting, but coldly treated by the Latin world,
desiring the friendship of Rome, yet wounded by her superciliousness,
suspected of heresy by Damasus, and accused by Jerome of
pride.” Newman, Church of the Fathers, p.
115.