The devotional figures of St. Basil represent him, or ought to represent him, in the Greek pontificals, bareheaded, and with a thin worn countenance, as he appears in the etching of the Greek Fathers.
‘The Emperor Valens in the church at Cesarea,’ an admirably picturesque subject, has received as little justice as the scene between Ambrose and Theodosius. When the French painter Subleyras was at Rome in 1745, he raised himself to name and fame by his portrait of Benedict XIV.,[295] and received, through the interest of his friend Cardinal Valenti, the commission to paint a picture for one of the mosaics in St. Peter’s. The subject selected was the Emperor Valens fainting in presence of St. Basil. We have all the pomp of the scene:—the altar, the incense, the richly attired priests on one side; on the other, the Imperial court. It is not easy to find fault, for the picture is well drawn, well composed, in the mannered taste of that time; well coloured, rather tenderly than forcibly; and Lanzi is enthusiastic in his praise of the draperies; yet, as a whole, it leaves the mind unimpressed. As usual, the original sketch for this picture far excels the large composition.[296]
The prayers of St. Basil were supposed by the Armenian Christians, partly from his sanctity, and partly from his intellectual endowments, to have a peculiar, almost resistless, power; so that he not only redeemed souls from purgatory, but even lost angels from the abyss of hell. ‘On the sixth day of the creation, when the rebellious angels fell from heaven through that opening in the firmament which the Armenians call Arocea, and we the Galaxy, one unlucky angel, who had no participation in their sin, but seems to have been entangled in the crowd, fell with them.’ (A moral, I presume, on the consequences of keeping bad company.) ‘And this unfortunate angel was not restored till he had obtained, it is not said how, the prayers of St. Basil. His condition meantime, from the sixth day of the creation to the fourth century of the Christian era, must have been even more uncomfortable than that of Klopstock’s repentant demon in “The Messiah.”’
There are many other beautiful legendary stories of St. Basil, but, as I have never met with them in any form of Art, I pass them over here. One of the most striking has been versified by Southey in his ballad-poem, ‘All for Love.’ It would afford a great variety of picturesque subjects.
St. Athanasius.
Lat. S. Athanasius, Pater Orthodoxiæ. Ital. Sant’ Atanasio. Fr. St. Athanase. (May 2, A.D. 373.)
St. Athanasius, whose famous Creed remains a stumbling-block in Christendom, was born at Alexandria, about the year 298; he was consequently the eldest of the Greek Fathers, though he does not in that Church take the first rank. He, like the others, began his career by the study of profane literature, science, and eloquence; but, seized by the religious spirit of the age, he, too, fled to the desert, and became, for a time, the pupil of St. Anthony. He returned to Alexandria, and was ordained deacon. His first appearance as a public character was at the celebrated council of Nice (A.D. 325), where he opposed Arius and his partisans with so much zeal and eloquence, that he was thenceforth regarded as the great pillar of orthodoxy. He became Bishop of Alexandria the following year; and the rest of his life was a perpetual contest with the Arians. The great schism of the early Church blazed at this time in the East and in the West, and Athanasius, by his invincible perseverance and intrepidity, procured the victory for the Catholic party. He died in 372, after having been Bishop of Alexandria forty-six years, of which twenty years had been spent in exile and tribulation.