#18 – Pedicabo Et Irrumabo

* When did the decline in an interest in the classics start to emerge in the West? * It possibly started with Basil. * Basil of Caesarea * Basil was an influential bishop from Cappadocia, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). * Died in the late 4th century. * He was born into a wealthy family, raised a Christian by his mother, after his father was martyred before Constantine’s edict. * He got a classical education, first in Caesarea and then in Constantinople. * Then he fell under the spell of a charismatic preacher and decided to leave his legal and teaching career and devote himself to Christianity. * He wrote: I had wasted much time on follies and spent nearly all of my youth in vain labors, and devotion to the teachings of a wisdom that God had made foolish. Suddenly, I awoke as out of a deep sleep. I beheld the wonderful light of the Gospel truth, and I recognized the nothingness of the wisdom of the princes of this world. * He gave away his family fortune and is known for his work with the poor, setting up soup kitchens, and trying to convert theives and prostitutes. * In the Greek and Eastern tradition, it’s St Basil who is associated with Santa Claus, not St Nicholas. * He’s also known for having a huge influence on the monastic movement. * But what we want to talk about is his influential pamphlet ‘The Right Use of Greek Literature’ or “To Young Men, On How They Might Profit From Pagan Literature”. * This document was written later in his life, probably in the late 370s. * And it basically says this: Look kids, reading the pagan literature is pretty cool. But DON’T READ THE NAUGHTY BITS because they will corrupt your soul. * The naughty bits included anything that talked about sex or nudity or there being multiple gods or gods have fights and sex with other gods and humans. * But least of all shall we give attention to them when they narrate anything about the gods, and especially when they speak of them as being many, and these too not even in accord with one another. For in their poems brother is at feud with brother, and father with children, and the latter in turn are engaged in truceless war with their parents. But the adulteries of gods and their amours and their sexual acts in public, and especially those of Zeus, the chief and highest of all, as they themselves describe him, actions which one would blush to mention of even brute beasts–all these we shall leave to the stage-folk. * But apparently it was still okay to read about Yahweh impregnating Mary. * He says you should be like Alexander the Great when he captured the daughters and wife of Darius – even though they were beautiful, he wouldn’t look upon them, because that would be mean. * Basil also says you shouldn’t even think naughty sexy thoughts, because that’s bad. * He says good Christians should be like bees – just take the good stuff from the flower, don’t take all of the flower. * The pagan literature was full of all kinds of sins. * Open Homer’s Iliad and you might find your eyes falling on a passage about how the god Ares seduced golden Aphrodite – and how they were both then caught in flagrante delicto. * Open Oedipus the King and you might find a declaration that ‘the power of the gods is perishing’. * Even works by the most conservative authors were not without danger: open a work by the virtuous Virgil, and you might find Dido and Aeneas up to no good in a cave in a rainstorm. * Idolatry, blasphemy, lust, murder,