1 January 379 A.D. Gregory the Great—Recovery
of Love of Manly Christian Fellowship
Gregory
and Basil: Recovering the Love of Manly Christian Friendship Today
Gregory
and Basil: Recovering the Love of Manly Christian Friendship Today
Deacon
Keith Fournier
January 2, 2015
On
January 2nd in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, we remember Saints Basil
the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors of the undivided Christian
Church of the fourth century.
I
write this article for my Christian friends from across the confessional
spectrum, not just Catholic and Orthodox Christians who intentionally keep the
memory and meaning of the life and ministry of these two great Christian heroes
alive by recounting their lives and studying their writings.
I am
convinced that by exploring our early Christian patrimony, together, we can
learn to grow in our love for the Lord and one another - as the Holy Spirit
works on healing the wounds of division in the broken Body of Christ.
In a
unique and special way, the witness of the undivided Christian Church of the
first five centuries is both instructive and essential for our work together in
this new missionary age.
The
cultures into which our brothers and sisters in those early Christian centuries
were called on mission, were beset with many of the same illusory ideologies
and destructive patterns of life as we experience in our own.
Those
cultures pretended to offer progress and liberation, just like
the one in which we live, while they rejected the God who is the source of
both. There is nothing new about error. They offered the libertine use of
others, camouflaged as liberty, as a path to progress, when it leads to the
degradation of the persons involved and the decay of the culture.
They
promised progress while they trapped those who embraced the subterfuge in
self-constructed chains. It is only the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ
- and the teaching of His Word and His Church - which offers the way to
authentic human happiness, true human freedom and real progress, individual and
social.
The
reason why the Lord Jesus Christ sent our brethren into those cultures was to
transform them from within as leaven and light. That is why He sends us into
our own culture. He loves all men and women and wants us all to be free and
happy. Christians are the true liberators of every age!
Today,
I want to consider these two giants of our common Christian history from one
perspective, their friendship with one another, in the Lord. Theirs was a
friendship which began as children and lasted throughout their entire lifetime.
It is
a testimony to the beauty of authentic, manly, Christian friendship. In an age
which is relationally confused and has all but lost an understanding of the
gift of friendship between men, it provides us with a reminder that friendship
is a form of love.
As
with all authentic human love, Christian friendship participates in the Love of
the God from which it derives. Greek, the original language of the New
Testament, differentiates between the forms of love. English is very limited in
that regard. Friendship is a form of love.
Those
who are baptized into Jesus Christ - and choose to live their lives in Him -
are now His Friends. Friendship between men who bear the name Christian is a
vibrant and inspiring witness to the eternal truth of the fullness of Love,
revealed by God, in and through His Son Jesus.
The
Apostle, Evangelist and Gospel writer John records this beautiful teaching of
Jesus concerning friendship. It is a lengthy passage but one which needs to be
read - and re-read - and then prayed through - by everyone who bears the name
Christian in our age:
"I
am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-dresser. Every branch of mine that
bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes,
that it may bear more fruit. 3 You are already made clean by the word which I
have spoken to you.
"Abide
in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it
abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you
are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much
fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
"If
a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the
branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in me, and
my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By
this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my
disciples.
"As
the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love.
"If
you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my
Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you,
that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
"This
is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love
has no man than this - that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my
friends if you do what I command you.
"No
longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is
doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father
I have made known to you.
"You
did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and
bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the
Father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command you, to love one another".
(John 15: 1-17)
We are
grafted into Jesus Christ. We are invited to abide - to live - make our home -
in Jesus Christ. He chose us before we chose Him. He has a loving plan. He has
been raised from the dead and he now lives His life in and through us.
He
loves us the way the Father loves Him - and He promises us that we can live in
His love, and learn to love in the same way, by cooperating with His grace as
it given to us in and through Him. We are friends of Jesus Christ - the Friend
- called into the world.
By
grace, we are enabled, made capable, of building the kinds of friendships which
reflect the fullness of the love of God in our own lives - and thereby bear
witness to the truth of the Kingdom or Reign of God, as it continues to break
into history.
In and
through Jesus Christ the Friend, we can become friends with one another.
Authentic Christian friendship participates in the love of God. It is NEVER a
relationship of use. Rather, it is a call to love, lay our lives down for one
another, and spur one another on in holiness and happiness, by turning to the
Lord who is the source of both.
In my
Morning Prayer, I pray the Liturgy of the Hours. This beautiful treasury of my
own Christian tradition, as a Catholic Christian, offers a daily sequence of
biblical readings, Old and New Testament, which provide a framework for
personal prayer. They thereby help to inform a pattern for life.
Offered
along with these biblical readings every day are excerpts from the sermons and
reflections of great heroes of Christian history. This is called the Office of
Readings. The passage in the Office of Readings today contained an account by
St Gregory Nazianzen in which he addressed his true Christian friendship with
Basil.
Here
is a portion of this beautiful tribute to a friend:
"Basil
and I were both in Athens. We had come, like streams of a river, from the same
source in our native land, had separated from each other in pursuit of
learning, and were now united again as if by plan, for God so arranged
it."
"I
was not alone at that time in my regard for my friend, the great Basil. I knew
his irreproachable conduct, and the maturity and wisdom of his conversation. I
sought to persuade others, to whom he was less well known, to have the same
regard for him."
"The
same hope inspired us: the pursuit of learning. This is an ambition especially
subject to envy. Yet between us there was no envy. On the contrary, we made
capital out of our rivalry. Our rivalry consisted, not in seeking the first
place for oneself but in yielding it to the other, for we each looked on the
other's success as his own."
"Our
single object and ambition was virtue, and a life of hope in the blessings that
are to come; we wanted to withdraw from this world before we departed from it.
With this end in view we ordered our lives and all our actions. We followed the
guidance of God's law and spurred each other on to virtue. If it is not too
boastful to say, we found in each other a standard and rule for discerning
right from wrong."
"Different
men have different names, which they owe to their parents or to themselves,
that is, to their own pursuits and achievements. But our great pursuit, the
great name we wanted, was to be Christians, to be called Christians."
I was
struck by the true friendship between Gregory and Basil. It was rooted in Jesus
Christ the friend. They spurred one another on to holiness, virtue and heroic
living. They did so with the kind of manly character which this age needs so
desperately to witness. They seemed to have a sort of manly competition in the
pursuit of holiness.
They
knew who they were as men - because they knew who Jesus was and is. Do we know
who we are as men? Do we know who Jesus was and is? The two questions - and the
answers which they invite - will determine the path of our own lives.
This
age cries out for authentic Christian men who demonstrate the love of God. One
way which we do that is through offering the witness of manly Christian
friendship. We use an expression to refer to men who are comfortable in their
skin and content with being men. We say of such a man "He is a man's
man".
In the
past I have reflected on the greatest example, next to Jesus Himself, of such a
man. His name was Joseph. On this memorial we offered two more, Basil the Great
and Gregory Nazianzen.
The
Lord is still inviting Christian men to become all we can be in Jesus Christ
and to spur one another on in holiness and heroic virtue. In an age desperately
in need of men of courage and Christian conviction, we are given examples out
of the pages of our own Christian history to emulate.
We
need to follow their example by courageously, humbly and faithfully loving
Jesus Christ and learning to be friends, in Him, and with one another.
Basil
and Gregory Nazianzen, along with Basil's younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, are
collectively referred to as the Cappadocians because they came from the same
hometown, a region in what is now Turkey.
They
went on to become not only holy and heroic Christian men, but three of the
finest theologians of the early Church. In fact, their reflections on what it
means to live the Christian life are extraordinarily contemporary and profound.
We would benefit more from reading them than many of the contemporary Christian
books we seem to accumulate in our search for Christian maturity.
Gregory
Nazianzen once proclaimed in his teaching on the implications of the
Incarnation of Jesus Christ, "whatever was not assumed was not
healed". In that important theological insight we understand one aspect of
the danger of the denial of the sacred humanity of Jesus.
Redemption
would not be complete without Jesus, the New Adam, assuming the entirety of the
human experience - and recreating it anew. (See, Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians
15).
As I
often teach - and write - we are not only saved from, but saved for. Christians
are freed from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2) in order to live our lives
differently - beginning right now! Christianity is a way of life which begins
now and opens into eternity.
Part
of what was assumed and healed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ was our
capacity to love - in all of the beautiful expressions of that sublime word -
including the love of human friendship. It was the beloved disciple John who
made it all so clear in his first Letter, "God is love, and he who
abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." (Jn. 4:16)
The
love of Christian friendship both reveals and participates in the Love of God
made fully manifest in Jesus Christ who calls us friends. Let's learn it and
live it this new missionary age. It will shine a light of truth and liberation
on an age enchained in encroaching error and darkness.
Deacon
Keith A. Fournier is Founder and Chairman of Common Good Foundation and Common
Good Alliance. A married Roman Catholic Deacon of the Diocese of Richmond,
Virginia, he and his wife Laurine have five grown children and six
grandchildren, He serves as the Director of Adult Faith Formation at St.
Stephen, Martyr Parish in Chesapeake, VA. He is also a human rights lawyer and
public policy advocate who served as the first and founding Executive Director
of the American Center for Law and Justice in the nineteen nineties. He has
long been active at the intersection of faith and culture and currently serves
as Special Counsel to Liberty Counsel. He is also the Editor in Chief of
Catholic Online.
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