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Longer Rules

St Basil the Great, tr. Lowther Clarke, 1925

Rule 9: Should the Man Who Joins Those Who are Consecrated to the Lord Relinquish His…

Since the Lord said: “Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me”²; and again: “Sell that ye have, and give alms”³; I consider⁴ that the man who leaves his family with such an end in view ought not to feel contemptuously towards his possessions, but to make an accurate survey of them all, as consecrated henceforward to the Lord, and dispose of them with all care, either personally if he has the power and necessary experience, or through men who have been chosen for the work after careful testing and have given proof of their powers of faithful and wise administration. He must realise that it is dangerous either to cleave them to his relations or to dispose of them through any chance-comer. For if the man who is entrusted with the care of the King’s property, though often he has filched nothing from the store but only lost by neglect the interest he might have gained, is not absolved from blame;⁵ what condemnation must we expect them to undergo who have been slothful and negligent in the administration of possessions already dedicated to the Lord? Will they not be subject to the condemnation of the negligent? As it is written: “Cursed is every one that doeth the works of the Lord negligently.”⁶

We must be always on our guard lest under pretext of keeping Done commandment we be found breaking another. For it is fitting that we should neither fight nor spar with bad men, since “the Lord’s servant must not fight”⁷; but he that is badly treated by his kinsmen according to the flesh must remember the Lord’s words: “There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands”—not just left them but “for my sake and the gospel’s, who shall not receive a hundred-fold in this time, and in the world to come eternal life.”⁸ Certainly we should warn the bad men of the sin of sacrilege, according to the commandment of the Lord: “If thy brother sin, go, show him his fault etc.”⁹; but to engage in litigation with them before secular tribunals is forbidden by the word of piety, when it says: “If any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.”¹⁰ And, “Dare any of you, having a matter against his neighbour, go to law before the unrighteous, and not before the Saints?”¹¹ And let us summon them to appear before the latter, paying more heed to our brother’s salvation than to the abundance of possessions. For the Lord having said: “If he hear thee,” added, “thou hast gained” not thy money, but “thy brother.”¹² But it often happens that to make the truth plain we condescend to plead, when the originator of the ill deed challenges us to arbitration; we do not take the initiative, but obey the summons, not to satisfy our private feelings of anger or strife, but to reveal the truth. For thus we shall liberate even the aggressor, unwilling though he be, from evil, and shall not ourselves transgress the commandments, as ministers of God free from strife and covetousness, firmly insisting on the manifestation of the truth, and in no way transgressing the prescribed limits of zeal.

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