Estranged bishop who baptised St. Basil dies in his arms

CAESAREA, Cappadocia, 362 AD — Bishop Dianius of Caesarea in Cappadocia fell mortally ill this year and sent for Saint Basil the Great, the young cleric he had baptised. For two years St. Basil had refused to share communion with him. Dianius swore that he had never meant to abandon the faith of the Council of Nicaea, and St. Basil took his old bishop back into communion before Dianius died. To refuse communion with a bishop was to refuse to share the sacraments with him and his church.

The quarrel was over a creed. St. Basil would not share communion with a bishop who had signed it. Dianius wanted to make peace before he died, and St. Basil needed to hear from him what he had meant when he signed.

St. Basil had loved the bishop since boyhood, when he was sent to school at Caesarea. Around 357 AD, home from his studies, he was baptised by Dianius and soon afterwards ordained a Reader of the Scriptures. By the end of the decade he had been made a deacon.

In 360 AD George, a bishop from Laodicea, brought to Caesarea a creed agreed at Constantinople, and Dianius signed it. The bishops at Nicaea had said that the Son was “of one substance” with the Father. The new creed called that word “Essence” and dropped it, because it “caused offense” and “the Scriptures contain it not.” It said only that the Son was “Like the Father.”

St. Basil wrote that he, “together with many of them that in our country feared the Lord, sorrowed over him with sorrow unendurable.” He stopped taking communion with his bishop, and left Caesarea for Nazianzus to stay with his friend Saint Gregory of Nazianzus.

Two years later, in 362 AD, Dianius fell ill with the sickness that would kill him. As St. Basil grew up, he had come to know Dianius as a cheerful, friendly man who never lost his dignity. The bishop was, St. Basil wrote, “full of kindness and gentleness,” and “willing out of the fullness of his fatherly heart to give satisfaction to everyone,” and in that spirit he sent for the young man who had cut him off.

When St. Basil came, Dianius called the Lord to witness. He said, in St. Basil’s account, “that in the simplicity of his heart he had agreed to the document sent from Constantinople, but had had no idea of rejecting the creed put forth by the holy Fathers at Nicæa.” He told St. Basil that he had never believed anything other than what he had believed from the beginning. Then he prayed, St. Basil wrote, “that he might not be cut off from the lot of those blessed three hundred and eighteen bishops who had announced the pious decree to the world” — the bishops of the Council of Nicaea.

St. Basil wrote of his answer: “In consequence of this satisfactory statement I dismissed all anxiety and doubt, and… communicated with him, and gave over grieving.” Dianius died this year in St. Basil’s arms.

Eusebius, a layman of rank who had not yet been baptised, was elected to succeed him.

Years later, after St. Basil had become Bishop of Caesarea in 370 AD, a story went round that he had once anathematized Dianius, the bishop he had in fact taken back into communion at his deathbed. An anathema was excommunication in its most solemn form, pronounced with special ceremony. His friend Bosporius, bishop of Colonia, wrote to tell him of it, and St. Basil lay awake nearly the whole night over the letter.

St. Basil wrote back to Bosporius. He named no one, calling the men who spread the story “some of those that feel no fear of the Judge,” and he asked: “And I, tell me, I anathematized the right blessed Dianius? For this is what they have said against me. Where? When? In whose presence? On what pretext? In mere spoken words, or in writing? Following others, or myself the author and originator of the deed?” Then he set down what the bishop had been to him: “from my earliest childhood I was brought up in love for him, thought as I gazed at him how venerable he looked, how dignified, how truly reverend.”

St. Basil ended the letter with a challenge: “Such have been my relations with Dianius. If anyone avers that he is privy to any vile slander on my part against Dianius, do not let him buzz it slave-wise in a corner; let him come boldly out and convict me in the light of day.”