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Doctor Basil Doesn’t Care.
3MI Newsletter from June 14th, 2024
Click below to listen to an audio recording of this article.
As we celebrate the feast of one of the Four Great Eastern Doctors of the Church, St. Basil, we should not only admire his teaching but learn from him that the philosophic lies of evolution and long ages have been with us for thousands of years. Focusing on the former, we find Basil lambasting these soul-damning doctrines, just as other Fathers and Doctors of the Church have done.
Below, St. Basil corrects the philosophers peddling fish fantasies:
“Avoid the nonsense of those arrogant philosophers who do not blush to liken their soul to that of a dog; who say that they have been formerly themselves women, shrubs, fish. Have they ever been fish? I do not know; but I do not fear to affirm that in their writings they show less sense than fish.”[1]
St. Basil the Great, Doctor of the Church
Today’s fantasy-based philosophers – Catholics sadly included – have updated tactics: infographics!
How many Catholics are not only afraid to defend the perennial Catholic teaching on Creation, but even join with the agnostic and anti-Christian world, weaponizing words and throwing them in the face of Catholics defending 1,900 years of teaching. These hopefully good-willed but clearly ignorant Catholics launch the word “fundamentalist” in targeted derision toward Catholics who support what Augustine, Aquinas, Basil, Ambrose, Bede, Bellarmine, and all the other Doctors of the Catholic Church defended.
“I know the laws of allegory, though less by myself than from the works of others. There are those truly, who do not admit the common sense of the Scriptures, for whom water is not water, but some other nature, who see in a plant, in a fish, what their fancy wishes, who change the nature of reptiles and of wild beasts to suit their allegories, like the interpreters of dreams who explain visions in sleep to make them serve their own ends. For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense. “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel” Rom. 1:16.”[2]
The Mass of Saint Basil by Pierre Hubert Subleyras, 1746
Why are we Catholics so ashamed? Memes may have the answer:
Plants before the sun and moon? Impossible – so the modern Catholic critic says. Not only did Basil assent to this “fundamentalist” position, but he knew what such a position prevented:
“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and divide the day from the night. Heaven and earth were the first; after them was created light; the day had been distinguished from the night, then had appeared the firmament and the dry element. The water had been gathered into the reservoir assigned to it, the earth displayed its productions, it had caused many kinds of herbs to germinate, and it was adorned with all kinds of plants. However, the sun and the moon did not yet exist, in order that those who live in ignorance of God may not consider the sun as the origin and the father of light, or as the maker of all that grows out of the earth. That is why there was a fourth day and then God said: Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven.”[3]
The Aztecs were not the only sun worshipers in history. And yet, they as others, lived in ignorance of the true doctrine of the Living God, handed down from Adam, Abraham, and their posterity. What atrocious moral consequences flow from errors that begin with ignorance of the Creator!
[1] Hexameron, Homily VIII:2
[2] Hexameron, Homily IX:1
[3] Hexameron, Homily VI: 2-3
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