Meanwhile, St. Basil describes the Christian blogosphere

This morning I cracked open Basil the Great’s slender book, On the Holy Spirit. Writing during a period in which the nature of the trinity was hotly contested, Basil started by describing the state of the debate. Addressing his treatise to one Amphilochius, he says,

I admire your proposing questions not for the sake of testing, as many now do, but to discover the truth itself. For now a great many people listen to and question us to find fault. . . . [T]he questions of many contain a hidden and elaborate bait, like the hunters’ snare and the military ambush. These are the people who throw out words, not so that they may receive something useful from them, but so that they may seem to have a just pretext for war if they find answers that do not accord with their own liking.

In complete honesty, for the briefest of moments I lost utter track of what century I was in. I thought he was describing the Christian blogosphere.