In this essay I tried to discover new meanings in the relation between two orthodox Saints and the secular culture. So, we have here an interpretation of two similar attitudes: Saint Basil’s the Great attitude and Saint Nicolaj’s Velimirović one. I organized the information in six sections: 1) Prologue, 2) The Investigation method, 3) The secular culture and the ignorance of the early life, 4) The detection of the new sides of the secular culture, in the Holly Light, 5) The profound understanding of the secular culture and its abandonment, 6) Epilogue. The Prologue tell us that we really have a distinction between the religious and the secular culture. Each type has its own way of understanding the human being. Saint Basil the Great and Saint Nicolaj Velimirović shows us through their examples the road from the secular culture to the religious understanding of life. As investigation method, I used the Stelianos Papadopoulos way of writing biography. So, I tried to share the feelings of Saint Basil the Great and Saint Nicolaj Velimirović regarding the secular culture. As we know, in the early life, the two Saints wanted a secular education for their professions. But, very quickly, they found out that the secular education was an opportunity to discover the world’s vanities and traps. For both of them, the secular culture was a solution for an annoying problem: the ignorance of the juvenile age. Growing up, a new kind of ignorance devoured them: the spiritual ignorance. So, we can observe in their lives a turning point from the secular culture to the Holly Bible. After receiving the sacrament of baptism, Saint Basil’s life changed radically. Soon, he abandoned his legal and teaching professions in order to devote his life to God. In the autumn of
1909, Saint Nikolaj returned home from Geneva and became seriously ill. He decided to become a monk and devote his life to God if he stayed alive. At the end of 1909 his health got better and he was tonsured a monk, receiving the name Nikolaj. In the Holly Light of the Church they met new sides of the secular culture and its root: the nothingness of the human wisdom. Having a profound understanding of the secular culture and looking a life with God, they abandon their juvenile admiration for the human wisdom, choosing the Holly Wisdom. Looking at their lives we may understand how the secular culture promote the passing world and how their examples are eternal patterns for us.
