INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
"We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified."
So states the creed employed by the fathers who met in Constantinople in 381. Half a century earlier, at Nicaea in 325, the Holy Spirit had been mentioned almost as an afterthought: "We believe in the Holy Spirit," the original
Nicene creed simply stated, and that was all. But fifty storm-tossed years between the two councils proved that such vagueness would not do, that the Church of Christ was disintegrating into a jumble of warring factions, and that Ocottpetteig Adyot, words adequate for God, were necessary to define the catholic faith. As St. Basil wrote this treatise from his episcopal city of Caesarea at the request of his spiritual son Bishop Amphilochios of Iconium, he could only compare the state of the Church to a naval battle being fought in the midst of a raging tempest, in which the two fleets are so broken up by the storm that banners can no longer be seen, signals are no longer recognized, and one cannot distinguish one's ally from one's foe. Perhaps the first thing the modern reader should recognize concerning this book is that despite its polished rhetoric and elaborately-constructed syllogisms, it is essentially a treatise written in tempore belli; St. Basil is using his talents to help steer the Church away from imminent shipwreck.
It was of course the Arian controversy that was causing such havoc in the Church; and it is important not to oversimplify this conflict into a clear-cut battle between ']
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those who believed that Jesus was God and those who did not. A study of the conflict reveals four basic "groups": the "old" Nicaeans, who insisted that the Nicene Creed's declaration that the Son is of one essence (homoousios) with the Father must be upheld to the extent that acceptance of the word homoousios was the only sure proof of orthodoxy. The "new" Nicaeans, including St. Basil and the other Cappadocian fathers, although they unquestionably confessed Christ to be divine, thought that the use of homoousios could be ambiguous (of one essence could be misconstrued to mean that the Son and the Father were the same person), and for a time they preferred to use the term homoiousios, meaning that the Son is of a like or similar essence with the Father. These "old" and "new"
Nicaeans by and large came to realize that they professed the same faith; their difficulty lay in resolving which word was the most acceptable. But saying that the Son was like the Father had its own ambiguities; for to what extent was He like the Father? There were those who accepted the use of homoiousios, but nevertheless stressed the differences between Father and Son so much that if the divinity of the Son was not denied, it certainly was not affirmed very strongly; these may be called the semiArians. Then there were the radical Arians, those who placed the Son in the created order, denying that He was similar or equal to the Father in any way. In the midst of all this confusion another problem raised its head: what about the Holy Spirit, concerning whom relatively little is said in Scripture? Those who denied the divinity of Christ were not about to affirm the divinity of the Spirit, but the radical Arians were fast becoming a small minority.
Most others did not know what to think; they knew they had been baptized in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit; they sang hymns praising the three persons; they understood that by the outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost the proclamation of the saving Gospel to the ends of the
INTRODUCTION
world was made possible. But the question of what sort of being the Holy Spirit was simply had not been answered; one only has to read this treatise to discover the variety of opinions popular at the time. Arianizing elements felt that by fighting against the doctrine of the Holy
Spirit's divinity (thus earning for themselves the name Pneumatomachoi, or fighters against the Spirit) they would succeed in undermining Nicene orthodoxy. But St. Basil realized that by writing a book affirming the equality of the Spirit with the Father and the Son, he could make a water-tight case for orthodoxy: if we are bound to confess the divinity of the Spirit, we must confess the Trinity to be three persons sharing the same divine nature; once this is accomplished, it is much easier to determine what is orthodoxy and what is not. So his primary objective in this treatise is to clear up the muddle —a muddle which he denounces as the end-product of vanity and pride, caused by those who dare to utter clever-sounding words about God without loving truth in their hearts, who refuse to measure their own opinions with the yardstick of the Church's living faith, who admit of no absolute standard outside themselves. He writes during a time when persecutions are past, when Christianity is becoming fashionable, a "state" religion subject to the whims of emperors influenced by ambitious ecclesiastics. His struggle is one for truth, the changeless truth which the Lord promised would bring freedom to those who know it, and in possession of which men would be enabled to fulfill their destiny to become like God, to become by grace what God is by nature.
St. Basil was educated in the schools of Athens, which at his time were still flourishing. He received thorough training in the classical disciplines of rhetoric and logic, and then placed his formidable intelligence in the service of the Church. He treats his subject with an exhaustiveness which may easily weary the modern reader, but which is
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necessary for the inductive process to be successful: the more specific the evidence, the more definite the conclusion.
Many readers might be perplexed or even scandalized when they discover that nowhere in the entire treatise does
St. Basil bluntly say: "the Holy Spirit is God" or "God the Holy Spirit," but it must be borne in mind that such a statement is nowhere to be found in Scripture. This explains why St. Basil and the other Cappadocian fathers are unwilling to make a general statement of the Holy
Spirit's divinity; instead, they prefer to assemble all the witnesses available in Scripture and in the baptismal and liturgical tradition of the Church, and when they have examined all the evidence, they unmistakably conclude that the Spirit indeed is divine (avoiding, even in their conclusions, the use of "untraditional" general statements).
Thus, although one will never read that "the Holy Spirit is God" in St. Basil's treatise, one will find numerous statements that "the Holy Spirit partakes of the fullness of divinity" (see paragraph 46). This is not rhetorical hairsplitting; rather, it reveals a great pastoral wisdom: present all the evidence so that confession of the Spirit's divinity is the only possible orthodox choice, but avoid, at a time when unspiritual men yearn to multiply controversies, the use of an unprecedented statement.
Much of St. Basil's argument consists in showing that we can tell who the Spirit is by examining what He does.
He is called the Holy Spirit, and because of His holiness creatures are made holy. The holiness of a creature cannot sanctify other creatures; only someone who is holy by nature can sanctify. Since only God is holy by nature, and since according to the Scripture it is the Holy Spirit who sanctifies men, then the Holy Spirit must be divine. The other operations of the Spirit are discussed in the same logical way: it is the Spirit who renews the face of the earth; the gifts of the Spirit cause "knowledge of the future, understanding of mysteries, heavenly citizenship, endless
INTRODUCTION
joy in the presence of God, becoming like God, and the highest of all desires, becoming God" (paragraph 23). How could a creature be the origin of such blessings? If Scripture says that "no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit" (I Cor. 12:3), how can a creature be the inspiration by which the saving Gospel is proclaimed?
To reject the divinity of the Holy Spirit is to reject His work of sanctification and His gifts of faith and renewal, and thus is a rejection of salvation itself. If saving regeneration begins through baptism in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, with name in the singular, then Father, Son, and Spirit form a coordinate series, with all three sharing equal rank. Finally, if baptism must be administered in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, then praise, thanksgiving, and worship must be offered in the same way.
Lex orandi lex est credendi; worship must use the same terms as the profession of faith.
The question of exactly how glory was to be ascribed to God is the cause of the lengthy grammatical discussions in this treatise which surely bring frustration to reader and translator alike. The problem was this:. St. Basil was attacked for using the form "Glory to the Father with (uetc&) the Son together with (obv) the Holy Spirit" in his church. The customary form for the Greek-speaking churches at the time was "Glory to the Father through (Six) the Son in (év) the Holy Spirit," although as St. Basil points out, the first formula had long been traditional in many of the non-Greek-speaking churches of the East. At Caesarea Basil used both formulas; he thought that the first formula was best for adoration offered to the Godhead, while the second was most appropriate for describing the way God deals with man. Thus he recognized that two sets of theological terminology are necessary: one to describe God as God, and another to describe
God's plan of salvation for men. Although no contradiction can be involved, different words are often necessary
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for the sake of precision. In order to demonstrate that there was no conflict between the two doxologies, he first had to prove that the prepositions through and in do not subordinate the persons of Son and Spirit, as his opponents claimed. He accomplishes this by enumerating dozens of Scriptural texts in which these very prepositions are used in reference to the Father, and accuses the Pneumatomachoi of imitating the vocabulary of pagan philosophy instead of Scripture. His next task is to justify the use of with, which is not found in Scripture, since the baptismal formula of Mt. 28:19 uses and. Here St. Basil appeals to common sense: in everyday speech there is no real difference between and and with. Although one is a conjunction and: one a preposition, they serve the same purpose; the only possible difference is that in a series of names with implies co-operation better than and. Since it is abundantly clear from Scripture that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit cooperate, how can anyone denounce the use of with?
Here St. Basil offers his opponents a compromise: if they utterly refuse to use with the Spirit because it cannot be found in Scripture, he will settle for everyone using and, which adequately expresses unity of the persons in one nature. This was certainly a prophetic compromise, since that is the form of the doxology which finally was adopted by all catholic Christians.
It is this translator's opinion that a good dose of dry, logical Cappadocian theology can serve as an effective antidote for the subjective emotionalism in which modern
Christians frequently find themselves engulfed. Doctrine these days is often ignored, taken for granted or replaced with individualism, and perhaps the fathers can help us by reminding us (often in many words!) that God became man to show us the truth which gives life and freedom, a truth which is eternal. This is the principal reason for attempting a modern English translation of this book, the only previous translation being done in the
INTRODUCTION
last century by Rev. Blonfield Jackson, presently found in Volume 8 of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series.
This translation is a complete revision of the former; the Greek text used was that found in Volume 32 of Migne's
Patrologia Graeca. May the Lord who is the Spirit, through the prayers of St. Basil, enlighten us with the knowledge that inspired the fathers who have gone before us, that we may be led to the vision of the glory of God, shining in the face of Christ.
Davip ANDERSON August 1980
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