CHAPTER 10. Against those who say that it is not right to rank
ON THE HOLY SPIRIT
CHAPTER 10. Against those who say that it is not right to rank the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son.
24.
They say that it is not suitable to rank the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son, because He is different in nature and inferior in dignity from them. But it is fitting for us to respond to them with the apostles' words: "We must obey God rather than men." ** When the Lord established the baptism of salvation, did He not clearly command His disciples to baptize all nations "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit"? *°
He did not disdain His fellowship with the Holy Spirit, but these men say that we should not rank Him with the Father and the Son. Are they not openly disregarding
God's commandment? If they will not admit that this arrangement of Father, Son, and Spirit testifies to their union and fellowship, let them explain to us why we should agree with their opinion. How could Father, Son, and Spirit be united in a different or more suitable way? If indeed the Lord did not speak of Himself, the Father, and the Spirit as being united in baptism, then let our opponents blame us for having invented this doctrine. But no one is so shameless that he will deny the obvious meaning of the words which clearly say the Spirit is one with the Father and the Son. So let our opponents be silent; as for us, we will follow the words of Scripture.
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All the weapons of war have been prepared against us; every intellectual missile is aimed at us; the blasphemers' tongues strike us harder than the stones thrown at Stephen by the Christ-killers of old. They pre128 Acts 5:29.
129 Matt. 28:19.
ST. BASIL THE GREAT
tend that their attack is directed against us, but they cannot conceal that their real purpose is much worse. They say that they have prepared this siege and these snares against us; they have taken inventory of each man's strength and cunning and advance against us with shouts. But the object of their attack is the faith itself. The one aim of the whole band of these enemies of sound doctrine is to shake the faith of Christ down to its foundations, by utterly levelling apostolic tradition to the ground. They clamor for written proofs and reject the unwritten testimony of the Fathers as worthless, proving themselves worse than debtors who refuse to pay what they owe when there is no written evidence of the loan. But we will never surrender the truth; we will not betray the defense like cowards. The Lord has delivered to us a necessary and saving dogma: the Holy Spirit is to be ranked with the Father.
Our opponents do not agree; instead they divide and tear away the Spirit from the Father, transforming His nature to that of a ministering spirit. Can anyone dispute that they make their own blasphemy more authoritative than the law of the Lord? But let us abandon these rivalries for now, and examine the following questions.
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What makes us Christians? "Our faith," everyone would answer. How are we saved? Obviously through the regenerating grace of baptism. How else could we be?
We are confirmed in our understanding that salvation comes through Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Shall we cast away the standard of teaching we received? This would surely be grounds for great sorrow; if we now reject what we accepted at baptism, we will be found to be further away from our salvation than when we first believed. We would be no different from someone who died without baptism, or who had been baptized with an unacceptable form. We made this profession when we first entered the Church; we were delivered from idols and came before the living