St. Basil Book Report

In the teaching on the Holy Trinity, St. Basil was a student of Alexandrian theology and its main representatives—Origen and Athanasius of Alexandria. The reason St. Basil wrote this teaching is that the Church was waging a war against heresies of Pneumatomachoi and Neo-Arians. St. Basil wrote the work On the Holy Spirit between 373 and 375 AD. It was written to “Your desire for information, my right well-beloved and most deeply respected brother Amphilochius, I highly commend, and not less your industrious energy.” The author commends his brother’s eagerness to find knowledge. When the Apostle Paul writes, “There is one God and Father of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ through whom are all things,” it does not mean that a writer is trying “to introduce the diversity of nature, but to exhibit the notion of Father and of Son as unconfounded.”

In order to substantiate Orthodox triadology, there was an emergent necessity for St. Basil to develop a clear and understandable terminology. The most plausible of historical and philosophical sources that the saint used in the doctrine of differentiating between “essence” and “hypostases” by the so-called generic principle, is the “Introduction” of Porphyry of Tyre, who was a Neoplatonic philosopher, and “Categories” of Aristotle. In the understanding of “essence” (as opposed to the terms Aristotle used, while this term was used by Gregory of Nyssa), there is a place for orthodox stoic character. St. Basil characterized God’s essence using the ideas of community, identity, unity and simplicity, and yet God’s essence is still not comprehensible. The prelate says that the Father’s “hypostasis” has a distinctive characteristic—“fatherhood,” Son—“sonship,” and Holy Spirit—“...

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...t of God, not by generation, like the Son, but as Breath of His mouth.”

See the works of Origen and Mark DelCogliano, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Lewis Ayres, Athanasius, and Didymus, Works on the Spirit: Athanasius’s Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit, and, Didymus’s On the Holy Spirit (Yonkers, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011).

Paul J. Fedwick, “A Chronology of the Life and Works of Basil of Caesarea,” in Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic: A Sixteen-Hundreth Anniversary Symposium (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), 16-17.

NPNF 3.8.1.1.0.1.2.

NPNF 3.8.1.1.0.5.7. NPNF, 3.8.1.1.0.6.9.

NPNF, 3.8.1.1.0.13.30.

Stephen Hildebrand, The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea: A Synthesis of Greek Thought and Biblical Faith (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 179.

NPNF, 3.8.1.1.0.19.