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Part I
Basil of Caesarea
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1
The Reader – A Little Lower than the Angels
The reader of the Bible is, obviously enough, a human being. But what does it mean to be human? There are many answers to that question. In modernity, no single response has proven more powerful and enduring, both in the high intellectual culture of the West and at the popular level, than that of exclusive humanism. This is true in spite of the influence of postmodern attempts to dissolve the subject and do away with a unified agent. Basil’s answer to the question of what it means to be human is rather different from either of these options, for he refuses to marginalize theology in doing so. For him, theological terms are a crucial means to depict who human beings are and – something that is no less important – what they ought to become. To state this view in less formal and more material terms, it is necessary to begin by saying that readers are created by God with faculties that allow them to know their creator. In addition, their end or purpose is to live eternally in fellowship with him. Sin consists in the failure of human beings to fulfill their purpose and takes the form of prioritizing false ends ahead of the single proper one. The divine pedagogy is God’s response to this situation: it is his determination to bring human beings into fellowship with himself by purifying them of sin and by granting them new life in Christ. A major recent work in theological anthropology notices the theocentricity that marks anthropological reflection before the rupture of modernity. For Basil and others, “God’s relation to human beings and human beings’ relation to God was structurally essential to such proposals, and not a topic to be raised after (conceptually ‘after’) the anthropological proposals had been framed in a way that bracketed the God-relation.”1 The author just quoted, David Kelsey, makes theocentricity in this sense an overriding goal of his work, as I do of mine. A significant reason for focusing on Basil in this chapter is that just this sort of theological anthropology is available in his writing.
In order to understand Basil’s anthropology, it is helpful to see humanity’s location in a wider cosmic order. An especially useful point of reference in this structure is the angels. As rational creatures, the angels are similar to humanity, which becomes apparent below, but they are nevertheless different too in some crucial ways. A key contrast between human beings and the angels has to do with the role of time for each, and this sets up the need that people, but not angels, have for Scripture. This chapter first expounds this basic distinction and then uses it as a vantage point from which to outline Basil’s construal of the reader. In order to evaluate the cogency of Basil’s theological position, the chapter concludes by considering a couple of significant objections to Basil’s view, one from within the Christian tradition as well as one from outside it.
Angels: Perfect upon Creation
For Basil, an angel, like a human being, is an ens creatum: that is, a creature, a being whose existence and perfection depend entirely on that of the independent and absolute God. The angels receive; God gives, but even in giving, God is not thereby diminished. God’s life is like a spring that provides water for a plot of land but that itself never runs dry. This difference between creator and creature comes out nicely in the way Basil structures a sentence from De Spiritu Sancto around a series of contrasts between the Spirit and contingent reality: “He perfects all other things, and Himself lacks nothing; He gives life to all things, and is never depleted; He does not increase by additions, but is always complete, self-established, and present everywhere.”2 The notions of perfection and life, which indicate what creatures receive from the Spirit, are transparently teleological, and indeed theological: a creature’s perfection and its attainment of true life consist in its having a certain orientation toward God. A creature’s proper end necessarily centers on a relationship to God, because God is the source of creaturely good: “He is the source of sanctification, spiritual light, and illuminates everyone using His powers to search for the truth – and the illumination He gives is through Himself.”3 In demonstrating the dependency of the angels, Basil compares the Spirit’s sanctifying presence in them to heat’s presence in a branding iron. Fire heats the iron, rendering it hot, and the iron is not hot without the fire.4 Just as a heated branding iron is able to perform the function proper to it, angels made holy by the Spirit descry God. The Spirit’s revelation of God to creatures does not consist essentially in his imparting to them a proposition about God, but in restoring a creature’s ability to discern the worth or value of God.5 For instance, holy angels proclaim Jesus as Lord (1 Cor. 12:3).6 This act is at once cognitive and affective: it is a statement of belief, a confession of praise, and an implicit pledge of loyalty. Since holiness is such an encompassing notion, including so many dimensions of a creature’s existence, it ties in with its overall perfection.
While both angels and human beings are dependent creatures, what is distinctive about angels is that their perfection is simultaneous with creation. Speaking with reference to the angels, Basil says: “Therefore the Holy Spirit is present among those created beings which are not gradually perfected, but are immediately perfect from the moment of their creation.”7 As mentioned above, angelic perfection relates closely to being in God’s presence. This statement requires unpacking along two lines.8 First, angels experience a fellowship with God that is not susceptible to interruptions. Human beings have a body whose drives constantly threaten to turn them away from God and in the direction of lesser, carnal pursuits. Human sanctification consists of a reason-directed reorientation of desire away from contingent goods and to God instead. This is a struggle that angels do not have because they are not embodied. Second, for the angels, God’s self-revelation is not mediated through sacramental forms or through the biblical text. It is direct. Basil characteristically draws on the metaphorical biblical language of seeing God face to face to depict the closeness of fellowship between angels and God.9 All that is necessary for angels is to maintain their current state of perfection. Hence, Basil refers to angels as constant, in contradistinction to people, who change in both body and soul.10 As he closes De Spiritu Sancto 16.38, Basil sets out the reciprocity between God’s gracious presence and the perfection of the angels in this synoptic formula: “He gives them His own grace, that their nature might be maintained in perfection.”11
This last point raises a question: From the point of view of the summary statement just quoted, stressing as it does God’s active provision of grace and the angels’ resulting perfection, it is unclear why some angels defected. The angels enjoyed the direct presence of God; further, their fellowship with God was not disrupted by the desires of an unruly body. What is the origin, then, of the impetus to turn away from God? Earlier in the section of De Spiritu Sancto, Basil explains defection as an exercise of freedom, meaning that angels have a capacity to make choices that are not determined and that, moreover, may be evil. This notion of freedom explains why some angels could have turned away, but not why they did in fact exercise that choice. For this reason, Michael Haykin is right to say that this section raises some questions it does not answer.12 Basil’s Homilia quod Deus non est auctor malorum contains aspects of a fuller explanation. There, the Cappadocian explains that Adam’s fall resulted from satiation,13 an experience of being so full in one’s experience of God that one finally loses interest in the divine. Satan’s fall is due to a similar misuse of freedom.14 The concept of satiation has the merit of relating a full experience of God’s presence to a consequent fall, even if it does not provide a reason why some angels fell though others did not. Continuing to press for a fuller explication is not Basil’s intent in the brief homily. The Cappadocian’s discussion of Adam and Satan focuses on employing a notion of freedom to show why God is not culpable for the evil actions of creatures – hence the title of the sermon. The initial question remains unresolved.
Although this question is still hanging, the primary significance of the angels for the concerns of this section is clear. It is that from the moment of their creation, angels are perfect: they are in the presence of God and need only to remain there. They thus come to function for Basil as spiritual paradigms, examples of perfection achieved, models of the goal toward which human beings ought to strive.15
Humanity: Perfected over Time
Creation
As has already been suggested, while humanity and the angels both belong to the creaturely domain and attain perfection when they live in fellowship with God, sinful human beings are dissimilar to the angels in that they reach perfection gradually. Hence, a depiction of human soteriology necessarily proceeds along narrative lines. Such an account consists of a termi...
