Basil’s doctrine of creation is another means that he used to argue for the divinity of the Holy Spirit on the grounds of the activities of the Holy Spirit as God, rather than by arguing about the nature of God’s essence. As part of the continuing development of Christian thought on the nature of the created order and its meaning, Basil contributed a few small points of clarity that, as it turns out, opened up broad horizons for later thinkers in theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences.
The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that Basil’s doctrine of creation made the claim that the Holy Spirit is God through three distinct moves. First, Basil clearly presented the claim that the entire creation was a closed system separated from God its Creator by an ontological divide. Second, Basil explored the distinction between time and eternity, challenging the assumption that God is bound to time as we are. He recognized that God is in eternity and creation in time, and declared that the Holy Spirit is not bound by time. Last, Basil expected a certain divine disclosure to be evident in the created order; he expected that knowledge of God would be available through the study of the natural world. However, he was also wary of what could now be called a natural theology. For Basil, knowledge of God derived from the natural order had to be mediated by the power of the Holy Spirit. God can only be known by God, and the Holy Spirit makes God known through creation when the Holy Spirit illumines the mind. Basil focuses primarily on the activity of the Spirit renewing the mind for knowledge of the created order, leaving little reference to the creative activity of the Son, even though he recognizes that all activities of God are products of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In these three major arguments, it is clear that Basil defines the boundaries of what is divine and what is not, and places the Holy Spirit on the side of the one true God who is disclosed through Trinitarian activities toward creation.
Basil was an important part of the emergence of a Christian doctrine of creation. He recognized that the doctrine of creation was not only the interplay of the omnipotent God with the material world, but the relationship between eternity and time. How does an eternal, timeless, and changeless deity work in time to generate the cosmos? The enduring problem that Basil identified in cosmologies contemporary to him was the notion that God was materially and ontologically tied to the universe. It was a notion that he associated with the Greek philosophers, and he grouped them all together as a common enemy despite the clear evidence that his thought was also nourished by their insights.
Philosophical notions of the cosmos as an emanation or overflow of being out of God had to be dismissed from Christian discourse. They left God ontologically tied to the universe in ways Basil could not abide. But the most important and critical insight of Basil, and the one that had the greatest sustained impact on Christian Trinitarian theology, was his teaching that the divine act of creation is not a punctiliar act in time at the beginning, but an act of God sustained from beginning to end as one divine activity originating from outside of time itself. Creation is not something that happened at the beginning of time, it is the doctrine that God has established time and space for life as we know it from beginning to end, and this is what we call our cosmos. Basil expressed this notion most clearly when he assigned teleiōsis, or continuing perfection, as the manner in which the Holy Spirit participates in creation. Once it is understood that God enacts creation from a position of eternity as a holistic act from beginning to end, the role of Spirit as Perfecter is no longer marked with hints of subordinationism, but is a way of talking about a truly Trinitarian doctrine of creation.
Basil presents a particularly Trinitarian expression of the doctrine of creation that upholds the freedom of God, the “absolute ontological distinction” between the Creator and the creation, and the fundamental integrity of the contingent order of the universe. He employs both cosmogony and cosmology to demonstrate the continuing divine activity of the Holy Spirit as God. This chapter expounds upon Basil’s exploration of the ineluctable time continuum stretched out between archē and telos, a continuum that is only escapable by its Creator. The Spirit is outside of this continuum. For Basil, it is absurd to suggest chronology within the Trinity—that is, outside of the created time continuum that makes chronology possible. His doctrine of the simplicity of God precludes thinking of the Creator as an ontological series. Basil does not say explicitly that the Spirit is the Creator, although he comes close. What follows is the preponderance of evidence drawn from Basil’s theological system as a whole implying that the Spirit operates with cosmological significance from the position of the Creator, without ever using the word itself. Without saying the Spirit is God, Basil claims that the Spirit is outside of time, prior to archē, posterior to telos, governor of progress in perfection, an active participant in the self-disclosing energies of God, and makes the claim that the only thing in existence that occupies this position is the one true God. That is to say, Basil claims that the Holy Spirit is God.
Closing the Cosmos
The aim of the following section is to recognize the philosophical theories of cosmogony contemporary to Basil and to illustrate how he argues for a difference between a Christian doctrine of creation and any theory in which God is materially or ontologically bound to the universe. Basil communicated a Christian doctrine of creation in which the universe as we know it is closed. That is, there is no location in the universe where one might trip up on a god or traipse into the divine realm. The cosmos, from the smallest organism to the furthest star, is the creation of God who dwells in another realm entirely—on another ontological plane. It has been provided by God for distinct purposes, one of which is that we might study it aggressively and understand the world in which we live.
Plato’s creator is the demiurge, the “Maker and Father of the Universe,” who attempted to recapitulate the invisible world of forms into a material world, but was unable to fully actualize his own intentions. The Maker and Father of the Universe, was, in Plato, limited to doing his best and failed at attaining his goal; the invisible realm simply cannot be recapitulated in the visible cosmos. The demiurge creates by bringing order to disorder and form to chaos, but this disorder, formlessness, and chaos exist eternally alongside the Father and Maker of the Universe and thus impose limits on what can be accomplished. The universe does indeed have a beginning, an archē, for Plato. This is to say that there is a principle of becoming, of coming into existence, located in divine activity. But this archē of creation by the demiurge, the archē of coming into being, is not a free act of creation out of nothing but the imposition of order over the preexistent but formless material of the universe. It is not God who creates, but “God geometrizes.” The archē in which Plato’s Father and Maker of the Universe participates is a primary cause within a chain of causality, a first movement of time that exists within time, an ordering of an existent material universe that can only be claimed to have come into being if we understand “being” to mean “being in a form.” Yes, Plato argues for an act of creation at the beginning, but God exists within and as a part of a system of definitive ordering principles, “principles still higher” that only “God and the man who is dear to God” can understand; principles to which Plato refers but cannot outline. Subject to higher principles, God could only impose order and harmony on the universe at its beginning so far as the existent things were able to receive. For this reason, the universe is not fully as it ought to be or fully as the Maker of All intended. The Creator was subject to certain limitations.
When Aristotle claimed, then, that all philosophers before him were agreed that the universe came into being, he was referring to the prevalence of Plato’s conception of a principle of divine activity bringing the formless universe into form. Aristotle resolved the tension between the universe as it is and the universe as it ought to be by refuting the existence of the latter. The universe is what it is, which is what it always has been and what it always will be; the principle of change may be instantiated as things move from what they are potentially toward what they are actually, but this does not speak to the question of eternal existence. Motion does not require that the universe is finite. Aristotle claims that motion is a constant in the universe that does not suggest the need for a beginning and an end: “There never was a time when there was not motion, and never will be a time when there will not be motion.” Although Aristotle considered his proposal different in kind from all those who had preceded him, those who countered the philosophy of the Greeks were not wrong to conflate the views and include them both among those who say that the world always existed. Aristotle’s God is even more openly bound to the ontology of the cosmos that Plato’s.
The convergence of the two views is demonstrated in Middle Platonism, where Platonic and Aristotelian thought underwent a process of distillation and synthesis by those who wished to modernize Plato by “appropriatin...
