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130 Pages
Page 65
The Fifth Book against Eunomius is on the Holy Spirit, and therefore, even if it were of indubitable genuineness, it would be of comparatively little importance, as the subject is fully discussed in the treatise of his mature life. A reason advanced against its genuineness has been the use concerning the Holy Ghost of the term God. (S: 3.) But it has been replied that the reserve which St. Basil practiced after his elevation to the episcopate was but for a special and temporary purpose. He calls the Spirit God in Ep. VIII. S:11. At the time of the publication of the Books against Eunomius there would be no such reason for any "economy" [469] as in 374.
(ii) De Spiritu Sancto. To the illustration and elucidation of this work I have little to add to what is furnished, however inadequately, by the translation and notes in the following pages. The famous treatise of St. Basil was one of several put out about the same time by the champions of the Catholic cause. Amphilochius, to whom it was addressed, was the author of a work which Jerome describes (De Vir. Ill., cxxxiii.) as arguing that He is God Almighty, and to be worshipped. The Ancoratus of Epiphanius was issued in 373 in support of the same doctrine. At about the same time Didymus, the blind master of the catechetical school at Alexandria, wrote a treatise which is extant in St. Jerome's Latin; and of which the work of St. Ambrose, composed in 381, for the Emperor Gratian, is "to a considerable extent an echo." [470]
So in East and West a vigorous defence was maintained against the Macedonian assault. The Catholic position is exactly defined in the Synodical Letter sent by Damasus to Paulinus of Tyre in 378. [471] Basil died at the crisis of the campaign, and with no bright Pisgah view of the ultimate passage into peace. The generalship was to pass into other hands. There is something of the irony of fate, or of the mystery of Providence, in the fact that the voice condemned by Basil to struggle against the mean din and rattle of Sasima should be the vehicle for impressing on the empire the truths which Basil held dear. Gregory of Sasima was no archiepiscopal success at Constantinople. He was not an administrator or a man of the world. But he was a great divine and orator, and the imperial basilica of the Athanasia rang with outspoken declarations of the same doctrines, which Basil had more cautiously suggested to inevitable inference. The triumph was assured, Gregory was enthroned in St. Sophia, and under Theodosius the Catholic Faith was safe from molestation.
[469] cf. remarks in S: vi. p. xxiii. of Prolegomena.
[470] Swete, Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, p. 71, who further notes: "St. Jerome is severe upon St. Ambrose for copying Didymus, and says that the Archbishop of Milan had produced "ex Graecis bonis Latina non bona.' The work of the Latin Father is, however, by no means a mere copy; and other writers besides Didymus are laid under contribution in the argument; e.g. St. Basil and perhaps St. Athanasius."
[471] Theod. v. 11 in this edition, p. 139; Mansi iii. 486.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/basil/life-works.asp?pg=65
