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Translated by Bl. Jackson.
St Basil the Great Resources Online and in Print
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80 Pages (Homilies: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
Page 80
O enemy of Christ, hear God speaking to His Co-operator, to Him by Whom also He made the worlds, Who upholds all things by the word of His power. [1727] But He does not leave the voice of true religion without answer. Thus the Jews, race hostile to truth, when they find themselves pressed, act like beasts enraged against man, who roar at the bars of their cage and show the cruelty and the ferocity of their nature, without being able to assuage their fury. God, they say, addresses Himself to several persons; it is to the angels before Him that He says, "Let us make man." Jewish fiction! a fable whose frivolity shows whence it has come. To reject one person, they admit many. To reject the Son, they raise servants to the dignity of counsellors; they make of our fellow slaves the agents in our creation. The perfect man attains the dignity of an angel; but what creature can be like the Creator? Listen to the continuation. "In our image." What have you to reply? Is there one image of God and the angels? Father and Son have by absolute necessity the same form, but the form is here understood as becomes the divine, not in bodily shape, but in the proper qualities of Godhead. Hear also, you who belong to the new concision [1728] and who, under the appearance of Christianity, strengthen the error of the Jews. [1729] To Whom does He say, "in our image," to whom if it is not to Him who is "the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person," [1730] "the image of the invisible God"? [1731] It is then to His living image, to Him Who has said "I and my Father are one," [1732] "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," [1733] that God says "Let us make man in our image." Where is the unlikeness [1734] in these Beings who have only one image? "So God created man." [1735] It is not "They made." Here Scripture avoids the plurality of the Persons. After having enlightened the Jew, it dissipates the error of the Gentiles in putting itself under the shelter of unity, to make you understand that the Son is with the Father, and guarding you from the danger of polytheism. He created him in the image of God. God still shows us His co-operator, because He does not say, in His image, but in the image of God.
If God permits, we will say later in what way man was created in the image of God, and how he shares this resemblance. Today we say but only one word. If there is one image, from whence comes the intolerable blasphemy of pretending that the Son is unlike the Father? What ingratitude! You have yourself received this likeness and you refuse it to your Benefactor! You pretend to keep personally that which is in you a gift of grace, and you do not wish that the Son should keep His natural likeness to Him who begat Him.
But evening, which long ago sent the sun to the west, imposes silence upon me. Here, then, let me be content with what I have said, and put my discourse to bed. I have told you enough up to this point to excite your zeal; with the help of the Holy Spirit I will make for you a deeper investigation into the truths which follow. Retire, then, I beg you, with joy, O Christ-loving congregation, and, instead of sumptuous dishes of various delicacies, adorn and sanctify your tables with the remembrance of my words. May the Anomoean be confounded, the Jew covered with shame, the faithful exultant in the dogmas of truth, and the Lord glorified, the Lord to Whom be glory and power, world without end. Amen.
[1727] cf. Heb. i. 2, 3.
[1728] Phil. iii. 2.
[1729] The Arians.
[1730] Heb. i. 3.
[1731] Col. i. 15.
[1732] John x. 30.
[1733] John xiv. 9.
[1734] to anomoion. Arius had taught that the Persons are anomoioi pampan allelon.
[1735] Gen. i. 27.
The End
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/basil/hexaemeron.asp?pg=80
