Hexaemeron (Homily 1, Paragraphs 1 & 2)
In the Beginning God made the Heaven and the Earth.
1. It is right that any one beginning to narrate the formation of the world should begin with the good order which reigns in visible things. I am about to speak of the creation of heaven and earth, which was not spontaneous, as some have imagined, but drew its origin from God. What ear is worthy to hear such a tale? How earnestly the soul should prepare itself to receive such high lessons! How pure it should be from carnal affections, how unclouded by worldly disquietudes, how active and ardent in its researches, how eager to find in its surroundings an idea of God which may be worthy of Him! [COMMENT: Here, Basil believes the first lesson of Revelation was that there was a spiritual origin to the observable world that is evidenced by its orderliness which stands above the particular tangible things themselves. An example would be a "note" and the melody which stands above it and gives us the impression of a "song". The world, according to St. Basil, is not just a bunch of random sounds but a kind of melodious order by which the sounds have sense. Thus, there is something of the world that pervades it by intention without actually being physically "part" of the visible order. This higher order factuality of Creation is similar to the writer, the plot, and the words of his story in terms of precedence. For St. Basil, this is the first lesson that man could only acknowledge so far by reason alone. Now in the year of our Lord 2026, the major divide within our society are those who believe in the irrational basis of the world's spontaneous emergence vs. those who believe in its intentional creation. This is the heart of the so-called "God Debate" which scandalized so many souls.].
But before weighing the justice of these remarks, before examining all the sense contained in these few words, let us see who addresses them to us. Because, if the weakness of our intelligence does not allow us to penetrate the depth of the thoughts of the writer, yet we shall be involuntarily drawn to give faith to his words by the force of his authority. Now it is Moses who has composed this history; Moses, who, when still at the breast, is described as exceeding fair; Moses, whom the daughter of Pharaoh adopted; who received from her a royal education, and who had for his teachers the wise men of Egypt; Moses, who disdained the pomp of royalty, and, to share the humble condition of his compatriots, preferred to be persecuted with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting delights of sin; Moses, who received from nature such a love of justice that, even before the leadership of the people of God was committed to him, he was impelled, by a natural horror of evil, to pursue malefactors even to the point of punishing them by death; Moses, who, banished by those whose benefactor he had been, hastened to escape from the tumults of Egypt and took refuge in Ethiopia, living there far from former pursuits, and passing forty years in the contemplation of nature; Moses, finally, who, at the age of eighty, saw God, as far as it is possible for man to see Him; or rather as it had not previously been granted to man to see Him, according to the testimony of God Himself, If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house, with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently and not in dark speeches. It is this man, whom God judged worthy to behold Him, face to face, like the angels, who imparts to us what he has learned from God. Let us listen then to these words of truth written without the help of the enticing words of man's wisdom 1 Corinthians 2:4 by the dictation of the Holy Spirit; words destined to produce not the applause of those who hear them, but the salvation of those who are instructed by them. [COMMENT: here, St. Basil is operating by the understanding of his own time and place which places the Pentateuch under Mosaic authorship. This belief is not necessary for salvation per se, but it is a belief held by most of the Church Fathers. That said, the second paragraph raises an interesting point about the inspired nature of Biblical revelation as a whole (and where St. Basil's belief does gain some material weight even for us): this text of Genesis contains an original and inexplicable formulation of God's Transcendence above and beyond this world is itself a unique attribution of the Divine. Ancient peoples casted their gods as personifications of nature, not as transcendent beings. For more detail, please see "The Religion of Israel" by Yehezkel Kaufmann who argued for the originality of Ancient Israel's monotheism despite the question of post-Exilic developments. Besides, even if Moses did not himself author these texts firsthand, the scribes and priests who followed him certainly did. The Mosaic authorship thus could comprise a "tradition" of a sort (and a rather faithful one at that given the sincerity of Ancient Jewry in transmitting their fathers' wisdom.). In this sense, St. Basil's attribution is merely ambiguous vs. untrue.].
2. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1:1 I stop struck with admiration at this thought. What shall I first say? Where shall I begin my story? Shall I show forth the vanity of the Gentiles? Shall I exalt the truth of our faith? The philosophers of Greece have made much ado to explain nature, and not one of their systems has remained firm and unshaken, each being overturned by its successor [NOTE: St. Basil here says that the alternative to Revelation by the Creator is for mankind to engage in endless philosophical speculation as the limit of scientific inquiry. A good God, it is implied, would not leave mankind in a state of perpetual confusion even if He permits speculation as a foil to His own glorification [i.e. first through His Revelation through Israel's Prophets; and more importantly, through the Incarnation of the Word]. A great advantage to Christianity is that God is not some remote idea, much less an ideal, but a person who became one of us to be with one of us. No other such magnificent claim exists on par with Christianity.]. It is vain to refute them [i.e. the philosophers]; they are sufficient in themselves to destroy one another. Those who were too ignorant to rise to a knowledge of a God, could not allow that an intelligent cause presided at the birth of the Universe; a primary error that involved them in sad consequences. Some had recourse to material principles and attributed the origin of the Universe to the elements of the world. Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules and ducts, form, by their union, the nature of the visible world. Atoms reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths and the most durable bodies only owe their consistency to the strength of their mutual adhesion: a true spider's web woven by these writers who give to heaven, to earth, and to sea so weak an origin and so little consistency! [NOTE: it is important to note that materialism was a philosophical proposition well before the rise of modern science between Galileo, Newton, Darwin, et. al. What Basil argues here is that it all rests on a major category error that misunderstands what matter is and is not. Here, St. Basil speaks of the atomists and hedonists, but other philosophical schools, including Aristotelianism, Platonism, Stoicism, etc., had known that there were formal considerations as first causes beyond matter itself. That is, wood in itself does not fully explain why there are wooden tables. The idea of a table is not reducible to the material of wood even if a concretized table necessitates wood as one of its many preconditions for existence.]. It is because they knew not how to say "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" [NOTE: this is not something that is easily grasped even by the most learned which validates God's inspiration of the minds of certain men in certain moments for certain reasons]. Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that was all was given up to chance. To guard us against this error the writer on the creation, from the very first words, enlightens our understanding with the name of God; In the beginning God created. What a glorious order! He first establishes a beginning, so that it might not be supposed that the world never had a beginning. Then he adds Created to show that which was made was a very small part of the power of the Creator. In the same way that the potter, after having made with equal pains a great number of vessels, has not exhausted either his art or his talent; thus the Maker of the Universe, whose creative power, far from being bounded by one world, could extend to the infinite, needed only the impulse of His will to bring the immensities of the visible world into being. If then the world has a beginning, and if it has been created, enquire who gave it this beginning, and who was the Creator: or rather, in the fear that human reasonings may make you wander from the truth, Moses has anticipated enquiry by engraving in our hearts, as a seal and a safeguard, the awful name of God [NOTE: here "awful" is being used as modern existentialists might understand it; look, more specifically, at Wittgenstein's review of Heidegger's concept of "Dasein"]: In the beginning God created — It is He, beneficent Nature, Goodness without measure, a worthy object of love for all beings endowed with reason, the beauty the most to be desired, the origin of all that exists, the source of life, intellectual light, impenetrable wisdom, it is He who in the beginning created heaven and earth.
[REFLECTION: St. Basil eloquently deflates the meagerness of philosophical speculation in the face of Divine Revelation as ultimate source of Truth. While holding himself as a "theologian" (and bishop), he himself makes an important philosophical contribution to Christian apologetics (which is necessarily philosophical in nature as it appeals in the beginning to Reason only). What is that contribution here? That Christianity makes a unique metaphysical claim that the world had a beginning; and if it had a beginning (as everything is said to have temporality and thus a beginning), then somebody decided so in the willed effort to start the world. This is because true beginnings are intentional. Things can accidentally start but we see them merely as transformations of highly connected events and conditions such that they more or less automatically happen. That may be true of certain things [like spilling a glass of milk and it beginning to stain your clothes], but it cannot be said to be the explanation of everything because there is intentionality in the world [that is most manifest in human beings' faculty of deliberation to do X instead of Y even when Y could have been done.]. Intentionality is an aspect of personhood. Rocks and stars lack intentions because they lack a mental life. Cats and dogs who have animality and thus a "soul" lack intentions too in their mental life as they merely have instinct built into them. God who began the world did so with intentionality. As there is one universe, so there is one mind behind its unity: This is possibly the greatest of Mosaic contributions to the accurate Monotheistic sense of ultimate reality. St. Basil explains why this account of God too could only be given by God Himself by way of prophecy/inspiration because there are too many philosophies and none have a way of resolving themselves. As Basil points out, they have a tendency of nullifying one another. Rationality therefore requires not only a God as an "idea" or "mechanism" or "force", but a theistic and personal God.]
Courtesy of New Advent (online version of the Catholic Encyclopedia and more).
Source. Translated by Blomfield Jackson. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 8. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32011.htm>.
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