Taking the advice of C. S. Lewis, we want to help our readers “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds,” which, as he argued, “can be done only by reading old books.” Continuing our Rediscovering Forgotten Classics series we want to survey some forgotten Christian classics that remain relevant and serve the church today.
“You need to get off Twitter,” a pastor friend told me. He was right. We both noticed my feed turning me into a church cynic. Too often, I’ve participated in this perennial problem:
We attack each other, and are overturned by each other. Even if the enemy did not hit us first, the comrade wounded us; and if someone was hit and fell, his comrade stepped on him. We have in common with each other that we hate our common opponents, but whenever the enemies leave, we then harm each other as enemies. (118–19)
Basil of Caesarea (AD 330–79) wrote those words nearly 1,700 years ago. He was troubled by the intra-Christian squabbles of his day—not unlike our culture of division all these years later. His answer? A better theology of the Holy Spirit, which he laid out in his classic work On the Holy Spirit.
On the Holy Spirit
Basil of Caesarea
In his funeral oration for St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nazianzus calls him a “standard of virtue,” a “noble champion of the truth,” and a “second Joseph” for feeding the hungry in a time of famine. The centuries-long dissemination and study of Basil’s works has only confirmed Gregory’s appraisal of Basil’s great personal holiness, his profound insight into the eloquent defense of the Christian faith, his self-effacing generosity toward the poor and the needy, and his wise and expert guidance for those who sought a deeper union with the Lord through the ascetic life.
On the Holy Spirit is a classic expression of the Church’s faith in the Spirit and a lasting testimony to St. Basil’s Christian erudition. Again in the words of Gregory, Basil’s treatise was “written by a pen borrowed from the Spirit’s store.”
Context
The time period between the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) and its reaffirmation and expansion at Constantinople (AD 381) has received a lot of attention. But you may be less familiar with conflicts surrounding the Holy Spirit at the same time. Based on the prepositions used to refer to the Spirit’s work, and the Spirit being the third person of the Trinity, some believed the Spirit “must not be ranked with the Father and Son, because he is different in nature and lacking in dignity” (55).
For Basil, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. He recognized that if his opponents were correct, salvation would be an impossibility—and the church would be just another community groping in the dark for the beautiful life, unable to lay hold of it. The church needed a good pneumatology.
Beautiful Holy Spirit and His Church
On the Holy Spirit changed my life. Not only did it settle some questions I had about the Trinity, it confronted me with the incredible beauty of the Spirit. It might seem odd to describe him as beautiful. But as God, he is beauty itself subsisting—the deepest desire of our souls and the source of all beauty. And as God the Spirit, he is the One who opens our eyes to contemplate in himself the beauty of the Son who reveals the Father.
Basil’s reflections were not the musings of a romantic but the framework in which he conceived the entirety of the Christian life. He wrote,
The Spirit illuminates those who have been cleansed from every stain and makes them spiritual by means of communion with himself. When a ray of light falls upon clear and translucent bodies, they are themselves filled with light and gleam with a light from themselves. Just so are the Spirit-bearing souls that are illuminated by the Holy Spirit: they are themselves made spiritual, and they send forth grace to others. (54)
Basil understood that the Spirit ministers to the church so she might know, enjoy, and manifest the very beauty of God amid this dark and dreary world. Specifically, I believe he wanted readers to see three ways this occurs.
How the Spirit Works in the Church
First, the Spirit works through the right teaching of the “beautiful words of God . . . written by the inspiration of the Spirit” (91, 95). Faithful Bible teaching requires the Spirit’s help to “look into the depths of the meaning of the Law, and [pass] through the obscurity of the letter as through a veil, so to enter the mysteries”—that is, to see how a particular passage points toward Christ. This intertwining of the so-called bodily and spiritual sense was how one “clearly [fixed their] eyes on the Spirit,” which led to being “transformed by the Spirit’s glory into something brighter” (90). In short, the Spirit beautifies his church through the preaching of Christ from every page of Scripture.
The Spirit beautifies his church through the preaching of Christ from every page of Scripture.
Second, the Spirit shapes his church through her liturgical rhythms. “In worship,” Basil explained, “the Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son, for if you are outside of him, you will not worship at all” (103). Thus Basil made a point to worship and pray both to the Spirit and in the Spirit. The former confesses the equal dignity of the Spirit, while the latter recognizes that “we are not sufficient to glorify God from ourselves; rather, our sufficiency is in the Holy Spirit, in whom we are empowered to give thanks to our God for the kindness done to us” (102). The Spirit, then, helps the church contemplate God in all his glory, in order that she might be fashioned to reflect his character on earth as it is in heaven (103).
Third, the Spirit makes his church virtuous, which for Basil is synonymous with the good life. Sin is ugly; it cannot satisfy or bring lasting pleasure. Righteousness, on the other hand, satisfies the longings of the soul and can only be brought by the Spirit:
Everything that needs holiness turns to him. All that live virtuously desire him. . . . He perfects others, but himself lacks nothing. . . . He is the source of holiness, an intellectual light for every rational power’s discovery of truth, supplying clarity, so to say, through himself. . . . He is like a sunbeam whose grace is present to the one who enjoys him. (53)
Cure for What Ails You
Some of Basil’s contemporaries had lost sight of the beauty of the Spirit—and missed out on his beautifying work. The result was ugly. The gospel faded as legalism moved to the foreground. Worship was gutted of contemplation and wonder. Strife prevailed rather than the peace of righteousness. Hate flourished in love’s rightful place.
Because I fear the same is true of our age, I believe Basil’s classic work is worthy of reengagement. May the Spirit of the Lord be glorified in his church today so we shine his beauty.
