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4 The Divine Light over Scripture Having discussed the sacrament of baptism and the doctrine of creation, Basil also used his theology of the inspiration and authority of Holy Scripture to argue for the full divinity of the Spirit. For Basil, there is something the individual believer receives in the engagement with Scripture, and what is received reveals the Trinity. This chapter explores the difference between Eunomius and Basil in their view of Scripture and its exegesis. It exposes Basil’s relationship with his rhetorical instructors in order to draw from the lexicon of Basil’s rhetorical background and demonstrate what Basil meant when he used these words to describe the Spirit. His proposal that the Person of the Holy Spirit must act upon the mind of the Christian to surmount the crisis of interpretation is an unexplored argument for the full divinity of the Spirit. The words of Scripture are inspired by the Holy Spirit and given as a gift of knowledge to the church, in Basil’s view. They are the final measure of the created order and provide the proper intellectual matrix for the exploration of nature. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Spirit’s activity in creation and the Spirit’s activity in inspiration are inextricably intertwined. The correspondence between the rational order of the cosmos and our ability to perceive and comprehend it is evidence, for Basil, of the activity and the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and this correspondence is located in the consistency between the inspired word of Scripture and the nature of the created world. By Basil’s time, the argument that the universe is held in rational order is commonplace. Basil exploits this commonplace assertion to claim that the correspondence between the order of the natural world, the order of Scripture, and the order of the rational mind are only revealed by the process of illumination by the Holy Spirit. Basil was trained in rhetoric under some of the most renowned and celebrated rhetors of the Second Sophistic movement. His exposure to this field of study provided a model in his mind of the good and decent rhetor, a model 145 that he used to describe the Holy Spirit. A good rhetor not only uses the power of words to move the soul but also works to develop the student by moving the student’s soul in a proper direction. Having served as an instructor in rhetoric himself, Basil had a highly developed sense of the pedagogical role and a high regard for the power of words to direct the soul. His background and training in rhetoric did more to shape his hermeneutic tendencies than his affiliation with the so-called Alexandrian or Antiochene strains of exegesis, models which do not fit the Cappadocians anyway.1 Basil saw the Spirit as a rhetor—the one who provided not only the words of the church, but their meaning and proper application. The Spirit, in Basil’s view, provides both the vocabulary and the grammar of theology. Where other authors had expounded upon the beauty of Scripture and its language, Basil more deeply explored the Spirit’s role as the master wordsmith of the word of God. Basil commonly used the phrase “Word of the Spirit” to denote the Bible, and saw the Spirit as the source of the Scriptures, but he recognized that there was a stark difference between his own confession and that of his opponents. Eunomius continued to associate Scripture with the Logos as its source in ways that, in the end, isolated him from the rest of the church, and he never accepted the assertion that the Spirit inspired the prophets. Eustathius, on the other hand, called the Scriptures theopneustos but associated this divine action with the Spirit in a way that left questions about the full divinity of the Spirit. For Basil, the Spirit was the primary source of the words of Scripture, their meaning and authority both in its original inspiration and its “attentive” and “godly” reception by the reader. The text of Scripture did not pass down through history unaccompanied, in his view, and its meaning was not dictated by a rigid methodology of interpretation. Scripture is accompanied always by its Inspirer, the Holy Spirit, who applies its meaning to the hearts of those who are illumined within the church. Basil was aware of a crisis of interpretation, a deep chasm between a word and its meaning that he believed could only effectively...

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