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3 The Divine Light over Creation Basil’s doctrine of creation is another means that he used to argue for the divinity of the Holy Spirit on the grounds of the activities of the Holy Spirit as God, rather than by arguing about the nature of God’s essence. As part of the continuing development of Christian thought on the nature of the created order and its meaning, Basil contributed a few small points of clarity that, as it turns out, opened up broad horizons for later thinkers in theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that Basil’s doctrine of creation made the claim that the Holy Spirit is God through three distinct moves. First, Basil clearly presented the claim that the entire creation was a closed system separated from God its Creator by an ontological divide. Second, Basil explored the distinction between time and eternity, challenging the assumption that God is bound to time as we are. He recognized that God is in eternity and creation in time, and declared that the Holy Spirit is not bound by time. Last, Basil expected a certain divine disclosure to be evident in the created order; he expected that knowledge of God would be available through the study of the natural world. However, he was also wary of what could now be called a natural theology. For Basil, knowledge of God derived from the natural order had to be mediated by the power of the Holy Spirit. God can only be known by God, and the Holy Spirit makes God known through creation when the Holy Spirit illumines the mind. Basil focuses primarily on the activity of the Spirit renewing the mind for knowledge of the created order, leaving little reference to the creative activity of the Son, even though he recognizes that all activities of God are products of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In these three major arguments, it is clear that Basil defines the boundaries of what is divine and what is not, and places the Holy Spirit on the side of the one true God who is disclosed through Trinitarian activities toward creation. 71 Basil was an important part of the emergence of a Christian doctrine of creation. He recognized that the doctrine of creation was not only the interplay of the omnipotent God with the material world, but the relationship between eternity and time. How does an eternal, timeless, and changeless deity work in time to generate the cosmos? The enduring problem that Basil identified in cosmologies contemporary to him was the notion that God was materially and ontologically tied to the universe. It was a notion that he associated with the Greek philosophers, and he grouped them all together as a common enemy despite the clear evidence that his thought was also nourished by their insights. Philosophical notions of the cosmos as an emanation or overflow of being out of God had to be dismissed from Christian discourse. They left God ontologically tied to the universe in ways Basil could not abide. But the most important and critical insight of Basil, and the one that had the greatest sustained impact on Christian Trinitarian theology,1 was his teaching that the divine act of creation is not a punctiliar act in time at the beginning, but an act of God sustained from beginning to end as one divine activity originating from outside of time itself. Creation is not something that happened at the beginning of time, it is the doctrine that God has established time and space for life as we know it from beginning to end, and this is what we call our cosmos. Basil expressed this notion most clearly when he assigned teleiōsis, or continuing perfection, as the manner in which the Holy Spirit participates in creation. Once it is understood that God enacts creation from a position of eternity as a holistic act from beginning to end, the role of Spirit as Perfecter is no longer marked with hints of subordinationism, but is a way of talking about a truly Trinitarian doctrine of creation. Basil presents a particularly Trinitarian expression of the doctrine of creation that upholds the freedom of God, the “absolute ontological distinction”2 between the Creator and the creation, and the fundamental integrity of the contingent order of the universe. He employs both cosmogony 1. Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 9. 2...

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