On the Human Condition Book

"O human, you are a ruling being. And why do you serve the passions as a slave? Why do you throw away your own dignity and become a slave of sin? For what reason do you make yourself a prisoner of the devil? You were appointed ruler of creation, and you have renounced the nobility of your own nature."

Saint Basil of Caesarea, alongside his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his lifelong friend and collaborator, the poetically-brilliant Gregory Nazianzus, was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers and an indispensable figure in fourth-century Nicene Christianity. Born into a family of saints and academics, Basil spent many of his formative years studying philosophy and theology in Cappadocia and at Athens, where he and Gregory Nazianzus attended the lectures of Libanius, one of the last major pagan philosophers in the twilight of the old gods, and brushed elbows with a young man who would become known to history as the emperor Julian the Apostate. A gradual convert to his ancestral faith, Basil travelled around the near east to immerse himself in the world of solitary Christian asceticism, but found the lifestyle unsuited to his naturally familial disposition and his political and administrative proclivities. He resettled in Cappadocia, where he was eventually consecrated Bishop of Caesarea. He took an active role in the social and spiritual conditions of his parish, building soup kitchens, hospitals, and hospices, and delivering daily homilies on social justice and the centrality of community to Christian life.

Central to Basil's theology is his anthropology, and specifically his relational and communitarian understanding of the human person. In his First Homily on the Origin of Humanity, he emphasizes the special nature of human origins in the creation account. Whereas God spoke the cosmos into being through a simple formula of command and acknowledgement'He created the earth and the non-sentient animals and called them good'the creation of humanity began with the words, "Let us make" [Gen. 1. 26], suggesting that the three Persons of the Trinity consulted among themselves about the formation of the human being, and that this communal relationality constitutes the core of human identity. It also indicates the unique role of humanity as, in a sense, co-creator of itself, as the mutuality within the Triune God and within humanity separately are also conjoined in the process of creation. Humanity accords to the image and likeness of God by participating in its own creation through salvation history.

Our accordance with the image, according to Basil, is inherited by virtue of our very existence as human beings. It is grounded in our capacity for reason, the highest functionality of the embodied soul*, which governs not only our rational intellectual capacities but also our moral deliberations and our freedom of choice. Reason empowers us to rule over the irrational beasts of the earth; be they other animals, like fish and birds, or the innumerable beasts within ourselves, like anger, deceit, hypocrisy, and lust. The beastly passions, when allowed to dethrone our reason, take possession of us, undermine our humanity, and reduce us to servitude. Basil addresses this point with characteristic eloquence in his Homily Against Anger, in which he describes anger as a temporary insanity that makes us ignorant of ourselves and others, and which must be broken within us by the hardness of our reason as waves are broken on a beach. The passion of anger is contrasted with temper (thumos), which can beneficially sharpen our attention and strengthen our will against evil.

All of humanity is made according to the image, but it is only through the Christian Way that one is conformed to the likeness of God in Christ. Basil succinctly describes Christianity as "likeness to God as far as is possible for human nature". This conformation to the divine likeness is accomplished through the usage of our reason and our free will to adopt the teachings of Christ, cultivating the fruits of the Spirit as described by Saint Paul and overcoming the malevolent forces that would turn us away from the true worship of God. In accordance with our Trinitarian nature, it is given to us to freely and consciously participate in the accomplishment of our own creation. It is through the conquest of the Self that we join with God in finalizing the creation of humanity and calling it good.

In the Second Homily, Basil reminds us that we are at once humble and exalted, because we were formed from the lowly dust of the earth, and yet the vessels of our bodies were molded by the hands of God: a dignity not afforded to the rest of creation. The remembrance of our origins should guard us against arrogance and despair, as both conditions arise from an instability of our self-perception. Our very physical stature manifests our condition. We are rooted to the earth, but our verticality suggests a striving for transcendence and the attainment of higher things. Cattle scour the earth on all fours looking for food to fill their bellies, but the human head inclines above the stomach and toward the sky, to which it longs for kinship.

Man was commanded in Genesis to "multiply" and "fill the earth", but Basil interprets this injunction in a spiritual way befitting man's spiritual nature, rather than in a purely physical one. For beasts, the command is simply to propagate the species and populate the world, but "multiply", for Basil, pertains to the Church. We multiply not only by reproducing, but by growing the ranks of those "engendered according to the Gospel." We fill the earth through good will and the propagation of the Gospel, and by "filling" ourselves with the occupation of performing good works.

The Homily Explaining that God Is Not the Cause of Evil may be less satisfying for modern readers who, like myself, take the Dostoyevskyan view that theodicy, even if intellectually coherent, can be far uglier than simple apophatic silence in the face of calamity; that the unspeakable sufferings of the world would be even more jarring if they fit neatly into some divine plan than they would be if they were morally unintelligible.

Nevertheless, Basil introduces some valuable insights through a largely anthropocentric understanding of evil. True evil does not come about by the material forces of nature, but is only a product of human fallenness. Sin arises from our capacity for self-determination, as our ability to participate in the creative nature of the divine also allows us to turn away from the good and Holy. Basil subscribes to the traditional view of evil as a privation of good. Evil has no positive essence of its own; it was neither created by God, whose nature is entirely good, nor is it eternal, which would make it coequal with God. Basil identifies it instead with a certain lapse of attention, a void or distortion that occurs when the beatific union with God is ruptured.

Saint Basil deserves to be widely read'even by non-Christians. The works excerpted in this short volume are only the tip of the iceberg, and I certainly intend to explore his writings further. May his moral clarity realign our thoughts toward God in this Christmas season.

Saint Basil, pray for us.








*According to Basil, the locus of our humanity is in an interior soul, and the physical body is merely a vessel or encasement of the soul. Bodily differences, like those between men and women, are ultimately superficial. Men and women have the same capacities of soul, and their resurrection bodies will not have their sexual distinctiveness:

"The woman also possesses creation according to the image of God, as indeed does the man. The natures are alike of equal honor, the virtues are equal, the struggles equal, the judgment alike. Let her not say, 'I am weak.' The weakness is in the flesh, in the soul is the power."