NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works - Holy Bible Institute

Against those who say that the Holy Ghost is not to be numbered with, but numbered under,the Father and the Son. Wherein moreover there is a summary notice of the faith concerningright sub-numeration.Chapter XVII.Against those who say that the Holy Ghost is not to be numbered with, but numbered under,the Father and the Son. Wherein moreover there is a summary notice of the faith concerningright sub-numeration.41. What, however, they call sub-numeration, 1077 and in what sense they use this word,cannot even be imagined without difficulty. It is well known that it was imported into ourlanguage from the “wisdom of the world;” 1078 but a point for our present consideration willbe whether it has any immediate relation to the subject under discussion. Those who areadepts in vain investigations tell us that, while some nouns are common and of widely extendeddenotation, others are more specific, and that the force of some is more limited thanthat of others. Essence, for instance, is a common noun, predicable of all things both animateand inanimate; while animal is more specific, being predicated of fewer subjects than theformer, though of more than those which are considered under it, as it embraces both rationaland irrational nature. Again, human is more specific than animal, and man thanhuman, and than man the individual Peter, Paul, or John. 1079 Do they then mean by subnumerationthe division of the common into its subordinate parts? But I should hesitateto believe they have reached such a pitch of infatuation as to assert that the God of the universe,like some common quality conceivable only by reason and without actual existencein any hypostasis, is divided into subordinate divisions, and that then this subdivision iscalled sub-numeration. This would hardly be said even by men melancholy mad, for, besidesits impiety, they are establishing the very opposite argument to their own contention. For1077 “The word was used as a quasi philosophical term to express the doctrine quoted by St. Basil, in § 13:it does not occur in the confession of Eunomius, which was prepared after this book, a.d. 382; but it was usedby him in his Liber Apologeticus (before a.d. 365) against which St. Basil wrote.” Rev. C.F.H. Johnston. For“ὑπαρίθμησις” the only authorities given by the lexicons are “ecclesiastical.” But the importation from the“wisdom of the world” implies use in heathen philosophy.1078 cf. 1 Cor. i. 20.1079 “This portion of the theory of general language is the subject of what is termed the doctrine of the Predicables;a set of distinctions handed down from Aristotle, and his follower Porphyry, many of which have takena firm root in scientific, and some of them even in popular, phraseology. The predicables are a five-fold divisionof General Names, not grounded as usual on a difference in their meaning, that is, in the attribute which theyconnote, but on a difference in the kind of class which they denote. We may predicate of a thing five differentvarieties of class-name: A genus of the thing (γένος). A species (εἶδος). A differentia (διαφορα). A proprium(ἰδιόν). An accidens (συμβεβηκός). It is to be remarked of these distinctions, that they express, not what thepredicate is in its own meaning, but what relation it bears to the subject of which it happens on the particularoccasion to be predicated.” J. S. Mill, System of Logic, i. 133.196