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

The creation of moving creatures.been condemned to crawl. The just is an honest man, like Job. 1621 Wherefore God setteththe solitary in families. 1622 So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable,both small and great beasts. 1623 Yet a wise and marvellous order reigns amongthese animals. Fish do not always deserve our reproaches; often they offer us useful examples.How is it that each sort of fish, content with the region that has been assigned to it, nevertravels over its own limits to pass into foreign seas? No surveyor has ever distributed tothem their habitations, nor enclosed them in walls, nor assigned limits to them; each kindhas been naturally assigned its own home. One gulf nourishes one kind of fish, anotherother sorts; those which swarm here are absent elsewhere. No mountain raises its sharppeaks between them; no rivers bar the passage to them; it is a law of nature, which accordingto the needs of each kind, has allotted to them their dwelling places with equality andjustice. 16241621 So the Cod. Colb. and Eustathius, who renders Justus nihil habet fictum sicut Job. The Ben. Ed. suspectthat Basil wrote Jacob and Job. Four mss. support Jacob alone, who, whatever may be the meaning of the Hebrewin Gen. xxv. 27, is certainly ἄπλαστος only in the LXX., and a bad instance of guilelessness.1622 Ps. lxviii. 6.1623 Ps. civ. 25.1624 cf. Cudworth, Int. Syst. iii. 37, 23: “Besides this plastick Nature which is in animals, forming their severalbodies artificially, as so many microcosms or little worlds, there must also be a general plastick Nature in themacrocosm, the whole corporeal universe, that which makes all things thus to conspire everywhere, and agreetogether into one harmony. Concerning which plastick nature of the universe, the Author De Mundo writesafter this manner, καὶ τὸν ὅλον κόσμον, διεκόσμησε μία ἡ διὰ πάντων διήκουσα δύναμις, one power, passingthrough all things, ordered and formed the whole world. Again he calls the same πνεῦμα καὶ ἔμψυχον καὶγόνιμον οὐσίαν, a spirit, and a living and Generative Nature, and plainly declares it to be a thing distinct fromthe Deity, but subordinate to it and dependent on it. But Aristotle himself, in that genuine work of his beforementioned, speaks clearly and positively concerning the Plastick Nature of the Universe, as well as that of animals,in these words: ‘It seemeth that as there is Art in Artificial things, so in the things of Nature, there is anothersuch like Principle or Cause, which we ourselves partake of: in the same manner as we do of Heat and Cold,from the Universe. Wherefore it is more probable that the whole world was at first made by such a cause as this(if at least it were made) and that it is still conserved by the same, than mortal animals should be so: for thereis much more of order and determinate Regularity in the Heavenly Bodies that in ourselves; but more of Fortuitousnessand inconstant Regularity among these mortal things. Notwithstanding which, some there are, whothough they cannot but acknowledge that the Bodies of Animals were all framed by an Artificial Nature, yetthey will need contend that the System of the Heavens sprung merely from Fortune and Chance; although therebe not the least appearance of Fortuitousness or Temerity in it.’ And then he sums up all into this conclusion:ὥστε εἶναι φανερὸν ὅτι ἔστι τι τοιοῦτον ὃ δὴ καὶ καλοῦμεν φύσιν. ‘Wherefore it is manifest that there is somesuch thing as that which we call Nature,’ that is, that there is not only an ‘Artificial,’ ‘Methodical,’ and PlastickNature in Animals, by which their respective Bodies are Framed and Conserved, but also that there is such a327