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

To his Brother Gregory, concerning the difference between and .him on the one His own Father, and on the other His own Spirit. For He who eternally existsin the Father can never be cut off from the Father, nor can He who worketh all things bythe Spirit ever be disjoined from His own Spirit. Likewise moreover he who receives theFather virtually receives at the same time both the Son and the Spirit; for it is in no wisepossible to entertain the idea of severance or division, in such a way as that the Son shouldbe thought of apart from the Father, or the Spirit be disjoined from the Son. But the communionand the distinction apprehended in Them are, in a certain sense, ineffable and inconceivable,the continuity of nature being never rent asunder by the distinction of the hypostases,nor the notes of proper distinction confounded in the community of essence.Marvel not then at my speaking of the same thing as being both conjoined and parted, andthinking as it were darkly in a riddle, of a certain 2040 new and strange conjoined separationand separated conjunction. Indeed, even in objects perceptible to the senses, any one whoapproaches the subject in a candid and uncontentious spirit, may find similar conditionsof things.5. Yet receive what I say as at best a token and reflexion of the truth; not as the actualtruth itself. For it is not possible that there should be complete correspondence betweenwhat is seen in the tokens and the objects in reference to which the use of tokens is adopted.Why then do I say that an analogy of the separate and the conjoined is found in objectsperceptible to the senses? You have before now, in springtime, beheld the brightness of thebow in the cloud; the bow, I mean, which, in our common parlance, is called Iris, and is saidby persons skilled in such matters to be formed when a certain moisture is mingled withthe air, and the force of the winds expresses what is dense and moist in the vapour, after ithas become cloudy, into rain. The bow is said to be formed as follows. When the sunbeam,after traversing obliquely the dense and darkened portion of the cloud-formation, has directlycast its own orb on some cloud, the radiance is then reflected back from what is moist andshining, and the result is a bending and return, as it were, of the light upon itself. For flamelikeflashings are so constituted that if they fall on any smooth surface they are refracted onthemselves; and the shape of the sun, which by means of the beam is formed on the moistand smooth part of the air, is round. The necessary consequence therefore is that the airadjacent to the cloud is marked out by means of the radiant brilliance in conformity withthe shape of the sun’s disc. Now this brilliance is both continuous and divided. It is of manycolours; it is of many forms; it is insensibly steeped in the variegated bright tints of its dye;imperceptibly abstracting from our vision the combination of many coloured things, withthe result that no space, mixing or paring within itself the difference of colour, can be dis-1402040 ὥσπερ ἐκ αἰνίγματι. cf. 1 Cor. xiii. 12. ἐν αἰνίγματι or ἐξ αἰνιγμάτων, as in Æsch., Ag. 1113=by darkhints. The bold oxymoron concluding this sentence is illustrated by Ovid’s “impietate pia” (Met. viii. 477), Lucan’s“concordia discors” (Phars. i. 98), or Tennyson’s “faith unfaithful.”430