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

To the Sozopolitans.3. As to the statement that human feelings are transmitted to the actual Godhead, it isone made by men who preserve no order in their thoughts, and are ignorant that there is adistinction between the feelings of flesh, of flesh endowed with soul, and of soul using abody. 3179 It is the property of flesh to undergo division, diminution, dissolution; of fleshendowed with soul to feel weariness, pain, hunger, thirst, and to be overcome by sleep; ofsoul using body to feel grief, heaviness, anxiety, and such like. Of these some are naturaland necessary to every living creature; others come of evil will, and are superinduced becauseof life’s lacking proper discipline and training for virtue. Hence it is evident that our Lordassumed the natural affections to establish His real incarnation, and not by way of semblanceof incantation, and that all the affections derived from evil that besmirch the purity of ourlife, He rejected as unworthy of His unsullied Godhead. It is on this account that He is saidto have been “made in the likeness of flesh of sin;” 3180 not, as these men hold, in likenessof flesh, but of flesh of sin. It follows that He took our flesh with its natural afflictions, but“did no sin.” 3181 Just as the death which is in the flesh, transmitted to us through Adam,was swallowed up by the Godhead, so was the sin taken away by the righteousness which isin Christ Jesus, 3182 so that in the resurrection we receive back the flesh neither liable todeath nor subject to sin.These, brethren, are the mysteries of the Church; these are the traditions of the Fathers.Every man who fears the Lord, and is awaiting God’s judgment, I charge not to be carriedaway by various doctrines. If any one teaches a different doctrine, and refuses to accede tothe sound words of the faith, rejecting the oracles of the Spirit, and making his own teachingof more authority than the lessons of the Gospels, of such an one beware. May the Lordgrant that one day we may meet, so that all that my argument has let slip I may supply whenwe stand face to face! I have written little when there was much to say, for I did not like togo beyond my letter’s bounds. At the same time I do not doubt that to all that fear the Lorda brief reminder is enough.3013179 cf. De Sp. S. § 12. p. 7.3180 Rom. viii. 3, R.V. marg.3181 1 Pet. ii. 22.3182 cf. Rom. v. 12 ad fin.821