Basil the Great

De Spiritu Sancto 27 is the most-quoted patristic text on this, and his claim is unambiguous: some of what the church preserves comes from written teaching, some was delivered "in a mystery" by apostolic tradition, and the two have the same force. Reject the unwritten customs and you would injure the gospel in its vitals. But he is not putting tradition above Scripture — where doctrine is genuinely disputed he makes Scripture the arbiter and refuses to let custom function as the rule of orthodoxy.

WORTH CORRECTINGA two-tier rule, and both halves must be quoted together or he gets misused. On doctrine: "let God-inspired Scripture decide between us" (Letter 189.3). On discipline: regional custom and the fathers govern. Note also that every example he gives of unwritten tradition is a rite or custom — the sign of the cross, turning east to pray, triple immersion, blessing the water and the chrism — not a doctrine absent from Scripture.

De Spiritu Sancto 27.66"both of these in relation to true religion have the same force"

No canon list found. What exists is indirect: the canonical letter defends the Greek text against pressure from the Hebrew, and Letter 8 quotes Wisdom as Scripture without qualification — but Letter 8 is the disputed one.

WORTH CORRECTINGOnly about 10 of roughly 330 letters were read. Letter 188 is the likeliest home for a canon statement and doesn't contain one.

He supplies the Cappadocian grammar the West later took as standard — one ousia, three hypostases, the distinction being that of the general to the particular, as animal is to a particular man. He blocks both errors in one move: deny the common essence and you get polytheism, deny the distinction of hypostases and you get modalism. On the Spirit he argues for ranking and glorifying him with the Father and the Son.

WORTH CORRECTINGA deliberate restraint worth knowing: across De Spiritu Sancto he never once calls the Spirit "God" outright, arguing his divinity entirely from shared titles, shared operations, inseparability and equal honour. His own theory of reserve — "Dogma and Kerugma are two distinct things; the former is observed in silence" — is arguably why.

Letter 236.6 — "we confess one essence or substance so as not to give a variant definition of existence"

Not determined. The texts read are on the Trinity, creation and church order. He died in 379, seventy-two years before Chalcedon, so the period label is safe but there is no text here to ground a stance.

Hexaemeron 2 is as clear a statement of libertarian responsibility as the fathers offer: evil has no substance of its own, it is the soul's condition when it falls away from good, and each person is the first author of his own vice. Do not look for a cause outside yourself. He adds that virtues exist in us by nature. Nothing here about inherited guilt or bondage.

WORTH CORRECTINGA real gap worth stating: the nine Hexaemeron homilies never treat Adam's fall, and the two homilies On the Origin of Man that would are not on New Advent. So this rests on his account of the origin of evil and the will, not on an exposition of Genesis 3.

Hexaemeron 2.5 — "Each of us, let us acknowledge it, is the first author of his own vice."

Like Athanasius, his salvation language is deification, and the forensic/transformative/infused categories do not fit it. De Spiritu Sancto 9 ends its ladder of what the Spirit gives with "the being made God" — the goal is participation in the divine life through the Spirit's indwelling, reached by being cleansed and made spiritual by fellowship with him. There is no account of a sinner being declared or made righteous; the question is not posed.

WORTH CORRECTINGThe NPNF editor's own footnote cross-references this line to Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54, plus Irenaeus, Origen and 2 Peter 1:4 — the two men are working the same framework.

De Spiritu Sancto 9.23"abiding in God, the being made like to God, and, highest of all, the being made God"

Not addressed in the texts read. His account of the will points away from unconditional election, but that is inference from a different question rather than a position.

Letter 93 treats the elements realistically and without qualification: communicating every day is good and beneficial because it is partaking of the holy body and blood of Christ, grounded on John 6:54. He reports communicating four times a week, and records that the solitaries in the desert, and most of the laity in Alexandria and Egypt, keep the sacrament at home and take it themselves, "participating in it each time as entire" — which presupposes that what is reserved is still what it was when the priest gave it. He offers no account of how that is so, and gives no sign of thinking one is owed.

WORTH CORRECTINGContested because of Basil, not because of the grid. Letter 8 reads the same John 6 language in a markedly non-sacramental direction — "we eat His flesh, and drink His blood, being made through His incarnation and His visible life partakers of His Word and of His Wisdom" — and the NPNF editor flags the passage as Basil's view of the spiritual meaning of eating the flesh. Letter 8's authorship is widely disputed and often reassigned to Evagrius Ponticus, which New Advent does not note. Weigh the two letters before quoting either.

It is good and beneficial to communicate every day, and to partake of the holy body and blood of Christ.Letter 93, to the Patrician Caesaria, concerning Communion (NPNF2-08)

De Spiritu Sancto 9 describes the charismata as present operations of the Spirit on those cleansed from every spot — foreknowledge of the future, understanding of mysteries, apprehension of what is hidden, distribution of good gifts — citing Romans 12:6. He is describing the Spirit's work in the church of his own day as a matter of course, with no suggestion any of it has lapsed.

WORTH CORRECTINGContested because this is a list of the Spirit's operations, not an argument about whether gifts continue. He never poses the question, so the stance is read off his assumptions.

De Spiritu Sancto 9.23"Hence comes foreknowledge of the future, understanding of mysteries, apprehension of what is hidden"

What baptism does he states strongly — burial with Christ, the water fulfilling the image of death while the Spirit gives the earnest of life, three immersions with three invocations, and any grace in the water coming not from the water but from the Spirit's presence. Who it is for he never says.

WORTH CORRECTINGInfant baptism appears nowhere in De Spiritu Sancto, in the canonical letter where it would most plausibly sit, or in any letter read. The effect is well attested; the subject is not.

De Spiritu Sancto 15.35"This then is what it is to be born again of water and of the Spirit"

Not reached. His discussion of eternal punishment sits in the ascetical Rules and the homilies, neither of which was read.