Learning to See God in the School of Creation: Theoria and the Teleological Character of Creation in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron

Abstract

AbstractThis article offers a constructive reading of Basil’s doctrine of creation in the Hexaemeron in order to articulate the relation between Christ the divine Logos and the logos of particular creatures. Tracing two lines of thought in Basil’s homilies on the six days of creation – (1) an ambivalence about the possibility of a material substrate in creation and (2) a teleological understanding of creation – I argue that the true ontology of the creature is something realized only eschatologically as a result of the divine Logos working out in creatures what they are to become. Basil’s ability to order creaturely speculation within a spiritual pedagogy of theoria allows him to articulate the nature of creation as something that is both unknowable (for now) and yet something to be realized (in the eschaton). Though these themes remain underdeveloped in Basil’s thought, when read constructively, the Hexaemeron provides an insightful theological grammar to express the divine Logos as immanent to the logos of creaturely beings and, at the same time, to name creaturely being as an eschatological gift, the end‐product of the divine Logos bringing to realization the creative purposes and powers of each and every being.