St Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–79)

The Cappadocians inherited the Alexandrian Gnosis through Origen, though each departed from the position of their master, St Basil most of all. He was more interested in the moral and pastoral than in the philosophical implications of the Faith, distrusted allegory, and clung to the literal interpretation of Scripture, to which the pagan learning was to supply rational corroboration as required rather than combine with it to form a synthesis. Therefore, as was to be the case with the Aristotelian Christians, he made greater use of the physics of the pagans than of their metaphysics, and in his Homilies on the Hexaëmeron, intended as a scientific defence of the Mosaic account of creation, he drew chiefly on the current cosmology, meteorology, botany, astronomy and natural history.

As a consequence, the Christian theory of creation assumed certain pagan features, of which the most important were the implied identification of the Platonic Demiurge with Yahweh, the Aristotelian division of the universe into the supralunar and sublunar spheres, and the notion of a universal harmony (συμπαθεια): ‘Although the totality of the universe is composed of dissimilar parts, he binds it together by an indissoluble law of friendship into one communion and harmony, so that even the parts that from the positions they occupy seem most distant from one another are yet shown to be united by the universal sumpatheia.’

Nature is the work of God, who created her in time, or rather created time in the process of creating her. Matter is a part of creation, for if it were uncreated God would have been dependent upon it for bringing his plan to fruition; and if matter were independent of God there would not be that reciprocity between agent and patient which is everywhere apparent.