Basil of Caesarea

English

And God said, let us make a human. Where are the Jews now, who in what follows — where the light of the Godhead shines as if through certain caverns, and a second person is indeed declared mystically though not yet plainly seen — used to fight back, saying that God was speaking to himself, since he himself said and he himself made, 'let there be light', and there was light? Their absurdities were ready to hand then, as they are now brought out. For what blacksmith, or carpenter, or tanner of hides, standing alone in his workshop with no partner in the craft at hand, says to himself, let us make a sword, or let us put together a plough, or let us shape a shoe — and does not rather begin in silence upon the thing he has settled in his mind? It is empty chatter that any human being should sternly command something to himself, like a judge or a censor. Though what will these men not say, who crucified the Lord, having tongues trained to lying, even though the very voice now present has stopped their mouths altogether? And God said, let us make a human. So long, then, as there was no one to be taught, the preaching of the Godhead lay hidden in the deep. But when the creation of a human began to be looked for, faith was revealed, and the teaching of the truth plainly flashed out. Listen, Jew, you fighter against Christ, how he addresses the partner of the world's making, through whom he made the ages, who does all things by the word of his power: but your mind does not receive the words of piety. For as wild beasts, when they are shut in cages, gnaw at their own wombs with their teeth, showing their own bitterness and yet unable to work off their fury, so the Jew, the adversary of the truth, hemmed in by the straits of these bindings, asserts that there are many persons to whom the Word of God went out, and lies in saying it. For they say that he said it to the angels: let us make a human. A Jewish fiction, truly, and a fabling worthy of their perfidy! So as not to receive one, they confess many; they take the Son into fellowship with servants by a sharing of dignity, and make our fellow slaves the authors of the human form, and want the one who perfected the human to be equalled with angels — when it is absurd that any thing made should be equal to its maker. Let us consider what follows too: let us make a human to our image. What do you answer? Is there one image of God and of the angels? For the Father's must necessarily be the same as the Son's, yet in such a way that the figure is understood as befits God, that is, not consisting in bodily form but in the divine property. Listen, you too, who come forward out of the new circumcision, commending the cult of Judaism under a pretence of Christianity. To whom does he say, to our image, if not to the radiance of the glory and the stamp of the paternal substance, which is the image of the invisible God? He speaks, then, to his own image, which said: I and the Father are one; and, whoever sees me sees my Father also — to this one he says: let us make a human to our image. For where there is a unity of image, nothing can be unlike. For he did not say, to our images, as Scripture also testifies: God made, it says, the human: they did not make. He prudently avoided a multitude of persons here: so that where he confounded the Jew, here he might shut out the rite of the gentiles. Therefore he called to mind the unity, so that you might know the Son to be together with the Father, and might avoid the danger of a multitude of persons.

Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson · cc-by

Latin

PL 53, col. 964A · pd

Notes

⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The most violent page on the site, and the one that proves the two benches were in contact on this question, because it is an answer to an argument the rabbinic bench is on record making. Basil — in Eustathius's Latin, which is how the Latin bench read him — knows three Jewish readings of the plural and takes them in order: that God spoke to himself, which he answers with the workshop analogy (no smith alone says 'let us make a sword'); that God spoke to the angels, which he calls a Jewish fiction and answers from the image (there is not one image of God and of the angels); and, underneath both, that the plural cannot mean persons. Then the sentence that matters most for this daf: Fecit Deus, inquit, hominem: non fecerunt — 'God made the human: they did not make'. That is the singular-verb argument of Bereshit Rabbah 1:7 and of R. Simlai at Bereshit Rabbah 8:9, in Latin, used to the opposite end. The abuse is not incidental and is not softened here: the Jew is a beast gnawing its own womb, the reading is perfidia, and the passage ends by turning on judaizing Christians. It is also, and this is the point for the finding, a Christian text that knows what the other bench says and answers it by name.

Threads

• → contests · Targum Pseudo-Jonathan
  Basil reports the position and Pseudo-Jonathan is the position. 'Ferunt enim, quod angelis dixerit: Faciamus hominem' — for they say that he said it to the angels — is answered as a Judaica fictio; and the targum reads, in the biblical line itself, 'and the LORD said to the angels who minister before him … let us make a human in our image'. Basil's argument against it is the image clause: is there one image of God and of the angels? The targum has already met that by dating the angels to the second day, so that they are creatures and no rival makers. Neither text has the other, and the caricature turns out to be a quotation.
• → contests · Bereshit Rabbah
  The same grammatical proof on both benches, aimed in opposite directions, and each aimed at the other's people. Basil: 'Non enim dixit ad imagines nostras, sicut et Scriptura testatur: Fecit Deus, inquit, hominem: non fecerunt' — God made the human, they did not make — used to show that the plural is of persons and not of makers. R. Simlai, asked by the minim how many divinities created the world: 'va-yivre'u Elohim et ha-adam be-tzalmeihem is not said, but va-yivra Elohim et ha-adam be-tzalmo.' One verse, one observation about the number of the verb, two disputations, and each bench is arguing with the other's readers.
• ← transmits · Ambrose
  Ambrose is working through Basil at Milan and keeps the order of the questions: to whom does he say it — not to himself, because he does not say faciam; not to the angels, because a servant is no partner in the master's work; therefore to the Son. What he adds is the second front: 'etiamsi Judaei nolint; etiamsi Ariani repugnent', so that the Jewish reading of the plural and the Arian subordination of the Son are refuted by one argument, and whoever denies the Son a share in the working ends by making a gift of it to servuli.
• ← transmits · Bede
  Bede is copying the Latin Basil and keeping the sentence while dropping the fight. 'Donec is qui doceretur non erat, in profundo fuit abdita praedicatio Deitatis; ubi vero coepit hominis exspectari creatio, revelata est fides' stands word for word in both. What Bede removes is every Jew in the passage, and what he puts in its place is a reason: it could not be said to angels, 'quia nulla prorsus ratio sinit ut Dei et angelorum unam esse eamdemque imaginem sive similitudinem credamus'. The argument survives the polemic, and it is the argument, not the polemic, that Rabanus and Angelomus then copy from Bede.