mondaybeforeepiphany

From the book On The Holy Spirit by Saint Basil the Great, bishop
(Cap 26, Nn 61, 64: PG 32, 179-182, 186)

The Lord gives life to his body in the spirit.

A spiritual man is one who no longer lives by the flesh, but is led by the Spirit of God, one called a Son of God, remade in the likeness of God’s Son. As the power of sight is active in the healthy eye, so the Holy Spirit is active in the purified soul.

We may form a word either as a thought in the heart or as a sound on the lips. So the Holy Spirit, bearing witness to our spirit, cries out in our hearts saying “Abba Father,” or speaks in our place, as Scripture says: “It is not you who speak; it is the Spirit of the Father who speaks in you.”

In the gifts that he distributes, we can see the Spirit as a whole in relation to its parts. We are all members of one another, but with different gifts according to the grace God gives us. “So the eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you, nor can the head say to the feet, I have no need of you.” All the members together make up the body of Christ in the unity of the Spirit, and render each other a necessary service through their gifts. God has arranged the various parts of the body according to his own will, but there exists among them all a spiritual fellowship which makes it natural for them to share one another’s feelings and to be concerned for one another. “If one member suffers, all suffer with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Moreover, as parts are present in a single whole, so each of us is in the Spirit since all who make up the one body have been baptized into the one Spirit.

As the Father is seen in the Son, so the Son is seen in the Spirit. To worship in the Spirit, then, is to have our minds open to the light, as we may learn from our Lord’s word to the Samaritan woman. Misled by the tradition of her country, she imagined that it was necessary to worship in a certain place but our Lord gave her a different teaching. He told her that one must worship in Spirit and in Truth, and clearly by the truth he meant himself.

As then we speak of worship in the Son because the Son is the image of God the Father as, so we speak of worship in the Spirit because the Spirit is the manifestation of the divinity of the Lord. Through the light of the Spirit, we behold the Son the splendor of God’s glory, and through the Son, the very stamp of the Father we are led to him who is the source both of his stamp, who is the Son, and of its seal, who is the Holy Spirit.