Vigils Reading – SS Basil and Gregory

A Letter on the Incarnation2
by St Basil the Great

You have written that there are some among you who are doing away with the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, as much as they are able, and rejecting the grace of the great mystery kept secret from eternity but manifested in His own time, when the Lord, after having gone through all things pertaining to the care of the human race, in addition to all else, bestowed upon us His own sojourn among us. For He aided His own creature, first through the patriarchs, whose lives have been set forth as examples and rules for those desiring to follow in the footsteps of the saints and through a zeal like theirs to arrive at the perfection of good deeds. Then, He gave a law for our assistance, delivering it by angels through Moses; then Prophets, who proclaimed beforehand the salvation that was to be; judges, kings and just men, who performed mighty works with hidden hand. After all these, in the last days, He Himself was manifested in the flesh, “born of a woman, born under the Law, that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive adoption”.

If, therefore, the sojourn of the Lord in the flesh did not take place, the Redeemer did not pay the price for us, and He did not by His own power destroy the dominion of death. For, if that which is subject to death were one thing, and that which was assumed by the Lord were another, then death would not have ceased performing its own works, nor would the sufferings of the God-bearing flesh have become our gain; He would not have destroyed sin in the flesh; we who had died in Adam would not have been made to live in Christ; that which had fallen asunder would not have been restored; that which was shattered would not have been repaired; that which had been estranged through the deceit of the serpent would not have been again made God’s own. For, all these things are done away with by those who say that the Lord made His sojourn with a heavenly body. And what was the need of the blessed Virgin, if the God-bearing flesh was not to be assumed from the substance of Adam? But who is so bold as now to revive once more through sophistic words and the testimony, as they pretend, of the Scriptures the teaching of Valentinus which was silenced long ago? This impiety of the “appearance”, in fact, is not something new, but it was begun long ago by the weak-minded Valentinus, who, taking a few detached phrases of the Apostle, constructed the impious fiction for himself, saying that He had taken on “the nature of a slave”, and not the slave himself, and that the Lord had been made “in the form”, but that humanity itself had not been assumed by Him.

It is evident that the Lord took on the natural feelings for a confirmation of the true Incarnation and not of one according to the appearance, but rejected as unworthy of the undefiled Godhead the feelings arising from vice which soil the purity of our souls. For this reason it is said that He was “made in the likeness of sinful flesh”, not, indeed, in the likeness of flesh, as these men think, but in the likeness of sinful flesh. Accordingly He took our flesh with its natural feelings, but He “did not sin”. Yet even as death in the flesh, which was handed down to us through Adam, was swallowed up by the Godhead, so also sin was utterly destroyed by the justice which is in Jesus Christ, so that in the resurrection we resume our flesh, which is neither liable to death nor subject to sin.

2 The Fathers of the Church – Letters of St Basil, vol. II, pg. 232 – New York – Fathers of the Church, Inc. – 1955.