The Hexaemeron Homilies

St. Basil’s Hexaemeron is a series of nine homilies on the “six days” of creation (Genesis 1:1–26), preached extempore to the congregation of Caesarea over the course of a single Lent, probably in 378 — the last full year of his life. They are at once a verse-by-verse exposition of the creation account, a survey of the natural science of the fourth century, and a sustained argument for reading Scripture in its plain, “literal” sense against the allegorical excesses of the Alexandrian tradition. This file treats the homilies as a preached and exegetical event; their creation theology is treated in Basil’s Cosmology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Preaching Setting

The Hexaemeron (Greek hexaēmeron, “the six days”) is not a treatise but a transcript of live preaching. Basil delivered the nine homilies as a connected course during one Lent, almost certainly in 378, the year before his death, to the ordinary congregation of his cathedral city of Caesarea in Cappadocia (Way, FOTC 46, introduction; Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 10). Internal evidence shows that several were preached on the same day — a morning homily followed by one in the evening — and that Basil was working at speed, often apologizing for the limits of the hour (Basil, Hexaemeron III.1, VIII.8; trans. NPNF II/8).

The homilies are vividly aware of their audience. Basil addresses laborers and artisans directly, urging the workman to carry the morning’s lesson back to his bench, and he tempers his learning for hearers without philosophical training:

“Let us glorify the supreme Artificer for all that was wisely and skilfully made… You will finally discover that the world was not conceived by chance and without reason, but for an useful end… I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring to you the clear remembrance of the Creator.” (Basil, Hexaemeron V.2; trans. NPNF II/8)

This pastoral aim — that the contemplation of nature should become continual remembrance of God — governs the whole series and distinguishes it from a merely scholastic cosmology.

The Day-by-Day Structure

The nine homilies follow the sequence of Genesis 1, though Basil does not assign exactly one homily per day; some days receive two, and the sixth day’s account of the creation of man is left unfinished at the end of the ninth (Way, FOTC 46, introduction).

Homily I — “In the beginning God made heaven and earth” (Gen. 1:1): the meaning of “the beginning,” creation from nothing, against the eternity of matter.
Homily II — “The earth was invisible and unfinished” (Gen. 1:2): the formless earth, the Spirit “borne over the waters,” the nature of darkness, and a warning against reading darkness as an evil principle.
Homily III — “Let there be a firmament” (Gen. 1:6–8): the second day, the nature of the firmament and the waters above it.
Homily IV — “Let the waters be gathered together” (Gen. 1:9–10): the gathering of the seas and the appearance of dry land.
Homily V — “Let the earth bring forth grass” (Gen. 1:11–13): the germination of plants, with extended moral lessons drawn from the botanical world.
Homily VI — “Let there be lights” (Gen. 1:14–19): the fourth day, sun, moon, and stars, and a polemic against astrology.
Homily VII — “Let the waters bring forth” (Gen. 1:20–21): the fifth day, the creation of fish and sea creatures.
Homily VIII — birds and the remaining creatures of the fifth day, and the land animals of the sixth (Gen. 1:20–25).
Homily IX — the land animals of the sixth day (Gen. 1:24–26), closing with the announcement of, but not the full treatment of, the creation of man.

The homilies are studded with the natural history of fish, birds, and beasts, each creature read as a moral emblem — the loyalty of the stork, the industry of the bee, the destructiveness of the viper — in the manner that the later Physiologus and the medieval bestiaries would inherit from this very text (Way, FOTC 46, introduction; Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, ch. 10).

Basil’s Exegetical Stance: “I Take All in the Literal Sense”

The most quoted passage of the Hexaemeron is Basil’s programmatic statement, in the ninth homily, of how he reads the creation account. Surveying those who dissolve the text into allegory, he sets his face against them:

“I know the laws of allegory, though less by myself than from the works of others. There are those truly, who do not admit the common sense of the Scriptures, for whom water is not water, but some other nature, who see in a plant, in a fish, what their fancy wishes… For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense. ‘For I am not ashamed of the gospel.’” (Basil, Hexaemeron IX.1; trans. NPNF II/8, citing Rom. 1:16)

The target is the Alexandrian allegorical method, descended from Philo and Origen, which Basil charges with substituting human invention for the plain word of Scripture — with believing themselves, as he puts it, “wiser than the Holy Spirit” and producing “their own ideas under a pretext of exegesis” (Basil, Hexaemeron IX.1; trans. NPNF II/8). Against this he sets a simple rule: “Let us hear Scripture as it has been written” (ibid.).

Two cautions keep this from being mistaken for modern literalism. First, “literal” here is set against allegorical, not against spiritual or theological: Basil’s whole project is to read the physical creation as a disclosure of its Maker, and his pages overflow with moral and contemplative application — the literal sense is the floor of meaning, not its ceiling. Second, his practice is more supple than his manifesto. Basil himself reads the primordial light of the first day as more than ordinary sunlight, treats the “waters above the firmament” with reserve about their exact nature, and frequently allows that the text speaks of realities transcending present experience (Basil, Hexaemeron II.7–8, III.4–5; trans. NPNF II/8). His rule excludes the evacuation of the historical sense, not the layering of spiritual meaning upon a real one. This is the very distinction Fr. Seraphim Rose later builds upon (see Patristic Sources) — a “literal” reading that is theological rather than rationalistic.

The Science of His Day

Basil deploys the best natural philosophy available to him, drawn from the Greek scientific and doxographical tradition, and he is candid about its uncertainties. He reports the competing accounts of the shape and stability of the earth, the causes of the sea’s saltiness, the mechanisms of weather, and the habits of animals, frequently citing “those who have written on these matters” without slavish deference (Basil, Hexaemeron I.8–10, IV; trans. NPNF II/8). His zoology in particular leans on the Hellenistic naturalists; later scholarship traces much of his animal lore to such sources as Aristotle’s History of Animals and the poet Oppian (Way, FOTC 46, introduction).

Crucially, Basil treats this science as provisional and subordinate. Where the philosophers contradict one another on the structure of the cosmos, he declines to adjudicate, since “it is enough for our salvation” to know that God made heaven and earth; he refuses to let the homily become a lecture on physics divorced from its theological end (Basil, Hexaemeron I.10, IX.1; trans. NPNF II/8). The science serves wonder, and wonder serves worship.

The Critique of Allegorical Excess

Basil’s polemic against allegory is not a rejection of every figurative reading of Scripture — he employs typology elsewhere freely — but a protest against a method that, applied to the creation account, makes the text mean whatever the interpreter wishes. His objection is twofold: such reading is arbitrary, untethered from the words actually written; and it is prideful, exalting the cleverness of the exegete over the simplicity of the Spirit (Basil, Hexaemeron IX.1; trans. NPNF II/8). His insistence on the “common sense” of Scripture became a standing reference point for the Antiochene exegetical sensibility and, through Ambrose’s borrowing, for the Latin West as well (see Basil’s Cosmology).

The Disputed Anthropology Homilies (CPG 3215)

The ninth homily ends before the creation of man is fully expounded, and the manuscript tradition supplies the gap with a pair of homilies On the Origin of Man (De creatione hominis), sometimes printed and counted as the tenth and eleventh homilies of the Hexaemeron. Their authorship is disputed. They are transmitted under Basil’s name and have been edited and translated as his (so the Popular Patristics edition, trans. Nonna Verna Harrison), and they were counted as Basil’s tenth and eleventh homilies; but the critical edition of H. Hörner prints them among works of uncertain authorship (auctorum incertorum), and many scholars assign them instead to Basil’s brother Gregory of Nyssa, whose own On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio) was written precisely to complete Basil’s unfinished Hexaemeron (CPG 3215; Hörner, Gregorii Nysseni Opera Supplementum, Leiden 1972; cf. the parallel note in Patristic Sources). For this reason any teaching on the creation of man drawn from these two homilies should be attributed cautiously — “the homilies On the Origin of Man transmitted under Basil’s name, of disputed authorship” — rather than flatly to Basil.

References

Basil the Great. The Hexaemeron (Homilies on the Six Days of Creation). Nine homilies, c. 378. Trans. Blomfield Jackson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 8 (verification anchor).
Basil the Great. Exegetic Homilies. Trans. Agnes Clare Way, Fathers of the Church 46. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963.
[Basil the Great / Gregory of Nyssa, attrib.]. On the Origin of Man (De creatione hominis, CPG 3215). Authorship disputed; ed. H. Hörner, Gregorii Nysseni Opera Supplementum, Leiden 1972; trans. (as Basil’s) Nonna Verna Harrison, On the Human Condition, Popular Patristics 30.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man (De hominis opificio). c. 379. Trans. NPNF II/5.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.