Teologia Creației în gândirea Sfântului Vasile cel Mare
The Theology of Creation according to Saint Basil the Great

Summary/Abstract: By confessing the mystery of God, the entire creation is an essential way through which man can grow spiritually, transfiguring himself and rising to the knowledge of his Creator. In this sense, Saint Basil the Great develops, in the nine Homilies at Hexaemeron a profound and original cosmology, opening the soul and mind of his believers to the secret depths of creation. An erudite Cappadocian, the great hierarch of the Christian Church paints, with deep wisdom and spiritual skill, the picture of the world brought into existence by God from nothing, using his vast theological, astronomical, philosophical and biblical-exegetical wisdom. Saint Basil the Great deals, in detail, with the daily divine activity of the creation of the world, elaborating a true theology of creation, which will become later an important point of reference for the entire patristic cosmology. All the six days of the creative act are a preparation for the creation of man, which appears, following the divine counsel (Genesis 1, 26), as a crowning of the entire creation, being the point of intersection of the spiritual and the material world. The light, the sky, the standing and flowing waters, the fruit trees and all the plants of the earth, the stars that adorn the firmament, the swimming animals, the flying birds and all the land mammals find their fulfilment at the end of the divine creative activity, when man, the miniature cosmos, is brought into existence, and God reveals Himself as one in being, but threefold in Persons. Therefore, the entire creation is meant to be an environment of affirming man in communion with God, nature being, thus, a vital context by which man advances ontologically towards the Tabor of divine glory, the place where one lives, spiritually, the eternity of the eighth day.

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