Timothy Crouch


the Gospel’s whole way of life

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A great little aside in St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit (15.35, p. 68 in PP42):

The Lord, therefore, in restoring us to the resurrected life, sets forth the Gospel’s whole way of life, by establishing as laws of conduct freedom from anger, the suffering of evil, freedom from the filth of loving pleasure, freedom from the love of money. In this way, we are set right and by design partake of those things which the age to come naturally possesses. Now, if someone would say as a matter of definition that the Gospel is a prefiguring of the resurrected life, he would not, it seems to me, go astray of what is proper.

St. Basil names three of the four as “freedom(s) from,” and I think they may all be so understood (and so coordinated with passages from the Sermon on the Mount):

The positive virtues (if that is the right word) that characterize the resurrected life, then: reconciliation, non-retaliation, self-control, and generosity.