Hexaemeron
Basil of Caesarea, Homilies on the Six Days
Basil of Caesarea
Nine sermons on the first six days, preached to labourers who had to get back to work.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 150
- Stat total
- 248
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Nine homilies, complete, and never out of circulation — a whole preached course on Genesis 1 rather than a fragment of one. Solid Stamina.
The Greek text is well attested, and an early Latin translation survives alongside it, so the two can be checked against each other. Little is disputed: a sturdy Defend.
The hexaemeral commentaries of the Latin west descend from these nine homilies — Ambrose first, and then everyone after Ambrose. A book that far upstream gets recalled: it speaks early as often as not.
Cited for this book
Basil preached these to a working congregation, morning and evening, and kept apologising for keeping them from their trades. Ambrose leaned on them heavily for his own Hexaemeron — which is the thread that runs from Cappadocia to Milan to a rhetorician sitting in the back row.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Six Days | Exegesis | Argument | 62 | 100% | 15 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 1 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 16 | Order in Creation | Natural Theology | Argument | 58 | 100% | 20 |
| 20 | Argument from Design | Natural Theology | Argument | 76 | 100% | 10 |
| 24 | Steelman | Rationality | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
Read it: God Created
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Koine Greek.
“It is this man, whom God judged worthy to behold Him, face to face, like the angels, who imparts to us what he has learnt from God.”
Basil of Caesarea, Hexaemeron 1.1, on Moses (trans. Jackson, NPNF² 8, public domain).
“Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that … all was given up to chance… He does not say ‘God worked,’ ‘God formed,’ but ‘God created.’”
Basil of Caesarea, Hexaemeron 1.2 and 1.7 (trans. Jackson, NPNF² 8, public domain). The long ellipsis spans five sections. The ellipsis after “and that” covers a slip in CCEL’s electronic text, which reads “and that was all was given up”; the extra word is not Jackson’s.
“That which was begun in time is condemned to come to an end in time. If there has been a beginning do not doubt of the end.”
Basil of Caesarea, Hexaemeron 1.3 (trans. Jackson, NPNF² 8, public domain).
“I know that many artisans, belonging to mechanical trades, are crowding around me. A day’s labour hardly suffices to maintain them; therefore I am compelled to abridge my discourse, so as not to keep them too long from their work.”
Basil of Caesarea, Hexaemeron 3.1 (trans. Jackson, NPNF² 8, public domain).
Nine homilies, preached at Caesarea around 378 — probably in Lent, certainly in the last year or two of his life. Not a commentary. Sermons, delivered out loud, to a room.
And you can tell who was in the room. He stops in the middle of the third one because the labourers standing at the back have a day’s wage to earn and he is costing them it.
His one grammatical point carries the whole argument against an eternal or accidental world: the text does not say God worked, or God formed. It says created. Formed implies something already lying there.
Ambrose preached his own six days with this book open in front of him and said so. If you are carrying that one, it is this one wearing Latin.