On the Holy Spirit (St Basil)

Written about 375 for Amphilochius of Iconium, and provoked by a quarrel over a preposition. St Basil had given glory to the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit, and was attacked for it, since the customary form put the Spirit lower. His answer is that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son because He is God, and the treatise assembles the evidence for it from Scripture and from what the Church does. The twenty-seventh chapter is the classic Orthodox statement about unwritten tradition: the sign of the cross, turning east to pray, the words of the epiclesis and the blessing of the water are nowhere in Scripture and no one doubts them. Six years later the Second Council put his teaching into the Creed.