On the Holy Spirit
Basil of Caesarea, De Spiritu Sancto
Basil of Caesarea
Written to Amphilochius, who had asked why every syllable of theology deserved exact investigation. Basil spent thirty-three chapters proving it did.
- Catch rate
- 65 / 255
- Base research
- 176
- Stat total
- 268
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.
Thirty-three chapters, most of them answering a single accusation of impiety over a preposition. A short book that took a great deal of Stamina to write.
Basil never writes the sentence "the Spirit is God" — Gregory of Nyssa says so himself. He argues the case by implication and Scripture instead, which lands harder for taking the longer way round. Two years after he died, the council of Constantinople wrote the third article of the creed the church still says on Sundays, and it is this argument standing behind it.
The Macedonian tracts Basil is answering survive only where somebody quoted them in order to refute them. On the Holy Spirit has been copied, translated and printed without a break since he wrote it. High Popularity — it takes the floor ahead of what it answers.
Cited for this book
Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto), c. 375 (trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF² 8, public domain).
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 | Shares in Royalty | Theology Proper | Argument | 68 | 100% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 9 | Steelman | Rationality | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 16 | Silence | Christology | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 24 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |