But also, faith in Moses does not show that faith in the Spirit is of
little value. Rather, according to their line of thought, it belittles the
confession in the God of all. For, “the people,” Scripture says, “believed God
and Moses his servant” (Ex 14:31). Now he is associated with God, not with the
Spirit, and he was the type not of the Spirit, but of Christ. He, then, through
himself prefigured the “mediator between God and men” (1 Tim 2:5) in the
ministry of the Law. Moses, in mediating the things of God to the people, was
not a type of the Spirit. For the Law was given “arranged by angels, in the
hand of a mediator”—obviously Moses (Gal 3:19), and this at the behest of the
people who said, “You speak to us; let God not speak to us” (Ex 20:19). And so
faith in him refers to the Lord, the mediator between God and men, who said,
“If you believed Moses, you would believe me” (Jn 5:46).
Is, then, faith in the Lord a small thing, since it was prefigured
through Moses? Likewise, if someone is baptized into Moses, the grace of the
Holy Spirit at baptism is no small thing. And yet I have to say that it is
customary for the Scriptures to say “Moses and the Law.” For example, “they
have Moses and the Prophets” (Lk 16:29). So, then, when Paul said, “They were
baptized into Moses,” he spoke of the baptism of the Law (1 Cor 10:2). Why,
then, do they show the “boasting of our hope” (Heb 3:6) and the rich gift of
our God and Savior who through regeneration makes us new and young again like
the eagle—why do they show these to be contemptible by disparaging the truth on
account of its shadow and its types?
It is the mark of an infantile mind and of a child who truly needs
milk to be ignorant of the great mystery of our salvation, that, according to
the elementary manner of teaching, we were introduced to training for
perfection in piety and were instructed in knowledge first in matters easy to
grasp and proportionate to us. He who directed us, as if we were eyes kept in
darkness, led us up to the great light of truth accustoming us to it little by
little. For by the sparing of our weakness, in the depth of the richness of his
wisdom and in the unsearchable judgments of his intelligence he showed a
guidance gentle and accommodating to us: he first trained us to see the shadows
of bodies and to look at the sun in water, so that we not be blinded by
wrecking ourselves on the vision of pure light.
According to the same logic, the Law, “being a shadow of things to
come” (Heb 10:1), and the prefiguring of the Prophets, a reflection of the
truth, are intended as a school for the eyes of the heart, so that the change
from these things to the wisdom hidden in mystery will be easy for us.
So much, then, concerning types. We cannot linger further on this
topic, or the tangent would be many times longer than the main subject. (Basil
the Great, On the Spirit 14.33 in On
the Holy Spirit [trans. Stephen Hildebrand; Popular Patristics Series 42; Yonkers,
N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011], 64-66)
