I The Sources

strived for the same manner of divine service."

The change in the doxology, which provided the occasion for the writing De Spiritu Sancto On the Holy Spirit¹, could not be interpreted alone as evidence of special liturgical reform activity; however, his innovations in psalmody, that is, in the daily office², were evidently quite radical, and the subsequent "unrest" of the people shows that he was felt to be an uncomfortable innovator. It is an essentially different question, however, whether the extant Basil liturgy or its original form should be attributed to him. In terms of external evidence, we have at our disposal a letter that Petrus Diaconus, as spokesman for the "Scythian monks," sent to Fulgentius Ferandus in Africa around 520³: it states:

"Hence also the blessed Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, in the prayer of the sacred altar, which almost the entire East uses, says among other things: Give, O Lord, strength and protection: make the evil, we beseech thee, good, and preserve the good in goodness: for you can do all things, and there is none who contradicts you: for when you will, you save, and no one resists your will."

Only, of course, our joy in this citation is not insignificantly dampened by the fact that it is not to be found in the extant texts of the liturgy; on the other hand, given the very general character of the excerpted words—they could stand in most prayers or be absent—this proves nothing against our texts. Soon after, around 540, Leontius of Byzantium accuses Theodore of Mopsuestia, among other things, of having composed his own anaphora Eucharistic prayer without respect for the one handed down from the Fathers by the Apostles and the one written in the same spirit by the great Basil.

de spir. s. 1, 3 t. III p. 3d Bened.
epist. 207.
Liber de incarn. et gratia 8 (Migne l. 62, 90 e): the passage is repeated in Fulgentius epist. 17, 25 (Mi. 65, 449 c).