ANNOTATED BY FRENCH THEOLOGIANS BASIL, Saint, and Janus CORNARIUS (editor).

[Opera, Greek] Απαντα τα του θειου … Βασιλειου … Divi Basilii Magni opera.

Editio princeps of St. Basil’s complete works in the original Greek. In 1532 Froben had published, under the editorship of Erasmus, an edition containing the De Spiritu Sancto, the Hexaemeron, the Homilies on the Psalms, twenty-nine further homilies, and some letters. The present edition was an attempt to provide all the known works of Basil in Greek within one volume and was prepared by the medical doctor Janus Cornarius (c. 1500–1558) who in 1540 had made a Latin translation based partly on Erasmus’s edition: ‘Although inclining to the Reformation, Cornarius never took up any theological stand on confessional matters and his translation of Basil is dedicated to the Archbishop of Mainz, Albrecht. Doing so, Cornarius was acutely aware that he was leaving himself open to accusations of meddling in theology, a realm of learning that he knew little about. However, his decision to translate Basil was quite deliberate and thought out. As he says in his preface to Albrecht, he disapproves of the separation of realms of knowledge and thinks that he is not the first among pagan and Christian physicians to intervene on theological terrain. Thus intervening he wants to show, firstly, that a medical doctor too can be a good Christian and, secondly, he hopes to pacify confessional quarrels of his own time by appealing to Basil’s time and the bishop of Caesarea’s stand in the church’s combat against heresies’ (Irena Backus, ‘The Church Fathers and the Humanities in the Renaissance and the Reformation’ in Re-envisioning Christian Humanism (ed. J. Zimmermann, 2017), p. 48).