Cappadocian innovations?

For John Zizioulas and others, the Cappadocians introduced an innovative ontology, an ontology of communion.  In his Letter 38, Basil provides some support for this interpretation, since he acknowledges that the Trinity represents a “new” and “paradoxical” sort of reality:

“He who eternally exists in the Father can never be cut off from the Father, nor can He who works all things by the Spirit ever be disjoined from His own Spirit. Likewise moreover he who receives the Father virtually receives at the same time both the Son and the Spirit; for it is in no wise possible to entertain the idea of severance or division, in such away as that the Son should be thought of apart from the Father, or the Spirit be disjoined from the Son . . . .

“But the communion and the distinction apprehended in Them are, in a certain sense, ineffable and inconceivable, the continuity of nature being never rent asunder by the distinction of the hypostases, nor the notes of proper distinction confounded in the community of essence. Marvel not then at my speaking of the same thing as being both conjoined and parted, and thinking as it were darkly in a riddle, of a certain new and strange conjoined separation and separated conjunction (Greek, kainen kai paradoxon diakrisin te sunemmenen kai diakekrimenen sunapheian ).”  Fergus Kerr translates the latter phrase as “a new and paradoxical (conception of) united differentiation and differentiated unity.”

Basil saw this theological paradox everywhere: “Indeed, even in objects perceptible to the senses, any one who approaches the subject in a candid and uncontentious spirit, may find similar conditions of things.”  Trinitarian theology thus opened up a “new” way of conceiving God’s own existence and being, and also a new way of conceiving the “conditions of things.”  This certainly sounds as if Basil is offering a tentative, rudimentary Trinitarian ontology.