Basil of Caesarea

Basil was born about 330 at Caesarea in Cappadocia, in the middle of what is now Turkey, into a wealthy landowning family that produced more saints than most centuries do. His grandmother Macrina the Elder had hidden in the woods for years during persecution. His mother Emmelia raised ten children. His older sister Macrina the Younger turned the family estate into a monastic community and was, by his brother's account, the strongest mind in the house. His brother Gregory became bishop of Nyssa; another brother, Peter, bishop of Sebaste.

He was given the best education money could buy, Caesarea, then Constantinople, then Athens, where he studied for several years alongside Gregory of Nazianzus. The two became lifelong friends there, and Gregory later wrote that they knew only two streets in the city, the one to the church and the one to the school.

Basil came home about 356 brilliant, credentialed, and pleased with himself. He says so. He began teaching rhetoric, and Macrina went at him about it until he saw it, that he had spent years acquiring an impressive nothing. He was baptized, gave away his share of the property, and went traveling through Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia to see how the monks actually lived. Then he settled by the river Iris in Pontus to live the same way, and wrote to Gregory to come join him. Gregory came, complained about the vegetables, and helped him work.

What came out of those years shaped Eastern monasticism permanently. Basil looked at the solitary hermits and asked a blunt question: whose feet are you going to wash? He built his rule around community, monks living together, under obedience, at fixed hours of prayer, doing real work, and running orphanages and schools for the surrounding countryside. His Longer and Shorter Rules are still the foundation of monastic life in the Orthodox churches, and Benedict, writing his own rule in Italy two centuries later, tells his monks to go read Basil.

He was ordained priest about 362 and made archbishop of Caesarea in 370, with authority over a large and difficult province.

The famine came first. In 368 the harvest failed across Cappadocia, and grain speculators sat on their stocks waiting for prices to climb. Basil sold his remaining inheritance, opened a soup kitchen, and preached the sermons that made his name, telling the rich to their faces that the bread in their storehouse belongs to the hungry, the coat in their chest to the naked, the shoes rotting in their closet to the barefoot.

Then he built something permanent. Outside the city walls he laid out what people called the Basiliad: a hospital with staffed wards, a hospice, a home for the poor, a house for travelers, workshops to train the able-bodied in a trade, and a separate quarter for lepers, whom he served himself, and embraced in public, at a time when leprosy meant expulsion from human society. Gregory of Nazianzus called it a new city. It is the ancestor of the hospital as an institution.

He held Cappadocia against the Arian emperor Valens, who was systematically deposing Nicene bishops. The prefect Modestus was sent to break him and threatened confiscation, exile, torture and death. Basil answered that a man who owns nothing cannot be confiscated, that every land is God's so exile is no exile, that the first blow would finish a body as worn as his, and that death would only send him home sooner. Modestus said no one had ever spoken to him that way.

Basil replied, Perhaps you have never met a bishop. Valens came to Caesarea himself at Epiphany, walked into the packed church, and, the story goes, was shaken enough that his hands trembled when he brought his offering forward. The exile order was signed and then torn up.

His great book is On the Holy Spirit, written about 375. Nicaea had settled the Son. It had said almost nothing about the Spirit, and men were now teaching that the Spirit is a creature, a servant of God rather than God. Basil answered from the church's own practice: we are baptized into the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; we glorify the Spirit with the Father and the Son. What the church prays is what the church believes. That argument, carried by his friend Gregory to the Council of Constantinople in 381, is why the creed recited every Sunday says the Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.

Basil did not live to see it. Worn out by fasting, illness and work, he died on 1 January 379, aged about forty-nine, two years before the council settled what he had fought for. The whole city, Jews and pagans included, turned out for the funeral.

Sources: Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43: Funeral Oration on Basil the Great; Basil, On the Holy Spirit; Basil, Letters; Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina; Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 8.