Basil

Basil of Caesarea, known in later tradition as Basil the Great, was a fourth-century bishop, theologian, and organizer of monastic life in Roman Cappadocia. He was born in Caesarea Mazaca, the chief city of that province, into a wealthy Christian family of Greek culture whose piety is unusually well documented. His grandmother Macrina the Elder had been formed in the tradition of Gregory Thaumaturgus; his parents, Basil the Elder and Emmelia, raised a large household in which several children—Macrina the Younger, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste among them—were later venerated as saints. After elementary studies in Caesarea he continued his education in Constantinople and then at Athens, where he formed a lasting friendship with Gregory of Nazianzus. For a short period he taught rhetoric, the profession of his father, before abandoning a secular career.

Influenced especially by his sister Macrina, he received baptism as an adult, gave away a substantial part of his property, and visited the monastic settlements of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia. He then withdrew to the family estate at Annesi on the Iris River in Pontus and gathered a community of ascetics. The rules associated with that experiment, later circulated as the Longer and Shorter Rules, became the principal legislative foundation of Eastern monasticism. In the mid-360s he was ordained priest in Caesarea and served as the chief collaborator of Bishop Eusebius. Upon Eusebius’s death in 370 he was elected bishop of Caesarea and metropolitan of Cappadocia, a see whose influence extended over a wide region of Asia Minor.

As bishop he became the leading Nicene opponent of Arianizing policy in the East under the emperor Valens. He refused to compromise the confession of the full divinity of the Son, maintained correspondence with Athanasius of Alexandria, and, when the emperor divided Cappadocia in order to weaken his position, appointed trusted colleagues—including his brother Gregory—to newly created sees. Outside Caesarea he established a large charitable complex, remembered as the Basiliad, which combined a hospital, a hospice for strangers, and organized relief for the poor and the sick. His principal surviving works include the treatise On the Holy Spirit, the books Against Eunomius, the Hexaemeron homilies on the six days of creation, an extensive correspondence, and moral and ascetic writings. A eucharistic liturgy that bears his name remains in regular use in the Byzantine rite, especially in Lent.

Basil died in Caesarea on 1 January 379, before the First Council of Constantinople (381) gave conciliar confirmation to the theology he had defended. He is counted among the Cappadocian Fathers and, with Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom, among the Three Holy Hierarchs of the Eastern churches. Pope Pius V numbered him among the Doctors of the Church in 1568. He was never the subject of a formal medieval process of canonization; veneration is ancient and universal in both East and West. His principal feasts fall on 1 January in the Byzantine calendar and on 2 January in the General Roman Calendar, with a further Eastern commemoration of the Three Hierarchs on 30 January.