Basil

Basil of Caesarea, known throughout Christian tradition as Basil the Great, was a bishop, theologian, and organizer of monastic life in the eastern Roman Empire during the fourth century. He was born about 330 in Caesarea Mazaca, capital of the province of Cappadocia, into a family of substantial means and already notable for Christian piety. His father, Basil the Elder, practiced rhetoric and law; his mother, Emmelia, belonged to a family that had endured persecution. Several of his brothers and sisters entered religious life and were later venerated as saints, among them Macrina the Younger, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste. Basil studied first in Caesarea, then in Constantinople, and finally in Athens, where he formed a close and lasting friendship with Gregory of Nazianzus. After returning home he taught rhetoric for a short time, following the career expected of a man of his class and education.

A decisive change came under the influence of his sister Macrina. Basil received baptism, distributed a large part of his inheritance, and traveled to observe the monastic settlements of Egypt, Palestine, Coele-Syria, and Mesopotamia. He then settled as an ascetic on a family estate at Annesi on the Iris River in Pontus, where Gregory of Nazianzus joined him for a period. The rules and exhortations he composed there, later collected as the Greater and Lesser Ascetica, became the principal guide for communal monasticism in the Greek East and, through Latin translations and the example of Benedict of Nursia, influenced Western monastic practice as well. About 362 he was ordained priest by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea. Relations with Eusebius were at times strained, but Basil became the bishop's principal collaborator and a public defender of the Nicene faith against Arian teaching.

In 370, after Eusebius's death, Basil was elected bishop of Caesarea and metropolitan of Cappadocia, despite opposition from some of the suffragan bishops and from Arian court circles. As bishop he divided the large province for pastoral reasons, appointed trusted men including his brother Gregory to sees such as Nyssa, and built outside Caesarea a great charitable complex known as the Basiliad, which included a hospital, a hospice for travelers and the poor, and facilities for work and care of the sick. He confronted the emperor Valens, who favored Arianism, and refused to surrender churches or communion to Arian clergy. His principal theological works include the treatise On the Holy Spirit, which argued for the full divinity of the Spirit, and the Hexaemeron, a series of homilies on the six days of creation. He left hundreds of letters that document the ecclesiastical politics of the 370s, as well as homilies on fasting, wealth, and the psalms. The eucharistic liturgy that bears his name remains in use in Eastern churches, especially during Lent and on his feast.

Basil died in Caesarea on 1 January 379, after years of ill health worsened by ascetic discipline. He did not live to see the Council of Constantinople in 381, which endorsed the Trinitarian theology he had championed. From the time of his death he was honored as a saint; there was no later papal canonization of the medieval type. Eastern churches keep his principal feast on 1 January and commemorate him again on 30 January with Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom as the Three Holy Hierarchs. The Roman calendar now observes his feast on 2 January, together with Gregory. He is regarded as a Doctor of the Church in the West and as one of the great Cappadocian Fathers. Traditional patronages associated with him include Russia, Cappadocia, monks, hospital administrators, and reformers.