Basil

Basil of Caesarea, known as Basil the Great, was a fourth-century bishop, theologian, and monastic legislator whose life and writings became foundational for Eastern Christianity. He was born in Caesarea, capital of the Roman province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor, into a wealthy and already distinguished Christian family. His grandmother Macrina the Elder had been formed in the tradition of Gregory Thaumaturgus and had lived through the persecutions; 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—would themselves be venerated as saints. Basil received a thorough education in rhetoric and philosophy at Caesarea, then at Constantinople, and finally at Athens, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Gregory of Nazianzus. After a brief period teaching rhetoric in his native city, he received baptism and turned from a secular career to the ascetic life.

In the following years Basil visited monastic settlements in Egypt, Palestine, Coele-Syria, and Mesopotamia in order to observe the practices of the desert fathers. Returning to the family’s Pontic estates on the River Iris near Neocaesarea, he established a community there and was joined for a time by Gregory of Nazianzus. From that setting came the moral and ascetic writings later known as the Longer and Shorter Rules, which supplied the principal framework for communal monasticism in the Greek East and later influenced Benedictine legislation in the West. In the early 360s he was ordained to the presbyterate at Caesarea, reluctantly at first, and became the chief assistant of Bishop Eusebius. Upon Eusebius’s death he was elected bishop of Caesarea in 370 and thereby metropolitan of Cappadocia.

As bishop, Basil confronted the Arianizing policies of the emperor Valens and the wider confusion that followed the Council of Nicaea. He worked to restore Nicene orthodoxy in Asia Minor, to draw moderate Homoiousian bishops toward the Nicene position, and to defend the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, the subject of his treatise On the Holy Spirit. He reorganized diocesan life, founded the large charitable complex outside Caesarea later called the Basiliad—a hospital, hospice, and workshops for the poor and for travelers—and preached frequently on usury, famine, and the duties of the wealthy. His extensive correspondence records interventions in church affairs from Antioch to Rome and his efforts to obtain Western support against Arianism.

Basil’s surviving works include homilies on the Hexaemeron and on the Psalms, polemical books against Eunomius, a eucharistic liturgy that still bears his name and is used on appointed days in the Byzantine rite, and hundreds of letters that remain among the most important sources for fourth-century church history. Weakened by austere living and chronic illness, he died in Caesarea on 1 January 379 and was buried there. He is counted among the Cappadocian Fathers, one of the Three Holy Hierarchs of the Eastern Church, and a Doctor of the Church in the Latin West. His principal feasts are 1 January in the Byzantine calendar and 2 January in the Roman calendar, with a joint commemoration of the Three Hierarchs on 30 January.