The Life
Saint Basil the Great was the kind of bishop the world rarely sees. He was born into a wealthy family with five saints among his ten siblings. He gave away his entire fortune to feed the poor. He built the first hospital in Christian history, big enough to be called a city. He stood up to the Emperor Valens when half of Asia Minor had bowed to Arianism. He wrote the rules that have shaped Orthodox monastic life for sixteen hundred years. He composed the Liturgy that Orthodox Christians still celebrate ten times a year. And he did all of this, while sick most of his life, in only forty-nine years.
Basil’s family is a wonder. His grandparents on his father’s side had hidden in the forests of Pontus for seven years during the persecution of Diocletian. His mother’s father was a martyr. His parents had ten children, five of whom became saints: Basil himself; his older sister Macrina the Younger, the Teacher; his brother Gregory of Nyssa, the great theologian; his brother Peter, who became Bishop of Sebaste; and his sister Theosebia, a deaconess. His mother Saint Emilia is also commemorated by the Church. It is one of the most extraordinary families in Christian history. Holiness ran in their blood the way music runs in some families.
Basil studied at the finest schools of his day. First at Caesarea, where he met a Cappadocian named Gregory who would become the closest friend of his life. Then at Constantinople. Then at Athens, the center of pagan learning, where he stayed four or five years and mastered everything they could teach — philosophy, rhetoric, law, science, mathematics, medicine, astronomy. Gregory was there with him. They lived together, studied together, prayed together. Gregory later wrote that they thought of themselves as one soul in two bodies. They knew, even then, that they were going to give their lives to Christ.
When Basil came home from Athens, he was a famous teacher of rhetoric. The leading citizens of Caesarea wanted him to educate their sons. He could have had a brilliant secular career. But his older sister Macrina, who had become an ascetic on the family estate after her fiance died, took one look at him and saw the danger. She talked to him. She showed him what she had given up and what she had gained. He listened. He gave away his entire inheritance to the poor. He went on pilgrimage to visit the great ascetics of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Then he came home and started his own monastic community on the river opposite his mother’s.
When Basil started his monastery in Pontus, he had a vision: the monastic life should not be solitary hermits scattered through the desert, but a community of brothers living together, praying together, working together, sharing everything in common, like the first Christians in the book of Acts. He wrote two sets of rules — the Long Rules and the Short Rules — that explained how this kind of life should work. They are still followed in Orthodox monasteries today. Every cenobitic monastery on Mount Athos, in Russia, in America, in any Orthodox country anywhere in the world, is a child of what Basil started.
When Basil became Bishop of Caesarea in 370, the famine had been bad for two years. Half the population was starving. So Basil sold what was left of his family’s property, gathered every donation he could, and built something the world had never seen: a complete city of mercy. There was a hospital with doctors. There was a hospice for the dying. There was a poorhouse for the homeless. There was a leprosarium where Basil himself washed the wounds of the lepers and kissed them. People called the whole complex the Basiliad, after him. It was so large that a contemporary said it was like a new city built outside the walls. It was the first hospital in human history. Every Christian hospital, every monastery hospice, every modern Western medical institution, descends in some real sense from what Basil built outside the walls of Caesarea.
In the 370s the Emperor Valens was a fanatical Arian. He sent bishops who wouldn’t bow into exile. He bullied. He killed. Half of Asia Minor surrendered. Then he came to Cappadocia for Basil. He sent his prefect Modestus to threaten Basil with confiscation of his property, exile, beating, even death. Basil listened calmly. Then he answered. "If you take my possessions, you will not be richer or me poorer — my old worn-out clothes and few books are not much. Exile means nothing; I am bound to no place. Torture? I am so weak the first blow would kill me. Death? Death would only bring me sooner to my God." Modestus was stunned. "No one has ever spoken so boldly to me," he said. Basil answered: "Perhaps you have never spoken to a bishop before."
In Basil’s day there were Christians who believed that Jesus was God (Nicaea had settled that question in 325) but who weren’t sure the Holy Spirit was God. They were called pneumatomachians — fighters against the Spirit. Basil knew this was a disaster. So he wrote a careful, beautiful book called On the Holy Spirit, where he proved from Scripture, from the Liturgy, from the Apostolic Tradition, that the Holy Spirit is fully God along with the Father and the Son. Two years after Basil’s death, the Second Ecumenical Council met at Constantinople and confessed exactly what Basil had argued. The line in the Creed that says "And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life..." came partly from Basil’s pen.
Modestus had threatened the saint with everything Rome had to offer — confiscation, exile, torture, death. Basil had answered each threat with calm contempt. Modestus said he had never been spoken to like this. Basil’s reply has rung in Christian ears for sixteen hundred years. A bishop who fears nothing because he has nothing left to lose is a bishop who can speak the truth to anyone, because his words come not from himself but from the Holy Spirit who lives in him.
Basil’s entire life embodied this verse. He had mastered all the secular learning of his age and then set it aside for the deeper learning of holiness. He was a doctor of medicine but his real medicine was the Eucharist. He was a master of rhetoric but his real eloquence was simplicity before God. He was a philosopher but his real wisdom was the Cross of Christ.
Basil had been sickly his whole life. The labor of teaching, the asceticism, the burden of being bishop in those terrible decades, all wore him down. He died on January 1, 379, only forty-nine years old. The whole city of Caesarea poured out for his funeral, both Christians and pagans. Just before he died, he blessed his lifelong friend Gregory the Theologian to take up the See of Constantinople and continue the fight against Arianism. Gregory wept for him for the rest of his life. The Church began celebrating Basil’s memory immediately. He has not been forgotten for a single day in sixteen hundred years.
Saint Basil matters to every Orthodox Christian because his work is everywhere in our daily life. When we go to the Liturgy of Saint Basil during Lent or on Christmas Eve, we are praying his prayers. When we hear about an Orthodox monastery, we are hearing about something he organized. When the Creed says "And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life," we are confessing something he defended with his life. When an Orthodox hospital opens or a parish food pantry feeds the hungry, the spirit of the Basiliad is at work. He has been gone for sixteen hundred years but the Orthodox Church is still walking on roads he paved.