Saint Basil the Great

St. Basil was born in Cappadocia in about 330 AD, the eldest of five sons. His father was an advocate and a teacher of rhetoric with a high reputation in Pontus. His mother's father had been impoverished and put to death for Christ.

His grandparents had hidden about seven years in the mountains of Pontus during the persecution. His father died while he was young, and the household moved to Annesi on the river Iris. His grandmother, the elder Macrina, brought him up there, and he learned the Scriptures from infancy.

St. Basil went from Caesarea to Constantinople, and on to Athens in 351 AD. He worked through rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, geometry and medicine. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus spared him the students' hazing, and the two became inseparable.

He came home early in 356 AD and taught rhetoric at Caesarea with success. His brother Saint Gregory of Nyssa remembered him coming home puffed up beyond measure with the pride of oratory. Neocaesarea offered him the teaching of its young men, and he refused.

His sister Saint Macrina had founded a religious community on the family estate. Under her influence St. Basil gave up his prospects and took to the religious life. The divisions among the Church's leaders horrified him.

Dianius, the bishop he had admired as a schoolboy, baptized him in 357 AD. He was ordained Reader soon afterwards. Then he travelled to the ascetics of Egypt, Palestine, Coele-Syria and Mesopotamia.

In 358 AD St. Basil settled in a wooded glen in Pontus, across the Iris from Annesi. Ascetics of the neighbourhood gathered to him, and he organised them into a common life. Until then such men had lived alone, or in groups of two or three.

St. Macrina kept her household on the far bank with their mother and youngest brother. He set rules for prayer, work, food and sleep, down to the hour of the single meal. The discipline he began there wore down his health.

Dianius signed an Arianizing creed, and St. Basil withdrew from Caesarea. He went to Nazianzus for the company of his friend. For two years he shunned communion with his own bishop.

Falling sick in 362 AD, Dianius sent for him and called the Lord to witness. He said he had never meant to reject the creed put out at Nicaea. St. Basil communicated with him and gave over grieving.

The Emperor Valens moved to impose Arianism on the clergy and people of Cappadocia. St. Basil left Pontus in 365 AD and took up the administration of the diocese. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus reconciled him to Bishop Eusebius.

The prefect Modestus questioned and threatened him, then reported his failure to the emperor. Illness kept St. Basil from the governor of the province, so he wrote instead. He had built a hospice outside Caesarea, and he answered an official complaint about it.

By 376 AD he had lost all his teeth, as he told Saint Amphilochius of Iconium. The Goths shook the empire in 378 AD, and he wrote nothing of it. The winter that followed dealt the last blow.

St. Basil died at Caesarea on January 1, 379 AD, not yet fifty. Jews, pagans and foreigners joined his own flock in doing him honour. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus told in the funeral oration that people died in the crush of the crowd.

In 397 AD Rufinus turned the monastic rules into Latin for Western monks. The Rule of Saint Benedict follows his teaching closely on private property. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls him the father of Oriental monasticism.

In 1081 AD the Patriarch John of Constantinople established the feast of the Three Holy Hierarchs, which the East has kept on January 30 ever since. The Roman memorial of St. Basil and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus falls on January 2. Pope John Paul II dated his letter Patres Ecclesiae on that memorial in 1980 AD.