Basil the Great

Basil came to the ascetic life from the top of provincial society. His family was wealthy and Christian, he was educated at Caesarea, Constantinople and Athens, and he was on the path to a career in rhetoric when he abandoned it, travelled to see the monastic settlements of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and withdrew to family land in Pontus. What he wrote afterwards is not a rule in the later Western sense of a legal code, but a body of answers to questions put by ascetics, transmitted as the Longer and Shorter Responses.

The argument running through them is that the solitary life is a mistake. Philip Rousseau's study emphasises how deliberately Basil made the case: a Christian is commanded to love a neighbour, to wash feet, to bear another's burdens, and a man alone in a cell has no neighbour to practise on. Withdrawal without community produces a person who cannot be corrected, whose gifts serve nobody, and who has no way of discovering his own faults. So the ascetic house Basil describes has a superior, a shared table, common property, set hours of prayer and manual work, and children being taught in it.

That preference for the common life became the ordinary shape of monasticism in the Greek and Slavonic churches, and it reached the West as well. The Rule of Saint Benedict closes by directing the reader who wants more than a beginner's guide to the writings of the fathers, and names the rule of our holy father Basil among them, so the two great organising documents of Eastern and Western monastic life are not independent of one another.

Basil became bishop of Caesarea in 370, during a famine, and the works he is remembered for in his own city were material. On land outside the walls he built a complex with a church, a residence for clergy, lodging for travellers, workshops in which the poor could be given a trade, and quarters for the sick, including a separate provision for lepers, whom he is recorded as having touched and cared for himself. Gregory of Nazianzus, describing it after Basil's death, calls it a new city. Later writers call it the Basiliad. It is regularly cited as one of the earliest institutional hospitals of the Christian world, though the claim that it was the first requires more care than it usually receives.

His doctrinal work belongs to the long argument after Nicaea. The treatise On the Holy Spirit defends the Spirit's full divinity, and does so partly by an argument from how the church already prays, on the ground that a practice held everywhere carries weight even where a scriptural proof text is contested. The position was settled at Constantinople in 381, two years after he died.

The second eucharistic liturgy of the Byzantine rite bears his name and is served on about ten days of the year, chiefly the Sundays of Lent, the eves of Christmas and Epiphany, and his own feast. Robert Taft's history of the rite treats the connection between Basil and the anaphora as real in origin, while stressing that the text as it is served has been reworked repeatedly and is not simply his composition.