Basil was born about 330 at Caesarea in Cappadocia. He came from a wealthy and pious family which gave the Church a number of saints, including his mother Saint Emmelia, grandmother Saint Macrina the Elder, sister Saint Macrina the Younger and brothers Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Peter of Sebaste.

While Basil was still a child, the family moved to Pontus; but he soon returned to Cappadocia to live with his mother’s relations, and seems to have been brought up by his grandmother Macrina. There he met Gregory of Nazianzus, who would become a lifetime friend. Eager to learn, Basil and Gregory went on to study in Constantinople. Finally, the two spent almost six years in Athens starting around 349, where they met a fellow student who would later become the emperor Julian the Apostate. It was at Athens that he began to first think about living a life focused on Christian principles.

Returning from Athens around 355, Basil briefly practiced law and taught rhetoric in Caesarea.

A year later, Basil’s life would change radically after he encountered the bishop and ascetic Eustathius of Sebaste. Basil soon abandoned his legal and teaching professions in order to devote his life to God. Describing his spiritual awakening in a letter, Basil said:

I had wasted much time on follies and spent nearly all of my youth in vain labors, and devotion to the teachings of a wisdom that God had made foolish. Suddenly, I awoke as out of a deep sleep. I beheld the wonderful light of the Gospel truth, and I recognized the nothingnes of the wisdom of the princes of this world.

After receiving baptism, Basil resolved to seek out the most famous hermit saints in Syria and Arabia, in order to learn from them how to attain enthusiastic piety and how to keep his body under submission by asceticism.

After this we find him at the head of a convent near Arnesi in Pontus, in which his mother Emmelia, now a widow, his sister Macrina and several other ladies, gave themselves to a pious life of prayer and charitable works.

He was ordained presbyter of the Church at Caesarea in 365, and his ordination was probably the result of the entreaties of his ecclesiastical superiors, who wished to use his talents against the Arians, who were numerous in that part of the country and were favoured by the Arian emperor, Valens, who then reigned in Constantinople.

In 370 Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, died, and Basil was chosen to succeed him. It was then that his great powers were called into action. Caesarea was an important diocese, and its bishop was exarch of the great diocese of Pontus. With all his might Basil resisted the emperor Valens, who strove to introduce Arianism into his diocese. He impressed the emperor so strongly that, although inclined to banish the intractable bishop, he left him unmolested. To an imperial prefect, astonished at Saint Basil’s temerity, he said, “Perhaps you have never before dealt with a proper bishop.”

The principal theological writings of Saint Basil are his Treatise on the Holy Spirit, an appeal to Scripture and early Christian tradition to prove the divinity of the Holy Spirit; and his Refutation of the Apology of the Impious Eunomius, written in 363 or 364 against the chief exponent of Anomoian Arianism.

Saint Basil was a famous preacher, and many of his homilies, including a series of Lenten lectures on The Six Days of Creation (Gr. Hexaëmeron), and an exposition of the Psalter, have been preserved. Some, like that against usury and that on the famine in 368, are valuable for the history of morals; others illustrate the honor paid to martyrs and relics. The address to young men on the study of classical literature shows that Basil was lastingly influenced by his own education, which taught him to appreciate the importance of the classics as preparatory instruction.

His ascetic tendencies are exhibited in the Moralia and Regulae, ethical manuals for use in the world and the monastery respectively. His three hundred letters reveal a rich and observant nature, which, despite the troubles of ill health and ecclesiastical unrest, remained optimistic, tender and even playful.

Fresco of Basil the Great in the cathedral of Ohrid. The saint is shown consecrating the Gifts during the Divine Liturgy which bears his name.

It is in his ethical manuals and moral sermons that the practical aspects of his theoretical theology are illustrated. In his Sermon to the Lazicans we find Basil explaining how it is our common nature that obliges us to treat our neighbor’s natural needs (e.g., hunger, thirst) as our own, even though he is a separate individual. Later theologians explicitly explain this as an example of how man is an image of the one common nature of the Trinity.

Saint Basil reposed in the Lord on January 1, 378, and is commemorated by the Church every January 1 (Jan. 14 on the Church’s calendar).

Troparion (Tone 1)

Thy proclamation has gone out into all the earth
Which was divinely taught by hearing thy voice
Expounding the nature of creatures,
Ennobling the manners of men.
O holy father of a royal priesthood,
Entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Kontakion (Tone 4)

Thou wast revealed as the sure foundation of the Church,
Granting all men a lordship which cannot be taken away,
Sealing it with thy precepts,
O Venerable and Heavenly Father Basil.