Basil the Great 330 AD – 379 AD

Basil of Caesarea, called the Great, was a fourth-century Cappadocian theologian, bishop, and the chief organizer of Eastern Christian monasticism. The elder brother of Gregory of Nyssa and friend of Gregory of Nazianzus, he played a leading role in shaping orthodox Trinitarian theology in the decades after Nicaea. His monastic rules became the foundation of cenobitic life in the East and shaped Western monasticism through Benedict's Rule. His Hexaemeron is a celebrated set of homilies on the six days of creation, and his social writings challenged the wealthy of his city to share with the poor.

Basil the Great was born around 330 in Caesarea of Cappadocia, the eldest son of a wealthy Christian family of Roman provincials whose women — Macrina the Elder, Emmelia, and Macrina the Younger — had as much to do with his formation as his teachers. He studied rhetoric at Caesarea, Constantinople, and Athens, where his fellow-students included Gregory of Nazianzus and the future emperor Julian.

After a brief secular career and a tour of the monastic centers of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, he retired around 358 to family lands at Annesi to live in ascetic community with Gregory; the rules of monastic life that he composed in this period (the Long and Short Rules) became the foundation of Eastern Christian monasticism. Ordained priest in 365 and consecrated metropolitan of Caesarea in 370, he devoted himself to administration, charity (the Basileias hospital complex), the defense of Nicene Christianity in the homoian crisis, and a flow of writings: the dogmatic On the Holy Spirit, Against Eunomius, the homilies on the Hexaemeron, the Address to Young Men on Greek Literature, and several hundred letters.

Basil's combination of theological precision, practical charity, and openness to classical literature made him the most influential of the Cappadocian Fathers. He died at Caesarea in January 379, just before the Council of Constantinople would vindicate the Trinitarian theology for which he had spent himself.