St. Basil the Great

Basil came of a family that gave five saints to the Church: his grandmother Macrina the Elder, his parents Basil and Emmelia, his sister Macrina the Younger, and his brothers Gregory of Nyssa and Peter of Sebaste. He studied at Constantinople and Athens, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Gregory the Theologian.

Returning to Cappadocia he was baptized and withdrew to a hermitage on the river Iris with his sister and brother. There he wrote, with Gregory, the Philokalia of Origen and his own Longer and Shorter Rules, the foundation of all later Eastern monasticism.

Made bishop of Caesarea in 370, he confronted both the Arian emperor Valens and a famine that gripped his city. He sold the family estates to build a hospital, almshouse, and school complex outside the walls, the Basileiad, one of the first such institutions in history.

His treatise On the Holy Spirit is the patristic charter for the Spirit's divinity. The Divine Liturgy that bears his name is still served in Orthodox churches on the Sundays of Great Lent, on his own feast, and on the eves of Nativity and Theophany. He reposed at forty-nine, worn out by ascetic labor and a chronic illness.