Saint Basil the Great More Saints
From the book "On the Holy Spirit" by
Saint Basil the Great, bishop
(329-379)By one death and resurrection the world was saved
When mankind was estranged from him by disobedience, God our Savior made a plan for raising us from our fall and restoring us to friendship with himself. According to this plan Christ came in the flesh, he showed us the gospel way
of life, he suffered, died on the cross, was buried and rose from the dead. He did this so that we could be saved by imitation of him and recover our original status as sons of God by adoption.
To attain holiness, then, we must not only pattern our lives on Christ’s by being gentle, humble and patient, we must also imitate him in his death. Taking Christ for his model, Paul said that he wanted to become like him in his death in the hope that he too would be raised from death to life.
We imitate Christ’s death by being buried with him in baptism. If we ask what this kind of burial means and what benefit we may hope to derive from it, it means first of all making a complete break with our former way of life, and our Lord himself said that this cannot be done unless a man is born again. In other words, we have to begin a new life, and we cannot do so until our previous life has been brought to an end. When runners reach the turning point on a race course, they have to pause briefly before they can go back in the opposite direction. So also when we wish to reverse the direction of our lives there must be a pause, or a death, to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another.
Our descent into hell takes place when we imitate the burial of Christ by our baptism. The bodies of the baptized are in a sense buried in the water as a symbol of their renunciation of the sins of their unregenerate nature. As the Apostle says: The circumcision you have undergone is not an operation performed by human hands, but the complete stripping away of your unregenerate nature. This is the circumcision that Christ gave us, and it is accomplished by our burialwith him in baptism. Baptism cleanses the soul from the pollution of worldly thoughts and inclinations: You will wash me, says the psalmist, and I shall be whiter than snow. We receive this saving baptism only once because there was only one death and one resurrection for the salvation of the world, and baptism is its symbol.
Source: The Liturgy of the Hours - Office of Readings
Narrated by Frank Dugan
Saint Basil the Great (329-379) was one of ten children of St. Basil the Elder and St. Emmelia and was born in Caesarea in Asia Minor in 329. He was educated by his father and his grandmother, St. Macrina the Elder. He took advanced studies at Constantinople and Athens, where Gregory Nazianzen and the future Emperor Julian the Apostate were classmates. Basil was well advanced in rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, astronomy, geometry, and medicine. He taught rhetoric at Caesarea, and then turned his attention to the spiritual life. Basil himself tells us how, like a man roused from deep sleep, he turned his eyes to the marvelous truth of the Gospel. He wept many tears over his miserable life, and prayed for guidance from God: "Then I read the Gospel, and saw there that a great means of reaching perfection was the selling of one's goods, the sharing of them with the poor, the giving up of all care for this life, and the refusal to allow the soul to be turned by any sympathy towards things of earth" (Ep. ccxxiii). To learn the ways of perfection, Basil visited the monasteries of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia. He was baptized and entered the religious life. In 358 he became a hermit by the Iris River in Pontus, attracted numerous followers and organized the first monastery in Asia Minor.Saint Basil was ordained a priest in 363 at Caesarea and joined Saint Gregory Nazianzen, his lifelong
friend and companion, in combating Arianism. After the death of Eusebius, the Archbishop of Caesarea in 370, Basil was elected archbishop in his place despite objections of the Arian Emperor Valens. Caesarea was then a powerful and wealthy city. Its bishop was Metropolitan of Cappadocia an Exarch of Pontus which embraced more than half of Asia Minor and comprised eleven provinces. Basil was active in helping the sick and the poor and built a hospice and a huge complex to minister to them. He attracted huge crowds by the eloquence of his preaching. He became the leader of the Orthodox Christians in the East in the continuing struggle against the Arian heresy which threatened to destroy the Church in the East. Basil played a major role in the victory of denouncing Arianism at the Council of Constantinople in 381-82. He fought simony, aided the victims of drought and famine, strove for a better clergy and insisted on rigid clerical discipline. He fearlessly denounced evil wherever he detected it and excommunicated those involved in the widespread prostitution traffic in Cappadocia. He was both a statesman and a man of great personal holiness and one of the great orators of Christianity. Basil became known as the father of Oriental monasticism, the forerunner of St. Benedict. His four doctrinal writings which include "On the Holy Spirit", and four hundred other letters earned him the title Doctor of the Church and patriarch of Eastern monks. He died on January 1, 379 at age 50.