St. Basil the Great (330-379)

Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs. He studied at Athens with Gregory the Theologian, came home a celebrated rhetor, and was turned by his sister Macrina toward the monastic life, for which he wrote the Rules that Orthodox monasteries still keep. As bishop he defended the divinity of the Holy Spirit in a treatise that prepared the Creed of 381, and he built outside Caesarea a whole new town of hospitals, hospices and workshops for the poor that people called the Basiliad. His preaching on wealth is the hardest the Church has: the bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry, the cloak in your chest to the naked. The Liturgy that carries his name is served ten times a year and holds the longest and oldest anaphora in use. He died at forty-nine. Feast: January 1.