Basil builds a city for the poor
Basil of Caesarea and the Basilias
Basil of Caesarea is one of the most gifted men of his generation — theologian, preacher, administrator, bishop. He is also one of the angriest, in the best possible way, about what wealth does to people who have it while others starve.
His sermons on wealth are among the most direct in Christian history. To the rich man in his congregation who asks what he should do with his surplus: The bread you are holding back belongs to the hungry. The coat you keep locked in your closet belongs to the naked. The shoes rotting in your house belong to those who have none. The money you have buried belongs to the poor. You are doing wrong to as many people as you could be helping.
But Basil does not stop at preaching. In 370 AD, during a famine in Cappadocia, he sells his own inheritance and uses it to organize food distribution. Then, on the outskirts of Caesarea, he builds something the ancient world has never seen.
The Basilias — named, somewhat awkwardly, after himself — is a complex of buildings that functions simultaneously as a hospital, a hospice for the dying, a home for the poor, a leper colony, an inn for travelers, and a training center for medical workers. It has wards. It has staff. It has a system.
His friend Gregory of Nazianzus, describing it to someone who has not seen it, says: Go outside the city and you will see a new city — a storehouse of piety.
The Basilias is, by most accounts, the first hospital in the Western world.
“The bread you are holding back belongs to the hungry. The coat you keep locked in your closet belongs to the naked. The money you have buried belongs to the poor.”
— Basil of Caesarea, Homily on Luke 12:18, c. 368 AD
“The King will answer them, 'Most assuredly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'”
Basil preached about poverty and then built a hospital. The sermon and the building said the same thing in different languages.
The church has sometimes been content to preach about suffering without organizing to address it. Basil decided that was not enough — that the theology of the incarnation demanded something physical, something institutional, something that would outlast him.
The Basilias outlasted him by centuries. The model it established — that the church is responsible for the bodily welfare of the poor and sick — shaped Western medicine and social welfare in ways that are still visible today.
What is the building your preaching is not building? What is the institution your theology demands but you have not yet organized?