Basil the Great

Educated in Athens alongside his friend Gregory Nazianzen, Basil renounced a brilliant secular career for monastic life, and his Rules still govern Eastern monasticism. As archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia he faced down the Arian emperor Valens in person, refusing to yield an inch of the Nicene faith. On the Holy Spirit vindicated the Spirit's divinity; his Hexaemeron homilies on the six days of creation delighted congregations and centuries of readers after them. Outside the city he built the Basiliad, a whole town of hospices and hospitals for the poor and sick. He died at about forty-nine, worn out, in 379.

His Basiliad outside Caesarea — hospice, hospital, and poorhouse in one — is often cited as the ancestor of the modern hospital.

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