St. Basil the Great

Who they were

Basil met Gregory Nazianzen as a student in Athens, and the friendship that followed is the one Gregory later described in the most famous funeral oration of antiquity: we seemed to be one soul in two bodies, and our single object was virtue.

Basil became the great builder. His Basiliad outside Caesarea, a hospital, hospice, trade school, and poorhouse in one, was effectively the first hospital complex in history, and his monastic rule still governs Eastern monasticism. Facing down an imperial prefect who told him he had never been spoken to that way, Basil answered that perhaps he had never met a bishop. The friendship survived their diverging gifts, barely and honestly: Basil once strong armed Gregory into a bishopric he did not want, and the wound is in the letters. A canonized friendship with a documented quarrel is worth more than an idealized one. The Church keeps the two of them together on 2 January, on purpose.

Why people turn to St. Basil the Great

Friends, and this is the page to pray for one by name. Hospital administrators have him by right, since he invented the thing they run.

How to ask their intercession

One decade offered for your oldest friend by name, and, in their honesty, one for a friendship that took a wound.