SAINTS FOR THE WEEK. 

January 2nd.  St. Basil the Great & St. Gregory Nazianzen.

These two great teachers of the Eastern Church both came from the Cappadocian region of inland Turkey and are called theologians of the ‘Cappadocian School’.  They were friends as unviersity students in Athens and later as monks.  Basil was born in 330 of a family containing several later canonised saints, and after his university days became a monk and hermit before being consecrated Bishop of Caesarea in 370.  As with Gregory, much of his theological writing was composed in opposition to the Arian heresy (named after Arius, a monk of Alexandria, who denied the full divinity of Christ) and his teaching influenced the Council of Constantinople (381) which refined the Church’s Creed, dating from the Council of Nicaea (325) into the form which we know today and use Sunday by Sunday.  He was a notable pastoral bishop and champion of the poor, responsible for the building of the so-called ‘Basiliad’, a kind of hospital-town where every kind of remedial help was grouped in one place.  As an educator he did not deny the value of the best in pagan learning, and urged Christians to seek a fully-rounded academic development.  He produced the Monastic Rule universally followed by monks and nuns of the Eastern Church (who, unlike the West, do not divide into separate orders, but call themselves, without exception, ‘Basilian’).  He died in 379.  

Gregory, his friend, named after his home town of Nazianzus, was the son of a bishop, and ordained comparatively late in life.  He was later consecrated by Basil as bishop of Sasima, an out-of-the-way frontier town;  it must be admitted that Gregory found this post far from congenial, and indeed his friendship with Basil suffered as a result.  He was later invited to Constantinople to restore harmony to the Christian community after the impact of the Arian heresy, and although as a retiring character, used to rural life, he only agreed with reluctance to accept this responsibility in the capital, he proved highly successful.  He later retired to his native town to resume the life of study and contemplation which was his natural field.  He died in 389.