“As you are burying your wealth, you
entomb it with your own heart.”
The winter rains refused to fall in Caesarea in 369, in what
is now modern-day Turkey, resulting in food shortages, panic among the rich,
and desperate hunger for the poorest citizens, immigrants, and slaves. By 370,
fear had taken root among the city’s wealthy landowners causing them to refuse
to release grain from their storehouses. Into this calamity a new voice was
heard, that of a Christian bishop, exercising one of the earliest
understandings of a bishop’s public role in imperial Roman Christianity to be a
‘lover of the poor.’ In Basil’s homily In
a Time of Famine and Drought, he first describes the misery of death by
starvation before declaring to a disquieted congregation that “the person who
can cure such an infirmity and refuses one’s medicine because of avarice, can
with reason be condemned a murderer.”[1]
Basil’s homilies to the elite of Caesarea are troubling,
direct, and a pleasure to read and represent a socially-focused response to the
complex questions that Christian bishops were facing in fourth century Rome.
What was the public role of a Christian bishop during a time of natural
disaster? Did the Church have anything to say to the wealthy as poverty and
hunger intensified all around? Were Christians to be exclusively concerned with
their own poor or did they also have a responsibility to the impoverished and
hungry in the wider public as well?
Basil’s passionate arguments for the wealthy to give their
stores of grain and riches to the poor are the fruit of lifelong inner
struggle. While Basil’s significance in Christian history often focuses on his
role in the development Christian theological doctrine, he also wrestled with
the meaning of his own and others’ wealth in the face of rampant poverty and
desperation.
Born to a family of wealthy Christians in 329 in Caesarea,
capital of Cappadocia, Basil’s classical education included a year of study in
Athens, where he met Gregory of Nazianzus, who would become a lifelong friend.
Basil practiced as a lawyer after his return from Athens until a chance
encounter with the Christian monk Eustathius of Sebaste rekindled an earlier
interest in hermetic asceticism. With the encouragement of his sister Macrina,
Basil subsequently left his law practice and embarked on a radically new path.
In 357 Basil traveled to Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and
Mesopotamia to learn more about ascetic practices and is said to have
distributed his personal fortune to the poor along the way. While in Egypt, he
visited Pachomius, an abbot credited with having brought solitary ascetics into
an organized form of communal monasticism for the first time. His travels and
visit with Pachomius’ community would inspire Basil to abandon the solitary
life of hermetic asceticism to found a monastic community on his family’s
estate. Once again, his sister Macrina appears to have been influential both in
this decision and then at the community itself. Basil would draw heavily from
his visit with Pachomius when he wrote his Larger Rule and Shorter Rule, texts
that remain as foundational to Eastern monasticism as Benedict’s Rule is to
Western monasticism. This experience would shape Basil’s understanding of the
social purpose of wealth and is reflected in his urging the rich to take up the
monastic ideals of sufficiency, simplicity, and the communal distribution of
wealth.[2]
Basil’s contributions to Christian doctrine were
significant. He was an early and influential supporter of the Nicene Creed at a
synod in Constantinople in 369, and he played an important role in resolving
the Arian controversy which threatened to divide the church. Partly as a result
of his theological leadership at these synods and controversies, Basil was made
a deacon in 362 and then made bishop of Caesarea just eight years later in 370.
As a new bishop, Basil stepped into a precarious public
leadership role that required integrating the traditions of the
pre-Constantinian Christian assemblies with the pressing expectations of
imperial Rome. The hunger taking hold of Caesarea only served to exacerbate
these challenges. Earlier in the fourth century, the recently converted emperor
Constantine assigned to Christian bishops the public role of ‘lovers of the
poor.” In Poverty & Leadership in the
Later Roman Empire, Peter Brown notes “Beneath the gaze of the emperor and
his highly placed officials, Basil created publicly acclaimed systems of poor
relief that justified the wealth and tax exemptions of the Church of Caesarea.”[3]
Even
so, the expectation that a bishop would care for the poor appears to have been
a role that Basil personally embraced. In letters, sermons, and a eulogy about
Basil delivered by his friend Gregory of Nanzianus, one finds the new bishop
urging the wealthy in stark and innovative terms to open their storehouses of
grain both to gain their own salvation and so that the hungry might eat.
Having already given away his personal fortune in 357, Basil
would add his family’s fortune to incoming donations to establish a soup
kitchen and build a hospital for the indigent sick of Cesarea. The soup kitchen
he created also reflected a development in who Christians considered ‘the
poor.’ Whereas prior to Constantine, collections had generally been distributed
to the poor among the Christian assembly, Christian bishops were now charged
with the role of caring for all the Roman poor, Christian and non-Christian
alike.
Basil’s vision for how the Christian church in Caesarea
could simultaneously address the wealthy’s need for salvation and the immediate
needs of the poor went further. Through the donations of the wealthy of the
city and his family’s wealth, Basil constructed a complex of buildings
considered to be the first hospital. The Basiliad, as it would later be called,
was staffed by both physicians and clergy and offered medical treatment and
trade skills to the impoverished sick. In his letter to Amphilochius, Basil is
recorded as inviting the bishop of Iconium to come and visit his newly built
‘church of the hospital (or poorhouse)’ on the outskirts of Caesarea.[4]
The Basiliad would exist for centuries after Basil’s death.
Longer lasting still would be how his arguments – especially his innovative
appropriation of the Roman practice of liturgia
– would reshape Roman and Christian philanthropy.
----
Basil’s writings on wealth and poverty have received close
scrutiny by scholars like Peter Brown, Helen Rhees, and Susan Holman and have
inspired research exploring how Basil and other Christian bishops of his time
redefined Roman liturgia and applied
it to the poor.
In fourth century Rome, liturgia
referred to the drama of the elite’s giving of gifts to the wider public. This liturgia was a key component of the
Roman patronage system and represented the dramatic transaction of material
benefits from the wealthy in exchange for loyalty and safety from the wider
public. And yet the ‘public’ here was narrowly defined and applied only to
those who had resources and influence to offer in exchange.
This version of philanthropy continues to echo through our
society today. As a New Yorker, I’ve often walked past and been struck by the
black granite plaza and fountains that stand at the entrance of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, a beloved cultural institution that is free for
residents of New York City. These stunning fountains are remarkable both for
their beauty and for the name emblazoned on the black marble frontispiece:
David K. Koch. Like the ancient liturgia
of Roman times, this dramatic gift carries a whiff of both threat and exchange.
For while I and many New Yorkers know that the Koch family is notorious for
their funding of climate change denial and dark money conservative politics,
the grandeur of the fountains and plaza serve as powerful reminders that this
same family helps to fund many of our most cherished cultural institutions.
This exchange may not be apparent or particularly interesting to the vast
majority of people passing by, yet its message is abundantly clear to the
educated and liberal elite of the city who wish to see those institutions
continue to thrive.
Yet as was the case in fourth century Rome, the liturgia of this gift – the drama of
this exchange – has almost nothing to do with the immediate needs of the poor.
This drama takes place among people with wealth and cultural influence to
trade, a conversation between the super wealthy and an educated elite largely
removed from the tens of thousands experiencing daily hunger and
homelessness.
Basil of Caesarea’s innovation – which he shares with other
Christian and Jewish leaders of his time – is that he appropriated the language
of liturgia and reoriented it to aid
the most marginalized members of society. In a time of famine, he did so by
making theological arguments that may cause wincing among those formed by
Augustine of Hippo and reformed Protestantism’s insistence on justification by
grace alone, for Basil argued that in this Christian liturgia of giving to the poor, the wealthy were transacting with
God for their own salvation.[5]
While many Christians today may not be comfortable saying
that our gifts to the poor are in exchange for our own salvation, Basil’s
argument – made in the midst of famine - represents a remarkable synthesis of
longstanding Jewish and Christian care for the poor with the philanthropic
practices of fourth century Rome. In doing so, Basil fulfilled the public role
of Christian bishops at that time. Peter Brown makes this point dramatically:
“To put it bluntly: in a sense, it was Christian bishops who invented the
poor”.[6] That
is, the poor – who had nothing to offer the wealthy in exchange - were finally
seen as worthy recipients of their gifts because bishops preached that a more
significant exchange was taking place with God.
Basil’s approach to both his and others’ wealth was
personal, theologically imaginative, and profoundly practical and resulted in
both a reimagining of the language of liturgia
and a concrete transfer of wealth to offer food and aid to what was considered
an expendable population. It is also clear that Basil understood his work to
not only be of benefit to the poor, but also for the humanity of the rich. He
presses this point in his Homily to the Rich when he speaks movingly about what
one risks through the accumulation of wealth: “Yet while it is uncertain
whether you will have need of this buried gold, the losses you incur from your
inhuman behavior are not at all uncertain... And I think that when it comes to
this, as you are burying your wealth, you entomb it with your own heart.”[7]
The questions Basil faced as the new bishop of Caesarea
continue to resonate today: What is the public role of a Christian bishop
during a time of natural disaster? Does the Church have anything to say to the
wealthy as poverty and hunger intensify all around? Are Christians to be
exclusively concerned with our own poor or do we also have a responsibility to
the impoverished and hungry in the wider public as well? Basil of Caesarea’s
labors on behalf of the hungry and indigent sick in Caesarea reflect how both
Christians and the Roman empire thought deeply about such questions, and I
believe The Episcopal Church may find inspiration in his story as we, one of
the wealthiest among mainline Christian denominations, seek to find our own
voice amidst increasing inequality, unemployment, and yes, growing hunger.
[1] Homily 8: In Time of Famine and Drought. Translation
in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Fortress Press, 2017.
[2] Rhee, Helen. Loc 424 in Wealth and Poverty in Early
Christianity. Fortress Press, 2017.
[3] Brown, Peter. Poverty & Leadership in the Later
Roman Empire. University Press of New England, 2002. Pg 39.
[4] Heyne, Thomas. “Reconstructing the world’s first
hospital: The Basiliad.” Hektoen International, Spring 2015.
[5] Holman, Susan. The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and
Bishops in Roman Cappadocia. Oxford University Press, 2001. Page 27.
[6] Brown, Peter.
Poverty & Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. University Press of New
England, 2002. Pg 8.
[7] Homily 7 to the Rich. Translation in Wealth and
Poverty in Early Christianity. Fortress Press, 2017.
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