In the latter part of the fourth century, amidst a famine and drought, Basil of Caesarea embraced a still new, public role for a Christian leader, that of ‘lover of the poor.’ For Basil, this role entailed preaching forcefully – even confrontationally - to the wealthy of the city, laying bare the hidden suffering of the poor in a time of famine and drought in the starkest of terms and raising funds for food and medical aid. In 2021, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, I’m struck by the way that this role continues to be of paramount importance.
The winter rains had refused to fall in Caesarea in 369, in what is now modern-day Turkey, resulting in food shortages, panic among the rich and hunger among the most marginalized citizens, immigrants and slaves. By 370, fear had taken root among the city’s landowners and they were unwilling to release grain from their storehouses. Into this calamity a new voice was heard, that of a Christian bishop, exercising 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 Such a statement would have shocked those who were inconvenienced but not devastated by the famine, yet Basil pressed on, believing that the salvation of the wealthy landowners was at stake. In his Homily to the Rich, he says, “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.”2
As a ‘lover of the poor,’ Basil laid bare the suffering that could easily have been ignored. He raised funds amidst natural disaster for a soup kitchen and what is now considered the first hospital in history. The Basiliad, as it would later be called, was staffed by physicians and clergy and offered medical treatment and trade skills to the impoverished sick of the region for centuries to come.
Basil’s homilies to the elite of Caesarea are troubling, direct, and remain a pleasure to read because of their force and clarity, 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 during times of natural disaster? 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?
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Basil’s passionate arguments for the wealthy to give their stores of grain and riches to the poor were the fruit of lifelong, spiritual development on issues of wealth and poverty. While discussions of Basil’s significance in Christian history often focus 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 within 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 period would continue to 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.3
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 balancing the practices and traditions of Christian assemblies with the pressing expectations of imperial Rome. The hunger taking hold of Caesarea only served to exacerbate these challenges. As discussed in Chapter 13, in the fourth century, the recently-converted emperor Constantine assigned to Christian bishops the public role of ‘lovers of the poor.” The very public gifts which Christian churches were now receiving from the Roman empire came with a newly-imposed, public responsibility of caring not only for their own poor but for the publicly registered poor, both Christian and non-Christian alike.4 Interestingly, it was during this period that a new and universal application of Matthew 25: 31-45 began to emerge, one that emphasized how Christ appears in every person - not just fellow Christians - who is hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, and imprisoned. Historian Helen Rhee observes, “It is significant that only in the post-Constantinian era with the public service of the church that the non-Christians were explicitly included as legitimate recipients of alms by the church.”5
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.”6 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 in a eulogy about Basil delivered by his friend Gregory of Nanzianus, one hears of the new bishop urging the wealthy in stark and innovative terms to open their storehouses of grain so that the hungry might eat and for their own salvation.
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Basil preached several homilies about the famine and drought that had befallen Cesarea in 369, texts that sparkle with such intensity that you can almost hear his voice as he rallies support for relief efforts. Those homilies remain striking for the direct and confrontational manner that he speaks to the wealthy, beginning with his placing blame for the drought and subsequent famine as God’s punishment for the lack of concern the wealthy have had for the poor: “No, the reason why we are not governed in the usual way is clear and self-evident: We receive, but give to nobody; we praise good works, but do not practice them towards the needy…” and “Our barns and granaries are too tight for what we store in them, and yet we ourselves do not have compassion for those who suffer from tight circumstances.”7
Basil describes famine as the worst possible kind of punishment to befall the poor, and offers a visceral description of what happens to the human body through starvation: “Of all human calamities, famine is the principal one; and the most miserable of deaths is, no doubt that by starvation.” Once starved, “The flesh clings to the bones like a cobweb. The skin has no color. . . The belly is hollow, contracted, formless, without weight, without the natural stretching of the viscera, joined to the bones of the back. Now, what punishment should not be inflicted upon the one who passes by such a body?”8
The prospect of this terrible death by starvation forced people to make unimaginable decisions, including leading parents to sell their own children into slavery. In Pull Down Your Barns, Basil describes a father’s internal weighing of which of his children to sell on the slave market to have money to purchase food for his family to eat:
“And what are [the father’s] thoughts at such times? ‘Which should I sell first? Which will please the corn merchant best? Should I take the eldest? He has rights of the firstborn I dare not violate. The youngest then? I pity his youth, still innocent of misery. This one is his parents’ living image; this other is ripe for schooling. What hopelessness! What am I to do? Can I turn against any of them? Can I become a brute beast? Can I forget the bond of nature? If I cling to them all, I will see them all wasting away with hunger. If I sacrifice one, with what face can I look at the others? They will suspect me of treachery at once. How can I stay in a household which I myself have orphaned? How can I sit down to my table with food when these are the means of filling it?’”9
For Basil, the wealthy of Cesarea had the means to prevent the starvation and desperation he so vividly described, and their refusal to do so amidst so much need was a question of salvation for their souls. He makes this argument about the state of the wealthy’s souls through several moves.
First, Basil lays out the peculiar temptations that come with wealth. He describes the special insanity of the wealthy who have so much yet who remain obsessed with accumulating more and more. He invokes The Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12.13-21) to describe those who are so wealthy that they must pull down their barns to build a still larger ones in order to store all that they have, even as people all around them suffer for the lack of what they pile up without mercy: “[The rich fool] added continually new to old, swelled his plenty with annual increase, and came at length to the hopeless dilemma where greed prevented him from letting the old be brought out, yet he had no room to store the new.” 10 This avarice ends up being a source of misery, for “What heartens others distresses the miser. It does not cheer him to have his granaries filled within; his heart is wrung by the overflow of wealth; he fears it may reach the folk outside and thus help to relieve the destitute.”11 In this same homily, he later describes what could be done with this wealth if only it were given away, “Yet you keep it all locked away behind doors and sealed up; and then the thought of it keeps you awake at nights; you take counsel about it inwardly, and your counselor is yourself—a fool!”12
For Basil, then, the immorality of wealth is not simply tied to how the wealth was made (the issue of sources of wealth), but zeroes in on how accumulating this wealth when others are in desperate need is itself a form of evil. It is akin, he argues, to withholding medicine from someone dying from the lack of it: “The person who can cure such an infirmity and refuses one’s medicine because of avarice, can with reason be condemned as a murderer.”13
Basil also joins in on the long tradition of reinterpreting the Gospel of Luke’s vexing Parable of the Unjust Steward. Unlike Clement of Alexandria, he faithfully emphasizes that it is a repentant steward whom God accepts. Basil urges the wealthy to turn away from stewards of their wealth alone, endlessly accumulating and needing to build larger and larger barns for it, and instead repent and become stewards of humanity, recognizing that their wealth belongs to the wider community: “You have been made the minister of a gracious God, steward for your fellow servants. Do not suppose that all these things were provided for your belly. The wealth you handle belongs to others; think of it accordingly. Not for long will it delight you; soon it will slip from you and be gone, and you will be asked to give strict account of it.”14
Basil then enters into a description of a form of almsgiving which many mainline Christians may not feel as comfortable with today but which should be set into the context of him trying to save people’s lives: namely, his suggestion that releasing the grain from their barns was a transaction that assured wealthy people’s salvation. “If you give to the hungry, the gift becomes your own and comes back to you with increase. As the wheat falling on the ground brings forth a gain for the one who scatters it, so the grain bestowed on the hungry brings you profit a hundredfold hereafter,” and “You must leave your money behind whether you will or not, but your honor coming from the glory of good works will take you to the Master.”15
This focus on transactional almsgiving speaks to the fact that Basil was part of a larger reimagining the Roman philanthropic tradition of liturgia. 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. Yet the liturgia of such gifts – the drama of this exchange – generally had nothing to do with the immediate needs of the poor. This drama took place among people with wealth and cultural influence to trade, a conversation between the super wealthy and an educated elite largely removed from the those experiencing daily hunger and homelessness.
Basil of Caesarea’s innovation – which he shares with many 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 often cause wincing among those formed by 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.16
Basil’s argument – made in the midst of famine - represents a remarkable synthesis of longstanding Jewish and Christian traditions of caring 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”.17 That is, the poor – who had nothing to offer the wealthy in exchange - were finally being 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 elsewhere 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.”18
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One of the strangest sights during this very strange year of 2021 has been that of two billionaires, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, hurtling into space aboard privately-funded space rockets. The photos of these ultra-wealthy men enjoying a great view, and the prospect of how much wealth they spent on their joyrides, ignited a debate across social media about the ethical responsibilities that come with wealth. Some people insisted that outside of breaking the law, the ultra-wealthy such as Branson and Bezos held no social responsibility to use their wealth for the betterment of humanity. Many others (perhaps the majority) at least entertained the question of what good could have been done with this wealth had it been redirected (or at least taxed). Still a smaller group -- and I imagine Basil would have been among these – questioned the morality of individuals having accumulated this much wealth in the first place, arguing that such inequality in wealth reflects an individual and societal form of insanity, and that to use this wealth as they did as so many others suffer from want of basic needs was an egregiously immoral act. As for me, I'll admit that watching Branson and Bezos hurtle into the sky as the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change result in shocking increases in extreme poverty around the globe, called to mind a few of Basil's most damning lines -- including about the doctor who withholds medicine from a suffering patient.
For Basil, however, these debates were not playing out across social media, nor were his reflections hypothetical meditations about other people’s wealth. Having already given away his personal fortune, Basil would ultimately add his family’s fortune to the incoming donations during this time of famine and drought to establish a soup kitchen and to build a hospital for the indigent sick of Cesarea. The Basiliad, as that hospital 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.20 The Basiliad would exist for centuries after Basil’s death.
The questions Basil faced as the new bishop of Caesarea continue to resonate today: Is the accumulation of wealth moral in the face of so much suffering? At what point do wealthy people have an social obligation to the most vulnerable? For the Church, what is the public role of a Christian bishop in the face of such inequalities, particularly during a time of natural disaster? Does the Church have anything to say to the wealthy as poverty and hunger intensify all around? Basil’s homilies to the rich are a startling reminder that Christianity has not always had such an obsequious relationship to the rich, and that there have been leaders who have spoken clearly and forcefully about wealth in the face of great need.
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1 Homily 8: In Time of Famine and Drought. Translation in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Fortress Press, 2017.
2 Homily 7 to the Rich. Translation in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Fortress Press, 2017.
3 Rhee, Helen. Loc 424 in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Fortress Press, 2017.
4 Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich. Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 4240 - 4257
5 Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich. Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 4240 - 4257
6 Brown, Peter. Poverty & Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. University Press of New England, 2002. Pg 39.
7 Homily 8 In Time of Famine and Drought, on page 66 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
8 Homily 8 In Time of Famine and Drought, on page 66 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
9 Homily 6 I Will Pull Down My Barns. page 59 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
10 Homily 6 I Will Pull Down My Barns. page 57 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
11 Homily 6 I Will Pull Down My Barns. page 57 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
12 Homily 6 I Will Pull Down My Barns. page 57 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
13 Homily 8 In Time of Famine and Drought, on page 67 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
14 Homily 6 I Will Pull Down My Barns. page 57 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
15 Homily 6 I Will Pull Down My Barns. page 58 of Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.
16 Holman, Susan. The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia. Oxford University Press, 2001. Page 27.
17 Brown, Peter. Poverty & Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. University Press of New England, 2002. Pg 8.
18 Homily 7 to the Rich. Translation in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Fortress Press, 2017.
19 “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: Reversal of Fortune” - https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/34496/9781464816024.pdf - Page 5
20 Heyne, Thomas. “Reconstructing the world’s first hospital: The Basiliad.” Hektoen International, Spring 2015.
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