Wealth and Poverty: The Famine Homilies

In the crisis of the Cappadocian famine of 368–369 and the years around it, St. Basil the Great preached a series of homilies on wealth, hoarding, and usury that became the classical Orthodox theology of property. This file treats the four sermons gathered in English as On Social Justice — To the Rich, I Will Tear Down My Barns, In Time of Famine and Drought, and Against Those Who Lend at Interest — quoting their most famous passages in C. Paul Schroeder’s translation, setting out their theology of the common ownership of goods and the framing of hoarding as theft, and noting honestly how Basil has been claimed by opposing modern movements.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Four Homilies

The homilies are occasional, forged in a concrete emergency rather than composed as a treatise; their force is pastoral and rhetorical. Four are gathered in C. Paul Schroeder’s translation On Social Justice (Popular Patristics Series 38, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009): To the Rich (Homilia in divites), I Will Tear Down My Barns (Destruam horrea mea, on the parable of the rich fool, Luke 12:16–21), In Time of Famine and Drought (In famem et siccitatem), and Against Those Who Lend at Interest (the homily on Psalm 14, LXX — Ps. 15 in the Hebrew numbering). They date from Basil’s years as priest and early bishop at Caesarea, several of them tied directly to the famine of 368–369 (Schroeder, On Social Justice, introduction).

To the Rich and the Young Ruler

To the Rich takes as its text the Gospel encounter of the rich young ruler (Matthew 19:16–22), who keeps the commandments but goes away sorrowful when told to sell what he has and give to the poor. Basil presses the modern hearer with the young man’s failure: the man was not a thief or an adulterer, yet one thing was lacking, and that one thing — the surrender of possessions — proved the thing he could not do. Basil draws out the dominical saying that follows, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom, and refuses every comfortable softening of it. The homily then sets out his most quoted social syllogism: if each took only what was needed and left the rest to those who lacked, “no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need” (Basil, To the Rich; trans. Schroeder, On Social Justice). Wealth in excess of need, on this reading, is not a neutral fact but a standing injustice — a portion of the common store diverted from its purpose.

The Bread Belongs to the Hungry

Basil’s most quoted lines come from I Will Tear Down My Barns, his exposition of the rich man who, blessed with an abundant harvest, plans only larger storehouses for himself. Basil turns the goods of the hoarder over to their rightful owners:

“The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not” (Basil, I Will Tear Down My Barns §7; trans. Schroeder, On Social Justice, p. 70).

The grammar is the whole argument: the bread is for the hungry, already and by right. In the same homily Basil presses the rich man with the question that exposes the logic of accumulation — “Whom do I treat unjustly, if I keep what is my own?” — and answers that what the rich call their own was given to them precisely to be shared, so that the refusal to share is robbery of those it was meant for (Schroeder, On Social Justice, pp. 69–71).

Hoarding as Theft, and the Common Ownership of Goods

The theology beneath the rhetoric is a doctrine of koinonia — the common destination of created goods. For Basil, God made the earth’s abundance for all in common; private surplus is therefore not an absolute possession but a stewardship, and to withhold it from the needy is not a failure of generosity but an act of injustice. Almsgiving, on this account, is restitution rather than benevolence: the giver returns what already belonged to the poor. In To the Rich, Basil sharpens this against the claim of secure title: “Are not you then a robber, for counting as your own what you have received to distribute? … The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the cloak you keep locked in your storeroom belongs to the naked” (Basil, To the Rich §7; trans. Schroeder, On Social Justice, pp. 43–44). The wealthy man who hoards is likened to one who takes a seat in the theater and then forbids anyone else to enter — treating a common good as a private monopoly.

In Time of Famine and Drought

In Time of Famine and Drought is the most directly occasional of the four, preached into the teeth of the 368–369 crisis. Basil reads the drought theologically — not as blind misfortune but as a summons to repentance and to mercy — and turns the disaster outward toward the hoarders. He paints the famine economy with terrible precision: the merchant who watches the sky and rejoices at the failing rain because scarcity raises his price; the father reduced to selling a child to buy bread for the others; the laborer fainting in the field. The sermon’s force is to make the comfortable see that the catastrophe is not only meteorological but moral — that the grain locked in the wealthy man’s barn is, in the midst of starvation, a kind of murder by withholding (Basil, In Time of Famine and Drought; trans. Schroeder, On Social Justice; cf. Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, ch. 4). It is the homiletic counterpart of the Basiliad: the same emergency that built the institution shaped the preaching.

Usury

The homily on Psalm 14 (LXX) turns the same conviction against usury. Lending at interest, for Basil, is to grow rich from another’s distress, profiting from the misery of the very neighbor whom the loan pretends to help; he urges instead a giving that imitates God’s own generosity. “Do not make profit from the misfortunes of others, nor take interest on the miseries of fellow human beings,” he preaches, contrasting earthly usury with the “heavenly usury” repaid by God to those who lend expecting nothing in return (Basil, Against Those Who Lend at Interest, on Ps. 14; trans. Schroeder, On Social Justice; cf. Susan R. Holman, The Hungry Are Dying, Oxford, 2001). The debtor’s spiraling ruin, the lender’s calculating cruelty, and the enslavement of poor families to interest are described with a vividness drawn straight from the famine economy Basil watched at work.

The Rhetoric and Its Roots

The homilies are works of high rhetoric, and their power is inseparable from their art. Basil, trained in the Athenian schools, deploys the full apparatus of late-antique declamation — apostrophe, dramatized dialogue with an imagined rich interlocutor, vivid ekphrasis of the hoarder’s overflowing barns and the beggar’s wasting body, the sharp reversal that turns the audience’s assumptions against them. This is deliberate: the sermons aim not to construct a system but to convert a will, to dislodge the listener from the self-justifying logic of ownership and move him, this Sunday, to open his stores. The theology is carried on the back of the rhetoric, and reading the homilies as flat propositions misses how they work. At the same time the rhetoric rests on a genuine doctrine — the common destination of goods, the stewardship of surplus, the identity of Christ with the poor — that Basil shares with his brother Gregory of Nyssa (who preached his own homilies On the Love of the Poor and against usury) and that his younger contemporary John Chrysostom would carry to Antioch and Constantinople. Basil stands at the head of a coherent Cappadocian-and-after tradition, not alone.

Basil Claimed Both Ways

Because Basil’s language is so unsparing toward wealth, his homilies have been pressed into the service of opposing modern causes, and honesty requires naming the uses. Some twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers, including Christian socialists and liberation-minded theologians, have read Basil as a near-revolutionary critic of private property — a patristic witness against capitalism. Others, including Schroeder himself, caution against the anachronism: Basil does not call for the abolition of property or for state expropriation but for voluntary restitution flowing from conversion of heart, addressed to individual consciences and embodied in the Church’s own charity rather than in political program (Schroeder, “Building the New City: St. Basil’s Social Vision,” in On Social Justice, introduction). Still other readers, in defending market economies, have stressed that Basil presupposes ownership even as he limits its claims. The text itself supports neither a modern ideology nor its opposite cleanly: Basil speaks the language of justice and theft, but his remedy is the converted almsgiver and the institution of mercy — the Basiliad (see The Basiliad) — not the confiscating state. The wider arc of this tradition, from Basil through John Chrysostom to the modern Orthodox social documents, is traced in Orthodox Social Ethics.

References

Basil the Great. On Social Justice. Translated by C. Paul Schroeder. Popular Patristics Series 38. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009. [To the Rich; I Will Tear Down My Barns; In Time of Famine and Drought; Against Those Who Lend at Interest.]
Holman, Susan R. The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil. Translated in NPNF II/7.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.