The Three Hierarchs and the Liturgical Legacy of St. Basil

St. Basil was acclaimed “the Great” within his own generation, and the centuries that followed translated that judgment into the Church’s calendar and worship: a feast on January 1 with its Vasilopita custom, the shared feast of the Three Hierarchs on January 30 born of an eleventh-century dispute, a Divine Liturgy and a body of prayers under his name, a fixed iconographic type, and a place of honor in the Western monastic tradition through Benedict’s Rule and the Basilian orders.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

“The Great” in His Own Generation

Unlike most of the Fathers, on whom the epithet was conferred only by later veneration, Basil was already held to be a man of singular stature in his own lifetime and in the years immediately after his death on January 1, 379. The decisive witness is the funeral oration delivered for him by his lifelong friend St. Gregory of Nazianzus — Oration 43, On Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea, composed around 382 and read at a memorial in Caesarea (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43; trans. NPNF II/7). Gregory’s oration is at once a eulogy and a portrait of an already-acknowledged greatness: he describes the crowds at the funeral pressing in such grief and veneration that some were trampled, and he frames Basil’s whole life — his learning, his asceticism, his episcopal courage before the Arian emperor Valens, his works of mercy — as a single argument that here was a man whose like the age had not seen. The title “the Great” attaches to Basil in the very titulature of this oration and in the early tradition that received it, so that it functions less as a posthumous honorific bestowed centuries later than as the settled verdict of the men who knew him.

That verdict was reinforced by his two great theological allies — Gregory of Nazianzus himself and Basil’s younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, who completed Basil’s unfinished polemic Against Eunomius and composed his own encomium on his brother. Together the three Cappadocians secured Basil’s reputation as the architect of the Trinitarian settlement that the Council of Constantinople (381) would ratify, two years after his death. Basil did not live to see that council; his greatness was nonetheless its presupposition, and the Church’s memory has never separated the two.

The Feast of the Three Hierarchs (January 30)

The most distinctive liturgical monument to Basil’s stature is a feast he shares: the Synaxis of the Three Holy Hierarchs and Ecumenical Teachers — Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom — celebrated on January 30. Its origin is a famous resolution of a quarrel.

According to the tradition transmitted in the Synaxaria, during the eleventh century a partisan dispute broke out in Constantinople over which of the three great hierarchs and teachers was the greatest. One faction exalted Basil for the depth of his doctrine and the example of his ascetic and pastoral life; a second exalted John Chrysostom, “the Golden-Mouthed,” for his unmatched eloquence and his power to move sinners to repentance; a third exalted Gregory the Theologian for the sublimity, purity, and profundity of his theological orations. The factions — calling themselves Basilians, Joannites, and Gregorians — hardened into rival camps. The tradition relates that the three saints then appeared together to St. John Mauropous, Metropolitan of Euchaïta, declaring that they were equal before God, “There are no divisions among us, and no opposition to one another,” and bidding him institute a single joint feast to end the strife. John Mauropous appointed January 30 — the month already containing the separate feasts of all three (Basil on the 1st, Gregory on the 25th, Chrysostom on the 27th) — for their common commemoration, and composed the liturgical service for it (account in the Synaxarion; cf. Three Holy Hierarchs, OrthodoxWiki, citing the Synaxaria).

Historians treat the John Mauropous vision as a pious origin-narrative whose details are not independently corroborated — it is not attested in other Byzantine sources, and the chronology of Mauropous’ own life sits awkwardly against the reign of Alexios I Komnenos — but the institution of a common January 30 feast around the year 1100, under Alexios I, is well established (Alexandra Nikiforova, “The Origins of the Veneration of the Three Holy Hierarchs and Their Feast,” orthochristian.com). Whatever the precise events, the feast did what the legend says it did: it set the three teachers on a single footing and made their equality, rather than their ranking, the object of the Church’s celebration. In the modern Greek world January 30 has also become the feast of Greek letters and education, the three hierarchs being honored as patrons of Christian learning.

His Own Feast (January 1) and the Vasilopita

Basil’s individual feast falls on January 1, the day of his repose, where in the Orthodox calendar it coincides with the Circumcision of the Lord (the eighth day after the Nativity). The two commemorations are kept together, and on this day, when the fixed-feast cycle calls for it, the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil is itself served (below).

In the Greek tradition January 1 carries a beloved domestic custom, the Vasilopita (Βασιλόπιτα, “Basil-bread” or “Basil-pie”): a sweet bread or cake baked with a single coin hidden inside, cut ceremonially at the turn of the New Year, the one who receives the slice with the coin being held to be blessed for the year. The custom is traced in popular and ecclesiastical tradition to Basil’s own episcopate in Caesarea of Cappadocia. The most widely told version relates that, when the city was threatened by a rapacious official who demanded its treasures, the faithful surrendered their gold and jewels to Basil to ransom the city; the threat passed without the treasure being taken, and Basil, unable to identify which valuables belonged to whom, had loaves baked with the items concealed inside and distributed them, so that — by providence — each family received back its own (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, “The Story Behind the Vasilopita,” goarch.org; Vasilopita, GreekReporter.com). The pious narrative is exactly the kind of etiological legend the methodology directs be reported as tradition rather than asserted as documented history; what is securely the case is that the custom is centuries old, is firmly attached to Basil’s feast, and expresses in domestic form the saint’s historical reputation as a distributor of charity to the poor — the same reputation embodied in the Basiliada, his great philanthropic complex outside Caesarea.

Basil in the Orthodox Liturgy

Basil’s most pervasive presence in Orthodox worship is the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great. The anaphora that bears his name — markedly longer and more theologically elaborated than that of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom — is, in its Byzantine recension, plausibly connected to Basil’s own redaction of the eucharistic prayer; an Egyptian recension preserves what many scholars take to be an earlier, shorter form of the same family (Liturgy of Saint Basil, with the two-family classification of the surviving anaphoras). Where it was once the ordinary Sunday Liturgy of Constantinople, its use was later restricted, and it is now served only ten times in the year: the five Sundays of Great Lent, Holy Thursday, Holy Saturday, the Eves (or feasts) of Nativity and Theophany, and January 1, Basil’s own feast. The theology of this anaphora is treated in Anaphora Theology and the liturgy as a whole in The Liturgy of St. Basil.

Beyond the Liturgy, a substantial body of the Church’s prayers circulates under Basil’s name. Best known are the three Kneeling Prayers read at the Great Vespers of Pentecost — served immediately after the Liturgy — in which the faithful, kneeling for the first time since Pascha, petition for the descent of the Holy Spirit and, distinctively, for the souls of the departed (Russian Orthodox tradition on the Pentecost kneeling prayers). The Euchologion (Book of Needs) also assigns to Basil a set of exorcism prayers — commonly counted as three under his name, alongside four attributed to John Chrysostom — read over those afflicted by unclean spirits and, in adapted form, within the office of the catechumenate at the beginning of the baptismal rite (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, “Exorcism in the Orthodox Church”; OrthodoxWiki, “Exorcism”). As with all such attributions, the ascription to Basil reflects the tradition’s memory of his authority more than a verifiable autograph; the prayers’ antiquity and their fixed place under his name in the Euchologion are what the sources attest.

Iconography

In Orthodox iconography Basil is given a fixed and recognizable type. He is shown as a bishop in episcopal vestments — phelonion and omophorion, the omophorion often marked with the distinctive cross-pattée — holding a Gospel book or a scroll and giving a blessing, the scroll signifying his teaching and the codified prayers of his Liturgy. His face is ascetic and grave: a high, often balding forehead and a long, dark, narrowing (pointed) beard, features that distinguish him at a glance from the white-bearded Nicholas, the bald and short-bearded Chrysostom, or the more rounded Gregory the Theologian (iconographic conventions described at icon.org.ua and christianiconography.info). In the icon of the Three Hierarchs the three stand together, each in his recognizable type, frequently with Basil to the (viewer’s) left, Chrysostom to the right, and Gregory between or central — a visual statement of the equality the January 30 feast proclaims (iconreader.wordpress.com, “Icon of the Three Holy Hierarchs”).

Basil in the West

Basil’s authority crossed into the Latin West early and decisively, above all through monasticism. St. Benedict of Nursia, closing his Rule (c. 530s) with a chapter pointing the monk beyond the Rule itself toward the great sources of the tradition, names Basil explicitly. Rule 73 directs the monk to “the Conferences and the Institutes and the Lives of the Fathers, as also the Rule of our holy Father Basil” as tools by which the obedient and well-living monk may press on toward the heights of perfection (Rule of St. Benedict 73). Benedict thus presents his own Rule as a beginning, and names Basil’s Asketikon (see The Asketikon) as a charter of the fuller monastic tradition standing behind it — an unmistakable homage from the father of Western cenobitism to the father of the Eastern.

In the later Western and Eastern-Catholic worlds Basil’s name was attached directly to monastic institutes. The “Basilian” orders are communities following (or claiming descent from) his rule. In 1579 Pope Gregory XIII gathered the surviving Italo-Greek monasteries of southern Italy and Sicily, centered on the abbey of Grottaferrata near Rome, into a single congregation of Italian Basilians. More prominent today is the Order of St. Basil the Great (OSBM), the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic monastic order reorganized in 1617 under Metropolitan Josyf Veliamyn Rutsky and St. Josaphat Kuntsevych and later named for Josaphat; it remains an active order of pontifical right serving Greek-Catholic communities in central and eastern Europe and the diaspora (Order of Saint Basil the Great, with the 1617 reform and the 1579 Grottaferrata congregation). These institutes carry Basil’s name through traditions in communion with Rome rather than within the Orthodox Church; their existence testifies to the reach of his monastic legacy across the confessional divide.

References

Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43: On Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (the funeral oration, c. 382), trans. NPNF II/7
Three Holy Hierarchs, OrthodoxWiki (transmitting the Synaxarion account of the eleventh-century dispute and the vision of St. John Mauropous of Euchaïta; common feast instituted under Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1100)
Alexandra Nikiforova, “The Origins of the Veneration of the Three Holy Hierarchs and Their Feast,” orthochristian.com (on the historicity of the Mauropous narrative and the date of the feast’s institution)
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, “The Story Behind the Vasilopita” (goarch.org); “Vasilopita and the Lucky Coin,” GreekReporter.com — for the New Year custom and its attachment to Basil’s Caesarea
Liturgy of Saint Basil — survey of the anaphoras attributed to Basil and their classification into Egyptian and non-Egyptian families; the ten annual occasions of its Byzantine use
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, “Exorcism in the Orthodox Church”; “Exorcism,” OrthodoxWiki — for the three exorcism prayers under Basil’s name in the Euchologion and their use at the catechumenate
The Pentecost Kneeling Prayers of St. Basil, read at Great Vespers of Pentecost (Russian Orthodox liturgical tradition)
Iconographic conventions for St. Basil and the Three Hierarchs: icon.org.ua; christianiconography.info; “Icon of the Three Holy Hierarchs,” iconreader.wordpress.com
The Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 73 (“the Conferences and the Institutes and the Lives of the Fathers, as also the Rule of our holy Father Basil”)
Order of Saint Basil the Great (OSBM): 1617 reform under Metropolitan Josyf Veliamyn Rutsky and St. Josaphat Kuntsevych; the 1579 congregation of Italian Basilians centered on Grottaferrata under Pope Gregory XIII