Homilies on Various Subjects
For For anyone who has heard Basil quoted on wealth and the poor and wants the sermons themselves (I will pull down my barns, To the rich, On the famine, Against usury), with others on fasting, anger, envy and baptism. One is free in English.
Length About 130,000 words, about 9 hours.
This is not a single treatise but a gathering of occasional sermons preached by Basil of Caesarea across roughly fifteen years, first as a presbyter and then as bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, a see he held from 370 until his death in 379. The homilies respond to the pressures of his pastoral office in a specific place and time: a severe famine and drought that struck Cappadocia, widening gaps between rich and poor in a provincial capital, and the ordinary vices of congregational life — envy, anger, drunkenness — that Basil judged worth naming from the pulpit rather than leaving to private conscience.
Across these sermons Basil turns the full resources of his classical rhetorical training, acquired in Athens and Constantinople, toward concrete moral instruction. He argues that surplus wealth is not a private possession to be defended but a trust held on behalf of the destitute, so that hoarding grain during famine or refusing alms to the hungry is not merely ungenerous but unjust, a form of theft from those who have nothing. He treats envy and anger as diseases of the soul requiring diagnosis and discipline, not simply as sins to be confessed. Throughout, he insists that Christian ethics has teeth in economic life: almsgiving is obligation, not optional virtue, and the preacher's task is to confront his hearers' comfort directly.
The homilies matter because they show patristic preaching doing real pastoral work under crisis conditions, and because they fed a durable strand of Christian social teaching on property, poverty, and the obligations of wealth that later writers, East and West, drew on directly. They are also valuable simply as evidence of how a trained rhetorician reshaped his craft for the pulpit rather than the lecture hall.
Who should read this: readers interested in the history of Christian social ethics, in patristic preaching as a genre, or in Basil's response to a documented famine will find concrete, forceful material here. Readers looking for a unified theological argument or a single continuous text should look elsewhere, since this is a miscellany of separate occasional sermons rather than a planned work.
Editions
External off-site sources
Free downloads
- OTHER Homiliae diversae (The Tertullian Project (Kenrick, 1843)) PD AbridgedTrans. Francis Patrick Kenrick · 1843One homily of the twenty-four: Basil's Exhortation to Baptism (Homily 13), in Francis Patrick Kenrick's 1843 translation as transcribed and lightly modernised by Roger Pearse for the Tertullian Project (2014), with Kenrick's notes. Public domain, complete for this homily, and the only sermon of the group free in English.
- PDF Homiliae diversae (Internet Archive (Kenrick, 1843)) PD AbridgedTrans. Francis Patrick Kenrick · 1843One homily of the twenty-four: the Exhortation to Baptism (Homily 13) in Francis Patrick Kenrick's translation, pp. 225-241 of his Treatise on Baptism (Philadelphia, 1843), a page scan of the whole book, whose first part is Basil's On Baptism. For readers who want the printed original of the web text.
- PDF Homiliae diversae (Internet Archive (Migne, PG 31)) PD Greek1857Migne's Patrologia Graeca vol. 31 (1857): the Greek of all twenty-four homilies (Homiliae et sermones) with the Latin version facing, in a scan of the whole volume. The complete text in the original; only one homily is free in English.Much harder than the work: Greek with Latin facing; one homily exists free in English