Life and Trials
Basil's Life relates that he abandoned the world in his youth and struggled in a desolate place, living as a grass-eating hermit. Byzantine imperial officials, suspicious of his appearance, brought him to Constantinople for questioning. In one tradition his interrogation was conducted by the patrician Samon.
Under torture Basil disclosed nothing of his spiritual practice and would not even give his name. By tradition he endured three days of cruel torment, including being hung upside down with his hands and feet bound, yet emerged unharmed. When he was thrown before a lion the animal remained peaceful at his feet, and when he was cast into the sea he was rescued—accounts say by dolphins—and brought safely to shore.
Having survived these trials, Basil healed a fever-stricken man named John and settled in Constantinople. He is said to have lived with a poor couple, John and Helena, and later moved into the household of Constantine Barbaros, a eunuch and parakoimomenos (imperial chamberlain), where he spent the remainder of his life apart from a week passed in the Great Palace. The synaxarion gives his age at death as about 110 years. He is called Basil the New, or the Younger, to distinguish him from earlier ascetics of the same name.
Clairvoyance and Prophecy
Basil was renowned in his Life as a clairvoyant elder who foresaw future events. He is reported to have predicted the Rus' attack on Constantinople of 941 some four months in advance.
He is also said to have foreknown a planned coup d'état by Romanos Saronites, son-in-law of the emperor Romanos I, and to have prophesied that Helena Lekapene would bear daughters and a son named Romanos, born in 938.
The Vision of the Toll Houses
Basil's servant Theodora figures centrally in his Life. After her death, his pupil Gregory prayed to learn what had become of her, and was granted a vision—in some accounts Theodora herself appeared to him—describing her soul's passage through the aerial toll houses (telonia).
In the vision the soul, on the third day after separating from the body, is carried by angels toward Heaven and must pass a series of toll houses—numbered as twenty or twenty-one—each staffed by demons testing a particular sin. Basil's prayers are depicted aiding Theodora through these trials, imagined as a scarlet bag full of gold, enabling her soul to reach Heaven.
This tenth-century account in the Life of Basil the Younger is the primary and most detailed source for the Eastern Orthodox teaching on the aerial toll houses, and it received characteristically Byzantine elaboration there. The teaching remains theologically significant within Eastern Orthodoxy.
Death and Burial
Basil died on 26 March, in either 944 or 952, the earlier date being considered the more probable. The Vita recording his life was composed shortly afterward, between 956 and 959.
According to Gregory, Constantine Barbaros buried Basil in a private church of the Theotokos on the Asian side of the strait, across from the capital, though this account contains chronological inconsistencies.
