Dalmatus of Constantinople

The soldier

Dalmatus was a soldier, and the tradition is precise about his place: an officer of the second schola of the imperial guard — one of the palatine regiments that stood about the person of the emperor — in the reign of Theodosius the Great (379–395). He was a married man with children, and stood, on the ordinary reckoning of the world, at the beginning of a career.

What turned him is not recorded beyond the bare word of the synaxarion, that he was seized with the desire of the monastic life. The chronology the notices give is narrow and believable: he laid down his commission at some point between 381 and 383 — that is, in the very years when Theodosius was restoring the churches of the capital to the Orthodox and the Second Ecumenical Council was sitting — and went out to the monastery that the officer Saturninus had built for the Syrian ascetic Isaac in the Psamathia quarter beyond the Golden Gate. He did not go alone. He took with him his son Faustus, and the two were tonsured together by Isaac's own hand.

The disciple

Of Dalmatus's years as a simple monk the tradition preserves one detail, and it is the sort of detail the desert remembered: that in a single Great Lent he ate nothing at all for the forty days, and that at the end of that fast he was granted the vision of divine things. The notices do not elaborate the visions, and the repository does not invent them. What the anecdote establishes is the standing Dalmatus had in the house — that the old soldier had outstripped the monks who had been there before him, and that when Isaac came to name a successor there was no argument.

Isaac, in extreme age, laid the government of the monastery on Dalmatus and reposed — by the common reckoning about 383, though there are reasons for thinking the founder lived considerably longer (see the Disputed questions of Isaac's own entry). Dalmatus took the house, and the house took his name.

Archimandrite and exarch of the monasteries

The monastery of Isaac was the first coenobitic foundation inside the orbit of Constantinople, and by the early fifth century it was the senior house of a rapidly multiplying monastic city. Its abbot came in consequence to exercise a presidency over the others, and it is in connection with Dalmatus that the title ἀρχιμανδρίτης — archimandrite, "chief of the fold" — first appears at Constantinople, together with the office of exarch of the monasteries of the capital. Whether the dignity was conferred on him or simply grew to fit him is not something the sources settle; the hagiographic tradition says the fathers of the Council of Ephesus gave him the rank, which is at least a memory that the title and the events of 431 belong together.

With the abbacy Dalmatus took on an enclosure. From the day he entered the monastery he did not go out of it, and the number the tradition attaches to that silence — forty-eight years — is the number that makes the next episode intelligible.

The forty-eight years broken: Constantinople, 431

In the summer of 431 the Third Ecumenical Council met at Ephesus and deposed Nestorius, archbishop of Constantinople, for dividing the one Christ and refusing to the Virgin the name Theotokos. The council's difficulty was not doctrinal but political. The imperial commissioner Candidian had the roads and the harbours, the Nestorian party had the ear of the court, and for weeks no true account of what the council had done could be got past the guards to Theodosius II. The famous expedient of the Cyrilline party — a message carried out of Ephesus by a beggar, hidden in a hollow staff or reed — is part of the received story of the council.

Where the message went was to Dalmatus. The emperor had asked him more than once to come to the palace and he had always refused; the enclosure was absolute. Now, with the faith at stake, the old archimandrite came out. He gathered the abbots and the monks of every monastery in the capital and went down through the streets in procession, with crosses and lights and the chanting of psalms, an immense body of men in black moving on the palace — and the city came out to watch its monks walk behind the man who had not been seen for half a lifetime.

Theodosius received him. The very fact of Dalmatus's presence was the argument: the emperor understood at once that nothing but a matter of the first order could have brought him past his own door. The acts of the council were read; the emperor undertook to receive its sentence and to hear its legates; and Dalmatus went back and reported to the assembled people of the city, who answered with the acclamations of the Orthodox. The imperial policy turned from that day, and the deposition of Nestorius held. Cyril of Alexandria wrote to Dalmatus in gratitude, and the council itself addressed him — an archimandrite corresponding as a power with patriarchs.

Later years and repose

Dalmatus lived on into extreme age, governing the monastery and, so far as the record goes, never leaving it again. The notices give him about ninety years and place his repose after 446; the calendars and the general reckoning put his death about 440. He was buried in his monastery beside Isaac, and his son Faustus succeeded him in the abbacy.

The monastery that bears his name

The house outside the Golden Gate was known from Dalmatus onward as τὰ Δαλμάτου, "the monastery of Dalmatus" or "of the Dalmatians," and it is by that borrowed name that its founder Isaac is universally, and somewhat misleadingly, called Isaac of Dalmatia. Its archimandrites stood first among the monastic clergy of the capital and subscribed the synods; a Faustus, presbyter and archimandrite of the monastery of Dalmatus, appears among the heads of the Constantinopolitan houses in the acts of the mid-fifth-century synods that dealt with Eutyches, and the repository takes that man, with the tradition, to be Dalmatus's son. The monastery remained one of the great houses of Byzantium for centuries; in the second Iconoclasm its abbot Hilarion the New of Dalmatia (†845) was starved, flogged and exiled for the holy icons, so that the founder who withstood Valens, the archimandrite who withstood Nestorius, and the abbot who withstood the iconoclasts belong to one continuous history of a single monastery kept in the calendar on May 30, August 3 and June 6.