Elias I of Jerusalem
Our Father among the Saints Elias the Confessor, Patriarch of Jerusalem
Patriarch · Bishop · Confessor · d. 518, in exile at Aila on the Red Sea
Commemorated 20 July — Repose in exile; commemorated with Flavian II of Antioch
Elias, Patriarch of Jerusalem from 494 to 516, was an Arab by birth and an Egyptian monk by formation, who came to Palestine as a refugee from the anti-Chalcedonian persecution in Egypt, lived under Euthymius the Great in the desert, and was raised to the throne of the Holy City. His patriarchate is inseparable from the two great archimandrites of the Judaean desert, Sabbas the Sanctified and Theodosius the Cenobiarch, whom he himself appointed over the hermits and the cenobites; and when the Emperor Anastasius I moved to have the Council of Chalcedon condemned, it was the monks of the desert, marching on Jerusalem in their thousands, who saved their patriarch for a time. He stood with Flavian II of Antioch at the synod of Sidon in 512, was deposed by imperial officers in 516, and died in exile at Aila on the Red Sea in 518 — by the account of Cyril of Scythopolis, two days after learning by revelation of the death of the Emperor who had banished him. The Church keeps him on July 20 as a confessor.
From Egypt to the Judaean desert
Elias was of Arab stock and was formed as a monk in Egypt, in the monastic settlements of Nitria. When Timothy Aelurus and the anti-Chalcedonian party gained control in Alexandria after the Council of 451, the monks who would not abandon Chalcedon were driven out; Elias was among them. He came, with his companion Martyrius — a future patriarch himself — into Palestine, and was received into the great lavra of Euthymius the Great in the wilderness east of Jerusalem, where the Chalcedonian confession had struck deep root through Euthymius's own resistance to the usurping bishop Theodosius. Cyril of Scythopolis, who is the principal source for all of this, records that Euthymius foretold to both men that they would become patriarchs of Jerusalem, and it is from Cyril that the details of Elias's life almost entirely come.
Elias afterwards left the lavra for the plain of Jericho, where he built a monastery of his own — a cenobium that endured for centuries — and gathered a community.
Patriarch of the Holy City
On the death of the patriarch Sallustius in 494 Elias succeeded to the throne of Jerusalem, and held it for twenty-two years. He was a builder and an organiser. He gathered the spoudaioi, the scattered clergy and singers attached to the Church of the Resurrection, into a common community with a monastery beside the Anastasis, and enlarged the patriarchal buildings; he was active in the affairs of the desert, in which he had been formed, and in the settlement of the Christian Arab tribes of the province.
His most consequential act was administrative and lasted long after him: in the same year as his accession he appointed Sabbas the Sanctified archimandrite over all the hermits and lavras of the Jerusalem patriarchate, and Theodosius archimandrite over all the cenobitic houses. The double office gave the Judaean monks a single voice, and it was that voice which decided the church-political struggle of the next twenty years.
The struggle over Chalcedon
The Emperor Anastasius I (491–518) pursued, with increasing openness, a policy of setting the Council of Chalcedon aside. At Antioch he replaced Flavian with Severus in 512; at Constantinople the patriarch Macedonius was deposed in 511; the Henotikon of Zeno was pressed as the test of communion, and the demand went out for explicit anathemas against the Council. Elias, like Flavian, had accepted the Henotikon in the received Palestinian sense — as a document that did not annul Chalcedon — and would go no further.
In 512 the Emperor convoked the synod of Sidon to obtain the condemnation of the Council. Elias and Flavian resisted, and the synod failed of its main purpose, but the pressure did not relent. When Severus, enthroned at Antioch, sent the customary synodical letter to Jerusalem, Elias refused to receive it and refused him communion. Anastasius answered by sending the dux Olympus of Palestine to remove him.
At this point the desert came to the city. Cyril of Scythopolis records that Sabbas and Theodosius brought the monks of the whole province down upon Jerusalem — a multitude the sources number in the thousands — and filled the church of St Stephen, where, in the presence of the imperial commissioner and of the Emperor's nephew Hypatius, they acclaimed the four councils and anathematised Severus and all who rejected Chalcedon. The demonstration cost them nothing that year; the Emperor drew back and postponed the reckoning.
Deposition, exile and repose
It came in 516. A new dux of Palestine expelled Elias from Jerusalem by force and installed his own candidate, John, on the promise that John would communicate with Severus. Elias was banished to Aila — the port at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, the modern Eilat — at the furthest edge of the province. (John, once installed, was persuaded by Sabbas and the monks to break his promise and to proclaim Chalcedon publicly from the pulpit before an enormous crowd; but Elias was not restored.)
He lived in exile two years. Cyril of Scythopolis tells that Sabbas and other fathers of the desert went down to visit him at Aila, and that on a day in July 518 Elias said to Sabbas that the Emperor Anastasius had died that hour and that he himself was summoned to appear before God with him; and that two days later he reposed. Anastasius died on 9 July 518; the Church keeps Elias on July 20. His successor's church, and the Empire under Justin I, restored the Council of Chalcedon that same year.
Feast and commemoration
July 20 (Old Calendar civil August 2), jointly with Flavian II of Antioch. The two are entered together in the synaxaria as the patriarchs who suffered for Chalcedon under Anastasius, and the Roman Martyrology keeps them together on July 4. The commemoration carries no proper office in general use and is sung from the common of hierarchs and confessors; in practice the day belongs liturgically to the Prophet Elijah. Elias is named also in the Palestinian monastic commemorations that gather the fathers of the Judaean desert, where his memory is bound to those of Euthymius, Sabbas and Theodosius.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to thy gentleness: take not thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of thy hierarch Elias, guide our life in peace.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Shepherd of the Holy City and father of the desert's fathers, thou wast driven from thy throne for the confession of Christ in two natures, and didst end thy course by the shore of the sea in a strange land; wherefore the Church honours thee, O confessor Elias.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No distinctive iconographic type of Elias of Jerusalem is transmitted, and no pre-modern image identified as his has been located for this corpus. In the Palestinian and Sinaite hierarch registers he would appear as an elderly bishop in phelonion and omophorion, blessing and holding the Gospel, without the martyr's cross; where the patriarchs of Jerusalem are painted in series — as in the calendar of the Holy Sepulchre and in some post-Byzantine Palestinian work — he stands in the succession between Juvenal and the patriarchs of the Justinianic age. He may also be found, unnamed or barely legible, among the crowd of desert fathers in narrative cycles of the life of Sabbas, at the scene of the monks' acclamation of the Councils in the church of St Stephen.
Disputed questions
- The revelation at Aila. The story of Elias foreseeing the Emperor's death and dying two days after comes from Cyril of Scythopolis, writing some forty years later on the testimony of the elders of the lavra of Sabbas. It is early, and it comes from the circle that had every reason to know; it is nonetheless a hagiographic topos as well as a report, and is transmitted here as the tradition gives it.
- The date of the deposition. The expulsion is usually placed in 516, with the death in 518; a minority of the chronicles compress the two, giving Elias a shorter exile.
- Whether he accepted the Henotikon. He did, in the Palestinian reading of it; his defenders in antiquity and since have insisted that the Jerusalem church never took the document to displace the Council, and the test came precisely when explicit anathemas against Chalcedon were demanded and refused.
- Not to be confused with the Prophet Elijah, whose great feast falls on this same July 20 — the coincidence of name and day is the reason the patriarch's memory is so often overlooked — nor with the later Palestinian and Slavic saints named Elias.