Isaac of Dalmatia

Origins and the desert

The synaxarion makes Isaac a Syrian by birth, one of that great generation of Semitic ascetics who filled the hinterland of Antioch and Mesopotamia with cells and enclosures in the middle of the fourth century. He was tonsured and pursued his struggle "in the desert" — the notices do not localise it further, and the later Russian tradition that he was a disciple of Antony the Great is a pious inference from his stature rather than a transmitted fact. What the sources do convey is the type: a solitary of the older, harsher school, with no office in the Church, no learning to appeal to, and no reason to be listened to by anyone except the authority of a life lived wholly for God. That is the man the historians place, without explanation, in the road outside Constantinople in the summer of 378.

The confrontation with Valens

The emperor Valens (364–378) had governed the East for fourteen years as a convinced supporter of the Arian party. Orthodox bishops were deposed and exiled, their congregations dispossessed, and the churches of the great cities handed to the homoian clergy; the persecution was administrative rather than bloody, but for the Nicene faithful of the East it was the bitterest phase since Constantius. In 378 the Goths, settled south of the Danube after the disaster of 376, were ranging through Thrace within reach of the capital itself, and Valens marched out of Constantinople to meet them.

Isaac came up from his solitude, and — the account is consistent in Theodoret, in Sozomen and in the synaxarion — pushed through the imperial column, took hold of the emperor's bridle, and cried out to him: "Open the churches to the Orthodox, and God will fight for you." Valens rode on. The monk ran alongside and repeated the demand, and repeated it a third time. The emperor, provoked past patience, ordered him thrown into a place from which he would not come out: the sources describe a deep pit choked with thorns and mire beside the road. Isaac was pulled from it — the received account says by three angels, and the saint himself is quoted as saying so — and overtook the column again.

The second word he spoke was sharper than the first. If the churches were restored, Isaac told him, the emperor would return victorious; if not, he would be defeated, taken, and burned alive, and would not see the city again. Valens, unnerved but unmoved, gave the monk into the custody of two of his officers, Saturninus and Victor, with orders that he be held until the emperor came back to deal with him — a sentence that turned, in the event, into the guarantee of Isaac's safety and the occasion of his fame, for it made the two men witnesses.

The fulfilment

On 9 August 378 the Roman field army was destroyed by the Goths at Adrianople. Valens disappeared in the rout. The report that reached Constantinople — and that the Church has always read as the fulfilment of Isaac's word — was that the wounded emperor was carried into a farmhouse or barn, that the Goths, not knowing whom they had cornered, set the building alight, and that he was burnt to death in it with those who had brought him there. No body was ever recovered.

Saturninus and Victor set Isaac free, and the city received him as a prophet. It is worth saying plainly what the tradition asks the reader to notice: the monk did not foretell a victory, he foretold a judgement, and he staked his own life on it in the open road, before an army, against an emperor. The confessor's title he bears rests on that morning and on the pit.

Theodosius, and the monastery outside the walls

Theodosius the Great (379–395) came east as the Nicene answer to Valens, and Saturninus and Victor — now his men — brought Isaac to him. The emperor received the old ascetic with reverence, and the tradition credits Isaac's counsel with a share in the two acts that reversed the Arian settlement: the expulsion of the heretical clergy from the churches of the capital and the restitution of the churches to the Orthodox. The Second Ecumenical Council met at Constantinople in 381, and the synaxaria place Isaac in the city among the ascetics who supported its confession against the Arians and the Pneumatomachi; he was not a bishop and did not subscribe, but the monastic constituency he headed was one of the forces that made the Council's verdict stick in the streets.

Isaac wished to go back to the desert. Saturninus and Victor would not let him, urging that the city needed him more than the wilderness did; Saturninus gave land in the Psamathia quarter outside the walls, near the Golden Gate, and built there the monastery of which Isaac became the first abbot. This house is, on the tradition's own reckoning and on the best historical evidence, the earliest monastery of Constantinople — the beginning of the coenobitic life inside the capital, and the parent of the whole Byzantine urban monasticism that followed. Isaac governed it as a father of monks and, no less, as a resource for the city: the notices insist on his care for laypeople who came for counsel and for the poor who came for bread.

Repose, and the name of Dalmatus

In great old age Isaac laid the government of the house on his disciple Dalmatus, a former officer of the second schola of the imperial guard who had entered the monastery with his son Faustus. Isaac then reposed, by the common reckoning about 383, on the thirtieth of May, and was buried in his own monastery.

The house he founded came to be called, from his successor, τὰ Δαλμάτου — "the monastery of Dalmatus," or "of the Dalmatians." Its abbots held the primacy among the monasteries of Constantinople and bore the title of archimandrite and exarch of the monks of the city; Dalmatus himself broke a forty-eight-year enclosure in 431 to lead the monks of the capital in procession against Nestorius, and the monastery stood for the Council of Ephesus. Its later abbots recur through Byzantine history — it is still the great house of the city in the eighth and ninth centuries, when John of Kathara knew it. Isaac is commemorated together with Dalmatus and Faustus on August 3 as the three fathers of that monastery, and it is from the monastery's borrowed name that he is universally styled, a little misleadingly, "Isaac of Dalmatia."

Veneration and later cultus

Isaac was kept from the first in the Synaxarion of Constantinople and passed with it into every Byzantine calendar; the Menaion of May 30 gives him a full office with canon, kathismata and stichera, celebrating the ascetic and the man who withstood a king.

The house he founded outlived him by five centuries and produced further saints of its own. Four and a half centuries after Isaac, its abbot Hilarion the New of Dalmatia (†845, commemorated June 6) governed Dalmatou through the whole of the second Iconoclasm and was imprisoned, starved, flogged and exiled by Leo V and Theophilos for the holy icons — so that the founder who defied Valens and the abbot who defied the iconoclasts belong to a single continuous history of one Constantinopolitan monastery, kept in the calendar on May 30, August 3 and June 6.

His most extraordinary afterlife is Russian. Peter the Great was born on 30 May 1672, Isaac's day, and took the saint of his birthday as his own patron and, by extension, a patron of the dynasty and of the new capital. The successive churches of St Isaac of Dalmatia in St Petersburg — a wooden chapel, then Matarnovi's church, then Rinaldi's, and finally the vast granite and gilt cathedral of Auguste de Montferrand (1818–1858), one of the largest domed churches in the world — carry the name of an obscure fourth-century Syrian solitary into the middle of imperial Russia. There is no more improbable dedication in Christendom, and no better illustration of how a Byzantine synaxarion entry can become a national monument.