Sabbas of Moscow
Our Venerable Father Sabbas, second Abbot of the Monastery of the Saviour at Moscow
Venerable · d. 1410
Commemorated 13 June — Commemoration with his teacher Andronicus, first abbot of the same house
Sabbas (†1410) was the disciple of Andronicus of Moscow and the second abbot of the Monastery of the Saviour on the Yauza — the Andronikov monastery — succeeding his teacher in 1395, when Andronicus in extreme old age laid down the government of the house and withdrew into silence. He is one of the two disciples named by St Joseph of Volokolamsk — Sabbas and Alexander — for the virtue and the skill in icon-painting for which that monastery became famous, and he governed it through the years in which Andrei Rublev and Daniel the Black were its monks. He reposed in 1410 and was buried in the monastery church beside Andronicus; the two burials were identified together in the excavations of 1993. The Church keeps him on June 13, with his teacher.
Almost nothing of Sabbas's own history is transmitted. He was a disciple of Andronicus in the Monastery of the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands on the Yauza at Moscow, the house founded by St Alexis, Metropolitan of Moscow about 1361 and governed from the beginning by Andronicus, a disciple of Sergius of Radonezh. Sabbas therefore stands in the third rank of the Sergian succession: Sergius, Andronicus, Sabbas.
In 1395, Andronicus — grown very old, and seeking the hesychia which was the end of the whole observance — resigned the abbacy to Sabbas and withdrew from the government of the brotherhood. Sabbas ruled the monastery for some fifteen years, the last nine of them after Andronicus's repose in 1404.
The one substantial testimony to his person is the sentence of St Joseph of Volokolamsk, who in the next century, writing of the great generation of Muscovite monastic painters, names the disciples of Andronicus — Sabbas and Alexander — and praises them for a virtue and a skill that he does not separate: their asceticism and their icon-painting are commended together, as one thing. This is the earliest and the firmest evidence for what the Saviour monastery was, and Sabbas is one of the two men in it. It was during his abbacy that Andrei Rublev and Daniel the Black were monks of the house and went out from it, in 1405–1408, to the Annunciation cathedral in the Kremlin and the Dormition cathedral at Vladimir.
He reposed in 1410 and was buried in the monastery's cathedral church. In 1993, archaeological work beneath the ancient altar of that church uncovered burials identified as those of the first two abbots, Andronicus and Sabbas.
Feast and commemoration
June 13 (church date; New Calendar civil June 13; Old Calendar civil June 26), kept in the Russian calendar and by the OCA, ordinarily in one commemoration with his teacher Andronicus: the Russian books style the day's notice for the venerable Andronicus and Sabbas, abbots of Moscow. He is also numbered among the saints of the Radonezh succession. Depending on the date of Pascha, June 13 may fall before the Apostles' Fast or within it — the fast begins on the Monday after the Sunday of All Saints and so has no fixed start — and the day's position is therefore not asserted here.
The centre of his cult, as of Andronicus's, is the Saviour-Andronikov Monastery in Moscow.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and thy longing for God brought forth fruit in abundance by the labour of thy sighs a hundredfold; and thou didst become a shining lamp, illumining the world by thy miracles, O Sabbas our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Sabbas is painted in the venerable Russian abbot type — the dark mantiya and analavos, bare-headed or in the koukoulion, bearded, the hand raised in prayer and a scroll in the left. He is almost never shown alone: the standard composition is the two first abbots together, Andronicus and Sabbas flanking the Image of the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands or the model of their cathedral, and he is distinguished from his teacher only by the inscription and by being the younger and less grey of the two. He appears also among the ranks of the Radonezh saints in the composite icons of that company.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection, and none was stored. He is additionally at risk of misidentification, since images labelled simply Преподобный Савва belong far more often to Sabbas of Storozhevsk, whose iconography is abundant; any candidate for this entry must be read from its inscription and its context in the Andronikov monastery before it can be accepted.
Disputed questions
- The extent of the record. This is the whole of it. There is no Life of Sabbas of Moscow, no miracle-account, and no transmitted detail of his origins, his age, or the manner of his repose. Two dates (1395, 1410), one see, one sentence of Joseph of Volokolamsk, and a grave: an honest entry cannot be longer, and no narrative has been supplied here to fill it out.
- Not to be confused — and this is the confusion most likely to occur — with Sabbas of Storozhevsk (†December 3, 1406), the founder of the Storozhev monastery at Zvenigorod near Moscow. The two are contemporaries; both are Muscovite abbots of the Sergian tradition; both bear the name Sabbas; both died within four years of each other. They are certainly distinct: Sabbas of Storozhevsk was a direct disciple of St Sergius, briefly abbot of the Trinity monastery itself, and founded his own house at Zvenigorod at the request of Prince Yuri Dmitrievich, and is a wonderworker with an uncovering of relics in 1652 and a great popular cult; this Sabbas was a disciple of Andronicus, at one remove from Sergius, and never left the monastery on the Yauza.
- Not to be confused, further, with the other Sabbases of the calendar: Sabbas the Sanctified (December 5), Sabbas of Serbia (January 14), Sabbas the Goth (April 12) or Sabbas Stratelates (April 24).
- Alexander. The second disciple named by Joseph of Volokolamsk, Alexander of the same monastery — later its abbot, and the builder of the surviving stone cathedral — is not himself in the calendar and has no entry here; he is named because the early testimony names the two together.