Sabbas the Sanctified

The life of Sabbas is known in exceptional detail because his biographer, Cyril of Scythopolis, was a monk of his desert who wrote within a generation of his death, gathering his information from elders who had lived with the saint. The Life of Sabas is one of the fullest and most reliable of all Byzantine hagiographies, and the account below follows it.

Origins and early life

Sabbas was born in 439 at Mutalaska, a village in the district of Caesarea in Cappadocia, to John (surnamed Konon), an officer of the imperial army, and his wife Sophia. When Sabbas was five his father was posted to Alexandria and took his wife with him, leaving the boy and the family estate in the charge of a maternal uncle. Ill-treatment there, and a bitter quarrel between this uncle and a paternal uncle over the guardianship and the property, drove the child from home; at the age of eight he entered the nearby monastery of Flavianae, and there he found his vocation.

Cyril preserves the memories that the monks kept of the boy: his rapid mastery of letters and of the whole Psalter, and above all his early command of the appetites. Working one day in the monastery orchard he was seized by the wish to eat an apple before the appointed hour; taking one, he checked himself, threw it to the ground and trampled it, and made a rule never again to eat apples — a small act the tradition treasured as the seed of his lifelong self-mastery. When his uncles, reconciled, tried to draw him back to the world and to marriage and the management of his inheritance, he refused, and at seventeen received the monastic tonsure. He remained about ten years at Flavianae.

Coming to Palestine and formation in the desert

Drawn to the holy places and to the great desert fathers of Palestine, Sabbas came to Jerusalem around 456, when he was eighteen, and sought out Euthymius the Great (January 20), the most celebrated ascetic of the Judaean wilderness. Euthymius, who did not receive beardless youths into the solitary life of his own lavra, sent him down to the neighbouring coenobium governed by Theoctistus, where Sabbas was schooled in the disciplined common life. There he laboured in perfect obedience, carrying water, gathering wood, and serving the brethren, and there Euthymius, watching his progress, gave him the name paidariogerōn — the "child-elder," old in judgement while young in years. Euthymius took him, with the deacon Domitian, into the deep desert of Rouba for the weeks of Great Lent, forming him in the extremes of the anchoretic life.

After the death of Euthymius in 473 Sabbas withdrew ever further into solitude, living for some years in the wilderness by the Jordan and in the harsh country south-east of Jerusalem, near the Dead Sea. Cyril describes a period of four years passed in almost total isolation before, in about 478, when he was thirty-nine, Sabbas settled in a cave high on the eastern cliff of the Kidron gorge, reached only by a rope, in one of the most forbidding landscapes of the inhabited world. There he lived alone five years, and there, as his fame spread, disciples began to gather at the foot of his crag.

The Great Lavra

From about 483 the community that formed around Sabbas in the Kidron ravine became the Great Lavra — the monastery known to later ages as Mar Saba. Its organisation followed the lavriotic pattern rather than the cenobitic: the monks lived as semi-anchorites, each in his own cell or cave scattered along the gorge, keeping silence and solitude through the week and coming together only on Saturdays and Sundays for the common services and a shared meal, after which they returned to their cells with the week's provisions and the raw material of their handwork. It was a mode of life demanding proven maturity, and Sabbas governed it with a shepherd's discernment, tempering the severity of the desert to the strength of each brother.

The early years brought their trials. Cyril relates that when Sabbas first came to his cliff-cave he shared it with a lion, which withdrew before the monk's prayer — one of the desert stories that fixed the lion in the saint's iconography. More pressing was the community's need of water in that arid ravine, which was met, the Life says, by a spring that opened at the foot of the tower after Sabbas's prayer, and flows still. As the brotherhood grew he built the churches of the Lavra: first the small cave-church later dedicated to Saint Nicholas, then, on a site he regarded as shown him by God (the "God-built church," theoktistos), the great church of the Mother of God that remains the heart of the monastery.

Sabbas himself long shrank from ordination, holding the priesthood incompatible with a monk's humility; but in 490 the Patriarch Sallustius of Jerusalem ordained him priest and consecrated the Lavra's church. It is to this — his consecration to offer the Holy Mysteries, joined to the transparent holiness of his life — that the tradition traces his epithet the Sanctified (Hēgiasmenos), which distinguishes him among the many monastic Sabbases of the calendar.

Archimandrite of the anchorites; the many monasteries

In 494 the Patriarch of Jerusalem appointed Sabbas archimandrite and exarch over all the monks of Palestine who lived the eremitic and lavriotic life, while Theodosius the Cenobiarch (January 11) was set over all who lived in coenobia. Between them the two friends governed the whole monastic world of the Holy Land, and their joint authority made the Palestinian desert one of the decisive forces in the Church of the age.

Sabbas was the founder of many houses. Besides the Great Lavra he established the New Lavra (507); the coenobium of the Cave (Spelaion); the fortress-monastery of Castellium (492), which he raised on the ruins of an ancient stronghold and cleansed of the demons that were said to haunt it; the "Little Coenobium" that served as a novitiate for the Great Lavra; and the monasteries of the Scholarius, of Heptastomos, of Zannos and of Jeremias, together with hospices for pilgrims at Jericho and at Jerusalem. Through these foundations the ordered ascetic life was carried across the whole wilderness between Jerusalem and the Jordan.

Not all the desert accepted his governance. Twice a faction of discontented monks rose against him — the second time some sixty of them, who could not endure his authority — and Sabbas, rather than fight for his place, withdrew in silence to the region of Scythopolis and Nicopolis, founding new communities there, until the Patriarch recalled him and settled the rebels in the New Lavra. That house later became, to Sabbas's grief, a seed-bed of the Origenist speculation — the pre-existence of souls and kindred doctrines — that troubled Palestinian monasticism after his death and was condemned under Justinian; the aged Cyriacus the Hermit was among those who resisted it.

Defender of Chalcedon; the embassies to the emperors

Sabbas was an unwavering adherent of the Council of Chalcedon (451) and its confession of the two natures of Christ, at a time when successive emperors and much of the East leaned toward the anti-Chalcedonian party. Under his leadership and that of Theodosius the monks of Palestine became the mainstay of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy in the region, and twice the Church sent the old abbot on embassy to Constantinople.

The first journey, about 511–512, was undertaken at the bidding of the Patriarch Elias of Jerusalem, to plead before the Emperor Anastasius I — a supporter of the Henotikon and the opponents of Chalcedon — both for the orthodox confession and for relief and protection for a province worn down by war and by Saracen raids. Cyril tells with relish how the imperial guards, seeing only a ragged and insignificant old monk, would not admit him among the ambassadors, until the emperor learned who he was; Anastasius, disarmed by his humility, received him with honour and granted his petitions, and though he could not move him from Chalcedon he dismissed him with gifts for his monasteries.

The second embassy fell in 531, when Sabbas was about ninety-two. The great Samaritan revolt of 529 had devastated Palestine, and the Patriarch Peter sent Sabbas to the Emperor Justinian I and the Empress Theodora to obtain the remission of taxes for the ruined province, funds for rebuilding the churches, a hospital and a fortress for the desert monks, and the protection of Orthodoxy against the Samaritans, the Origenists and other heresies. Justinian, who venerated him, granted all that he asked. Cyril records that when Theodora begged the saint to pray that she might bear a child, Sabbas declined, unwilling to ask of God an heir who — he foresaw — would be nourished in the doctrines of Severus and trouble the Church more than Anastasius had done: a refusal the tradition remembers as a mark of his prophetic discernment.

Repose

Returning from Constantinople, Sabbas fell ill soon after reaching his Lavra. He named the monk Melitas as his successor, gave his last counsels to the brethren, and after four days of silence died in his cell on 5 December 532, in his ninety-fourth year. He was buried in the Great Lavra in the courtyard between the two churches, where his tomb is still shown and venerated.

Relics and translations

The body of Sabbas remained incorrupt at the Great Lavra for centuries and became one of the desert's treasures. In the age of the Crusades the relics were carried off to the West and came at length to Venice, where they were kept in the church of San Antonino. There they lay until 1965, when — as a gesture of goodwill following the Second Vatican Council and the meeting of Pope Paul VI with the Patriarch Athenagoras — the relics were restored to the monastery of Mar Saba. The incorrupt body was received back into the Lavra it had founded fourteen centuries before, and rests there today, one of the few relics of a great early father returned to its original home.

Veneration and later cultus: Mar Saba and the Sabaite Typikon

The Great Lavra of Sabbas has been inhabited continuously since 483, one of the oldest surviving monasteries in the world and, through the Byzantine and Islamic centuries alike, a school of Orthodox theology, hymnography and liturgical order. Within its walls or its dependencies lived and worked John of Damascus — the great theologian and defender of the icons, who wrote his works there and lies buried in the Lavra — Cosmas of Maiuma the hymnographer, the two confessor-brothers Theodore and Theophanes the Branded, Stephen the Hymnographer the saint's own kinsman, and many another poet and confessor. The monastery gave to the Church a whole tradition of sacred song.

Its most far-reaching legacy is liturgical. The order of services developed at the Lavra — the Typikon of Saint Sabas, also called the Jerusalem Typikon — took shape over generations from a nucleus that the tradition traces to the founder himself. Combined later with the hymnographic riches of the Stoudios monastery of Constantinople, this Sabaite order became, in its "neo-Sabaite" form, the standard Typikon of the Byzantine rite: the framework of the daily cycle, of Vespers, Matins and the Hours, and of the reckoning of feasts and fasts, that governs Orthodox worship to the present day. Few individual saints have shaped the ordinary prayer of the whole Church so deeply.