Theodosius the Cenobiarch

The memory of Theodosius is preserved in exceptional fullness. His disciple Theodore, later bishop of Petra, delivered and wrote a Life of his master within a year of his death; Cyril of Scythopolis, the great biographer of the Judaean monks, added a shorter Life of Theodosius as companion to his Life of Sabbas; and the two saints' careers are so entwined that each life illuminates the other. The account below follows these near-contemporary witnesses.

Origins and early life

Theodosius was born about the year 424 at Mogariassos (Garissos), a village in the district of Caesarea in Cappadocia — the same Cappadocian countryside, and almost the same generation, that produced his friend and fellow-labourer Sabbas, born at Mutalaska not far off. His parents were pious Christians, and the boy was given early to the service of the Church: he became a reader in his village church, and the beauty of the Scriptures, above all the call of Abraham — "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred… unto a land that I will show thee" (Genesis 12:1) — kindled in him the desire to leave all and follow Christ into the desert. Still young, he set out for the Holy Land.

His road took him through Syria, and there he turned aside to the pillar of Simeon the Stylite the Elder, near Antioch. The tradition — told by Theodore of Petra and repeated in the synaxaria — holds that Simeon, seeing the young traveller approach, called him up onto the pillar and greeted him by name, though the two had never met, embraced him, and prophesied that he would become a shepherd of the rational sheep of Christ and would gather a great flock and win many souls. The meeting of the two ascetics — the stylite of the North and the coming cenobiarch of the South — is one of the cherished scenes of the Palestinian monastic memory, and it set the pattern of Theodosius's whole life under the sign of a prophecy.

Ascetic struggle: the cave near Bethlehem

Reaching Jerusalem and venerating the holy places, Theodosius placed himself first under an aged and holy elder named Longinus, whose discernment he prized above all things and whom he would not leave. At the request of a devout woman named Hikelia, who had built a church of the Mother of God on the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem (the church "of the Old Seat," Kathisma), he consented for a time to guide that church; but the press of visitors and the danger of vainglory drove him to seek solitude. He withdrew to a cave a little to the east of Bethlehem — the cave in which, tradition said, the three Magi had lodged on their return from worshipping the newborn Christ, having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod. There, in that cave hallowed by the memory of the first Gentiles to seek the Lord, Theodosius shut himself up in prayer, fasting and tears.

His austerities were severe and unbroken: coarse food, often only wild herbs and soaked pulse, little sleep, ceaseless psalmody, and a discipline of remembering death so constant that — the Life records — he dug his own grave and would stand beside it weeping, asking himself whether he was ready to lie in it. He is said to have passed some thirty years in this hidden warfare before the prophecy of Simeon began to be fulfilled.

The great coenobium

Disciples were drawn to him, at first a handful, then a stream, until the cave could not hold them. When he could no longer refuse them, Theodosius sought a sign: he took a censer with cold, dead coals and carried it through the desert, praying that where God willed his monastery to rise the coals would of themselves catch fire. At a place east of Bethlehem, toward the Dead Sea, the censer kindled of itself; and there — at the spot the Arabs still call Deir Dosi, the monastery of Dosi (Theodosius) — he raised the coenobium that made him famous throughout the Christian world.

Under his rule the community swelled to many hundreds of monks — the sources speak of four hundred and more, some say near seven hundred — drawn from every nation of the Christian East. Theodosius ordered it as a true cenobitic house: all things in common, common table, common prayer, obedience to the superior, manual labour, and the renunciation of every private will — the opposite pole from the lavra, the loose colony of semi-hermits living apart through the week, which Sabbas perfected in the same desert. Because his monks spoke many languages, he built several churches within the monastery so that each nation might hear the Divine Office in its own tongue — one for the Greeks, one for the Armenians, one for the Bessi (the Thracians, or Getae, of the lower Danube, who kept their own speech) — while for the Holy Communion all the brethren gathered together into the great Greek church, to be one body at the one Table. A further church, or oratory, served those troubled by evil spirits, that the mad might not be shut out from the prayers of the community.

Around the monastery Theodosius built up a whole city of mercy. There were guest-houses (xenodochia) for the endless stream of pilgrims and strangers; separate infirmaries for sick monks and for sick laymen; a home for the aged and infirm; care for the insane and the possessed; and a hospice for the dying, with the burial of the dead. In years of famine he fed the countryside from the monastery's stores, and the sources tell of the bread and provisions multiplying under his blessing when they should by every reckoning have run out. The coenobium of Theodosius became a model of the monastery as an engine of charity — worship and works of mercy joined in one household — and the pattern it set passed into the whole later tradition of Byzantine monasticism.

Superior-general of the cenobia, and the defence of Chalcedon

So great had the two friends grown in the esteem of the Church that about the year 494 the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Sallustius, set them jointly over all the monks of Palestine: Sabbas was made archimandrite and exarch of all the anchorites and lavras, and Theodosius archimandrite and exarch of all the cenobia — the communal monasteries. To Theodosius, therefore, belongs the title Cenobiarch, "head of the common life," by which the Church knows him; and the two offices together made Sabbas and Theodosius the visible heads of the whole desert, the strength of Orthodoxy in the Holy Land.

That strength was soon tried. The emperor Anastasius I (491–518) leaned toward the Monophysite party — the followers of Eutyches and of Severus of Antioch, who rejected the definition of the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon (451) that Christ is acknowledged in two natures, divine and human, in one person. Anastasius pressed the Churches of the East to abandon Chalcedon and to embrace the Henotikon and the Severan cause, and he set himself to win the monks of Palestine, whose word carried immense weight with the people. He is said to have sent Theodosius a great sum of gold — thirty pounds, the tradition says — under the name of alms; the old man took it and gave it all to the poor, but did not bend an inch from the faith. When bribes and blandishments failed and the emperor turned to threats and to open pressure for the rejection of the Council, Theodosius, though bowed with age, came forward as the champion of Orthodoxy. Standing in Jerusalem, before a great concourse of monks and people, he cried aloud the words that the tradition has never forgotten: "If anyone does not receive the four holy Ecumenical Councils as he receives the four holy Gospels, let him be anathema!" With Sabbas he rallied the monasteries of the desert, and together they wrote to the emperor in the name of the monks of Palestine, professing the faith of Chalcedon and refusing every compromise. For this Theodosius was for a time driven into exile; but the persecution did not last, and after the death of Anastasius in 518 — some accounts have him restored even before the emperor's death, the emperor relenting before the old man's fearlessness — he returned to his monastery in peace. It is because of this confrontation that the Church honours Theodosius, with Sabbas, as one of the pillars who held the Holy Land to the Council of Chalcedon in the darkest hour of the Monophysite crisis.

Repose

Theodosius governed his community to a very great age. In his last illness, foreseeing his end, he summoned three of the bishops who were his spiritual sons and made his farewell, foretelling the day of his departure. He reposed on January 11, in the year 529, having lived, the tradition agrees, about a hundred and five years — some sixty of them, or more, in the monastic life. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, Peter, together with a vast multitude of monks, clergy and people, came to his burial, and he was laid to rest in the cave of the Magi where his labours had begun. Miracles of healing were reported at his tomb, and his memory was kept from the first as that of one of the greatest fathers of the desert.