Euphratēs RiverThe eighteenth of October, in addition to being the feast-day of Saint Luke the Evangelist, is also the feast-day of another Levantine saint. Saint Ioulianos Saba of Mesopotamia was a fourth-century Syrian ascetic who lived on the banks of the Euphratēs River, and pursued a solitary desert existence there. Celebrated by both Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Ephraim the Syrian, Saint Ioulianos is considered to be one of the most important founding fathers of Syriac monasticism, and his life is treated at length in Blessed Theodoret of Kyrrhos’s History of the Monks of Syria.
Saint Ioulianos [Gk. Ἰουλιανὸς, L. Julian, Ar. Yûliyyân يوليان] was apparently ‘self-taught’, possibly suggesting humble social origins, and lived as an ascetic for many years in the desert outside Edessa, now ar-Ruhâ. He received the honourific cognomen of ‘Saba’, meaning ‘the grey(-headed)’, or ‘the old man’. Following the call of Christ out into the deserts of Mesopotamia, Ioulianos found a small, damp cave on the riverbank ‘not made by hands’, and lived there. He held his meagre, uncomfortable cell to be more valuable than a palace filled with gold and silver. He ate only once a week, subsisting on barley bread taken with some salt, and drinking meagre handfuls of water from a holy well nearby. He counted it as luxury to sing from the Psalter, and to spend long hours in prayer. The lifestyle of the ‘Saba’ began to attract younger men to him, who themselves sought the quietude and austerities of the desert. Ioulianos soon had around him not just a handful of disciples, but a full hundred monastics, who made up a community on the banks of the Euphratēs.
The hundred dwelt in a monastic complex, and emulated Saint Ioulianos’s way of life. The first building they were given permission to make was a store-house for the wild vegetables they would gather for the infirm amongst them, which would spoil and go rotten in the damp cave. Saint Ioulianos instructed them to go out into the wilderness in pairs, and alternatively throughout the day either to stand and sing from the Psalter, or to kneel in contemplative prayer to God.
Saint Ioulianos had a favourite disciple, a tall Iranian youngster named Iakōbos (or James), who followed him at a distance while they were walking in the desert. This Ioulianos did to keep conversation from distracting Iakōbos’s mind from the contemplation of God. One time as they walked Iakōbos saw a huge serpent lying across the path between him and Ioulianos. Iakōbos was stricken with fear, and could not move for a long time. At length he reached down and tossed a pebble at the beast, and only then did he observe that it was dead. He hurried to catch up with his master, and later on in the day he asked Ioulianos about the serpent. At first Ioulianos refused to tell him anything, but as Iakōbos kept insisting, Ioulianos relented. Forbidding his disciple to speak a word about it as long as he was alive, Saint Ioulianos related how he had come across the venomous reptile which had reared up to strike him, but when the hermit had made the Sign of the Cross the serpent fell down dead.
At another time, a well-bred youth named Asteriōn begged Saint Ioulianos to allow him to accompany him into the desert, on a long vigil which would last over a week. Seeing how ill-suited Asteriōn was to such feats of ascesis, Ioulianos refused at first. But the youngster pressed him until at last the elder relented. The youth accompanied Saint Ioulianos into the desert, and for three days he was well. But the sun beat down upon him, and the dry wind scorched his mouth and throat, and though he did not say a word of complaint he succumbed to heat stroke. Ioulianos revived the boy and told him to return to the cave to recover. Weak as he was, though, Asteriōn could not find the way. Ioulianos knelt down and wept, praying to God to save the young man, and then the wonder – the streams of the saint’s tears became a holy well of pure, cool spring water. With this the holy man tended to Asteriōn’s heat stroke, and quenched his thirst, and by God’s grace the youth was saved.
Asteriōn would go on to become a great ascetic himself, and would become the spiritual father and mentor of the bishop Akakios of Beroia (that is, Aleppo). Lifelong Asteriōn held his elder Ioulianos in reverence, twice a year bringing him a heavy load of fresh figs on his back. The first time he did this, Ioulianos sternly rebuked Asteriōn, and told him he would not eat them, for it was not seemly for an elder to enjoy the fruit that the younger had sweated and suffered in bringing him. But Asteriōn, as stubborn as ever, refused to put down his sack until Ioulianos agreed to eat the contents. At last the Saba agreed, so long as Asteriōn would put down the sack of fruit at once. Saint Ioulianos did not like it that others should serve him, but out of love for his student he accepted the service that was given to him.
At length, in order to escape from his growing fame and the temptations of praise and vainglory, the Saba set out with a handful of close disciples into the desert and made for Mount Sinai, taking with them only salt and bread, and a cup and sponge for water. Ioulianos climbed Sinai with his pupils, and when he had ascended there, he and his disciples built with their own hands a little chapel at the summit where Moses hid from God, which is actually still standing today, and is governed under the care of Saint Catherine’s by the autonomous Orthodox Church of Sinai. Once this chapel was completed, Ioulianos returned to the deserts of Mesopotamia.
It later happened that Antioch came under the persecutions of the warmongering, idolatrous Emperor Julian the Apostate – ‘who shared his name,’ as Blessed Theodoret says, ‘but not his piety’. The emperor set out to make war on Persia, breathing threats against Christ’s Church. Ioulianos retreated into his cave and held a vigil in fervent prayer that lasted for ten days. When the Emperor Julian was killed in battle with the Persians, the Saba received a whisper from God telling him what had happened. At once Saint Ioulianos’s prayers of supplication were transformed into hymns of joy. ‘Having rebelled against God who is Creator and Saviour, he has justly been slain at the hand of a subject,’ the Saba said to his disciples.
The Saba also gave voice to the Church’s stand against the impieties of Arius, though it took some persuasion for him to leave his desert solitude. The Arians had shamelessly propagated the lie, that Saint Ioulianos was of their party. In answer to this, Saint Flavianos, then a priest recently ordained from the diaconate, took counsel with his friend Diodoros and with Saint Aphraatēs the Persian, and together they applied to Akakios of Beroia and Asteriōn to ask Saint Ioulianos’s help. Asteriōn, however, having turned to the Arian doctrines himself, was of no help. Akakios alone came to the Saba’s desert abode and, reminding him of the Lord’s admonition to Peter in the Gospel of John – if he loved Him, to ‘feed my sheep’ – asked him to come out with them into Antioch and enter disputations with the Arian party. When it was put to him like this, the Saba agreed, and came out of his desert abode and went with Akakios into the city.
On the way into Antioch, a wealthy woman came out to greet the Saba and his party, and invited them all into her house. She at once began making ready to serve Saint Ioulianos… but one of the household servants came in and told her that her infant son had fallen down a well. The wealthy woman was stricken, but she went right on serving the holy man as though nothing was wrong. When at last, though, Saint Ioulianos asked that her son be brought to him to receive his blessing, the woman could not hide her grief and vexation. And so the Saba asked to be shown the well. The household servants brought him there, and he peered down into it, and saw the young child laughing and playing on the surface of the water below as though nothing was wrong. When the child was brought up, he ran at once to Saint Ioulianos, and recounted that he had seen Saint Ioulianos beckoning to him from above the surface of the water and then holding him up, keeping him from drowning. In this way the Saint requited the hospitality of this kind woman.
Such wonders accompanied Saint Ioulianos all the way into Antioch. However, when he drew near the church, the saint himself was suddenly stricken with a fever, and had to go withindoors to rest. The humble saint told his followers not to despair, and that if health was something God saw fit to give him, He would give it. He prayed to God, touched his forehead to the ground. He went into a sweat and his fever broke. He proceeded into the assembly of the Orthodox Christians, and he healed many who were sick, including a beggar who had been lame since childhood, and a military governor who was bedridden with a strange sickness. In this way he bore witness to the truths of the Orthodox faith, and confounded the falsities and insinuations of the Arians. Saint Ioulianos, having already advanced to a great old age, reposed in peace in the year 367.
Saint Ioulianos Saba was the first of many anchorites to seek struggle in the breathtakingly-beautiful arid landscapes of what is now northeastern Syria and northern Iraq. It may justly be said of him that he founded a tradition – an entire Syriac mode of holiness, if it can be described in so monistic a way – which emphasised extreme renunciations of both physical comfort and social standing, even social standing within the Church. It is with gratitude that we ask of him today: Holy and venerable Ioulianos Saba, humble and gentle athlete of the desert in Edessa and on Sinai, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!
Jabal Mûsâ Summit Greek Orthodox Chapel, Sinai, Ægypt
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