Saint Sabbas of Jerusalemالقديس سابا القدسي
Today, the fifth of December, is the feast-day of Saint Sabbas, one of the great monastic fathers of the Middle East in Late Antiquity. Saint Sabbas, who in the Orthodox Church is often known by his cognomen ‘the Sanctified’, established the Dayr Mâr Sâbâ, one of the holiest and most visited monastic houses in the Holy Land, which to this day continues as a shining jewel of the Jerusalem Patriarchate. He is venerated throughout the Holy Land and throughout the Orthodox Church.
Saint Sabbas [Gk. Σάββας, Syr. Sava’ ܣܒܐ, Ar. Sâbâ سابا] was born to Cappadocian Greek parents, Iōannēs and Sophia, in Moutalaski – which is in the modern-day Talas district in the Turkish province of Kayseri (Cæsarea) – in the year 439. His father, Iōannēs, was a commander in the Roman Army, who was placed on assignment in Alexandria when the future Sabbas was about five years old. His father left the boy in the care and tutelage of a kinswoman named Hermia. Unfortunately, Hermia was something of a weak governess. The boy’s uncles were given free reign over his property and fell to squabbling over it. As a result, he was sent into the monastery of Saint Flavian and given to the monks to study. When his father returned three years later, the boy had already renounced the world and had dedicated himself to the celibate service of God. Though his parents entreated and begged him to return to sæcular life and marriage and siring children, the young Sabbas adamantly insisted that he stay with the monks.
In particular, he loved reading from the Psalter. He performed all that was asked of him without complaint, even the menial duties, and loved the sixty-five monastic brethren with whom he lived, seeking to learn from each of them. In being the servant of all, he became the greatest among them. He acquired the virtues and held onto them like precious gems: sobriety, obedience and humility. So great was his virtue as a monk that he worked wonders even as a young man. At one time a baker left his clothing in a red-hot oven. Sabbas went into the oven to fetch the clothes, first making the holy sign of the Cross; he came out of the oven unscathed.
When he was fifteen or sixteen years old, he went to the abbot of Saint Flavian’s and asked his leave to undertake a pilgrimage into the Holy City, there to take up another monastic abode. After a probation of two years, his request was granted, and he went into Jerusalem, staying at the monastery of Saint Passarion that winter. The abbot at Saint Passarion’s, Elpidios, asked Sabbas to stay with them in that monastery, but Sabbas asked and was granted permission to seek out instruction from Euthymios who lived nearby, and who understood the path of hesychasm.
Saint Euthymios received Saint Sabbas in his own monastery, and treated him with great warmth and hospitality, but he forbade him to stay there, and instead recommended him to the care of his friend Saint Theoktistos. His reasoning for this seems to have been that he did not want to set the precedent for accepting teenagers into the cœnobitic life. Whatever his reason, however, Saint Sabbas obeyed the word of Euthymios as though it were the word of God Himself, and went and subjected himself to whatever discipline Theoktistos sought to lay upon him. He served in the community of Saint Theoktistos for ten years longer until the age of thirty, in fasting and vigil and prayer, and showed great love for his monastic brethren, as well as great skill and diligence in holding the Divine Liturgy and the monastic hours.
After the repose of the saintly abbot Theoktistos, Saint Sabbas asked the permission of his successor as abbot, Logginos, to go out into the wilderness and lead the life of a solitary anchorite and hesychast. After taking counsel with Saint Euthymios and considering the great virtue of the young monk, Abbot Logginos gave his assent, and Saint Sabbas went to live in a cave some short ways south of the abbey of Saint Theoktistos. Here he prayed, held vigil, fasted five days out of the week, and made crafts with the work of his hands, and brought them to the monastery on the sixth day where he also partook of food and the Eucharist. During Great Lent Saint Sabbas stayed with Saint Euthymios and one of his disciples named Dometian in a desert place in the Wâdî al-Jûz. There they fasted, even barely drinking water, and prayed constantly. Saint Euthymios reposed in the Lord on the twentieth of January, 473.
This wâdî was the place which Saint Sabbas chose for his desert strivings, though he went out further into the desert and lived in a cave there, guided by an angel of God. This became the centre of the Dayr Mâr Sâbâ. Saint Sabbas himself forged a close friendship with Saint Theodosios the Cœnobiarch at this time, and attracted to himself some 150 hermits and monks who together built the lavra. In the early days of the monastery, the ancient Enemy of mankind set eagerly to work sowing discord among the monks, and from their envious hearts they began to grumble against Saint Sabbas, slander him, and asked Patriarch Salloustios to grant them a replacement abbot. Far from granting their wish, however, Salloustios saw through their envy and instead appointed Saint Sabbas a priest as well as confirming him as abbot. Patriarch Salloustios also ordered that the central lavra church be renovated. This occurred in the year 491.
Many new monks came to the Dayr Mâr Sâbâ. Of particular importance among the Sabbaïtes were monks from the Armenian nation, who were drawn to Saint Sabbas’s holy way of life. A certain Bishop Johannes of Köln (not to be confused with the Dominican friar of the Counter-Reformation) even joined the lavra. Saint Sabbas built a cœnobitic monastery at Kastellion, a fortress to the north-east of the lavra. Patriarch Salloustios then proclaimed Saint Sabbas to be the abbot of all the anchorites, and Saint Theodosios to be abbot of all the cœnobites in the Holy Land. Saint Sabbas would joke with Saint Theodosios, that Sabbas was the ‘abbot of the abbots’, while Theodosios was the ‘abbot of the children’, and that Theodosios had the harder job.
Saint Sabbas continued to build new monastic communities and cave-dwellings for hermits. It was during this time in his life as well that he came into conflict with those in authority. If Saint Sabbas had lived an inward life of contemplation, of repentance, of collection of the virtues, he had not forgotten that in the outward world action is sometimes demanded. Emperor Anastasios I Dikoros, who sympathised with the more doctrinaire Monophysites, had begun deporting and exiling Chalcedonian priests and bishops on charges of ‘Nestorianism’. Soon even the new Chalcedon-supporting Patriarch of Jerusalem, Salloustios’s successor Elias, found himself a target of political repression, for his support of the Patriarch of Antioch, Flavian II. Saint Sabbas himself travelled to Constantinople to protest this action and defend Elias in speech, and subsequently organised the anchorites and monks of Dayr Mâr Sâbâ to stage a protest and defend Elias with their bodies. These actions were only partially successful and Elias was still sentenced to exile, where he reposed in the Lord. But Saint Sabbas and Saint Theodosios were able to successfully convince the Jerusalem Synod to appoint Iōannēs III to the Jerusalem Patriarchate. Although Iōannēs was an Alexandrian, his sympathies had been with the more moderate Miaphysite party, and he later embraced the Council of Chalcedon with both arms. In this way, the Chalcedonian creed was saved from being completely suppressed in the Christian East.
Saint Sabbas made a second trip to Constantinople at the age of ninety-two, where he met Emperor Justinian. Here again his pleas were for mercy and for good works. He interceded with the Emperor to spare the populace of the Holy City from a general political repression, which he had planned on account of the Ben Sabar revolt. While he had the ear of the Emperor, Sabbas also encouraged him to promote infrastructure and public architecture in the Holy Land, and prophesied that in so doing Emperor Justinian would win back the West for the Empire (which he did). Sabbas also spent the last years of his life preaching against the various hæresies which threatened the Church. He also by his prayers brought the rain which ended a drought which had plagued the Holy Land for five years following the exile of Patriarch Elias.
Saint Sabbas reposed on the fifth of December, 532, having striven lifelong in monastic asceticism, prayer, fasting and almsgiving. He was recognised as a saint almost immediately. When his relics were uncovered fifteen years later, in the translation from Jerusalem to Constantinople, they were found to be incorrupt. His importance for the life of the Church in his own time was so great that his life was committed to writing by the monk Kyrillos of Skythopolis in 557. The relics of Saint Sabbas rested in Constantinople until 1204. When the Crusaders burnt and pillaged Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, Saint Sabbas’s remains were among the plunder that was stolen and carted off to Venice. It was only in 1965, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, that the Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI formally apologised to the Eastern Orthodox Church and – as a gesture of goodwill and repentance – returned the relics of Saint Sabbas to Dayr Mâr Sâbâ in Jerusalem. Great and venerable father Sabbas, humble servant of all and teacher of monks and anchorites, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!
Apolytikion for Saint Sabbas of Jerusalem, Tone 8:
With the streams of your tears you cultivated the barrenness of the desert;
And by your deep sighs, you bore fruit a hundredfold in your labours.
You became a luminary, shining upon the world with miracles.
O our righteous Father Sabbas, intercede with Christ God that our souls be saved!
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