The Desert of Jerusalem

After five years at the lavra of Pharan, Euthymius and his inseparable companion Theoctistus withdrew into the deep wilderness east of Jerusalem and found a cave in the cliffs of a precipitous ravine — the gorge that drains toward the Dead Sea, traditionally identified with the Wadi Mukellik — which became the nucleus of a monastery. As men gathered to them, this first foundation was organized as a coenobium in the wadi under Theoctistus, the lower cenobium, while Euthymius, who loved stillness above all, later withdrew to higher ground where his own lavra arose. This file traces that founding (from c. 411 onward), the partnership with Theoctistus, the growth of the community, and the harsh and beautiful topography of the Judean desert that made the whole pattern possible.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)

From Pharan into the Wilderness

When Euthymius reached the Holy Land — at twenty-nine, having left Melitene in Armenia (see Armenia and Melitene and The Journey to the Holy Land) — he did not strike out alone into the desert but attached himself to an existing community: the lavra of Pharan, some six miles east of Jerusalem, one of the oldest of the Judean foundations (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 6; trans. Price 1991). There he lived in a cell outside the lavra, learning the regional discipline and supporting himself by the work of his hands, and there he formed the friendship that would shape the rest of his life. His neighbor was a monk named Theoctistus, and Cyril reports that the two became of one mind, “so united in their pursuit of the same goal” that they were scarcely to be separated (Life of Euthymius 6–7; Price 1991). The bond between them is the human foundation of everything that follows: the two monasteries that grew out of their partnership are inseparable in conception as the men were inseparable in life.

After about five years at Pharan, the two withdrew further. Cyril’s narrative places this around the second decade of the fifth century — the broad scholarly placement of the foundation is c. 411 — when, each January, the desire for deeper solitude drove them out of the lavra and into the untrodden wilderness toward the Dead Sea (Life of Euthymius 7; Price 1991; Chitty 1966; Binns 1994). What began as a Lenten retreat into the deep desert became, when they found their place, a permanent settlement. The lifelong pattern of withdrawal in Lent — Euthymius going out each year into the inner desert until Palm Sunday — is treated in its own right in The Ascetic and the Solitary; here it is the seed of a foundation.

The Cave in the Cliffs of the Ravine

The place they found was a gorge. Cyril describes a deep and terrible ravine, and high in its cliffs a cave, difficult of access, into which Euthymius and Theoctistus climbed and which they took for their dwelling (Life of Euthymius 7–8; Price 1991). The ravine is traditionally identified with the Wadi Mukellik, the gorge that cuts eastward through the Judean wilderness on its long descent toward the Dead Sea — a steep, waterless cleft of the kind that scores the whole eastern slope of the Judean plateau. The cave in its wall, which would become the heart of the cenobium, set the physical character of the foundation: not the open plain of the Egyptian Nitria but a vertical desert of cliff and torrent-bed, where cells could be cut or built into the rock and where water had to be hunted in cisterns and seasonal pools.

For a time the two lived hidden and unprovisioned, fed — in Cyril’s telling — by the Saracens who passed through the steppe and, on at least one occasion, by a more direct providence (Life of Euthymius 8; Price 1991). Cyril’s reports of miraculous provision in these early years are given here as his testimony, pinned to the Life, not asserted as independently established events (per METHODOLOGY §3.5; on Cyril’s reliability and the place of the miraculous in his work, see Flusin 1983 and Cyril of Scythopolis’s Life). What is not in doubt is the shape of the settlement: a hidden cave in a ravine, two ascetics, and the slow gathering of others.

The Lower Cenobium under Theoctistus

The solitude did not last, because solitude of this quality attracts company. Shepherds and Saracens spread word of the two ascetics in the gorge, and men seeking the monastic life began to come and ask to stay (Life of Euthymius 8–9; Price 1991). Euthymius, who from the first preferred stillness and the solitary cell, did not want to govern a crowd; and so the community that gathered around the cave was organized as a coenobium — a fully communal monastery, with shared refectory, common rule, and common worship — and placed under the direction of Theoctistus, while Euthymius retained the role of spiritual father over both men and discipline (Life of Euthymius 9; Price 1991; Binns 1994). The cave-church in the cliff became the monastery’s sanctuary, and the buildings of the cenobium rose in and beside the wadi below it.

This is the foundation known ever after as the lower cenobium, or simply the monastery of Theoctistus: a coenobitic house set in the wadi, governed by Theoctistus, the senior communal monastery of the Euthymian group (Life of Euthymius 9, and passim where Cyril names “the monastery of Theoctistus”; Price 1991). Its position in the gorge gave it its name and its function. It was the accessible house — the one a traveler or a postulant reached first, lower down and nearer the route — and it became the place where men entering the desert life were received, housed, and formed before any question of greater solitude arose. The complementary roles of the two houses, with the cenobium as the school of formation and the lavra as the colony of the proven, are set out fully in The Monastic Pattern; the point here is that the cenobium came first, as the original foundation, and that its governor was Euthymius’s own companion.

The Lavra on Higher Ground

Euthymius, however, was not a coenobiarch by temperament. Cyril is explicit that he loved stillness, hesychia, and that the growth of the community in the wadi was for him a burden as much as a consolation; again and again the Life shows him retreating from the press of men toward solitude (Life of Euthymius 9, and the Lenten withdrawals at 7 and after; Price 1991). In time he left the daily governance of the cenobium wholly to Theoctistus and moved to higher ground, and there, as disciples followed who were judged fit for the solitary life, his own lavra was founded.

A lavra (Greek laura, literally a “lane” or “alley”) was a different institution from a cenobium: not a single communal household but a colony of separate cells — caves or small huts — scattered around a central core of church and refectory, in which the monks lived through the week as semi-anchorites, each alone at his prayer and handwork, and gathered only on Saturday and Sunday for the common synaxis, the Eucharist, and a shared meal, before dispersing again to their cells (Chitty 1966; Binns 1994; on the form, The Monastic Pattern). It was a middle way between the full community of the cenobium and the total isolation of the hermit, and it would become the characteristic institution of the Judean desert.

Cyril and the later tradition date the founding of the lavra of Euthymius to 5 May 428 or 429 — the traditional date — though the precise year is not secure. [Disputed: dating of the foundation of the lavra. Cyril of Scythopolis, *Life of Euthymius* 16 (trans. Price 1991), places the foundation by his internal chronology, from which the traditional date of 5 May 428/429 is derived; modern scholars vary in the absolute year they assign within Cyril's relative scheme — see the discussions of Cyril's chronology in Binns, *Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ* (1994), and Chitty, *The Desert a City* (1966), neither of which fixes a single uncontested calendar year.] What is firmly attested is the two-house structure that resulted and the sequence that produced it: cenobium below under Theoctistus, founded first; lavra above under Euthymius, founded afterward as the colony of solitaries.

The Cenobium as the Training-House of the Lavra

The genius of the arrangement was that the two houses were not rivals but a single graded system. The lower cenobium served as the training-house: novices and newcomers were received there, formed in obedience and the communal disciplines, taught the office and the manual labor of the desert, and proved in the ordinary life of a community before they were judged ready for the harder, more dangerous solitude of the lavra (Life of Euthymius 9, 16; Price 1991; Binns 1994). Only when a man had been so formed and tested was he admitted to a cell in the lavra to live as a semi-anchorite. Euthymius held firmly to this order and to the principle behind it — that solitude is the reward and danger of the mature, not the starting-point of the beginner — and the most famous illustration of his rigor on the point belongs to the next generation: when the young Sabas came to him around 456 seeking the solitary life, Euthymius judged him too young for the lavra and sent him down to be formed in the cenobium of Theoctistus first (Life of Euthymius 16; Life of Sabas 7–8; Price 1991). The structure Euthymius built thus shaped the very man who would carry Palestinian monasticism to its height (see Father of the Desert and Sabas and the Next Generation, and the parallel collection St. Sabbas the Sanctified).

How the Community Grew

From its hidden beginning the foundation grew steadily, by the gravitational pull that the desert exerted on the spiritually serious. Cyril records a succession of arrivals: monks from Pharan and elsewhere drawn by Euthymius’s reputation; men of the surrounding country; and — most distinctively for the Euthymian foundation — the Saracens of the steppe, whose chief Aspebetos came to Euthymius with his afflicted son, was converted and baptized Peter, and was eventually consecrated bishop of the tent-dwelling Arab converts, the “Camp” (Parembole), that settled near the monastery (Life of Euthymius 10, 15; Price 1991). The conversion of the Saracens is one of the most important episodes of the Life and is treated in full in The Converted Saracens; here it belongs to the story of how the community grew, for the Parembole became a Christian population on the monastery’s doorstep, a diocese fed by the desert.

The growth had a recognizable rhythm. Euthymius’s instinct was always to flee the crowd toward deeper solitude, and the more men gathered, the further he tended to withdraw — into the inner desert each Lent, and at one point away to the wilderness of Ruba and the region of the Dead Sea entirely, before being drawn back (Life of Euthymius 11–13; Price 1991). The paradox that Cyril builds his narrative on is that the saint’s flight from fame produced fame, and his flight from community produced communities: each withdrawal seeded a new settlement or enlarged the old. By the time of his death in 473 (at the age of ninety-six, by Cyril’s reckoning), the lavra and its cenobium stood as established institutions with a population of monks, an attached Christian Arab diocese, and a network of younger foundations and disciples reaching across the desert (Life of Euthymius 39–40; Price 1991; Binns 1994).

The Topography of the Judean Desert

The shape of Euthymius’s monasticism cannot be separated from the land it grew in. The Judean desert is the strip of rain-shadow wilderness that falls away eastward from the high ridge of Jerusalem and Bethlehem — some 3,000 feet above sea level — down to the shore of the Dead Sea, the lowest dry land on earth, roughly 1,300 feet below sea level. In the space of barely fifteen miles the terrain drops more than four thousand feet, and the moisture that the Mediterranean winds carry up the western slope is wrung out before it crosses the watershed, so that the eastern descent is bone-dry: a chaos of bare limestone hills, soft chalk badlands, and deep dry torrent-beds — the wadis — that channel the rare violent rains down toward the Jordan rift and the Dead Sea (Chitty 1966; Binns 1994).

This was a desert close to a city. Unlike the vast Egyptian wastes of Scetis and Nitria, the Judean wilderness lay within a day’s walk of Jerusalem and its holy places; the desert and the patriarchal Church were neighbors, and the proximity is one reason the Palestinian fathers — Euthymius above all — were drawn into the public ecclesiastical struggles of the age in a way the Egyptian solitaries often were not (Binns 1994; on this nearness of desert and city, Father of the Desert). Yet within that short distance the land turned utterly hostile: waterless, shadeless, scored by ravines, and crossed by the nomadic Saracens of the steppe.

Three features of the terrain governed the monastic life directly. First, water: in a land without springs the monks depended on cisterns hewn into the rock to catch the winter runoff, and the management of scarce water is a constant of the Life — including the celebrated episode of rain granted in drought, reported by Cyril and pinned to his testimony as a wonder, not asserted as fact (Life of Euthymius 25; Price 1991; per METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Miracles). Second, the caves and cliffs: the soft chalk and fractured limestone of the wadi walls could be cut or enlarged into cells, and natural caves provided the first dwellings — the cave in the ravine that began the cenobium being the type of the whole (Life of Euthymius 7–8; Price 1991). Third, the graded distances from the inhabited world: a foundation could be set lower and nearer the routes (the cenobium) or higher and more remote (the lavra), so that the very topography supported the graded ascent from community to solitude that defined the Euthymian system. The desert of Jerusalem did not merely house this monasticism; it shaped its institutions.

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius (esp. §§6–16, 25, 39–40) and Life of Sabas (esp. §§7–8). In R. M. Price, trans., Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine (Cistercian Studies 114). Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. Cited by the section numbering of Eduard Schwartz’s critical edition, Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Texte und Untersuchungen 49.2; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1939). (The friendship with Theoctistus at 6–7; the withdrawal and the cave in the ravine at 7–8; the gathering of the community and the cenobium under Theoctistus at 9; the Saracen conversions at 10, 15; the founding of the lavra at 16; the rain in drought at 25; the saint’s death at 39–40.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The standard study of the Judean monasteries; the topography, the cenobium/lavra distinction, the chronology of the foundations, and Cyril as their historian.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The classic narrative of Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism; the geography of the Judean desert and Euthymius’s place in the sweep from Antony to the Arab conquest.)
Flusin, Bernard. Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. (The fundamental study of Cyril’s method and reliability and of the place of the miraculous in his work.)