Sabas and the Next Generation

Euthymius shaped Palestinian monasticism less through any written rule than through the men he formed — above all Sabas the Sanctified, the Cappadocian youth he judged too young for the lavra and sent to be trained in the lower cenobium, and who became the lawgiver of the Judean desert. Around Sabas stands a whole company of disciples named by Cyril of Scythopolis: Domitian the faithful attendant who would not survive his master; Martyrius and Elias, two monks of the lavra who each in turn became patriarch of Jerusalem; Gerasimus of the Jordan, drawn back from Monophysitism to Chalcedon; and Cosmas, Chrysippus, Gabrielius, Stephen, and the young Cyriacus. This file traces the line Euthymius → Sabas → the classical monasticism of the sixth century, reporting the disciples as Cyril attests them.

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

A Father Known by His Children

Euthymius left no monastic rule of his own. Unlike Pachomius in Egypt or, later, his own greatest disciple Sabas, he composed no typikon and bound his followers to no written code; what he left was a manner of life and a body of men who had learned it from him. This is the deliberate emphasis of Cyril of Scythopolis, who structures the Life of Euthymius so that the saint’s influence is measured not in institutions decreed but in disciples formed — and who can then, in the Life of Sabas and the other Lives, follow those disciples forward into the next two generations of the Judean desert (Cyril, Life of Euthymius, throughout; trans. Price 1991; on Cyril’s method, Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors, 1994, ch. 2). The history of Palestinian monasticism, in Cyril’s telling, is a genealogy of spiritual fatherhood, and Euthymius stands near its head. On the principle of formation through a living father rather than a paper rule, see Spiritual Direction and, for the wider institution, Monasticism.

Cyril is, by broad scholarly consensus, the most reliable hagiographer of the Christian East: he wrote within living memory of his subjects, inside the very communities they founded, naming his informants and dating events by consul and indiction (Flusin, Miracle et histoire, 1983; Binns 1994, ch. 2). His list of Euthymius’s disciples is therefore not a hagiographer’s flourish but something close to a documentary record of a fifth-century monastic household — checkable, at several points, against the independent record of the patriarchal succession of Jerusalem. The disciples named below are named because Cyril knew, or knew men who had known, who they were.

Sabas the Sanctified: The Child-Elder

The greatest of Euthymius’s heirs came to him as a boy. Sabas (439–532) was born at Mutalaska near Caesarea in Cappadocia and entered monastic life young, in the monastery of Flavianae in his own country; about the age of seventeen, around 456, he came to Palestine and sought out the holy places and the desert fathers (Cyril, Life of Sabas 2–6; trans. Price 1991). Drawn by the fame of Euthymius, he came to the lavra and begged to be received. But Euthymius — whose lavra was a community of solitaries, cells scattered around a common core, suited to men already tried and stable in the ascetic life — judged the youth too young for so unsupervised a discipline. He would not admit a boy to the lavra’s solitude (Cyril, Life of Sabas 7; Price 1991; on the lavra’s structure, The Monastic Pattern).

Instead Euthymius sent him down to the lower cenobium in the wadi, the coenobitic house governed by his lifelong companion Theoctistus, there to be trained in the common life under obedience and a rule before he should be entrusted with the cell (Cyril, Life of Sabas 7–8; Price 1991; on Theoctistus and the lower house, Father of the Desert). This is one of the most consequential decisions in the history of Eastern monasticism, and Cyril records it with evident relish, for it shows Euthymius’s discernment vindicated by the whole subsequent career of Sabas: the cenobium first, the lavra after, the eremitic freedom earned and not presumed. It is the very pattern Sabas would later impose on his own foundations as law.

Cyril preserves the affectionate name Euthymius gave the boy. Seeing in him a maturity beyond his years, Euthymius called Sabas paidariogeron — “child-elder,” the old man in the young — and prophesied his future greatness (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8; Price 1991; Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, ch. 5). The word is Cyril’s own report of Euthymius’s judgment, and it became the signature image of Sabas in the tradition: the youth whose gravity, obedience, and ascetic seriousness marked him from the start as the elder he would become. Euthymius loved him, took him on his Lenten withdrawals into the deep desert in later years, and treated him as a son (Cyril, Life of Sabas 10; Price 1991; on the withdrawals, The Ascetic and the Solitary).

From Euthymius to the Great Lavra

What Sabas built on this foundation belongs to his own collection (see St. Sabbas the Sanctified), but the line of descent must be marked here, for it is the chief reason Euthymius matters to the later tradition. After Euthymius’s death in 473 — and after years of further solitary discipline, including a long withdrawal east of the Jordan and in the wilderness of the brook Kedron — Sabas in 483 founded the Great Lavra in the gorge of the Kedron southeast of Jerusalem, the monastery known to this day as Mar Saba (Cyril, Life of Sabas 15–18; trans. Price 1991). It became the mother-house of Judean monasticism, and around it Sabas raised a whole network of further foundations.

In time the patriarch of Jerusalem appointed Sabas archimandrite of all the hermits and lavriot monks of the Judean desert, as Theodosius was made archimandrite of the cenobites — the two offices that organized Palestinian monasticism into a single ordered body under the patriarchate (Cyril, Life of Sabas 30; Price 1991; Binns 1994, ch. 5). Through Sabas, the lavriot pattern Euthymius had planted was codified, multiplied, and given a constitution; the typikon of Mar Saba would shape the liturgical and ascetic life of the whole Orthodox world for centuries after. It is in this precise sense that the line runs Euthymius → Sabas → the classical Judean monasticism of the sixth century: the founder of the pattern, the lawgiver who fixed it, and the great age of the desert it produced. Cyril, who wrote both Lives and was himself a monk first of Sabas’s New Lavra and then of the Great Lavra, is the witness who binds the two saints into a single tradition (Cyril, Life of Euthymius, prologue; Life of Sabas, prologue; Price 1991; Chitty 1966, ch. 5). On the trio that crowned this tradition, see The Palestinian Monastic Trinity; and a much later flowering of the same Mar Saba tradition is the great hymnographer and theologian St. John of Damascus, a monk of Sabas’s lavra in the eighth century.

Domitian, the Faithful Attendant

If Sabas is the disciple who carried Euthymius’s work forward, Domitian is the disciple who could not bear to be parted from him. Cyril presents Domitian as Euthymius’s faithful attendant and closest companion in his last years, the monk who served him and remained nearest to him (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 39–40; trans. Price 1991). The two are bound together in Cyril’s account of Euthymius’s death and its immediate aftermath, and Domitian’s end is among the most striking testimonies in the whole Life.

When Euthymius died on 20 January 473 and was buried, Domitian — according to Cyril — would not leave the tomb of his master. He remained beside it in vigil and grief, and on the seventh day after Euthymius’s death he too departed this life, dying at the tomb and being buried with the father he had served (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 40; Price 1991). Cyril reports, further, that Euthymius appeared to Domitian in glory and called him to follow, so that his death was a summons rather than mere sorrow (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 40). This vision and the seven-day vigil are pinned here as Cyril’s testimony, reported as what the Life attests rather than asserted as independently established fact, in keeping with the methodology that governs every wonder in this guide (METHODOLOGY §3.5; on the reading of Cyril’s wonders, The Miracles). What the episode shows, at the level of history, is the intensity of the bond between a desert father and the disciple who attended him — and Cyril’s willingness to record the tradition of Domitian’s death-vigil as he received it from the community’s memory.

Martyrius and Elias: Two Monks Who Became Patriarchs

Among the most historically verifiable of Euthymius’s disciples are two whose later careers are independently attested in the patriarchal succession of Jerusalem. Cyril records that Martyrius and Elias, two monks who had come from Egypt and entered the orbit of Euthymius’s lavra in the time of the Monophysite troubles, each in turn rose to the see of Jerusalem (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 32; Life of Sabas 31; trans. Price 1991). Euthymius is said to have foretold the patriarchates of both while they were still simple monks under his guidance — a prophecy Cyril records and which the event confirmed (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 32; Price 1991).

The independent record bears out the careers, whatever one makes of the prophecy. Martyrius held the patriarchal throne of Jerusalem from 478 to 486, and Elias from 494 to 516; both are figures of the documented Chalcedonian establishment of the Palestinian church in the decades after Euthymius’s death, and Elias in particular was a defender of Chalcedon against the pressures of the Henotikon and was eventually deposed and exiled by the emperor Anastasius for his stand (Cyril, Life of Sabas 31, 50–60, passim; Price 1991; Binns 1994, ch. 9; on the Christological context, Against the Monophysites). That two patriarchs of Jerusalem in the late fifth and early sixth centuries were formed in Euthymius’s community is a measure of how directly his disciples shaped the orthodoxy of the Holy City — the alliance of desert and patriarchate that is among the most important consequences of his life. On the see itself, see Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

Gerasimus and the Return to Chalcedon

The case of Gerasimus illustrates another dimension of Euthymius’s influence: not only the formation of monks but the recovery of those who had strayed into heresy. Gerasimus — the desert father of the Jordan valley, founder of a great lavra near the river and celebrated in his own right in later tradition (the famous story of the lion belongs to his cult) — had, in the turmoil following the deposition of the Chalcedonian patriarch Juvenal, been drawn into the Monophysite party that rejected the Council of Chalcedon (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27; trans. Price 1991).

Cyril reports that Gerasimus was reconciled to Chalcedonian orthodoxy through Euthymius. Coming to the desert father and hearing his teaching, Gerasimus was persuaded of the truth of the Council and returned to communion with the Church, abandoning the error into which the anti-Chalcedonian reaction had carried him (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27; Price 1991; Chitty 1966, ch. 4; Binns 1994, ch. 9). The episode is part of Cyril’s larger portrait of Euthymius as the moral anchor of Chalcedonian orthodoxy in the Palestinian desert during the crisis of 451–453, when the deposition of Juvenal and the usurpation of the see by the Monophysite “patriarch” Theodosius threw the monks into confusion (on which see Against the Monophysites, and, for the imperial dimension, The Empress Eudocia). Gerasimus’s reconciliation shows Euthymius’s authority reaching beyond his own disciples to the wider company of the desert fathers, several of whom — Gerasimus among them — looked to him as the touchstone of right belief.

Cosmas, Chrysippus, and Gabrielius

Cyril names a cluster of further disciples whose later eminence testifies to the quality of the formation Euthymius’s community gave. Three brothers — Cosmas, Chrysippus, and Gabrielius — came from Cappadocia and were received among Euthymius’s monks, and each rose to distinction (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30; trans. Price 1991).

Cosmas became guardian of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem — the staurophylax, keeper of the relic of the True Cross — and was afterward made bishop of Scythopolis, the very city from which Cyril, the hagiographer, came (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30; Price 1991; Binns 1994). This is a connection of more than passing interest: Cyril’s own home church was led by a man formed in Euthymius’s lavra, which helps explain both the hagiographer’s knowledge of the tradition and his veneration for its founder. Chrysippus became, like Cosmas, guardian of the Cross and is known as a writer — several of his homilies and encomia survive, making him one of the few of Euthymius’s disciples to leave a literary corpus of his own (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30; Price 1991; Chitty 1966, ch. 4). Gabrielius, the third brother, became superior of the monastery of St. Stephen at Jerusalem and was renowned for his ascetic gifts (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30; Price 1991). The three brothers together are a small case study in how a desert community fed the leadership of the Palestinian church — its sees, its great relic, and its houses — in the generation after the founder.

Stephen, Cyriacus, and the Memory of the Community

Cyril names still others. A monk Stephen appears among Euthymius’s disciples, and the Lives preserve a number of further figures who passed through the lavra or the lower cenobium and carried its discipline outward (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30, passim; Price 1991).

Of unique importance for the survival of the whole tradition is Cyriacus. Though he came to the desert as a young man near the very end of Euthymius’s life — and so was formed more fully under Euthymius’s successors and under Sabas — Cyriacus lived to an immense age and became one of Cyril of Scythopolis’s principal informants. Cyril visited the aged Cyriacus in his solitude at Sousakim and gathered from him much of what he reports of the first generation of the desert, including matter touching Euthymius himself (Cyril, Life of Cyriacus, passim; Life of Euthymius, prologue; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994, ch. 2). The line from Euthymius thus reaches Cyril’s pen partly through a man who stood at the end of Euthymius’s own lifetime — a reminder that the reliability of the Life of Euthymius rests on a real chain of living memory within the communities the saint founded (on the source and its informants, Cyril of Scythopolis’s Life and The Historical Euthymius).

The Shape of a Tradition

Taken together, the disciples of Euthymius are the argument of his life. He is too often read merely as “the master of Sabas,” and the formation of Sabas is indeed his greatest single legacy; but the company around Sabas shows a wider and more various influence — two patriarchs of the Holy City, a keeper of the True Cross who became a bishop, a writer, superiors of monasteries, a desert father reclaimed from heresy, an attendant whose devotion outlasted his own life, and an informant through whom the memory of the whole reached posterity. Through these men the lavriot pattern, the discipline of stillness, and the firm Chalcedonian orthodoxy that Euthymius embodied were carried into the institutions of the Palestinian church and, through Sabas above all, codified for the centuries to come (Cyril, Life of Euthymius and Life of Sabas, passim; Price 1991; Binns 1994, chs. 5, 9; Chitty 1966, chs. 4–5). The founder who wrote no rule shaped the desert through the men he made — and the next generation, gathered around the child-elder he had discerned in a Cappadocian boy, became the classical age of Judean monasticism.

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius and Life of Sabas, in Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Translated by R. M. Price, with introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Cited by the section numbering of Schwartz’s critical edition, Kyrillos von Skythopolis, 1939. Sabas as a young man sent to Theoctistus’s cenobium and the name “child-elder,” Life of Sabas 7–8; Sabas’s foundation of the Great Lavra, Life of Sabas 15–18; archimandrite of the hermits, Life of Sabas 30; Domitian’s death-vigil at the tomb, Life of Euthymius 40; Martyrius and Elias, Life of Euthymius 32 and Life of Sabas 31; Gerasimus reconciled to Chalcedon, Life of Euthymius 27; Cosmas, Chrysippus, and Gabrielius, Life of Euthymius 30; Cyriacus as informant, Life of Cyriacus and the prologues.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Cyril as historian, ch. 2; the organization of the desert under archimandrites, ch. 5; the Chalcedonian patriarchs of Jerusalem, ch. 9.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Euthymius and his disciples in the sweep of the desert tradition, chs. 4–5.)
Flusin, Bernard. Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. (The reliability of Cyril and the place of the miraculous in his work.)