Cappadocia and the Call East

St. Sabbas the Sanctified was born in 439 at Mutalaska, a village in the territory of Caesarea in Cappadocia, into the household of a military officer, and entered monastic life at the monastery of Flavianae near his home while still a small child. After roughly a decade of formation in Cappadocia, around the age of eighteen he set out for the Holy Land, drawn to the desert monasticism of Palestine. Almost everything we know of his origins comes from a single near-contemporary source, the Life of Sabas by Cyril of Scythopolis, whose unusual closeness to his subject gives his account a reliability rare among hagiographers.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; founder of the Great Lavra)

The One Witness: Cyril of Scythopolis

Before anything can be said about Sabbas’s birth and childhood, the nature of the evidence must be stated plainly, because it governs how every claim in this file is to be received. Practically all that is known of Sabbas the Sanctified derives from a single document: the Life of Sabas written by Cyril of Scythopolis, a Palestinian monk who composed his collection of monastic Lives in the years around 555 to 558, some two decades after Sabbas’s death in 532 (Binns 1994, 23–32; Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas, prologue; trans. Price, Lives of the Monks of Palestine, 1991). The dependence is near-total: where Cyril is silent, we are silent, and where later synaxaria and menaia add detail, they are almost always abbreviating, embroidering, or simply repeating Cyril rather than supplying independent information (Patrich 1995, 11–17).

This single-source situation would normally counsel deep caution. What makes the Life of Sabas an exceptional case — and it is genuinely exceptional within Byzantine hagiography — is the closeness of the author to his subject. Cyril was born at Scythopolis (Bet Shean) around 525, entered monastic life in the Judean desert, and lived in the very lavra Sabbas had founded and in the New Lavra and the monastery of Euthymius; he was, in other words, writing from inside the institutions and the living memory of the man he described (Binns 1994, 23–66; Chitty 1966, 12–13). He tells us himself that he gathered his information from elders who had known Sabbas personally — among them the monk Jeremias and others of the old generation — and from the documentary and oral memory of the monasteries themselves (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 82; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 9–11). His chronology is careful and internally consistent, frequently anchored to datable public events — imperial reigns, patriarchal successions, the great controversies of the age — to a degree that has allowed modern scholars to reconstruct a coherent and largely trustworthy framework for sixth-century Palestinian monasticism (Binns 1994, 33–65; Chitty 1966, 82–142).

The consequence for the present file is twofold. First, the outline of Sabbas’s Cappadocian origins and youth may be reported with more confidence than the corresponding sections of most saints’ lives, precisely because Cyril stands so near the events and the witnesses. Second, and without contradiction, the miracle-stories and ascetic prodigies of his childhood remain hagiographical claims attested by Cyril; in keeping with the methodology of this collection (METHODOLOGY §3.5), they are reported below as what Cyril relates, with his testimony named, and not asserted as bare historical fact. Cyril’s reliability raises the value of his testimony; it does not transmute a devotional narrative into a documentary one.

Birth at Mutalaska, 439

Sabbas was born in the year 439, in a village named Mutalaska in the territory of Caesarea, the metropolis of Cappadocia, in the highlands of central Asia Minor (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 1; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 18). Cyril, with his habitual precision, places the birth in a definite locality — Mutalaska is described as a small place belonging to the district of Caesarea — and the year 439 follows from his chronological framework, which counts Sabbas’s age at fixed points against datable events and yields a death in 532 at the age of ninety-four (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 76, 78; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994, 33–37; Chitty 1966, 82, 110). The Cappadocia into which he was born was a Christian land already famous in the Church’s memory as the country of the great fourth-century fathers — Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa — and a region with deep roots in ascetic life; Sabbas thus came from a homeland saturated with the monastic and theological tradition he would carry east (Chitty 1966, 82; Binns 1994, 149–151).

His parents were a couple of some standing. Cyril names his father John and his mother Sophia, and reports that the father bore the additional name or surname Conon (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 1; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 18). John was a soldier — a military officer attached to a unit; Cyril notes his enrollment in a regiment, the numerus of the Isaurians, which would in due course draw him away to Alexandria in Egypt on military service (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 1; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994, 150). The family was Christian and, on Cyril’s portrayal, not without means, which is consistent with the property disputes that would later trouble Sabbas’s childhood.

A Childhood Disrupted

The shape of Sabbas’s early life, as Cyril tells it, was set by his father’s departure. Posted to Alexandria, John took his wife Sophia with him and left the boy — then very young — in the care of relatives in Cappadocia, entrusting both the child and the management of the family property to a maternal uncle (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 1; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 18–19). The arrangement went badly. According to Cyril, the boy fell into a household riven by quarrels: the uncle to whom he had first been entrusted, and the uncle’s wife, treated him harshly, so that Sabbas removed himself to a paternal uncle; and the two uncles then fell into bitter dispute with one another over the administration and ownership of the property that had been left, the child becoming the occasion and the prize of their rivalry (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 1; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994, 150). Cyril presents this domestic strife with a moral and almost providential point: the disorder and contention of the household became, in his telling, the very thing that drove the boy away from the world and toward God. The unhappiness of a divided family, on this reading, was the lever by which Sabbas was pried loose from worldly inheritance and turned toward the monastic life (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 1; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 18–19).

It is worth registering the literary character of this episode without dismissing its substance. The motif of a saint fleeing a contentious household for the cloister is a hagiographical commonplace, and Cyril shapes the scene to edify. Yet the concrete details — the father’s posting to Alexandria, the entrusting of property to a particular uncle, the shift from one uncle’s house to another’s — are specific and unembellished in the manner of Cyril’s reliable reporting, and there is no reason to doubt the basic situation: a boy left behind by absent parents, in a household where property and affection were both contested (Binns 1994, 150; Patrich 1995, 18–19).

The Monastery of Flavianae

The boy’s response, as Cyril relates it, was decisive and astonishingly early. While still a small child — Cyril gives his age as about eight — Sabbas fled the strife of his relatives’ household and took refuge in a monastery called Flavianae, situated some distance from Mutalaska, where he received the monastic habit and was enrolled among the monks (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 2; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 19; Chitty 1966, 82). The detail that he took the habit at so tender an age is striking, and Cyril does not soften it; it belongs to the portrait of a child whose vocation was, from the first, unusually settled and whose flight from the world preceded any worldly understanding of what he was renouncing.

The monastery of Flavianae was, on the evidence, a coenobitic house — a community of monks living the common life under a rule and a superior — and it was here that Sabbas received his foundational monastic formation: the discipline of obedience, the round of psalmody and prayer, manual labor, and the reading of Scripture, which together constituted the ascetic schooling of a Cappadocian community in this period (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 2–3; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994, 150–151; Patrich 1995, 19–20). Cyril reports that Sabbas remained at Flavianae for roughly ten years, so that the bulk of his boyhood and adolescence — from about the age of eight to about eighteen — was spent within its walls (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 2–3; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 19–20; Chitty 1966, 82).

There is a complication in this period that Cyril records honestly. When Sabbas’s parents, returning from or settling their affairs after Alexandria, attempted to recover their son — to draw him out of the monastery and back into the family and its property — he refused, holding to his monastic vocation against the claims of kin (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 2; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994, 150). The episode reinforces the theme already set: the household and its inheritance are precisely what Sabbas renounces, and his steadfastness as a boy against the appeal of family is offered by Cyril as an early sign of the immovability that would mark the man.

The Apple in the Garden

The single best-known story of Sabbas’s childhood at Flavianae is the episode of the apple, and it must be reported for what it is: a tale of ascetic self-denial attested by Cyril of Scythopolis and offered by him as a sign of the boy’s precocious sanctity, not as an independently verifiable event (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Cyril relates that while Sabbas was working in the monastery’s garden or orchard, he was seized one day by an appetite to eat an apple before the appointed hour — out of season, or before the fruit was permitted to the community — and that he took one in his hand; but recollecting himself, and judging that the desire was a temptation of the enemy clothing sin in a fair appearance, he reproached himself, threw the apple to the ground, and trampled it underfoot, vowing thenceforth never to eat apples again for the rest of his life (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 2; trans. Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 82; Patrich 1995, 19).

Cyril tells the story to make a point about the quality of Sabbas’s asceticism from earliest youth: that his self-denial was not the mere keeping of a rule imposed from without but an interior vigilance, a readiness to renounce even a small and innocent-seeming pleasure for the sake of mastery over appetite and obedience to the common discipline. The detail of the lifelong abstention from apples — a small, lived consequence carried through a whole life — is exactly the kind of concrete, memorable particular that the monastic community would have preserved, and it is characteristic of Cyril’s manner that he reports it without straining for the marvellous (Patrich 1995, 19–20; Binns 1994, 151). The Orthodox reader receives it as the tradition’s witness to the temper of the saint: the apple trampled in the garden is the seed, in miniature, of the great ascetic and lawgiver of the desert.

The Call East: Departure for Palestine, c. 456

Around the age of eighteen — which on Cyril’s chronology falls about the year 456 or 457 — Sabbas conceived the desire to leave Cappadocia and go to the Holy Land, drawn to the monastic life flourishing in the deserts of Palestine and to Jerusalem, the city of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 3–4; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 20–21; Chitty 1966, 82). The precise year is a matter of reckoning from Cyril’s framework rather than an explicit date, and small variations appear in the secondary literature according to how the age and the chronology are calculated. [Disputed: the departure for Palestine is dated to c. 456 by Patrich, *Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism* (1995), 20–21, reckoning from Sabbas's age of eighteen on Cyril's framework; Chitty, *The Desert a City* (1966), 82, places the arrival in Palestine in 456/457 — the divergence is one of a year or so and turns entirely on the calculation of Cyril's internal chronology, not on any conflict in the sources.]

The eastward movement was not idiosyncratic but typical of the age. Through the fifth century the Judean desert exercised a powerful attraction on monks from across the Christian East — from Cappadocia and the rest of Asia Minor, from Armenia, from Syria — who were drawn both by the prestige of the Holy Places and by the reputation of the great desert fathers then living and teaching in the wilderness around Jerusalem. Cappadocians figured prominently among the population of the Palestinian monasteries; Sabbas’s journey thus joined a well-worn current of monastic migration toward the Holy Land (Binns 1994, 100–112, 149–152; Chitty 1966, 82–84; Patrich 1995, 20–21). Cyril reports that, on reaching Jerusalem, the young Sabbas did not remain in the city but, after wintering in a monastery there, sought out the desert and the company of the most renowned of its fathers — and so passed into the orbit of Euthymius the Great and Theoctistus, with whom the next stage of his life begins (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 6–7; trans. Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 82–84; see The Young Monk).

What Cyril gives us, then, is the portrait of a vocation formed early and pursued without hesitation: a child of a Cappadocian military family, displaced by his father’s absence and his uncles’ quarrels, who fled at eight to a monastery, was schooled there for a decade in the common life, and at eighteen turned east to the desert that would be the theater of his life’s work. The reliability of this outline rests on the reliability of its single witness; and that witness, as we have seen, is among the most trustworthy that Byzantine monastic biography affords (see The Life by Cyril of Scythopolis; The Historical Sabas).

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Sabas. In Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Translated by R. M. Price, with an introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Birth at Mutalaska in the territory of Caesarea, the parents John [Conon] and Sophia, and the father’s military service and posting to Alexandria, at chapters 1; the property disputes among the uncles and the flight to the monastery, at 1–2; the entry into Flavianae at about age eight, the ten years of formation, the parents’ attempt to recover him, and the episode of the trampled apple, at 2–3; the departure for Palestine at about age eighteen and the arrival in Jerusalem and the desert, at 3–7; the chronology yielding birth in 439 and death in 532 at age ninety-four, at 76–78; Cyril’s sources among the elder monks, at 82.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Cyril of Scythopolis as a near-contemporary and reliable witness, his sources and chronology, at 23–66; Sabbas’s Cappadocian origins, family, and youth, at 149–152; Cappadocian and Asian monks in the Palestinian desert, at 100–112, 149–152.)
Patrich, Joseph. Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 32. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995. (The dependence of the tradition on Cyril, at 9–17; birth, parentage, childhood at Mutalaska, the household disputes, entry into Flavianae, the apple episode, and the departure for Palestine c. 456, at 18–21.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Cyril of Scythopolis’s reliability and the reconstruction of the chronology, at 12–13, 82; Sabbas’s Cappadocian birth in 439, Flavianae, the apple, and the journey to Palestine in 456/457, at 82–84.)