The Judean Desert

When St. Sabbas the Sanctified came east from Cappadocia around the year 456, the wilderness of Judea between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea was already a flourishing monastic country, shaped over the previous century and a half by a founding generation of fathers — above all Chariton, the pioneer, and Euthymius the Great, the towering organizer of Palestinian monasticism, with his companion Theoctistus. This file sets out the geography of that desert and the two great forms of monastic life developed in it — the communal coenobium and the semi-eremitic laura — explaining the laura model in detail, since it is the form Sabbas would inherit and bring to its perfection at Mar Saba.

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

A Desert at the Edge of the Holy City

The Judean desert is a narrow band of wilderness — a high, dry, broken country falling away eastward from the central ridge of Palestine toward the great rift of the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea. Geographically it occupies the rain-shadow east of the watershed on which Jerusalem and Bethlehem stand: within a few miles of those cities the cultivated land gives out and the terrain descends through bare limestone hills, deep ravines, and the precipitous gorges of seasonal torrents — the wadis — toward the lowest place on the surface of the earth, the basin of the Dead Sea, more than thirteen hundred feet below sea level (Binns 1994, 99–102; Patrich 1995, 3–7; Chitty 1966, 14–16). It is an austere landscape, hot and waterless for much of the year, its scant rainfall confined to the winter months and quickly lost down the wadis to the salt sea; yet it is also, crucially, a desert adjacent to a great city. From the wilderness one could reach Jerusalem in a day’s walk; the Holy Places of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, the churches built by Constantine and his successors, and the seat of the Jerusalem patriarchate were all within the monks’ horizon (Binns 1994, 99–104, 149; Chitty 1966, 14–16, 82).

This proximity gave Palestinian monasticism a character distinct from the deep desert of Egypt. The Egyptian fathers of Nitria, Scetis, and the Thebaid had withdrawn into a vast and remote solitude; the Judean monks, by contrast, lived in a wilderness whose every gorge looked back toward the Holy City and whose communities were knit into the liturgical and ecclesiastical life of Jerusalem (Chitty 1966, 14–16, 82–84; Binns 1994, 99–104). Several features of the terrain shaped the settlement directly. The deep ravines — pre-eminently the gorge of the Kidron, which runs down from beside Jerusalem southeast toward the Dead Sea and in whose steep cliffs Sabbas would one day plant his Great Lavra — offered sheltered, defensible, and hidden sites whose caves could be made into cells and whose cliff-faces gave a vertical privacy (Patrich 1995, 6–7, 57–69; Binns 1994, 102–104). Water was the perennial constraint: the location of every monastery was dictated by the availability of a spring, a cistern, or a place where the winter run-off could be captured and stored, and the engineering of water — channels, reservoirs, cisterns cut into the rock — became one of the practical arts of Judean monasticism (Patrich 1995, 6–10; Binns 1994, 102–104). Within this country, between Jerusalem and Bethlehem on the heights and the Jordan and the Dead Sea in the depths, the whole drama of the Palestinian desert fathers — and of Sabbas among them — was played out.

The Founding Generation: Chariton

Monastic life in the Judean desert did not begin with Sabbas, nor with Euthymius; it had a founder of its own a century before, and the tradition remembered him as Chariton. A confessor who, according to his Life, came to Palestine from Iconium after suffering in the persecutions, Chariton is credited with establishing the first organized monastic settlements in the wilderness in the first half of the fourth century (Chitty 1966, 14–16; Binns 1994, 149; Patrich 1995, 5, 11). Three foundations are associated with his name and would remain landmarks of the desert for centuries: the laura of Pharan (Faran), reckoned the earliest of the Judean lauras, north-east of Jerusalem; the laura of Douka, near Jericho on the mountain of the Lord’s Temptation; and the laura of Souka, also called the Old Laura, in the wilderness south of Bethlehem toward Tekoa (Chitty 1966, 15; Binns 1994, 149; Patrich 1995, 5). Chariton is presented in the tradition as the originator of the laura form in Palestine — the semi-eremitic settlement of scattered cells around a common center — and his foundations served as the seed-bed and model from which the later, greater expansion grew (Chitty 1966, 14–16; Patrich 1995, 5). When Sabbas first entered the desert he would spend formative time at Souka, the Old Laura of Chariton, before his own foundations began (Patrich 1995, 21–24; Chitty 1966, 83–84).

Euthymius the Great and Theoctistus

If Chariton was the pioneer, the figure who towers over the formation of Judean monasticism — and over the spiritual genealogy of Sabbas himself — is Euthymius the Great (c. 377–473). Like Sabbas after him, Euthymius was a man of the eastern provinces who came to the Holy Land as a monk; like Sabbas, he became the organizing father of a whole monastic country; and it was into his orbit that the young Sabbas would be received on coming to the desert (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius, and Life of Sabas 7–9; trans. Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 82–84; Binns 1994, 149–152). Euthymius is the great founding father of Judean monasticism in its mature form, the master under whose influence the desert acquired both its institutional shape and its theological seriousness, and Cyril of Scythopolis gave him pride of place at the head of his collection of Lives precisely as the fountainhead of the tradition Sabbas would carry on (Binns 1994, 23–66; Chitty 1966, 82–97).

Euthymius did not labor alone. His closest companion in the early years was Theoctistus, with whom he settled in the wilderness east of Jerusalem and shared the founding of their first community. The pattern that emerged between the two men is itself instructive about the forms of Judean monastic life: the monastery they founded together in the wadi — the lower house, in the valley — developed under Theoctistus as a coenobium, a fully communal monastery for the common formation of monks, while Euthymius drew off to a more solitary life and in time established his own laura on the higher ground above (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius; trans. Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 82–85; Binns 1994, 149–151, 156–162). The coenobium of Theoctistus thus served as the place where newcomers were trained in the common life before, if they proved fit, being advanced to the greater solitude of the laura — a graduated arrangement that became normative in the desert and that Sabbas himself would later institutionalize on a large scale (Chitty 1966, 82–97; Patrich 1995, 21–24, 57–69). It was into precisely this complementary pairing — Euthymius’s laura and Theoctistus’s coenobium — that the young Cappadocian Sabbas was directed when he came to the desert, and his formation in it is the subject of the section that follows (see The Young Monk).

The Two Forms: Coenobium and Laura

The Judean desert worked out, with unusual clarity, two distinct institutional forms of monastic life, and the difference between them is essential for understanding everything Sabbas did. They are the coenobium and the laura (Binns 1994, 131–148; Patrich 1995, 11–17, 169–185; Chitty 1966, 14–16, 82–97).

The coenobium (Greek koinobion, “common life”) is the fully communal monastery, the form most familiar from the wider history of monasticism. Its monks live together within one enclosure, sharing a common refectory, common cells or dormitory, a common daily round of prayer, common labor, and a single superior whose obedience governs the whole. The coenobium is, by design, a school: it forms the beginner in obedience, humility, communal worship, and the renunciation of private will, providing the stable, supervised environment in which a young monk learns to be a monk before he is trusted with greater solitude (Binns 1994, 131–138; Patrich 1995, 169–177). In the Judean system the coenobium was characteristically the lower stage — the house, like Theoctistus’s, where novices were received and trained.

The laura (Greek laura, originally meaning a lane or alley, and by extension the cluster of cells strung along the paths of a settlement) is the semi-eremitic form that is the distinctive achievement of Palestinian monasticism and the form central to the whole story of Sabbas (Patrich 1995, 11–17, 57–69; Binns 1994, 131–148; Chitty 1966, 14–16). Because Sabbas’s life’s work — the Great Lavra at the Kidron — is a laura, the model deserves to be set out in detail.

The Laura Model

A laura is neither a fully communal monastery nor a scattering of independent hermits, but a deliberate combination of the two: a settlement of solitary cells gathered around a common center, in which the monks pass the working days of the week alone in their individual dwellings and come together at the center on the weekend for common worship (Patrich 1995, 11–17, 57–69, 169–185; Binns 1994, 131–148; Chitty 1966, 14–16, 82–97). The arrangement is best understood through its parts.

At the heart of a laura stood the core or center — usually comprising the church (or katholikon), a bakery, a refectory or common hall, storerooms, a hostel for guests, and the cells of those who served the community (Patrich 1995, 57–69, 169–185; Binns 1994, 138–148). Around this center, dispersed across the surrounding terrain — along the wadi, up the cliff-faces, among the ravines — lay the individual cells of the monks, each a separate dwelling, often a natural cave adapted and walled, connected to the center and to one another by paths (the laurai proper, the “lanes” from which the form takes its name) (Patrich 1995, 57–69, 78–106; Binns 1994, 138–148; Chitty 1966, 14–16). A monk admitted to a cell of the laura lived there alone.

The rhythm of the laura was weekly. From Monday through Friday each monk remained in his own cell, living the life of a solitary: he kept his rule of prayer and psalmody by himself, occupied himself with manual labor — characteristically the plaiting of ropes and baskets or the copying of manuscripts — and ate sparingly of the dry provisions he had carried back to his cell (Patrich 1995, 169–185; Binns 1994, 138–148; Chitty 1966, 82–97). Then, on Saturday and Sunday, the whole community gathered at the center: the monks came in from their cells to celebrate the common synaxis — the assembling for the night office and especially for the Divine Liturgy — to receive the Eucharist together, to eat a common meal in the refectory, and to be given the raw materials for the next week’s work and the provisions to take back to their cells; on Sunday, after the liturgy and the common meal, each returned to his solitude (Patrich 1995, 169–185; Binns 1994, 138–148; Chitty 1966, 82–97). The weekend gathering for the synaxis and Eucharist, and the weekday dispersion to solitary cells, are the two poles between which the whole life of the laura oscillated (on the cycle of common prayer that anchored the gathering, see The Daily Cycle; on the Eucharist at its center, The Divine Liturgy).

This model was a carefully calibrated middle way, and its rationale was pastoral and ascetic. The unbroken solitude of the full hermit was reckoned a danger for any but the most tested and advanced, prone to spiritual delusion, despair, or disordered austerity when undertaken without support; the laura provided solitude with safeguards (Patrich 1995, 169–185; Binns 1994, 131–148; Chitty 1966, 82–97). The solitary monk of a laura was alone for his ascetic struggle through the week, but he was never wholly cut off: he belonged to a community, came under the discipline and guidance of an abbot (the superior of the laura), returned each week to the sacraments and the common prayer, and lived within reach of his brethren. The laura thus held together the two goods that monasticism had always sought to reconcile — the depth of solitary prayer and the protection and order of common life — and it characteristically functioned as the higher stage in a graduated formation: a monk was first formed in the coenobium and only afterward, when judged ready, advanced to the greater solitude of a cell in the laura (Patrich 1995, 169–185; Binns 1994, 131–148; Chitty 1966, 82–97). This graduated relation of coenobium-then-laura, already visible in the partnership of Theoctistus and Euthymius, is the system Sabbas would inherit, and his own genius would lie in organizing it on a grand scale and binding many such houses together under a single discipline (see Founding Mar Saba (483); The Laura and the Cenobium).

The Desert and the Church of Jerusalem

The Judean monks were not a law unto themselves but were woven into the wider Church, and two relationships in particular located them. The first was their bond with the see of Jerusalem. The desert lay within the patriarchate of Jerusalem — the church of the Holy City, raised to patriarchal rank by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 (Chalcedon 451, Canon 7; see The Ecumenical Councils) — and the monasteries stood in close and consequential relation to the patriarch, who ordained their priests, consecrated their churches, and to whom the leading abbots looked, and who in turn looked to the great monastic fathers as the spiritual strength and, often, the doctrinal conscience of his church (Binns 1994, 104–112, 183–217; Chitty 1966, 82–104; on the ancient eastern sees, see The Churches of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem). In Sabbas’s own lifetime the monks of the desert would become a decisive force in the public life of the Jerusalem church, mobilized in defense of the Chalcedonian faith — a role that grew directly out of this bond between desert and city.

The second relationship was with the broader monastic tradition of the Christian East. Palestinian monasticism was not an isolated growth but the heir of the Egyptian fathers and a participant in the common ascetic inheritance of the Church; its laurae and coenobia were a particular flowering of the one monastic vocation (on which see Monasticism). The Judean desert drew its recruits from across the East and gave back to the whole Church not only saints but enduring institutions: the laura as a form, and, through Sabbas’s foundation in particular, a liturgical order that would shape Orthodox worship for centuries (Binns 1994, 99–112, 149–152; Patrich 1995, 11–17). This, then, was the world into which Sabbas came around 456: a desert at the edge of the Holy City, made habitable by a founding generation, ordered by Euthymius into coenobia and laurae, and bound to the patriarchate of Jerusalem and to the whole monastic tradition of the East. Into the care of Euthymius and Theoctistus the young Cappadocian now passed (see The Young Monk).

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 an introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Euthymius the Great and Theoctistus, the founding of their lower coenobium and Euthymius’s laura, and the reception of the young Sabbas, in the Life of Euthymius and at Life of Sabas 7–9.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Geography of the Judean desert, at 99–104; Chariton and the founding generation, at 149; Euthymius and Theoctistus, at 149–162; the coenobium and the laura as institutional forms and their physical and social organization, at 131–148; the monasteries and the Jerusalem patriarchate, at 104–112, 183–217.)
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 desert landscape and water management, at 3–10; Chariton’s lauras of Pharan, Douka, and Souka, at 5; the laura defined, its core, cells, and paths, and the archaeology of the form, at 11–17, 57–106; the weekly rhythm and the relation of coenobium to laura, at 169–185.)
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 Judean desert and its proximity to Jerusalem, at 14–16; Chariton and the first lauras, at 14–16; Euthymius the Great, Theoctistus, and the formation of the Palestinian desert, at 82–104.)