The Call to Solitude

Once the trained and tested monk had proved himself in the cenobium, Euthymius the Great began to draw Sabbas toward the solitary life — first by permitting the Lenten withdrawals into the deep desert that were Euthymius’s own custom, then, after Euthymius’s death in 473, by leaving Sabbas free to seek a more complete eremitism. This file follows Cyril of Scythopolis’s account of those wilderness years: the wanderings, the testing and demonic temptation, the cave he is said to have shared with a lion in the gorge of the Kidron, and the roughly five years of solitude that preceded the gathering of disciples and the founding of the Great Lavra. The miracle and temptation stories are reported as Cyril’s testimony, with his unusual reliability noted.

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

From the Cenobium Toward the Cell

The years under Theoctistus had been a schooling in the common life (see The Young Monk); the years that follow are the schooling in solitude, and Cyril presents the transition as gradual, supervised, and earned. In the Judean system a monk did not pass from the cenobium straight to the open desert; he moved by stages — first to a cell within or near the community, then to a more isolated cell, and only at last to the unsupported eremitic life — each step granted by the discretion of the elders as the man proved ready (Patrich 1995, 19–25; Chitty 1966, 106–108; on the graded forms, see Monasticism). Cyril shows Euthymius governing exactly this ascent for Sabbas, having first held him back precisely so that he might one day be advanced safely.

According to Cyril, when Sabbas had grown to maturity in the cenobium Euthymius at length received him into a closer relation, taking him with him into the inner desert and so beginning to form him directly in the anchoretic discipline he himself had perfected (Cyril, Life of Sabas 9–10; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 93–94). The old father had a settled custom that became the framework of Sabbas’s training: each year, on the octave of the Theophany, Euthymius would withdraw from the laura into the utter desert toward the Dead Sea, there to pass the whole of Great Lent in absolute solitude and fasting, returning only for Palm Sunday and the Pascha (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 11; Life of Sabas 10; Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 85–86). This Lenten withdrawal — leaving the community for the deep wilderness for the forty days and returning for the feast — was the proven rhythm of Palestinian anchoretism, and it is the pattern into which Sabbas was now being initiated.

The Lenten Withdrawals

Cyril makes the Lenten desert the proving-ground of Sabbas’s vocation to solitude. He records that Euthymius, recognizing the young monk’s readiness, took Sabbas with him into the wilderness toward the Dead Sea — to the region Cyril calls Rouba — for the season of the Fast, that he might be tested and seasoned in the bare eremitic life away from every support of the community (Cyril, Life of Sabas 10; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 93–94). On one such withdrawal, Cyril relates, the strain of the waterless desert overcame the younger man: Sabbas, exhausted and parched, fell as though dead, and Euthymius, praying over him, obtained water and revived him — a sign, in Cyril’s telling, both of the severity of the discipline and of the old father’s care for his disciple (Cyril, Life of Sabas 10; Price 1991). The episode is reported here as Cyril’s testimony to what the desert demanded and what Euthymius’s intercession was held to have done; it belongs to the hagiographer’s account, not to independent record (on Cyril as source, see The Life by Cyril of Scythopolis).

By repeated seasons of this kind Sabbas was brought, on Cyril’s account, to the point where he could keep the Lenten solitude himself. He came to spend the five weekdays alone in the deep desert — going out from the community after the Sunday synaxis, passing the working week in a remote cell or cave without bread or companion, sustained by what little he carried and by prayer, and returning to the brethren only for the weekend gathering and the Liturgy (Cyril, Life of Sabas 10–11; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 94; on the weekly liturgical return, see Daily Cycle). This five-day withdrawal, modeled directly on Euthymius’s own practice, was the recognized half-way station between cenobitic and fully eremitic life in the Judean desert — the monk tasting solitude for the week while remaining anchored to the community’s worship — and it is the discipline in which Sabbas’s anchoretic vocation matured (Chitty 1966, 85–86; Patrich 1995, 94).

After the Death of Euthymius

The decisive turn came with the death of the old father. Euthymius the Great died on 20 January 473, having governed the desert south of Jerusalem for more than half a century (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 39–40; Life of Sabas 11; Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 86; Binns 1994, 165). Cyril reports that Sabbas was deeply grieved, and that the loss of his guide moved him, rather than to seek another superior, to withdraw further from the settled houses into the unbroken wilderness — as though the discipline Euthymius had imparted now sought its full and unsupported exercise (Cyril, Life of Sabas 11; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 94–95). Sabbas was at this point in his middle thirties — about thirty-four in 473, moving toward forty over the years of solitude that followed — a man fully formed in both the common and the solitary disciplines and now free to follow the vocation Euthymius had marked out for him from the first (Patrich 1995, 90–95).

Cyril traces his wanderings in this period through the wilderness east and south of the cenobium: a season near the monastery of Gerasimus by the Jordan, time in the desert of Rouba, and a growing pull toward the desolate gorges that cut down toward the Dead Sea (Cyril, Life of Sabas 11–14; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 95–98; on the terrain, see The Judean Desert). For some years he lived as a true anchorite, moving between cells and caves, keeping no companion, and submitting himself to the unmediated severities of the desert. Cyril dates the close of this wandering to the year in which Sabbas, then about forty, settled in the deep ravine of the Kidron — the wadi that the later tradition would know as the site of the Great Lavra, Mar Saba (Cyril, Life of Sabas 15–16; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 98–100; Chitty 1966, 86–87).

The Testing in Solitude

The desert of Cyril’s narrative is not empty; it is a battlefield, and the eremitic years are above all a contest with the demons. Cyril reports that as Sabbas pressed deeper into solitude he was assailed by terrors and temptations — phantoms and frightening apparitions by night, assaults meant to drive him from his cell, and the whole repertoire of demonic warfare that the desert tradition, from Antony onward, held to be the trial of the solitary (Cyril, Life of Sabas 12, 15; Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 86–87). On Cyril’s account Sabbas met these assaults with prayer, the sign of the Cross, and an unshaken steadfastness, so that the terrors that would have broken a less seasoned monk could not move him from the place he had chosen (Cyril, Life of Sabas 15; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 98–99). These episodes are reported as Cyril’s testimony to the spiritual combat of the eremitic life, in the manner proper to hagiography (METHODOLOGY §3.5); they tell us what the tradition held the solitary’s trial to be, with the source named.

What the temptation narratives are meant to establish, in Cyril’s structure, is that Sabbas had become a perfected solitary before he was ever a founder — that the man who would gather and govern hundreds had first proved himself alone against the powers of the desert (Binns 1994, 175–177; Patrich 1995, 98–99). The order matters to Cyril and to the later tradition: authority over others is shown to rest on a solitude already mastered.

The Lion in the Cave

The most celebrated of the wilderness stories belongs to this period, and it is to be pinned squarely to Cyril, who is its source. When Sabbas had found a cave on the far side of the Kidron gorge to serve as his cell, Cyril relates, he discovered that the cave was already the lair of a lion. According to the Life, the great beast, returning at night, took the sleeping monk by his clothing and tried to drag him from the cave; Sabbas, undismayed, rose and stood at prayer, and the lion withdrew. When the lion later returned and again pressed its claim to the cave, Sabbas is said to have rebuked it, telling the beast that the cave was now his by the grant of God and that there was room enough for both if the lion would live peaceably, but that if it would not, it must depart — whereupon the lion gave way and left the cave to the saint (Cyril, Life of Sabas 33; Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 87; Patrich 1995). The tale belongs to the well-attested desert motif of the holy ascetic and the wild beast — the saint’s restored authority over creation, an Eden-peace recovered through holiness — and it is reported here as Cyril’s account, not as independent fact; its value is as testimony to how the tradition understood Sabbas’s sanctity, with its single source named.

Cyril’s reliability gives even such a story a particular standing. Unlike the anonymous and much-embroidered collections of monastic marvels, Cyril wrote within Sabbas’s own federation, from sources who had known the saint and from the laura’s own memory, with a verifiable accuracy of chronology and topography that historians have repeatedly confirmed (Binns 1994, 23–53; Chitty 1966, 82–84; Patrich 1995, 11–16). This does not turn the lion-tale into a documented event, but it means that the story circulated early and within the saint’s own house — that it is the laura’s own memory of its founder, not a late accretion (Binns 1994, 175–177).

Five Years Alone, and the Gathering Begins

Cyril fixes the duration of Sabbas’s complete eremitism. Having settled in the Kidron gorge around the age of forty, Sabbas lived there, on Cyril’s account, for some five years in total solitude — without disciple or companion, keeping the unsupported life of the perfect anchorite — before the providential turn that ended his solitude (Cyril, Life of Sabas 16; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 99–100; Chitty 1966, 87). The number is Cyril’s, and it serves his architecture: the five solitary years are the saint’s full apprenticeship in the eremitic life, the proving that authorizes everything that follows.

For at the end of them the solitude broke open. Cyril relates that men seeking the monastic life began to find their way to Sabbas in his gorge and to beg him to receive them, so that against his own desire for solitude — but in obedience, as the tradition reads it, to the will of God — he began to accept disciples and to assign them cells along the ravine (Cyril, Life of Sabas 16–18; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 100–104). This was the seed of the Great Lavra. The hermit who had been formed in obedience under Theoctistus, drawn toward solitude under Euthymius, and tested alone for five years in the Kidron now became, almost against his will, a founder and a father — and the desolate gorge where he had disputed a cave with a lion became the heart of a new monastic federation (Cyril, Life of Sabas 18; Price 1991; Chitty 1966, 87–90). That founding, traditionally dated to 483, opens the next section of his life (see Founding Mar Saba (483); on the structure that grew from it, The Lavra and the Cenobium).

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Sabas. In The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Trans. R. M. Price, with introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Euthymius drawing Sabbas into the desert and the Lenten withdrawals, chs. 9–11; the death of Euthymius and Sabbas’s deeper withdrawal, ch. 11; the wanderings near the Jordan and in Rouba, chs. 11–14; settlement in the Kidron gorge and the demonic temptations, chs. 15–16; the five years of solitude and the gathering of disciples, chs. 16–18; the lion-cave story, ch. 33.)
Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius. In The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Trans. R. M. Price, Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Euthymius’s Lenten withdrawal custom; his death on 20 January 473, chs. 11, 39–40.)
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 graded ascent to solitude and the five-day withdrawal, pp. 19–25, 94; the eremitic years and settlement in the Kidron, pp. 95–104; chronology, pp. 90–95.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine, 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Cyril’s method and reliability, pp. 23–53; Euthymius’s death and Sabbas’s transition to eremitism, pp. 165, 175–177.)
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’s Lenten custom, Sabbas’s wanderings, the lion, and the Kidron settlement, pp. 85–90.)