The Young Monk

When Sabbas came down from Cappadocia to Palestine around 456, in his late teens, he sought out Euthymius the Great — who judged him too young for the solitary life of the laura and sent him instead to the cenobium of Theoctistus in the wadi below for formation in community. There, through years of menial labor and exemplary obedience, the “beardless youth” grew into the monk Euthymius would call paidariogerōn, the “child-elder,” and would foresee as a coming great light of Palestinian monasticism. This file follows Cyril of Scythopolis’s account of those formative years of apprenticeship.

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

Arrival in Palestine

Sabbas was born in 439 at Mutalaska, near Caesarea in Cappadocia, and had been raised from boyhood in the monastery of Flavianae after a troubled childhood divided between quarreling relatives (Cyril, Life of Sabas 1–2; trans. Price 1991; on his origins, see Cappadocia and the Call East). According to Cyril, after some ten years in that Cappadocian house the young man conceived a desire to go up to Jerusalem and to take up the monastic life of the Holy Land, and he set out for Palestine — arriving, on Cyril’s chronology, in the winter that fell around the year 456, when Sabbas was about eighteen years old (Cyril, Life of Sabas 7; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 90). The dating rests on Cyril’s own internal scheme, which synchronizes Sabbas’s movements with the careers of Euthymius and the Jerusalem patriarchs; modern scholars accept it as broadly secure, since Cyril was unusually careful with chronology and wrote within living memory of the federation’s early generation (Binns 1994, 25–32; Patrich 1995, 11–16).

The Palestine Sabbas entered already possessed a mature and graded monastic culture. The Judean wilderness east of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, dropping toward the Dead Sea, had for a century been filling with cells, cenobia, and laurae (on the terrain, see The Judean Desert). At its head stood Euthymius the Great (377–473), himself a Melitene Armenian who had come west and established, with his companion Theoctistus, a monastic settlement in the wadi later called after Theoctistus, before withdrawing to found his own laura on the ridge above (Cyril, Life of Euthymius passim; Chitty 1966, 82–87; Binns 1994, 158–165). By the time Sabbas arrived, Euthymius was an old man of great authority, the acknowledged father of the desert south of Jerusalem.

Sent Down to Theoctistus

Cyril’s account of Sabbas’s reception is precise and revealing of how the Judean system worked. The young Cappadocian did not present himself at a cenobium and ask to be enrolled; he went, deliberately, to Euthymius, drawn by his fame and wishing to live near him in the laura (Cyril, Life of Sabas 7; Price 1991). Euthymius received him kindly but would not keep him. Judging him too young — Cyril stresses that Sabbas was still a “beardless youth” (ageneios), and that Euthymius had a settled policy against admitting beardless youths to his laura — the old man sent him down to the coenobium in the wadi below, the lower monastery governed by Theoctistus, telling him to remain there in the common life (Cyril, Life of Sabas 7; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 90–92).

The decision was not a rebuff but the ordinary working of a deliberate pedagogy. The laura — a colony of semi-anchorites living in scattered cells, gathering only on weekends for the common synaxis and the Liturgy — was a life for the spiritually mature, dangerous for the untrained; the cenobium, with its common dormitory, common table, common work, and constant supervision, was the school in which a man was first formed before he could be trusted with solitude (Chitty 1966, 16–17, 106–108; Patrich 1995, 19–21; on the two forms, see Monasticism). Euthymius’s own laura and Theoctistus’s cenobium stood in exactly this relation: the lower house in the wadi served as the receiving cenobium where novices and the young were trained before any of them might be admitted above (Binns 1994, 159–162; Patrich 1995, 90). In sending the eighteen-year-old down to Theoctistus, Euthymius was placing him at the bottom of the ladder he would have to climb in order.

The Years of Probation

Cyril presents the years that followed as a sustained schooling in obedience and humility, and it is here that the future founder’s character is first displayed. Sabbas, he tells us, gave himself wholly to the cenobitic discipline: he subjected himself to the abbot and the brotherhood, embraced the heaviest and most menial tasks, and outdid the others in bodily labor and self-abnegation (Cyril, Life of Sabas 7–8; Price 1991). The tasks Cyril names are the ordinary drudgery of a desert house — drawing and carrying water from the cistern, serving the brethren, loading and bearing burdens, the rough manual work on which a community in a waterless gorge depended (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 92). Sabbas, possessed of unusual physical strength, is said to have performed the labor of several men, carrying loads up from the valley that others could not lift, and to have done so without complaint or any seeking of relief (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8; Price 1991).

What Cyril is at pains to show is not feats of asceticism for their own sake but the perfect ordering of the will. The young monk did not choose his own austerities, did not seek a cell of his own, did not press to be advanced; he received what was assigned and obeyed without reserve, which in the desert tradition is the root virtue from which all the rest must grow (Chitty 1966, 84; Patrich 1995, 92; on obedience within the daily monastic round, see Daily Cycle). One incident Cyril preserves became famous as an emblem of this obedience. A brother of the cenobium had to make a journey to Alexandria; Sabbas accompanied him, and there, in the great city, the two unexpectedly met Sabbas’s own parents — his father, a soldier (Cyril gives his name as John, with the cognomen Conon), urging the boy to leave the monastery, enter the imperial service, and inherit the family estate (Cyril, Life of Sabas 25; Price 1991). Sabbas refused every inducement, accepting only a small sum which he handed over to his superiors, and returned to the wadi unmoved — the worldly future his father offered weighed as nothing against the obedience he had taken up (Cyril, Life of Sabas 25; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 92–93). (Cyril narrates the Alexandria episode out of strict chronological order, attaching it thematically to Sabbas’s formation; the meeting belongs to these cenobitic years.)

Paidariogerōn: the Child-Elder

It is to this period that Cyril attaches the epithet by which Sabbas is best remembered in his youth. Euthymius, watching the boy he had sent down to Theoctistus, perceived in him a maturity altogether beyond his years and took to calling him παιδαριογέρων (paidariogerōn) — the “child-elder” or “boy-old-man,” a youth who carried within him the spiritual seasoning of an aged monk (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 91; Chitty 1966, 84). The word is a striking compound — paidarion, a little boy or lad, fused with gerōn, the technical term for a spiritual elder — and Cyril uses it deliberately to capture the paradox the old father saw: the beardless youth excluded from the laura precisely for his youth was, in soul, already an elder. The epithet should be pinned to Cyril, who is its earliest and only ancient source; it is from his Life of Sabas that the title passed into the saint’s later veneration, and there is no independent attestation behind it (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 91).

The naming carries weight because of who bestowed it. Euthymius, the most authoritative monastic father in Palestine, was not given to easy praise; that he singled out the youngest and most menial of the cenobium’s laborers, and marked him with a title of his own coining, is Cyril’s way of registering the recognition of one great ascetic by another (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8; Price 1991; Binns 1994, 175). The “child-elder” was being watched from above.

The Round of Ascetic Life

The life into which Sabbas was being formed had a settled shape, and Cyril assumes rather than describes it. The cenobium kept the daily and weekly round of the Judean houses: the night office and the hours of psalmody, the common Liturgy, the silence of the cells, the discipline of fasting and of manual work that supported both body and prayer (Patrich 1995, 19–25; on the structure of the offices, see Daily Cycle; on the central act of the community’s worship, Divine Liturgy). Within this round Sabbas, by Cyril’s account, distinguished himself less by extraordinary feats than by exactness — keeping the rule entire, never absent from the synaxis, fasting and laboring steadily, and guarding the inward watchfulness that the outward discipline existed to serve (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8–9; Price 1991). Cyril notes in particular his abstinence and his readiness to keep vigil, traits that would mark his whole later life as a hermit and founder (Cyril, Life of Sabas 9; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 92).

This was the seedbed of everything that followed. The man who would later impose order on hundreds of monks, draft a typikon, and govern a federation of houses learned the common life from the inside before he was ever asked to rule it — a sequence Cyril clearly regards as the right one, and which the later tradition held up against the disorders that came when men sought solitude or office before they had been trained in obedience (Chitty 1966, 84, 106–108; Patrich 1995, 92; on what this formation prepared, The Lavra and the Cenobium).

Theoctistus, the Wadi, and the Threshold of Solitude

The cenobium that formed Sabbas was the house of an elder of the first generation. Theoctistus had been Euthymius’s earliest companion in the desert, and the two had founded the wadi settlement together before separating in office, Euthymius to the laura on the heights and Theoctistus to the governance of the cenobium below (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 8–16; Chitty 1966, 82–87; Binns 1994, 158–161). Theoctistus died in 467, after Sabbas had been some years under his rule; his successors continued the cenobium, and Sabbas remained within it under the continuing oversight of the aged Euthymius above (Cyril, Life of Sabas 9; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 92–93). Cyril marks the death of the old founder as one of the boundary-stones of the period, and it is after it that Sabbas’s gradual movement toward greater solitude begins to gather pace.

For the whole of these years Euthymius kept his distance even as he kept his interest. He did not bring Sabbas up to the laura while the young man was still in the cenobium’s school, but Cyril makes clear that he was watching the outcome of his own decision and judged it vindicated (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8–9; Price 1991). Cyril attributes to Euthymius a positive foresight: that this child-elder would in time become a great luminary of the monastic life and a father of many — a prophecy the Life is written, in part, to show fulfilled (Cyril, Life of Sabas 8; Price 1991; Binns 1994, 175; Patrich 1995, 91). The historian must register such forecasts as Cyril’s testimony rather than as bare fact, in the manner proper to hagiography; but Cyril’s unusual closeness to his sources, and the verifiable accuracy of his framework elsewhere, give even his report of Euthymius’s words more standing than the genre usually allows (Binns 1994, 23–53; Chitty 1966, 82–84). What is certain is that, by the end of these years of probation, the trained and tested monk was ready to be entrusted with what Euthymius had at first withheld: the solitary life of the deep desert. That movement — the call to solitude — is the subject of the next file (see The Call to Solitude).

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. (Birth and childhood, chs. 1–2; arrival in Palestine and reception by Euthymius, ch. 7; the cenobium of Theoctistus, the menial labor, and the epithet paidariogerōn, ch. 8; the ascetic round and Euthymius’s foresight, chs. 8–9; the meeting with his parents at Alexandria, ch. 25.)
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. (The founding of the wadi settlement with Theoctistus and the relation of cenobium to laura.)
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. (Chronology of Sabbas’s arrival and cenobitic years, pp. 90–93; the laura/cenobium system, pp. 19–25.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine, 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Cyril’s reliability and method, pp. 23–53; Euthymius and the wadi federation, pp. 158–175.)
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, Theoctistus, and the formation of Sabbas, pp. 82–87, 106–108.)