The Founding of Mar Saba (483)

In the winter of 483, after years of solitary training in the Judean wilderness, Sabbas the Sanctified settled in the gorge of the brook Kidron southeast of Jerusalem and there founded what would become the Great Lavra — the monastery known to later ages as Mar Saba. Cyril of Scythopolis, who entered the community in the next century and wrote from its own archives and oral memory, frames the founding around a cluster of attested wonders: a night guidance by a pillar of fire to the cave that became Sabbas’s cell, and the appearance of a spring of water in the dry ravine in answer to his prayer. This file reconstructs the founding from Cyril’s Life of Sabas, distinguishing the topographical and chronological data from the miracle accounts the source attests.

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

The Setting: The Kidron Gorge

The site of the foundation is one of the most forbidding in the inhabited monastic landscape of late-antique Palestine. The brook Kidron, which divides the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem, runs southeastward through deepening rock until, in the lower Judean desert, it becomes a sheer ravine — the Wadi en-Nar, the “valley of fire” of later Arabic usage — falling away toward the Dead Sea (Patrich 1995, ch. 3). It is into this ravine, some distance below the village of Bethlehem and a hard day’s walk from Jerusalem, that Sabbas came. The gorge here is dry for most of the year, its walls rising in vertical cliffs of limestone honeycombed with natural caves; the floor of the wadi carries water only after the winter rains. The choice of so waterless and inaccessible a place was deliberate: it lay far enough from settlement to guarantee solitude, yet within reach of Jerusalem and its pilgrim economy (Binns 1994, 100–105; Patrich 1995, 57–69).

Sabbas was about forty-five years old when he came to the gorge. Born around 439 at Mutalaska in Cappadocia, he had entered monastic life as a boy, come east to Palestine around 456, and passed the formative years of his ascetic life under the discipline of the great Judean fathers — entrusted in his youth to the monastery of Theoctistus in the wadi below the laura of Euthymius, and only after long probation permitted by Euthymius the Great to the more solitary forms of life (Cyril, Life of Sabas 7–9; trans. Price 1991; see The Young Monk and The Call to Solitude). By 483 he had spent some five years in near-total solitude, much of it, Cyril reports, in a cave on the far side of the gorge to which he withdrew for the five weekdays, returning to no community at all (Cyril, Life of Sabas 15; Price 1991). The founding of the lavra is the moment at which this solitude turned, against his own first intention, into the nucleus of a community.

The Pillar of Fire and the Cave (Cyril’s Account)

The founding narrative proper turns on a wonder, and it must be received as Cyril reports it — as the testimony of the Life of Sabas to what Sabbas and the community held to have happened, not as a fact this account independently asserts (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Cyril writes that while Sabbas was living in solitude in the gorge, keeping vigil one night, he saw to the east of the torrent-bed “a pillar of fire fixed in the ground and reaching to heaven,” and was filled with fear and wonder at the sight (Cyril, Life of Sabas 16; trans. Price 1991). Taking the appearance as a sign — recalling, Cyril notes, the pillar of fire that guided Israel in the wilderness — Sabbas resolved not to approach until daybreak. When morning came he crossed the ravine to the place where the pillar had stood and found there a large cave in the cliff face, “spacious and suitable as a church,” with a natural fissure shaped as if for an apse (Cyril, Life of Sabas 16; Price 1991). This cave he took as a divinely given church, and it became the first sacred center of the foundation.

Cyril’s framing is precise and theological rather than merely marvelous: the pillar of fire is the pillar of the Exodus, and the cave it reveals is the place of the new community’s worship. The narrative thus presents the very ground of the lavra as God-given — a motif Cyril sustains in his name for the cave-church, the Theoktistos, “the God-built” (see below). On Cyril’s general reliability, the modern judgment is that he is an unusually careful hagiographer who wrote within living memory of his subject, drew on the monastery’s own records and on the recollection of monks who had known Sabas, and is sober about chronology even where his theology shapes the telling of wonders (Flusin, cited in Binns 1994, 31–37; Patrich 1995, 7–11). The miracle accounts are therefore reported here as Cyril’s attested testimony, with his date and topography treated as historically usable and the wonders pinned to their source.

The Spring in the Ravine (Cyril, Life of Sabas 3)

The second founding wonder answers the gorge’s defining problem: water. A waterless ravine cannot sustain a community, and Cyril makes the provision of water the sign that the place was meant to be inhabited. He reports that, the brethren beginning to suffer from the lack of water and having to fetch it from a great distance, Sabbas was distressed for them and spent a night in prayer over the matter; and that in the night he heard the sound of an animal striking the ground with its hoof, looked out under the moon, and saw a wild ass digging at the bed of the ravine with its foot and then drinking from the spot. Going down at first light to the place, Sabbas dug there and found a spring of sweet water, which (Cyril says) has never since failed and which sufficed for the whole community (Cyril, Life of Sabas 3.5 in the internal division of the Life; trans. Price 1991; the episode is discussed in Patrich 1995, 70–73, who identifies the spring with the perennial water source still flowing at the monastery).

This account too is given as what the source attests (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Its function in Cyril is to confirm the foundation: the wild ass is led to the water as the pillar of fire led Sabbas to the cave, and the unfailing spring becomes the natural guarantee of the lavra’s survival in a place that could not otherwise hold one. The archaeological reality behind the account is not in doubt — Mar Saba did and does depend on a spring and on an elaborate system of cisterns cut to catch and store the winter flood — and Patrich treats Cyril’s spring-narrative as the hagiographical memory of the discovery and harnessing of that water (Patrich 1995, 70–73, with the survey of the monastery’s hydraulic installations at 73–90). [Disputed: the precise chapter-numbering of the spring episode varies by edition — Cyril's *Life of Sabas* is cited by some editors with a continuous chapter sequence in which the spring falls early, and the founding pillar-of-fire vision at the gorge is at chapter 16 (Schwartz's Greek text; Price 1991 follows Schwartz's chapter divisions); readers should locate the episode by content (the wild ass and the unfailing spring) rather than relying on a single chapter number across editions.]

The Gathering of Disciples

Sabbas had come to the gorge to be alone, and Cyril is explicit that he founded a community only reluctantly and under pressure of the men who sought him out. Word of the solitary in the Kidron spread, and anchorites and would-be disciples began to come to him asking to settle nearby (Cyril, Life of Sabas 16–18; trans. Price 1991). At first he received them grudgingly and in small numbers; Cyril gives a rising count as the years passed. Within a few years of 483 the brethren around him numbered some seventy, and Cyril reports that by a later point the community had grown to about a hundred and fifty monks settled in the lavra (Cyril, Life of Sabas 18, 32; Price 1991; Binns 1994, 105–110; Patrich 1995, 57–69). The growth is the natural consequence of the lavra’s reputation and of Sabbas’s own renown as a spiritual father, and it created the practical problems — of water, of building, of ordering common worship, and above all of forming beginners — that the rest of the foundation’s history works out (see The Lavra and the Cenobium).

The physical form the community took was dictated by the cliffs. The monks did not live in a single building but in cells scattered up and down the two walls of the gorge — some of them natural caves enlarged and faced with masonry, others built out on ledges and reached by paths, ladders, and ropes cut and fixed into the rock (Patrich 1995, 57–90, the fullest archaeological treatment). At the center, on the more habitable bank, stood the cluster of communal buildings to which the scattered hermits came at the week’s end. This dispersed-cell-around-a-center plan is the architectural signature of the lavra as a type, and Mar Saba is its classic and best-preserved example (Patrich 1995, ch. 3; Binns 1994, 100–110).

The Core Buildings: The God-Built Church and the Theotokos

The first church of the foundation was the cave revealed in the pillar-of-fire vision, which Cyril calls the Theoktistos — the “God-built” church — because, unlike a structure raised by human hands, it had been given ready-made in the rock (Cyril, Life of Sabas 16, 18; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 60–64). Here the brethren first gathered for the synaxis. As the community grew the God-built cave became too small for the assembled monks, and Sabbas built a larger church dedicated to the Theotokos — the principal katholikon of the lavra, set on the central terrace — while the cave-church of the Theoktistos continued in use (Cyril, Life of Sabas 18, 32; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 60–69, on the two churches and their relationship). The consecration of the new Theotokos church, Cyril reports, was performed by the patriarch of Jerusalem, marking the lavra’s recognition by the church of the Holy City (Cyril, Life of Sabas 18; Price 1991; on the Jerusalem patriarchate, see Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem).

The tradition that the patriarch also, at this period, ordained the reluctant Sabbas to the priesthood and confirmed his headship of the lavra belongs to the same complex of events by which the informal gathering of hermits became a canonically constituted monastery under a recognized superior (Cyril, Life of Sabas 19; Price 1991; Binns 1994, 105–110). The foundation of 483 is thus best understood not as a single act but as a process running across the 480s: the settling in the gorge, the revealing of the cave, the discovery of water, the gathering and then the deliberate organizing of disciples, and the building and consecration of the churches that gave the community its liturgical heart.

The Tower and Imperial Patronage

A monastery in so exposed a place needed defensible building and a source of funds beyond the labor of its monks, and here the lavra’s connection to Jerusalem and, beyond it, to Constantinople becomes material. Cyril records that a tower was built at the lavra — the kind of fortified tower (pyrgos) that served Judean monasteries as refuge, store, and lookout — and the later and larger building programs of the monastery were aided by imperial patronage (Cyril, Life of Sabas 31–32; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 57–90, on the towers and built fabric). The strongest documented instance of such patronage belongs to Sabbas’s old age, when in 531 he travelled to Constantinople to the emperor Justinian and obtained, among other things, imperial support for building and for the defense of the desert monasteries against raiders (Cyril, Life of Sabas 71–73; Price 1991; Binns 1994, 167–183, on Sabas’s embassies and imperial relations).

The repeated tradition that the women of the imperial house — the empress and imperial patronage generally — funded a tower or hospice at or near the lavra reflects this real pattern of Constantinopolitan support for the Palestinian monasteries, though the specific attributions in later sources should be held loosely. [Disputed: Cyril attributes major building and endowment for the Judean monasteries to Justinian after Sabas's 531 embassy (*Life of Sabas* 72–73; Price 1991), and the tradition associating a tower or women's hospice with imperial — including the empress's — patronage develops from this; the precise donor and structure are not securely fixed in the primary text and later attributions vary (Patrich 1995, 57–90; Binns 1994, 167–183).] What is not in doubt is the structural fact: Mar Saba was sustained not by agriculture, of which the gorge permitted almost none, but by a combination of the monks’ handwork, the offerings of pilgrims and benefactors, and intermittent imperial endowment channelled through the patriarchate of Jerusalem (Binns 1994, 100–110, 167–183; Patrich 1995, ch. 3).

Water and Economy

The economy of the lavra was, finally, an economy of water and of skilled handwork. The unfailing spring of Cyril’s account supplied drinking water, but the survival of a community of well over a hundred souls in a desert ravine depended on the systematic capture of the winter floods. The monks cut cisterns into the rock to store the runoff of the rains, channelled water along the cliff faces, and managed it with the discipline that the lavra’s whole regime imposed — a hydraulic system that Patrich’s survey reconstructs in detail and regards as integral to the foundation’s viability (Patrich 1995, 73–90). For food and materials, the monks produced handwork — chiefly the plaiting of ropes and baskets and the copying of manuscripts — which was carried out alone in the cells through the week and brought to the center, where raw materials were distributed and the finished work collected and sold, the proceeds buying what the desert could not grow (Cyril, Life of Sabas 18, 28; Price 1991; Binns 1994, 100–120, on the lavriote economy; Patrich 1995, ch. 3). The weekly gathering at the church was therefore at once the liturgical and the economic hinge of the community, and the form of life it presupposed — solitude through the week, assembly at its end — is the lavra model proper, examined in the companion file (see 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. (Primary source; the pillar-of-fire vision and the revealing of the God-built cave at ch. 16; the spring discovered by the wild ass in the early chapters; the gathering of disciples and the count of the brethren at chs. 16–18, 32; the two churches and the Theotokos katholikon at chs. 18, 32; Sabas’s ordination at ch. 19; the tower and building at chs. 31–32; the 531 embassy to Justinian and imperial patronage at chs. 71–73.)
Schwartz, Eduard, ed. Kyrillos von Skythopolis. Texte und Untersuchungen 49.2. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1939. (Critical Greek text underlying Price’s translation and the standard chapter divisions of the Life of Sabas.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The Judean desert monastic movement; Cyril’s reliability; the lavra of Sabas, its size, economy, and imperial connections.)
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 archaeology and topography of the Great Lavra: the gorge, the cells, the churches, the spring, the cisterns and water system, and the towers — the fullest physical study of the site.)
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 in the wider monastic history; Sabas and the lavra in narrative context.)