Leader of Palestinian Monasticism

In 490 Patriarch Sallustius of Jerusalem ordained the reluctant Sabbas to the priesthood, and in 494 appointed him archimandrite — exarch — over all the anchorites and lavras of the Jerusalem patriarchate, the superior-general of its hermit and laura monks, paired with Theodosius as head of the coenobites. This file follows Cyril of Scythopolis and modern scholarship through Sabbas’s ordination, his elevation to a patriarch-supervised headship, his founding, administering, and supervising of the desert network, and the discipline that provoked the secession of some sixty monks who founded the New Lavra around 507 — the institutional achievement by which scattered Palestinian asceticism became a coherent order.

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

The Reluctant Priest

For the first decade of the Great Lavra’s life Sabbas governed it as a layman. This was not exceptional in the early desert — the founder of a lavra was its abba, its spiritual father, and required no priestly grade to be that — but it became a practical difficulty as the community grew. The lavra’s monks had to fetch a priest from outside, or rely on visiting clergy, for the Sunday Liturgy that was the structural center of the lavra week, when the hermits gathered from their scattered cliff-cells for the all-night vigil and the Eucharist (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 19; trans. Price 1991; on the rhythm see The Lavra and the Cenobium). Cyril reports that Sabbas had long avoided ordination out of humility, regarding the priesthood as a dignity above him and a danger to the soul that sought only stillness — a reticence entirely typical of the desert, where the refusal of clerical rank was itself counted an ascetic virtue.

The resolution came, in Cyril’s telling, through the patriarch. Sallustius of Jerusalem (patriarch 486–494) came down to the Great Lavra to consecrate the church Sabbas had built — the cave-church and then the Theotokos katholikon — and on that occasion ordained Sabbas to the priesthood so that the founder might himself offer the Liturgy for his community (Cyril, Life of Sabas 19; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, ch. 2). The ordination is conventionally dated to about 490, in the years between the founding of the Lavra in 483 and Sabbas’s elevation to the exarchate in 494 (Patrich 1995; Binns 1994, ch. 6). [Disputed: the precise year is not fixed by Cyril, who narrates the ordination as part of the consecration of the Lavra's church rather than by date; Patrich, *Sabas* (1995), places it c. 490, while the event is bracketed only loosely between the foundation (483) and the appointment as archimandrite (494) by Binns, *Ascetics and Ambassadors* (1994).] What matters for the institutional story is the pattern it sets: Sabbas’s offices come to him from the patriarch of Jerusalem and are exercised under the patriarch’s authority, so that the desert and the see are bound together from the first.

The reluctance is worth dwelling on, because it is the hinge on which the whole later career turns. The man who would be made superior-general of the Palestinian hermits was, on Cyril’s portrait, one who had to be ordained almost against his will, who sought rank for himself not at all, and who accepted administration only as a burden laid on him by obedience to the Church. This is the standard hagiographical topos of the unwilling shepherd — Cyril deploys it deliberately — but in Sabbas’s case it is also load-bearing for the argument the Life is making: that authority in the desert is legitimate precisely when it is not sought (Cyril, Life of Sabas 19; Binns 1994; on Cyril’s aims and reliability see The Life by Cyril of Scythopolis).

The Appointment of 494: Exarch of the Anchorites

The decisive institutional event is the appointment of 494. In that year the patriarch of Jerusalem — Sallustius, in the last year of his patriarchate — divided the supervision of all the monks of his jurisdiction between two men according to their form of life, and set Sabbas over one half of it (Cyril, Life of Sabas 30; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, ch. 6). Sabbas was made archimandrite and exarch of all the anchorites and of the lavras of the Jerusalem patriarchate: the superior-general, that is, of every monk who lived the semi-eremitic life of the laura, the hermits in their scattered cells across the Judean desert. Theodosius the Cenobiarch was appointed at the same time and by the same act archimandrite of all the coenobia — the communal houses — so that between them the two governed the whole of Palestinian monasticism, divided not by region but by way of life (Cyril, Life of Sabas 30; Life of Theodosius; Binns 1994, ch. 6; Patrich 1995, ch. 6; on the partnership see Sabas and Theodosius).

The title needs to be understood with some care, for it marks a genuine novelty. The office of archimandrite — literally the head of a mandra, a sheepfold, hence a monastery — and the related title exarch of the monks were instruments by which the great sees of the East were, in the late fifth and sixth centuries, bringing the proliferating and sometimes turbulent monastic movement under hierarchical supervision. To appoint a single archimandrite over all the lauras of a patriarchate was to constitute the hermits, who by definition lived apart, into something like an order with a recognized superior answerable to the patriarch (Patrich 1995, ch. 6; Binns 1994, ch. 6; on the see and its jurisdiction see Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem). The arrangement gave the patriarch a chain of authority reaching into the desert and gave the desert a recognized voice at the patriarch’s side. It is the institutional spine of the rest of Sabbas’s life: when he travels to Constantinople to plead with the emperor, when he intervenes in the Christological struggles, when he disciplines or is defied by his monks, he does so as the patriarch’s archimandrite of the anchorites (the Christological embassies are treated in The Christological Struggles).

Modern scholarship has fixed the date of this appointment to 494 with some confidence, because Cyril ties it to the patriarchate of Sallustius and to the succession of events around the turn from Sallustius to Elias (Patrich 1995; Binns 1994). [Disputed: Cyril dates the joint appointment to the time of Patriarch Sallustius, hence 494, the last year of that patriarchate (so Patrich, *Sabas* [1995], and Binns, *Ascetics and Ambassadors* [1994]); some older accounts loosely associate the appointment with Elias, Sallustius's successor, under whom Sabbas's authority was certainly exercised, but the act itself is assigned by Cyril to Sallustius.]

Administering the Network

What did the office actually require? Cyril’s Life and the archaeological reconstruction of the Judean desert monasteries together let us see the shape of the work, and it was considerable. Sabbas was at once a founder, an administrator, a visitor, and a provisioner.

As founder, he did not stop with the Great Lavra. Across the decades of his exarchate he established a whole family of houses — lavras and coenobia both — across the desert and along the edge of the Jordan: the New Lavra (founded, as we shall see, by his opponents but soon brought back under his oversight), the Kastellion coenobium on the hilltop above the gorge, the cave-monastery near the Lavra, the monastery of the Cave (Spelaion), the Heptastomos, the Jeremias coenobium, and others, together with hospices and a hospital in Jerusalem and Jericho (Cyril, Life of Sabas 16, 27, 32, 37, 39, 58; Patrich 1995, chs. 4–5; Binns 1994, ch. 6). Cyril’s tally and the surviving ruins agree that Sabbas’s foundations number in the high single digits to low teens depending on how they are counted, making him the most prolific monastic founder of the Palestinian desert (Patrich 1995, ch. 5). His characteristic policy — never to leave the solitary life unguarded, but to pair each lavra with a coenobium where beginners were proved before they passed to the cell — is the organizing principle of the whole network (Cyril, Life of Sabas 28; see The Lavra and the Cenobium).

As administrator and provisioner, Sabbas bore the unglamorous weight of keeping a desert population alive. The Judean wilderness is arid and the monasteries depended on cisterns, on the carriage of supplies, on handwork sold in the towns, and increasingly on imperial subvention. Cyril preserves the memory of Sabbas’s journeys to obtain relief — most famously the great embassy to the emperor Anastasius at Constantinople (around 511/512) and, near the end of his life, the embassy to Justinian (around 531), on which he secured tax relief and funds for the rebuilding of churches and the support of the monasteries after the Samaritan revolt had devastated Palestine (Cyril, Life of Sabas 50–54, 70–73; Price 1991; Binns 1994, ch. 7; Patrich 1995, ch. 9). These were the journeys of an exarch acting for the whole monastic body, not merely for his own house, and Cyril’s detailed account of them is one of the reasons the Life is so valued as a source for the period (on Cyril’s unusual reliability see The Life by Cyril of Scythopolis).

As visitor and father, Sabbas moved constantly among his foundations, settling disputes, appointing and deposing superiors, receiving and forming novices, and bearing the care of the monks. Cyril’s narrative is full of the small business of governance — the placing of a steward, the correction of a wayward brother, the reception of a notable postulant — and behind it lies the larger labor of holding together a network of independent-minded ascetics scattered over a forbidding landscape (Cyril, Life of Sabas passim; Binns 1994, ch. 6; Patrich 1995, ch. 6). The desert was not naturally governable; that Sabbas governed it for nearly four decades is the measure of the achievement.

Discipline and Revolt: The Secession of c. 507

Authority in the desert was always contested, and Sabbas’s was no exception. Cyril does not conceal that the founder faced repeated revolts among his own monks, and the most serious of them is the secession that produced the New Lavra around 507.

The discipline Sabbas imposed was demanding. He required of those who would live the solitary life a long probation in community first, an exacting obedience, and a particular pattern of the cell-life; and he set himself against any relaxation of it. A faction within the Great Lavra came to resent his governance — Cyril presents them as proud, restless, and contemptuous of their abba — and the friction grew until, in the course of one of Sabbas’s absences and his returns, the dissidents broke openly with him (Cyril, Life of Sabas 35–36; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, ch. 7; Binns 1994, ch. 7). Cyril reports that some sixty monks seceded from the Lavra, withdrew to the wadi south of Tekoa, and there established a new house — the New Lavra (Nea Laura) — around 507 (Cyril, Life of Sabas 36; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, ch. 7). Characteristically, Sabbas’s response was not vindictive: Cyril relates that when the seceders found themselves in distress in their new and unprovided settlement, Sabbas came to their aid, sent them supplies and a sum of money for building, and helped them establish their monastery in order — an act of magnanimity toward those who had defied him (Cyril, Life of Sabas 36; Price 1991; Binns 1994, ch. 7).

The deeper significance of this secession — its later entanglement with the second Origenist controversy, for the New Lavra became in the sixth century the principal nest of the Origenist monks against whom Sabbas and his successors struggled — belongs to a later section and is treated there (see The Second Origenist Controversy). Here it is enough to mark the secession as a fact of governance: the price of imposing a coherent discipline on the anchorites was that some would not bear it, and the institutional order Sabbas built was held together against real and recurring resistance. Cyril records other revolts as well, including risings that drove Sabbas temporarily from the Lavra altogether and into a self-imposed exile in the region of Scythopolis and Nikopolis, from which the patriarch had to recall him and restore him (Cyril, Life of Sabas 33–35; Patrich 1995, ch. 7). The leader of Palestinian monasticism was not an undisputed monarch but a contested father, and the Life is honest about it.

The Patriarchs: Sallustius, Elias, Peter

Sabbas’s office bound him to the patriarchs of Jerusalem, and his career runs through the reigns of several of them. Sallustius (486–494) ordained him priest around 490 and appointed him archimandrite of the anchorites in 494 — the patriarch from whom both of Sabbas’s dignities derive (Cyril, Life of Sabas 19, 30; Patrich 1995). Elias (494–516), Sallustius’s successor and himself a former monk of the region, was Sabbas’s patriarch through the most active middle decades of the exarchate: it was under Elias that Sabbas undertook the embassy to Anastasius, and Elias and Sabbas stood together in the defense of Chalcedon until Elias was deposed and exiled by the emperor for his refusal to abandon the council (Cyril, Life of Sabas 50–56; Binns 1994, ch. 7; the Christological story is in The Christological Struggles). John (516–524) and then Peter (524–552) followed; under Peter, in extreme old age, Sabbas made his last embassy — to Justinian, in 531 — and it was Peter who presided over the patriarchate in the years of the Origenist struggle that broke out in earnest after Sabbas’s death in 532 (Cyril, Life of Sabas 70–73, 83–90; Patrich 1995, chs. 9–10).

The relationship between archimandrite and patriarch was reciprocal. The patriarch gave Sabbas his authority and his standing; Sabbas gave the patriarch the loyalty and the weight of the desert. When Jerusalem needed an envoy to the emperor, it was Sabbas who went; when the monks needed a voice at the patriarch’s councils, it was Sabbas who spoke for the anchorites and Theodosius for the coenobites (on the twin headship see Sabas and Theodosius). The institution Sallustius created in 494 thus did exactly what such an office was designed to do: it knit the unruly monastic movement to the hierarchical Church, and it made the desert a reliable ally of the see of Jerusalem in the doctrinal storms of the age.

The Institutional Achievement

It is easy to be drawn by the miracles and the personal sanctity of Cyril’s portrait and to miss the structural accomplishment that is, in the long view, Sabbas’s most consequential work. Before Sabbas, the Judean desert held a scatter of hermits, lavras, and coenobia — the foundations of Chariton, of Euthymius, of Theoctistus, of Gerasimus and others — related by the bonds of spiritual descent and proximity but not organized into any single order (on the prior generation see The Judean Desert and the formation under Euthymius and Theoctistus in The Young Monk). The appointment of 494 and Sabbas’s nearly forty years of administration under it turned that scatter into a coherent, patriarch-supervised network: a body of monasteries with a recognized superior-general for each form of life, a chain of authority reaching from the patriarch’s throne to the remotest cliff-cell, a graduated formation that fed the lavras from the coenobia, and a settled relationship of mutual support between the desert and the see (Binns 1994, ch. 6; Patrich 1995, chs. 5–6).

Patrich’s study makes the point with particular force: Sabbas is rightly titled not merely a great ascetic or a great founder but the leader of Palestinian monasticism, because the thing he led — an ordered monastic province under hierarchical supervision — did not fully exist before him and was substantially his creation (Patrich 1995, esp. chs. 5–6). Binns, surveying the monasteries of Palestine across the whole period 314–631, reaches a complementary judgment: the Sabaite system represents the maturity of Palestinian monasticism, the moment at which the heroic individualism of the early desert was integrated into a durable institution capable of outlasting its founder (Binns 1994, chs. 6–7). That this institution survived the Persian and Arab conquests, that the Great Lavra (Mar Saba) remains inhabited to this day, and that the Sabaite liturgical order became the typikon of the whole Byzantine and Slavic world (see The Jerusalem Typikon) are all, in the end, fruits of the organization wrought under the office of 494.

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Sabas, in The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Trans. R. M. Price, intro. and notes John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (The ordination at the consecration of the Lavra’s church, ch. 19; the appointment as archimandrite and exarch of the anchorites and lavras, ch. 30; the revolts and the secession of c. 507 founding the New Lavra, chs. 33–36; the embassies to Anastasius and Justinian, chs. 50–54, 70–73; the foundations, chs. 16, 27, 28, 32, 37, 39, 58.)
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 ordination dated c. 490; the appointment of 494; the structure and reach of the office of archimandrite; the foundations and the network; the secession and the New Lavra.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The twin archimandrites of 494; the patriarchs Sallustius, Elias, and Peter; the administration of the monasteries; the maturity of the Sabaite system.)
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 monasteries and Sabbas’s place among the Palestinian fathers.)