Sabas and Theodosius

In 494 the patriarch of Jerusalem set two men over all the monks of his jurisdiction, divided by way of life: Sabbas as archimandrite of the lavras and the anchorites, Theodosius the Cenobiarch as archimandrite of the coenobia. This file follows the partnership of the eremitic and the communal superiors-general — their friendship and collaboration, their shared defense of the Council of Chalcedon, their joint embassies and letters to the emperor Anastasius, and their complementary roles — down to Theodosius’s death in 529 and Sabbas’s own three years later, the two of them venerated together as the fathers of Palestinian monasticism.

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

Theodosius the Cenobiarch

The partner whose name is joined to Sabbas’s in the history of the Judean desert is Theodosius the Cenobiarch (c. 423–529), the great organizer of communal monasticism in Palestine. Born, like Sabbas, in Cappadocia, Theodosius came to the Holy Land as a young man, served for a time under the elder Longinus, and eventually settled east of Bethlehem, where around the 470s he founded the great coenobium that bears his name (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Theodosius; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994, ch. 6; Chitty 1966). His foundation grew into one of the largest and most elaborately organized communal houses of the East — Cyril and the later Life by Theodore of Petra describe a vast community with several churches for the different language-groups of its monks (Greek, Armenian, and others), a hospital, hospices for the sick, the aged, and the mentally afflicted, and a strict common discipline (Theodore of Petra, Life of Theodosius; Binns 1994, ch. 6; Chitty 1966). Where Sabbas’s genius was for the semi-eremitic lavra, Theodosius’s was for the fully communal coenobium: a single house in which the monks lived, prayed, ate, and worked together under one rule and one superior. The two men thus embodied between them the two classic forms of the monastic life (on those forms see Monasticism).

Cyril of Scythopolis, who wrote lives of both men, presents them as near-contemporaries and lifelong allies — both Cappadocian-born, both formed in the Palestinian desert, both raised to the headship of their respective branches of the monastic movement on the same day and by the same patriarchal act (Cyril, Life of Sabas 30; Life of Theodosius; Patrich 1995, ch. 6). The pairing is so close in Cyril that the two are almost a single institution seen from two sides.

The Twin Headship of 494

The constitutive event of the partnership is the appointment of 494. In that year the patriarch of Jerusalem — Sallustius (486–494) — divided the oversight of all the monks of the patriarchate between the two men according to their way of life, and appointed them jointly: Sabbas as archimandrite and exarch of all the anchorites and of the lavras, Theodosius as archimandrite of all the coenobia (Cyril, Life of Sabas 30; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, ch. 6; Binns 1994, ch. 6). The division is the key to the whole arrangement. It does not partition the desert geographically into two territories; it partitions the monastic life itself into its two forms and gives each form a single recognized superior-general answerable to the patriarch. Every hermit and every laura-monk of the Jerusalem patriarchate came under Sabbas; every communal house under Theodosius. Between them they constituted, for the first time, an ordered monastic province under hierarchical supervision (Patrich 1995, ch. 6; Binns 1994, ch. 6; on Sabbas’s half of the office see Leader of Palestinian Monasticism).

[Disputed: Cyril assigns the joint appointment to the patriarchate of Sallustius, hence to 494, the last year of that patriarchate (so Patrich, *Sabas* [1995], and Binns, *Ascetics and Ambassadors* [1994]); the office was in any case exercised under Sallustius's successor Elias, with whom some looser accounts associate the appointment, but the originating act is Cyril's and is given to Sallustius.]

The logic of the twin headship reflects the deep structure of Palestinian monasticism, which was always a single ecology of the eremitic and the communal rather than two separate worlds. A monk typically began in a coenobium, was formed in obedience and the common life, and only then — if he was judged ready — passed to the greater solitude of the cell in a lavra. Sabbas insisted on exactly this graduated path within his own foundations, pairing each lavra with a coenobium of beginners (see The Lavra and the Cenobium). The institution of 494 wrote that ecology into the constitution of the patriarchate’s monasticism: Theodosius governed the communal nurseries, Sabbas the eremitic summits, and the two halves of the office mirrored the two stages of a single ascetic vocation (Binns 1994, ch. 6; Patrich 1995, ch. 6).

Friendship and Collaboration

Cyril’s narrative makes the two archimandrites partners in fact and not merely in title. They consulted together, acted together, and presented a united front to the patriarch and the emperor alike. The closeness was rooted in their common origin and formation — both Cappadocians, both desert-trained — and Cyril preserves several scenes of their collaboration in the governance of the monks and in the affairs of the Church (Cyril, Life of Sabas and Life of Theodosius, passim; Binns 1994, chs. 6–7).

The collaboration mattered most when the desert had to speak to the world. When the monastic body needed to address the patriarch on a question of discipline or doctrine, the two archimandrites spoke for it together, each carrying the weight of his own constituency — Sabbas the anchorites, Theodosius the coenobites — so that their joint word was the word of the whole monastic movement of Palestine (Binns 1994, ch. 7; Patrich 1995, ch. 8). This is the institutional reason the partnership was so formidable in the Christological struggles: an emperor or a patriarch confronting both archimandrites at once was confronting the unanimous voice of every monk in the patriarchate.

The Shared Defense of Chalcedon

The supreme test of the partnership came in the doctrinal crisis of the reign of the emperor Anastasius I (491–518), whose sympathies leaned toward the anti-Chalcedonian (Miaphysite) party and who pressed the Eastern churches toward repudiation of the Council of Chalcedon (451) and acceptance of the Henotikon and its successors (on the council see The Ecumenical Councils; the full Christological story is in The Christological Struggles). Against this pressure the Palestinian monks, led by their two archimandrites, stood firmly for Chalcedon and for the patriarch Elias of Jerusalem, who upheld it.

Cyril records that Sabbas and Theodosius acted jointly in this defense — making common cause with the patriarch, rallying the monks of the desert, and addressing the emperor in writing on behalf of the orthodox faith of Palestine (Cyril, Life of Sabas 56–57; Life of Theodosius; Binns 1994, ch. 7; Patrich 1995, ch. 8). A celebrated incident, reported in the lives, has the two cenobiarchs and the monastic crowd of Jerusalem publicly anathematizing the enemies of Chalcedon and refusing the emperor’s demands; the great surviving document of the resistance is the petition or letter sent in the names of the two archimandrites and the monks of the desert to Anastasius, defending the Council of Chalcedon and warning the emperor against forsaking it (Cyril, Life of Sabas 57; Binns 1994, ch. 7; Patrich 1995, ch. 8). The desert’s two superiors-general thus put the whole authority of Palestinian monasticism behind the council, and their joint stand is one of the reasons Palestine remained, through the Anastasian crisis, a bastion of Chalcedonian orthodoxy when other Eastern provinces wavered (Binns 1994, ch. 7; Chitty 1966).

The embassy of Sabbas to Constantinople in person to plead with Anastasius (around 511/512), and the wider course of the Christological resistance, are treated in their own section (see The Christological Struggles). What belongs here is the shape of the alliance: in the defense of the faith as in the governance of the monks, Sabbas and Theodosius acted as a pair, the eremitic and the communal halves of the desert speaking with one voice for Chalcedon.

Complementary Roles

It is worth stating plainly what the division of labor meant in practice, because the complementarity is the heart of the partnership. Theodosius, the cenobiarch, presided over the communal life: the great house east of Bethlehem with its language-churches, its hospital and hospices, its strict common rule, its training of monks in the obedience and the shared discipline of the koinobion (Theodore of Petra, Life of Theodosius; Binns 1994, ch. 6). His was the monasticism of the common table and the common dormitory, the form most accessible to beginners and most stable against the dangers of solitude.

Sabbas, the archimandrite of the lavras, presided over the eremitic life: the scattered cells of the Great Lavra and its sister foundations, the hermits living alone through the working week and gathering only for the weekend synaxis, the more advanced and more perilous ascesis of solitude (Cyril, Life of Sabas passim; Patrich 1995; see The Lavra and the Cenobium). His was the monasticism of the cell and the cliff, reserved for those already proved in community.

Neither form was complete without the other, and the two men knew it. Theodosius’s coenobia fed Sabbas’s lavras with monks already formed in obedience; Sabbas’s lavras gave Theodosius’s communal discipline its higher goal and justification. The Church of Jerusalem, by setting one archimandrite over each and binding both to the patriarch’s authority, gave institutional form to a truth the desert had always known: that the cenobitic and the eremitic lives are two members of one body, and that the health of monasticism requires them both (Binns 1994, ch. 6; Patrich 1995, ch. 6; on the two forms in Orthodox tradition see Monasticism).

Theodosius’s Death and Sabbas’s Last Years

Theodosius, the elder of the two, lived to a great age — Cyril and the later tradition give him something over a hundred years — and died in 529 (Cyril, Life of Theodosius; Theodore of Petra, Life of Theodosius; Binns 1994). [Disputed: the year of Theodosius's death is generally given as 529, with his birth placed c. 423 and his age reckoned at over a hundred years (Binns, *Ascetics and Ambassadors* [1994]; Chitty, *The Desert a City* [1966]); the exact figures depend on the hagiographical lives of Theodore of Petra and Cyril and are not independently fixed.] Sabbas outlived his partner by about three years: he made his final embassy to the emperor Justinian in 531, in extreme old age, to obtain relief for Palestine after the Samaritan revolt, and died on 5 December 532 at the Great Lavra, aged ninety-three (Cyril, Life of Sabas 70–73, 76–77; Price 1991; Patrich 1995, ch. 10). With the deaths of the two archimandrites the founding generation of organized Palestinian monasticism passed, and the desert entered the troubled decades of the second Origenist controversy that followed (see The Second Origenist Controversy).

The Fathers of Palestinian Monasticism

The Church’s memory has kept the two together. Theodosius the Cenobiarch is commemorated on 11 January and Sabbas the Sanctified on 5 December, and the liturgical tradition honors them jointly as the twin fathers of Palestinian monasticism — the one the lawgiver of the communal life, the other of the eremitic, and both the pillars of the Chalcedonian faith in the Holy Land (Orthodox liturgical calendar; Binns 1994; Chitty 1966). The pairing in the calendar mirrors the pairing in history: as the patriarch of Jerusalem set them side by side over the monks in 494, so the Church venerates them side by side, and the institution they jointly founded — the ordered monasticism of the Judean desert, divided by way of life and united under the see of Jerusalem — is their common monument. The Great Lavra (Mar Saba) endures to this day, and the monastery of Theodosius was refounded in the twentieth century near its ancient site; but the deeper legacy is the structure itself, the twin headship of cell and community, that the two Cappadocian fathers of the desert built together (Patrich 1995; Binns 1994; on the enduring liturgical legacy see The Sabaite Liturgical Legacy).

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Lives of the Monks of Palestine (containing the Life of Sabas and the Life of Theodosius). Trans. R. M. Price, intro. and notes John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (The joint appointment of 494, Life of Sabas 30; the shared defense of Chalcedon and the address to Anastasius, Life of Sabas 56–57; Sabbas’s embassy to Justinian and death in 532, Life of Sabas 70–73, 76–77; the Life of Theodosius for the cenobiarch’s foundation, organization, and death.)
Theodore of Petra. Life of Theodosius the Cenobiarch. (The principal early vita of Theodosius; the great coenobium east of Bethlehem with its language-churches, hospital, and hospices.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The twin archimandrites of 494; the organization of Theodosius’s coenobium; the joint defense of Chalcedon under Anastasius; the chronology of the two fathers.)
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 division of the monastic office by way of life; Sabbas’s last years and death in 532; the partnership with Theodosius.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Theodosius and Sabbas among the Palestinian fathers; the Chalcedonian loyalty of the Judean desert.)