The Christological Struggles

In the last decades of his long life Sabbas the Sanctified became the foremost monastic champion of the Council of Chalcedon (451) within the patriarchate of Jerusalem, leading the Palestinian monks in their resistance to the anti-Chalcedonian policy of the emperor Anastasius I and to the unresolved tensions of the Henotikon. This file follows that struggle through his embassy to Constantinople on behalf of the patriarch Elias in c. 511/512, the great demonstration of monks at Jerusalem around 516, and his second embassy in 531 to Justinian after the Samaritan revolt — to his death on 5 December 532. The Christological dispute is presented with both Chalcedonian and Miaphysite positions named fairly, while making clear Sabbas’s own Chalcedonian commitment.

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

The Christological Question After Chalcedon

To understand Sabbas’s public role one must first see the dispute into which he was drawn, and see it without the anachronistic polemic that has too often disfigured its telling (METHODOLOGY §4). The Fourth Ecumenical Council, held at Chalcedon in 451, had confessed that Christ is “acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” (en duo physesin asynchytos, atreptos, adiairetos, achoristos), the property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one person (prosopon) and one subsistence (hypostasis) (Council of Chalcedon, 451, Definition of Faith; trans. Tanner 1990; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). For the Chalcedonians, including Sabbas, this language safeguarded the full reality of both Christ’s divinity and his humanity against the teaching of Eutyches, who had held that after the union there was only one nature.

A large body of Eastern Christians, however — those whom later Chalcedonian writers called “Monophysites” but who describe themselves as Miaphysite — rejected the formula “in two natures” as a betrayal of St. Cyril of Alexandria’s confession of “one incarnate nature of God the Word” (mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkomene). They feared that to speak of two natures after the union was to divide Christ as Nestorius had divided him. This was, for them, not a denial of Christ’s humanity but a defence of the integrity of his single concrete reality. The Orthodox Church confesses the Chalcedonian Definition as dogma; honesty nevertheless requires that the Miaphysite objection be stated as its holders understood it, and not caricatured (cf. the treatment in The Seven Ecumenical Councils, with its note on the modern Agreed Statements of 1989/1990). Sabbas stood firmly on the Chalcedonian side; that is the burden of this file. But the men he opposed were not, in their own eyes, deniers of the Incarnation, and the sixth-century reader will misjudge the whole struggle who forgets it.

The Henotikon and the Politics of Reunion

The decades between Chalcedon and Sabbas’s embassies were dominated by an attempt at compromise. In 482 the emperor Zeno, advised by the patriarch Acacius of Constantinople, issued the Henotikon (“instrument of union”), a document meant to reconcile Chalcedonians and their opponents by affirming the faith of Nicaea and Constantinople and the Twelve Anathemas of Cyril, anathematizing both Nestorius and Eutyches, while pointedly declining to endorse — or to repudiate — the Definition of Chalcedon by name (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood 1989; Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ, Oxford 1994). By saying nothing of “two natures” the Henotikon hoped to make the council’s most divisive formula recede from view.

The compromise satisfied few. To committed Chalcedonians the silence over the council was itself a concession to its enemies; to committed Miaphysites the document did not go far enough, since it did not condemn Chalcedon outright. In the West it provoked the Acacian Schism between Rome and Constantinople (484–519). In Palestine, where the prestige of Chalcedon was high and the monastic communities were largely loyal to it, the Henotikon years were a time of pressure and maneuver, in which the religious allegiance of a patriarch could be made or unmade by imperial favour. It is against this background that the political activity of Sabbas and of his fellow archimandrite Theodosius the Cenobiarch must be read.

The Palestinian Monks as a Bulwark of Chalcedon

By the early sixth century the monks of the Judean desert had become a constituency that no patriarch of Jerusalem could safely ignore. Their number, their prestige, and their concentration around the Holy City gave them a collective weight in ecclesiastical affairs, and their loyalties were overwhelmingly Chalcedonian. Cyril of Scythopolis, our principal narrative source, presents Sabbas and Theodosius as the twin leaders of this body — Sabbas over the lauras (the semi-eremitic houses) and Theodosius over the coenobia (the communal monasteries) — and as the guarantors of the patriarchate’s orthodoxy (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 56; trans. Price 1991). Cyril’s account is partisan in favour of Chalcedon and of Sabbas, and that bias must be weighed; but the broad fact of the monks’ Chalcedonian solidarity is well attested across the sources (Binns 1994; Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism, Washington 1995).

This monastic bulwark mattered most when the imperial throne turned against Chalcedon. The emperor Anastasius I (491–518), though a capable administrator, was in his religious sympathies inclined toward the anti-Chalcedonian party, and over the course of his reign he moved increasingly to favour Miaphysite leaders and to press for the deposition of Chalcedonian bishops (Meyendorff 1989; Chitty, The Desert a City, Oxford 1966). In Palestine this policy collided directly with the desert monks, and it is here that Sabbas first stepped onto the imperial stage.

The Embassy to Anastasius (c. 511/512)

The patriarch of Jerusalem in these years was Elias, himself a former monk of the desert and a man whose Chalcedonian commitment made him a target of Anastasius’s pressure. According to Cyril, when the emperor’s hostility threatened both the patriarch and the province, Elias chose Sabbas — already an old man and the most venerable of the desert fathers — to lead an embassy to Constantinople (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 50; trans. Price 1991). The mission, usually dated to around 511 or 512, was at once ecclesiastical and civil. Sabbas went to defend the cause of Chalcedon and of the patriarch, and also to plead for the temporal needs of Palestine — Cyril reports that he sought relief for the population, including the remission or reduction of taxes and aid for those impoverished by the disorders of the province (Cyril, Life of Sabas 51–54; Binns 1994).

Cyril’s narrative of the embassy is shaped to display Sabbas’s holiness and his boldness before power. The aged monk, plainly dressed and unimpressive to the courtiers, is at first turned away at the palace gate as a beggar, only to be received with honour once the emperor learns who he is; he speaks frankly to Anastasius in defence of the patriarch and the council, and obtains imperial concessions for Palestine (Cyril, Life of Sabas 51–53; trans. Price 1991). These scenes carry the colouring of hagiography — the despised holy man vindicated before the emperor is a recurring topos — and Cyril’s anti-Henotikon, pro-Chalcedonian standpoint governs the telling throughout (Binns 1994; Patrich 1995). What can be affirmed with confidence is the historical core: that Sabbas led an embassy to Anastasius on behalf of Elias and of Chalcedon, and that he combined the defence of orthodoxy with the pursuit of material relief for the people of Palestine. The mission did not reverse imperial policy, but it asserted, at the highest level, the immovable Chalcedonian loyalty of the Palestinian church.

The Deposition of Elias and the Resistance of the Monks

Anastasius’s pressure did not relent. In 516 the emperor at last secured the deposition of the patriarch Elias, who was driven from his see and exiled to Aila on the Red Sea, and a new patriarch, John (III), was installed in the expectation that he would accept communion with the anti-Chalcedonian party and abandon the council (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 56; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994). The desert monks regarded this as an assault on orthodoxy itself, and they mobilized. Cyril relates that Sabbas and Theodosius descended on Jerusalem with their monks to stiffen the new patriarch’s resolve and to prevent any betrayal of Chalcedon (Cyril, Life of Sabas 56–57; Patrich 1995).

The episode is a vivid instance of the monastic constituency acting as a check on imperial church policy. Whatever John may have promised the court, the presence and pressure of the monks made open repudiation of Chalcedon impossible; the patriarch, confronted by the assembled desert, held to the council (Cyril, Life of Sabas 56; trans. Price 1991; Meyendorff 1989). The monks’ power in this affair was not military but moral and demographic — the weight of a whole body of revered ascetics whose defection would have shaken the religious legitimacy of the see.

The Great Demonstration at Jerusalem (c. 516)

The resistance reached its climax in a mass demonstration that Cyril records in some detail. When official pressure to anathematize Chalcedon was at its height, the monks of the desert assembled in Jerusalem and, in a great public gathering, acclaimed the Council of Chalcedon and anathematized its opponents — naming, according to Cyril, Nestorius on the one side and the leaders of the anti-Chalcedonian party on the other, and proclaiming the four councils (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 56–57; trans. Price 1991). The demonstration was a deliberate counter-stroke: where the emperor sought a public renunciation of the council, the monks staged a public affirmation of it.

Cyril gives a figure for the assembled monks, and it is one of the points at which the historian must pause. [Disputed: Cyril of Scythopolis reports that about ten thousand monks gathered for the Chalcedonian demonstration at Jerusalem (Cyril, *Life of Sabas* 57; trans. Price 1991); modern scholars treat the figure as a rhetorical and round number rather than an exact census, while accepting that the gathering was genuinely very large and drawn from across the Palestinian monastic communities (Binns, *Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ*, Oxford 1994; Patrich, *Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism*, Washington 1995).] Whatever the precise count, the significance of the event is clear: it demonstrated, before the empire, that the monastic heart of Palestine would not be moved from the Chalcedonian confession. Sabbas, with Theodosius, stood at the centre of this affirmation, and it sealed his reputation as the council’s monastic champion.

Imperial policy itself changed soon after, though not through the monks’ agency alone. The death of Anastasius in 518 brought to the throne Justin I, who reversed his predecessor’s religious course, restored communion with Rome, and ended the Acacian Schism in 519 (Meyendorff 1989; Chitty 1966). The Chalcedonian cause that Sabbas had defended through the hard years now had an emperor behind it.

The Second Embassy: To Justinian (531)

Sabbas’s last great public act came under Justin’s nephew and successor, Justinian I (527–565), and it was occasioned by catastrophe. In 529 a revolt of the Samaritans devastated parts of Palestine; towns and churches were burned, the population was scattered or enslaved, and the agricultural economy on which the province depended was severely damaged (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 70; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994). In the aftermath, the patriarch Peter of Jerusalem turned once more to Sabbas, now extremely old — about ninety-two years of age — to lead an embassy to the emperor in Constantinople to seek relief and rebuilding (Cyril, Life of Sabas 70–73; Patrich 1995).

The aims of the embassy of 531 were several. Sabbas sought imperial aid for the reconstruction of the devastated province and relief from taxation for a population that had been ruined; he sought the building of a hospital for sick monks and other foundations in the Holy Land; he asked for protection and privileges for the Palestinian monasteries; and he came as a representative of orthodoxy, raising before the emperor both the security of Chalcedonian Palestine and — as the companion file describes — the danger of the Origenist teaching then troubling the lauras (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 70–73; trans. Price 1991; see The Second Origenist Controversy). Cyril records that Justinian and the empress Theodora received the old monk with great honour, and that the emperor granted his petitions, issuing measures for the relief and restoration of Palestine and for the protection of its monks (Cyril, Life of Sabas 72–73; Binns 1994).

Here too Cyril’s narrative is hagiographically heightened — the holy ambassador whose prayers and presence move the imperial couple — and his account of the privileges granted should be read as the report of a partisan witness rather than as a neutral charter (Binns 1994; Patrich 1995). One detail Cyril preserves is characteristic of the man: when Justinian and Theodora offered favours, Sabbas is said to have declined personal benefit and to have asked instead for what would serve the Holy Land and the monks (Cyril, Life of Sabas 71–73; trans. Price 1991). The embassy succeeded in its main object — substantial imperial support for the recovery of Palestine — and it set the seal on Sabbas’s lifelong role as the bridge between the desert and the throne.

Death (5 December 532)

Sabbas returned from Constantinople to his desert, and there, in the Great Lavra, he died not long after. Cyril dates his repose to the early winter following the embassy: he fell ill, appointed a successor as abbot, and died on 5 December 532, in extreme old age — having been born, by Cyril’s reckoning, in 439 (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 76–77; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995). His feast is kept on that day. He had spent the better part of a century in the desert and had ended as the public defender of the Council of Chalcedon and of his province, dying within a year of his last journey to the emperor.

Cyril of Scythopolis as Source

Almost everything narrated above comes from Cyril of Scythopolis, writing in the 550s, a generation after Sabbas’s death, and drawing on the memories of monks who had known the saint (Binns 1994; Patrich 1995). Cyril is an unusually careful hagiographer by the standards of his age, with a strong interest in chronology and named persons, which is why historians use him so heavily. But he is also a committed partisan — pro-Chalcedonian and, as the companion file shows, vigorously anti-Origenist — and his portrait of Sabbas is shaped to vindicate the causes Cyril himself held (Hombergen, The Second Origenist Controversy, Rome 2001; Binns 1994). The embassies and the demonstration are therefore best taken as historically grounded in their main lines while their speeches, miracles, and round numbers carry the colour of the genre. This is not a defect peculiar to Cyril but the ordinary condition of hagiographical evidence, to be handled as the methodology directs: the source is named, its standpoint is noted, and its claims are reported as its testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

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 embassy to Anastasius at chs. 50–54; the deposition of Elias and the resistance of the monks at 56–57; the Chalcedonian demonstration and the figure for the monks at 56–57; the Samaritan revolt and the embassy to Justinian at 70–73; the death of Sabbas on 5 December 532 at 76–77.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (On the embassies, the politics of the Henotikon and Anastasius, and Cyril’s reliability.)
Patrich, Joseph. Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 32. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995.
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
Hombergen, Daniël. The Second Origenist Controversy. Studia Anselmiana 132. Rome: Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, 2001. (On Cyril’s partisanship.)
Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 AD. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989.
Council of Chalcedon (451), Definition of Faith. In Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990.