The Relics

St Sabbas the Sanctified died at his Great Lavra in 532 and was buried there, and his relics were venerated in the gorge of the Kidron through the Byzantine centuries. At some point in the Middle Ages — most plausibly during the Crusader period — the relics were carried to Venice, where they rested for centuries in a church of the city. In 1965, in the era of the lifting of the mutual anathemas of 1054, Pope Paul VI returned the relics of St Sabbas to the Holy Lavra, where they rest today and are venerated, the tradition reports, as incorrupt. This file sets out what can be securely said about the burial, the medieval translation to Venice, and the documented modern return, distinguishing established fact from tradition and from points that remain uncertain.

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

The Death and Burial at the Lavra

St Sabbas died on 5 December 532, in his ninety-fourth year, having returned from his second embassy to Constantinople not long before; his death and burial are narrated by Cyril of Scythopolis, who entered the Sabaite community in the following years and wrote within living memory of the founder (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 76–78; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 1–13, on the chronology of Sabbas’s life and death). Cyril reports that the dying Sabbas appointed his successor as superior of the lavra, gave his final charge to the brethren, and died in peace, and that he was buried at the Great Lavra he had founded (Cyril, Life of Sabas 76–78; Price 1991). The tomb of St Sabbas at the lavra became, from this point, a centre of veneration: the founder’s relics rested in the monastery he had raised in the desert, and the keeping of his memory at the site is continuous in the tradition from his burial onward (see Feast and Cult).

The burial of the founder within the lavra is consistent with the wider pattern of the cult of the holy dead in early Christian monasticism, in which the tomb of a founding father became a sacred focus of the community he had gathered — the analogue, in the monastic setting, of the martyr’s shrine, whose veneration the early Church had already articulated in the keeping of the martyr’s tomb and the genethlia of his heavenly birthday. For Mar Saba the presence of Sabbas’s own body was, with the tomb of John of Damascus, one of the two great relics of the lavra.

The Incorruption: How the Tradition Reports It

The Orthodox tradition holds the relics of St Sabbas to be incorrupt — preserved whole and uncorrupted, a condition the Church reads as a sign of sanctity. This claim must be received as the tradition’s testimony and not as a bare assertion of physical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The incorruption of Sabbas’s relics is not a datum of the sixth-century Life — Cyril of Scythopolis narrates the death and burial but does not make the later condition of the body a theme — but belongs rather to the later history of the relics and to their veneration after the translation to Venice and their return to the lavra (Patrich 1995, ch. 3; the incorruption is attested in the modern devotional and liturgical tradition surrounding the relics rather than in the primary vita).

What can be said is this: the relics venerated at Venice and returned to Mar Saba in 1965 are venerated in the Orthodox tradition as the incorrupt body of the saint, and the modern accounts of the return describe a body preserved whole. [Disputed: the relics of St Sabbas are venerated as incorrupt in the Orthodox tradition, and modern accounts of the 1965 return describe them so; this incorruption is attested by the veneration and the modern reports rather than established by any forensic examination available here, and is reported as the tradition holds it (METHODOLOGY §3.5) — the antiquity of the specific claim of incorruption (whether it goes back to the medieval Venetian veneration or is principally a feature of the modern cult) is not securely established in the accessible sources.] The Orthodox practice, in any case, does not rest the saint’s holiness on the physical state of the relics: incorruption is read as a sign granted by God, not as the ground of veneration, which is owed to the saint and through the saint to God.

The Translation to Venice

At some point in the Middle Ages the relics of St Sabbas left the Holy Land and came to Venice, where they were enshrined and venerated for centuries. The transfer belongs to the broad medieval pattern by which relics of the Christian East were carried — by gift, by purchase, and not seldom by plunder — to the churches of Latin Christendom, and to Venice above all, the maritime republic whose merchants and crusaders gathered the relics of the East into the city’s churches on a scale unmatched in the West (the Venetian appetite for Eastern relics is most famously exemplified by the body of St Mark and by the spoils of the Fourth Crusade of 1204).

The relics of St Sabbas came to rest in Venice in the church of San Antonino (Sant’Antonin), where they remained until the twentieth century. [Disputed: the date and the precise circumstances of the translation of St Sabbas's relics from the lavra to Venice are not securely fixed in the accessible sources — the transfer is generally placed in the era of the Crusades (the twelfth or thirteenth century), when the routes and relations between Palestine and the Italian maritime cities were open and the traffic in Eastern relics to Venice was at its height, but the agent, the exact date, and the route are uncertain, and the bare statement "carried to Venice during the Crusades" should be taken as the best general placement rather than a documented event; the church of San Antonino (Sant'Antonin) in Venice is consistently named as the place where the relics rested before their modern return.] Through these centuries the relics of the founder of the Judean desert’s greatest lavra lay far from the gorge of the Kidron, in a parish church of the Venetian lagoon, while the monastery itself continued its life under Muslim and then Ottoman rule (see Mar Saba, the Living Monastery).

The Modern Return: 1965

The relics were restored to Mar Saba in the twentieth century, in one of the notable gestures of the modern rapprochement between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. In 1965 the relics of St Sabbas were returned from Venice to the Holy Lavra by Pope Paul VI, as an act of goodwill toward the Orthodox Church, and they were brought back to the monastery in the Kidron gorge, where they rest today (the 1965 return by Paul VI is the consistently reported account of the relics’ restoration to Mar Saba). The return reversed, after some seven or eight centuries, the medieval removal: the body of the founder came home to the lavra he had built.

The gesture must be read in its precise ecclesial moment. The mid-1960s were the years of the dramatic thaw between Rome and the Orthodox East presided over by Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople. In January 1964 the two had met in Jerusalem — the first meeting of a pope and an ecumenical patriarch in centuries — and on 7 December 1965, in a coordinated act announced simultaneously in Rome and in the Phanar, Paul VI and Athenagoras lifted the mutual anathemas that had been exchanged in 1054 between the legates of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople, “consigning them to oblivion” (the joint Catholic–Orthodox declaration of 7 December 1965 is the documented act; on the era and the question of councils and communion, see The Ecumenical Councils). The return of relics from Latin churches to the Orthodox East was a characteristic gesture of this period of reconciliation — the return of St Sabbas’s relics to Mar Saba in 1965 belongs with the better-known return of relics in the following years.

[Disputed: the return of St Sabbas's relics to Mar Saba by Pope Paul VI is firmly and consistently dated to 1965 in the tradition and the accounts of the monastery, and it plainly belongs to the ecumenical context of the Paul VI–Athenagoras rapprochement (the 1964 Jerusalem meeting and the 7 December 1965 lifting of the anathemas, both of which are securely documented); the exact day and the precise ceremonial details of the relics' handover and of their journey from Venice to the lavra are not established in the accessible sources and should not be invented — only the year (1965), the agent (Paul VI), the origin (Venice / San Antonino), and the destination (the Holy Lavra of St Sabbas) are reported here as secure, with the surrounding ecumenical events dated independently.]

The Relics at the Lavra Today

Since 1965 the relics of St Sabbas have rested again at the Great Lavra, where they are venerated by the monks and by the Orthodox pilgrims who descend into the gorge to the cliff-hung monastery. They are kept and shown within the enclosure — together with the tomb of St John of Damascus, the lavra’s other great glory — and are venerated, as the tradition reports, as the incorrupt body of the founder (Patrich 1995, ch. 3; see Mar Saba, the Living Monastery and Feast and Cult). The feast of St Sabbas is kept on 5 December, the day of his repose, and the presence of his relics in the lavra makes the monastery the chief centre of his cult (see Feast and Cult).

The history of the relics thus traces, in the fortunes of a single body, the long arc of the monastery’s own story: buried in the desert at the height of the Byzantine age, carried to the Latin West in the medieval centuries of the Crusades, and restored to the gorge of the Kidron in the modern era of Catholic–Orthodox reconciliation. That the founder’s relics now rest where his prayer began — in the lavra that has kept the cycle of its services for some fifteen centuries — is, for the Orthodox tradition, the fitting close of their long journey (see Legacy and Assessment).

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 for the death of Sabbas on 5 December 532 and his burial at the Great Lavra; chs. 76–78.)
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 life and chronology of Sabbas; the tomb and the later history and present veneration of the relics at the lavra.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The Sabaite community and the cult of its founder; the monastery’s later history.)
Common Declaration of Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I (7 December 1965). (The joint act lifting the mutual anathemas of 1054 and “consigning them to oblivion”; the documented ecumenical event contemporaneous with the return of the relics.)
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 and the fortunes of its monasteries, the context of the relics’ removal and survival.)