Saba

Saint Sabbas the Sanctified, commonly called Saint Saba in several Christian traditions, was one of the principal organizers of desert monasticism in Palestine during late antiquity. He was born in 439 in the village of Mutalaska in Cappadocia. The principal source for his life is the biography written by Cyril of Scythopolis a generation after his death. According to that account, his parents, John and Sophia, left Cappadocia for Alexandria when John, a soldier, was posted there, and the child was placed with an uncle. Family disputes over property led the boy to take refuge in the nearby monastery of Flavianae, which he entered at about the age of eight. He remained in Cappadocian monastic life until he was eighteen, when he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem with the intention of remaining in the desert.

In the Judean wilderness he attached himself to Euthymius the Great, the leading hermit of the region. Euthymius judged him too young for solitude and sent him to the cenobium of Theoctistus, where Sabbas spent many years in communal discipline. After the deaths of Theoctistus and then of Euthymius in 473, Sabbas adopted a fully eremitical life, occupying a cave on the eastern side of the Kidron gorge. Disciples gradually gathered around him. In 483 he established the Great Lavra, later known as Mar Saba, a cluster of hermit cells dependent on a common church and bakery on the cliff above the wadi. The lavra became the model for Palestinian lavriote monasticism. Sabbas founded or reorganized further houses, including a cenobium for novices not yet ready for solitude, the Kastellion monastery on an old fortress site, and other cells and coenobia in the desert and near Nicopolis. In 490 or 491 Patriarch Sallustius of Jerusalem ordained him to the priesthood so that the lavra could celebrate the Eucharist, and in 494 the same patriarch named him archimandrite over all the hermits of Palestine, alongside Theodosius, who supervised the cenobitic houses.

Sabbas was a firm Chalcedonian. He intervened repeatedly in the ecclesiastical politics of Jerusalem and Constantinople. Under the anti-Chalcedonian emperor Anastasius he traveled to the capital around 511 to defend the Council of 451 and the Palestinian monks. After the Samaritan revolt of 529 he went again to Constantinople, in 531, and obtained from Justinian funds to restore damaged churches, to endow a hospital in Jerusalem, and to ease the tax burden on the province. Within the desert itself he opposed Origenist speculation among the monks, a conflict that continued after his death. The liturgical rule associated with his lavra, the Typikon of Saint Sabas, later spread throughout the Byzantine monastic world and shaped the Orthodox divine office.

He died at the Great Lavra on 5 December 532, in his nineties. He was buried in the monastery he had founded between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. In the later Middle Ages his relics were taken to Italy, where they were kept in Venice; they were returned to Mar Saba in 1965. His feast is observed on 5 December. The monastery remains inhabited, and his reputation rests on the combination of eremitical rigor, institutional foundation, and defense of Chalcedonian doctrine that Cyril of Scythopolis recorded.