Saint Savvas the Sanctified

Saint Sabbas the Sanctified, known in Greek as Savvas, was born in 439 in Mutalaska, a village near Caesarea in Cappadocia in the Eastern Roman Empire. His father John served as a military officer and his mother was Sophia. When Sabbas was a small child his parents were posted to Alexandria and left him in the care of relatives. Family disputes over property followed, and at about the age of eight he entered a monastery near his native village, under the direction of Bishop Flavian. There he received instruction in the Scriptures and in the monastic life. The principal narrative of his career is the Life written in the mid-sixth century by Cyril of Scythopolis, a monk of the Judaean desert who drew on living memory of Sabbas and his disciples.

As a young man in the mid-fifth century Sabbas left Cappadocia for Jerusalem, seeking the desert life of Palestine. Saint Euthymius the Great, then the foremost abba of the region, judged him still young and sent him to the coenobium of Saint Theoctistus. Sabbas spent many years there in obedience and ordinary labor. After the death of Euthymius in 473 he obtained greater solitude, eventually settling in a cave on the steep eastern side of the Kidron Valley. Other hermits gathered around him. In 483 he organized the community as the Great Lavra, later called Mar Saba, following the lavriote system of weekday solitude and weekend common worship. He went on to found or restore further houses, including the New Lavra, the Castellion monastery, and a coenobium near the Jordan, forming a network of monastic sites in the Judaean wilderness.

In 491 Patriarch Sallustius of Jerusalem ordained Sabbas a priest so that the lavra might have a regular sacramental life. In 494 the patriarch appointed him archimandrite of all the lavrae and anchorites of the Jerusalem patriarchate. Sabbas used this position to defend the Council of Chalcedon. He opposed Origenist groups that had taken hold in some desert monasteries and resisted Monophysite pressure in Palestine. He journeyed to Constantinople, appearing at the courts of Emperor Anastasius I and later of Emperor Justinian I, and secured imperial support for the Palestinian monasteries and for Chalcedonian bishops. He also issued liturgical and disciplinary rules; the Typikon associated with his name, based on Jerusalem monastic usage, later became the foundation of the liturgical typikon of the Byzantine Orthodox Church.

Sabbas died in the Great Lavra on 5 December 532 and was buried in the monastery he had founded. Later tradition reported that his relics remained incorrupt. In the thirteenth century they were taken to Venice; they were returned to Mar Saba in 1965 and are still venerated there. His feast is kept on 5 December in the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Catholic calendars. The Great Lavra of Mar Saba, occupied without interruption since the late fifth century, is the most visible legacy of his work. Through that monastery and through the typikon that bears his name, Sabbas the Sanctified exercised a lasting influence on Eastern Christian monasticism and liturgy.