Sabbas the Sanctified

St Sabbas was born the son of John, a military commander, and Sophia, at Moutalaske near Caesarea of Cappadocia. The name of the village has no known meaning in Greek, but the Aramaic "Mata la zkha" translates as "Village of Victory".{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

Journeying to Alexandria on military matters, his parents left their five-year-old son in the care of an uncle. When the boy reached eight years of age, he entered the nearby monastery of Bishop Flavian of Antioch. The gifted child quickly learned to read and became an expert on the Holy Scriptures. Sabbas resisted his parents' pressure to return to the world and enter into marriage. When he was 17 years old he received monastic tonsure and subsequently spent ten years at the monastery of Bishop Flavian.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

After that, Sabbas went to Jerusalem, and from there to the monastery of Saint Euthymius the Great. But Euthymius sent Sabbas to Abba Theoctistus, the head of a nearby monastery with a strict cenobitic rule. Sabbas lived in obedience at this monastery until the age of thirty.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

After the death of the Elder Theoctistus, his successor blessed Sabbas to seclude himself in a cave. On Saturdays, however, he left his hermitage and came to the monastery, where he participated in divine services and ate with the brethren. After a certain time Sabbas received permission not to leave his hermitage at all, and he lived in isolation in the cave for five years.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

Euthymius attentively directed the life of the young monk, and seeing his spiritual maturity, he began to take him to the wilderness with him. They set out each January 14 and remained there until Palm Sunday. Euthymius called Sabbas a child-elder, and encouraged him to grow in the monastic virtues.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

File:The Dormition of Sabbas the Sanctified.png, 1656]]

When Euthymius died (c. 473), Sabbas withdrew from the lavra (a cluster of cells or caves for hermits, with a church and sometimes a refectory at the center) and moved to a cave near the monastery of St Gerasimus of the Jordan. After several years, disciples began to gather around Sabbas, seeking the monastic life. As the number of monks increased, the Great Lavra sprang up. The traditional dating of the founding of this lavra in the Kidron Valley, south of Jerusalem, is 484. Because some of his monks opposed his rule and demanded a priest as their abbot, the opposition continued and he withdrew to the New Lavra, which he had built near Thekoa. In the lavras the young monks lived a cenobitic life, but the elders a semi-eremitical one, each in his own hut within the precincts of the lavra, attending only the solemn church services.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

As a supporter of the Chalcedonian creed and strenuous opponent of the Monophysites and the Origenists, he tried to influence the emperors against them by calling personally on Emperor Anastasios I at Constantinople in 511 and on Justinian I in 531.{{cite encyclopedia |title=St. Sabbas |encyclopedia=Catholic Encyclopedia |url= http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13286b.htm}}

Sabbas founded several more monasteries. It is claimed that many miracles took place through the prayers of Sabbas: at the lavra a spring of water welled up, during a time of drought they received abundant rain, and there were also healings of the sick and the possessed.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

After the death of the archimandrite Marcian around 491/92, the monks in the wilderness around Jerusalem went to patriarch Salustius of Jerusalem to ask to obtain Sabbas as archimandrite of the anchorites and cave-dwellers and Theodosius as archimandrite of all cenobitic living monks.{{cite journal |editor1-last=Wheeler |editor1-first=Eric P. |title=Dorotheos of Gaza - Discourses and Sayings |journal=Cistercian Studies |date=1977 |volume=33 |publisher=Liturgical Press|pages=63-64}}

Sabbas composed the first monastic rule of church services, the so-called Jerusalem Typikon, for guidance of all the Byzantine monasteries. He died in the year 532 and his feast day is on 5 December, the day of his death.

File:Relics of St. Sabbas the Sanctified in the Mar Saba monastery in Palestine.jpg of St. Sabbas in the Catholicon (main church) of Mar Saba monastery, in Palestine.]]

Sabbas's relics were taken by Crusaders in the 12th century as a result of the War of Saint Sabas and remained in Italy in the Church of Saint Anthony in Venice,Cf. Speake (2021): "Venetian churches were dedicated to Greek saints and were enriched with Greek relics, such as those of St Sabas, St Donatus, and St Nicholas of Myra." until Pope Paul VI returned them to the monastery in 1965 as a gesture of good will towards the Orthodox.

Sabbas's Life was written by his disciple Cyril of Scythopolis. The chief modern authority is A. Ehrhard in Wetzer and Welte's Kirchenlexikon (ed. 2) and Römische Quartalschaft, vii; see also Pierre Helyot, Histoire des ordres religieux (1714), i.C.16, and {{ill|Max Heimbucher|de}}, Orden u. Kongregationen (1907), i, §10.

His Great Lavra long continued to be the most influential monastery in those parts, and produced several distinguished monks, among them St John of Damascus. It is now known as the monastery of Mar Saba. The church of San Saba in Rome is dedicated to him.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

The San Saba River in Texas, and other features in the area, are named after Sabbas; it was so called because Juan Antonio Bustillo y Ceballos discovered the river on St. Sabbas's day, 5 December 1732, and named it Río de San Sabá de las Nueces ("River of Saint Sabbas of the Walnuts").{{Handbook of Texas|id=rns11|name=San Saba River}}

• Anthony the Great (c. 251 – 356), monk who established Christian monasticism in the Egyptian desert
• Chariton the Confessor (end of 3rd century - ca. 350), founder of lavra-type monasticism in the Judaean desert
• Euthymius the Great (377–473), founder of monasteries in Palestine and saint
• Saint Sabbas the Sanctified, patron saint archive
• Sabbas (disambiguation) including Saint Sabbas, Saint Sabas, Saint Sava
• Saint Sava (1169/74–1236), Serbian prince and Orthodox monk who visited Mar Saba

{{Reflist}}

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• {{EB1911|wstitle = Sabas, St|volume=23 }}
• {{cite book |last= Patrich |first= Joseph |title= Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries |publisher=Dumbarton Oaks |series= Dumbarton Oaks studies |volume= 32 |year= 1995 |issn= 0070-7554 |isbn= 0884022218 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=OrZe96Bo9wUC |access-date=8 February 2022}}
• {{Cite book |last=Speake |first=Graham |title= Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition |date=2021 |publisher= Routledge |isbn=978-1-135-94206-9 |page= 1697 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=3ockEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1697}}

{{refend}}

{{wikisource author|Sabbas}}

• [https://web.archive.org/web/20070423214811/http://home.it.net.au/~jgrapsas/pages/sabbas.htm St. Sabbas the Sanctified] Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia
• [http://ocafs.oca.org/FeastSaintsViewer.asp?SID=4&ID=1&FSID=103477 St Sabbas the Sanctified] Orthodox Icon and Synaxarion (December 5)
• [http://saints.sqpn.com/saint-sabbas-of-mar-saba/ Patron Saints Index: Saint Sabbas]

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Category:439 births

Category:532 deaths

Category:5th-century Byzantine monks

Category:6th-century Byzantine monks

Category:Byzantine saints

Category:Saints from the Holy Land

Category:Saints from Anatolia

Category:6th-century Christian saints

Category:Archimandrites

Category:Byzantine Cappadocians

Category:People from Talas, Turkey