Portal:Catholicism/Patron Archive/December 5
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Sabbas the Sanctified (439-531/532) was a Palestinian monastic. Sabbas was born at Mutalaska, near Caesarea of Cappadocia, the son of John, a military commander, and Sophia.
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 monastery of Flavian located nearby. The gifted child quickly learned to read and became an expert on the Holy Scriptures. In vain did his parents urge St. Sabbas to return to the world and enter into marriage.
When he was seventeen years old he received monastic tonsure. After spending ten years at the monastery of Flavian, he went to Jerusalem, and from there to the monastery of 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.
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 struggled in the cave for five years.
Euthymius attentively directed the life of the young monk, and seeing his spiritual maturity, he began to take him to the Rouba wilderness with him. They set out on January 14, and remained there until Palm Sunday. Euthymius called Sabbas a child-elder, and encouraged him to grow in the monastic virtues.
When Euthymius died (c. 473), Sabbas withdrew from the Lavra and moved to a cave near the monastery of St. Gerasimus of 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 Kedron 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 cenobitical 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.
A strenuous opponent of the Monophysites and the Origenists he tried to influence the emperors against them by calling personally on Emperor Anastasius at Constantinople in 511 and on Justinian in 531.
Sabbas founded several more monasteries. Many miracles took place through the prayers of Sabbas: at the Lavra a spring of water welled up, during a time of drought there was abundant rain, and there were also healings of the sick and the possessed.
Patriarch Salustius of Jerusalem ordained him in 491 and appointed archimandrite of all the monasteries in Palestine in 494. Sabbas composed the first monastic Rule of church services, the so-called Jerusalem Typikon, for guidance of all the Palestinian monasteries. He died in the year 532.
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