Theodosius the Cenobiarch, Saint

THEODOSIUS THE CENOBIARCH, Saint. - Founder of the monastery of St. Theodosius, on a height of the Judaean desert, and archimandrite of the Jerusalem cenobites, whence his appellation, b. at Magarissos (or Garissos) in Cappadocia ca. 424, d. in his monastery on 11 January 529. The name of T., besides appearing in the Eastern liturgical books, figures in the Marble Calendar of Naples and in the Roman Martyrology on 11 January.

To satisfy his desire to devote himself to the ascetic life, he left his homeland to go to Palestine: in the vicinity of Antioch he visited St. Simeon Stylites to obtain his advice, and, having reached Jerusalem, in 451 he placed himself under the direction of the ascetic Longinus, one of the most venerable spoudaei who dwelt at the Tower of David. In about 455 the noble lady Ikelia, foundress of the monastery at the Old Cathisma, situated between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, obtained from Longinus that T. should move there with other monks of the Holy City; the pious Ikelia at her death left the temporal administration of the monastery to T., who, dreading the office of hegumen, to which he had been called, fled to Metopa, near the anchorites Marinus and Luke, and settled in the cave that tradition called the refuge of the Magi. The continual flocking of disciples induced him, between 460 and 470, to erect there a monastery where the strictest asceticism was joined to the practice of arts and crafts. Charity was generously practiced there: pilgrims and beggars were the object of daily distributions of food; sick religious or strangers, rich and poor, were received in separate hospitals; veterans of the solitary life in a gerontocomium; pious benefactresses in a nosocomium; the energumens, that is the insane, in their own hospice. While for the divine Psalmody the monks of Greek, Slavonic (Bessi) and Armenian tongue gathered in separate churches, for the celebration of Holy Mass all went to the Greek Church. For the insane, Mass was celebrated in their private oratory. The fame of the holiness and administrative abilities of T., hegumen of as many as 400 monks, spread rapidly through Palestine, so much so that in 493 he was chosen as archimandrite of all the cenobites of Jerusalem (cf. J. Pargoire, Archimandrite, in DACL, I, II, col. 2744; P. de Meester, De monachico statu iuxta discipl. byc., Vatican City 1942, p. 195).

The attitude of T. and of his great friend St. Sabas (v.) was exceedingly energetic on the occasion of the struggle against the Monophysite and anti-Chalcedonian ambitions of the emperor Anastasius. To T. and St. Sabas is due the organization of the grand monastic assembly (10 thousand men) in the church of St. Stephen in Jerusalem (end of 516 or beginning of 517) during which the patriarch John had to anathematize Severus of Antioch. It was then that the venerable T., before descending from the ambo, hurled the apostrophe that deeply moved the already electrified assembly: "If anyone does not believe in the 4 Councils as in the 4 Gospels, let him be anathema." Despite the decree of exile issued immediately afterwards by Anastasius, T. and St. Sabas, having again assembled the whole monastic population of Palestine, sent the Emperor a vigorous protest, a kind of declinatory plea against the attempt to make them accept communion with Severus of Antioch. After the death of Anastasius (518), T. governed for another 11 years the monastery that had taken on the appearance of a veritable city, set on a height from which Jerusalem and Bethlehem could be seen. The patriarch Peter of Jerusalem presided at the funeral of T., the great luminary of the Judaean desert, whose body was laid in the cave that he had chosen as his refuge more than half a century earlier. The monastery of St. Theodosius, today Deir Dosi, destroyed in the 15th century, was rebuilt at the beginning of our century by the Greek monks of Jerusalem.

A. Pietro Frutaz