SAINT ISAAC OF THE DALMATIAN MONASTERY

On the day of the spring equinox, April 4 according to the old calendar, the Church honors the memory of St. Isaac of Dalmatia. The history of the Church of Constantinople at that time knew two famous church figures named Isaac. The first boldly opposed Valens, the heretical emperor who openly supported the Arians. The second supported Emperor Arcadius, who persecuted John Chrysostom a quarter of a century after these events. The first Isaac died in 383, and the second after 405. The first Isaac was the abbot of a monastery founded with the funds of a benefactor named Dalmatus, who studied under Isaac and later became a monk himself and succeeded him as abbot. The monastery was not named after Isaac; moreover, thanks to the monastery, Isaac actually received the name of his disciple Dalmatus. Could this peculiarity of the name be related to the fact that the first and second Isaac are one and the same person? Perhaps this is why he has two days of remembrance, May 30 and March 22, that is, April 4 and June 12, respectively? Perhaps in order to preserve the good name of Isaac of Dalmatia, hagiographers “determined” the year of his death to be 383, as if separating him from the later period of his own biography, when he became a persecutor of St. John Chrysostom

In 330, Constantine the Great founded a new capital of the Roman Empire, which was named New Rome, on the European shore of the Bosphorus. There is a belief that, according to the emperor’s plan, the City of Constantine, or Constantinople in Greek, was to become an Orthodox Christian city, unlike the pagan Rome, which was still full of pagan idols, or Alexandria, which had always been full of false teachers and heretics and, moreover, was located too far away in Egypt.

Just seven years after the founding of the New Rome, when Constantine was nearing the end of his earthly journey, there were already fifteen monasteries in the new capital, the existence of which we know for certain. Soon, the Dalmatus monastery was added to these religious communities. It did not get its name from the historical region of “Dalmatia” in the Balkans, as many think, but from the name of its founder and patron, Dalmat, who later became a monk there himself and was even canonized by the Church as a saint.

The first abbot of the Dalmatian Monastery was St. Isaac. He was originally from Syria and initially lived as a hermit outside the city walls. When the Byzantine emperor Valens (364–378) began to openly support the Arian heretics and persecute the Orthodox, Isaac interrupted his seclusion and literally went out to meet the ruler with a denunciation. Valens was then going to war with the Goths. He ordered Isaac to be arrested and kept in chains so that he could later deal with him as a false prophet who had predicted his defeat for heresy at his return from the war. However, Valens was soon killed, and his body was never found, which was a rare occurrence in Roman history. Along with his freedom, Isaac gained the fame of a confessor, which led to him being literally forced to become the head of the monastery.

Thirteen centuries later, in 1672, on the day of Isaac’s commemoration, the future first Russian emperor, Peter the Great, was born in Moscow. To honor his heavenly patron, Peter ordered a church named after him to be built in the future new capital on the Neva River. It was rebuilt several times, eventually becoming the majestic St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the largest church in St. Petersburg.

Such was the earthly and heavenly path of the saint, who became a disaster for the heretical ruler Valens and a blessing for the Orthodox Russian emperor Peter. The paradoxical irony of history is that, while Constantine left the former pagan capital cities of Rome for the Christian capital on the Bosphorus, then, as historians tell us, Peter founded St. Petersburg because old Moscow seemed too traditional and ecclesiastical to him.