ISAAC OF THE DALMATOS MONASTERY
Today the Church honors the memory of St. Isaac of the Dalmatos Monastery (+383). The saint was a great ascetic of his time, a prophet and seer, an accuser of the powers that be. His name should be traced not to the historical region of Dalmatia in the Balkans, but to the name of the famous monastery in Constantinople, of which he became the founder.
According to life, Isaac came from Syria. Then Emperor Valens (364ā379) supported the Arian heretics and persecuted Nicene Orthodoxy. The biographies of the great saints of that time, Basil of Caesarea (330ā379), and many others, preserve memories of how Valens personally threatened them and demanded that they renounce their confession.
Valens deposed bishops, divided dioceses, and helped the Arians in every possible way. At that moment, Isaac appeared in Constantinople and openly denounced the emperor for his error. When the latter set off on a military campaign against the Goths, Isaac for the last time called on him to stop the persecution of the Orthodox. Valens ordered the monk to be placed in prison with the promise to deal with him upon his return with victory. Isaac predicted his imminent death for his evil faith. On August 9, 378, the Roman army was defeated in Thrace near Adrianople. Valens himself was killed and even his body, a unique case in Roman history, was not found.
Isaac came out of prison; his contemporaries saw him as a prophet. He wanted to retire to the lonely cell where he had lived before. But the saint’s benefactors, Saturninus and Victor, donated a plot of land in Constantinople, which was then located outside the boundaries of the original Constantinian city. This is how the famous monastery arose, which played a very important role in the subsequent spiritual history of the imperial capital on Bosporus.
After Isaac, Saint Dalmatus became the abbot of the monastery. Previously, he was a noble military official, but he left the world and, together with his son Faustus, settled in the monastery of Isaac. After his name, the monastery was called āDalmatianā. Retrospectively, and this is a very rare case in history, Isaac himself was named āIsaac of Dalmatiaā, after the subsequent name of the monastery. The memory of the council of the three reverend fathers - Isaac, Dalmatos and Faustus - is celebrated in August (3 (16)). Having become the founder of the monastery, he ruled it for a very short time. This place was a truly great and significant monastery of Christian antiquity; one could write a separate history filled with spirituality and theology, a kind of genius loci story. Subsequently, for a long time, the abbot of this monastery was the dean of the entire monastic clergy of Constantinople.
Saint Isaac died on May 30, 383. According to the amazing interweaving of divine and human destinies in history, on this day, in 1672, the future Russian Emperor Peter I was born. Due to the shift in the Julian and Gregorian calendars, this day then fell on June 9. Nowadays it is June 12 when, coincidentally, Russia National Day is celebrated.
According to pious tradition, saints whose memory is celebrated on a personās birthday become his heavenly patrons. On some days, several saints are commemorated. But on the celebration of St. Isaac there were no other commemorations then. Thus, Saint Isaac became the heavenly patron of Peter, and therefore in honor of him in the new capital of the Empire, St. Petersburg, the famous St. Isaac’s Cathedral was then erected, one of the most significant churches in terms of grandeur and architecture in all Christian history. Thus, the biography of Saint Isaac, earthly and heavenly, became the foundation of a great monastery and a great cathedral.