Biography
Abraham of Cratia
About Abraham of Cratia
Abraham was born in Emesa, now Homs in Syria, and entered monastic life while young. After an attack scattered his community, he and his monastic teacher went to Constantinople. His teacher became an abbot there, and Abraham took responsibility for the community’s practical affairs.
Around 500, he became an abbot at Cratia. After about ten years, he left without announcing his departure and went to Palestine, seeking a quieter life. He joined the community associated with the Tower of Eudocia.
Vailhé’s study of the surviving Life describes the conflict that followed. Bishop Platon of Cratia ordered Abraham to return and imposed ecclesiastical penalties when he refused. Abraham sought relief from the patriarch of Jerusalem, who declined to overturn the bishop’s decision. He eventually returned to Cratia and was reconciled with Platon.
After Platon’s death, Abraham succeeded him as bishop. Vailhé places that succession no earlier than 518, because Platon still appears in a council record that year. He reconstructs Abraham’s second departure for Palestine in 531, allowing about thirteen years as bishop. This differs from a later church biography’s date of about 525.
The later critical editor Eduard Schwartz rejected this reconstruction. He identified Abraham as the bishop present at the Constantinople synod in 536, rather than as a namesake successor. On that reading, the final return to monastic life occurred in 536 or later. Schwartz also questioned the narrative’s connection between Abraham’s departure and Sabas’s journey. The precise retirement year therefore cannot be treated as settled.
Abraham spent his final years in monastic retirement. His death is commonly placed around 558, but Vailhé notes that the Arabic Life supplies 6 December without a death year and that Abraham was still alive when Cyril wrote in 557. The chronology therefore remains approximate.
His commemoration is on 6 December. The Norwegian church biography notes that his name is absent from the 2001 Roman Martyrology.
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