Saint Sava and the Power(s) of Spiritual Authority

Once upon a time there lived a boy prince, very intelligent, rich, and fair looking. All the doors of worldly pleasures and success were open before him. But something within himself turned him away from all those things after which millions of human beings are feverishly striving. He renounced all vanities and allurements of the world and one day secretly fled away from the royal court and settled in a desert place as a poor stranger intent only to enlighten his soul by fulfilling God’s will to perfection. Many years later this worldly prince, led by God’s hand, returned from the desert to his native country as a prince of the church and forever the spiritual leader of his nation.¹

To those familiar with it, this description may evoke the life of Prince Siddhartha, later known as the Buddha; but in fact these words introduce another spiritual leader, in another part of the world and almost 17 centuries later. Indeed, the life story of Prince Rastko, later known as Saint Sava, the founder of the autonomous and then autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church, and Gautama Buddha, the founder of what we know today as Buddhism are remarkably similar. The author of the introductory quote, Bishop Nicholai Velimirovich himself familiar with Indian religions and philosophy, admits that “we cannot help making comparisons.”² But the key difference is that the youngest son of the Grand Župan Stefan (Stevan) Nemanja³ and his wife Ana, Prince Rastko, never married but fled his parent’s home at the age of 17 precisely to avoid it. He fled to the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, the spiritual center of Orthodox Christianity since ninth century. That is why, as the Bishop remarks, unlike Siddhartha who was married and fathered a son, Prince Rastko remained childless, but later as monk Sava and the first Serbian Archbishop and finally Saint, “he became the father of many and many millions of his spiritual sons and daughters through the centuries.”⁴

In this essay I will consider the emergence and function of the cult of Saint Sava, his role in the religious life and organization of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and his collateral impact on the political realities of the medieval and modern Serbian states. To do so I will be referring to religious categories necessary to understand the phenomenon of spiritual authority, most notably the category of sainthood. Saints are human beings who, to paraphrase Peter Brown, take part in the joining of Heaven and Earth, and they do so particularly effectively as dead human beings.⁵ The death of a holy person holds special significance from early on in Christian history. Starting with martyrs and confessors in the era of persecutions, sainthood was gradually replaced with the “symbolic” death from the world by the desert monastics so that eventually sanctity was ascribed to their asceticism.⁶ Furthermore, that sanctity was also extended to those who spread the gospel or to those who governed the Church or the State with piety. Even though saints’ cults “have their specificity and their complex history at a variety of levels, they also display certain structural features which may be seen across cultures and across time.” ⁷ To those we now turn in the context of Saint Sava’s life.

There is little doubt that the death of Saint Sava in 1236 immediately assumed special significance in the history of his people, and beyond.⁸ Bishop Nicholai writes, “[t]he death of a member of a family is a blow to that family. The death of a King or a national hero is a blow to his nation. But the death of a Saint is a blow to many nations or even to the world.”⁹ The cult of dead saints often sprang from a reputation for sanctity acquired during their lifetime, a reputation created by others, and a role that others expect of them. From his earliest biographers, Domentian (early thirteenth century) and Theodosius of Hilandar (late thirteenth or early fourteenth century), to the more contemporary ones such as Bishop Nicholai (early...