Mar Abraham Chaldean Catholic Church

Our Patron Saint | Mar Abraham the Great of Kashkar

Monk, founder and abbot of the ‘Great Monastery’ on Mount Izla.

Abraham was from the region of Kashkar (later al-Wāsiṭ, in present-day southern Iraq). After a period of preaching in Ḥirta, he is said to have traveled to the Egyptian desert of Scetis, to Mount Sinai, and to Jerusalem. He then spent some time at the School of Nisibis, where he studied with Abraham of Beth Rabban and with Yoḥannan of Beth Rabban, before settling, around the middle of the 6th century, on Mount Izla, in the vicinity of Nisibis. He built the ‘Great Monastery’ and assembled many disciples. A monastic rule, consisting of twelve canons, was issued in 570. In the following decades, Abraham’s disciples founded monasteries all over Mesopotamia and Persia. Many of the great ascetics of the Church of the East are associated with Abraham’s monastic movement.

Although asceticism and monasticism must have existed in the Church of the East long before Abraham, they had been marginalized by the synods of the late 5th century. Abraham succeeded in bringing them back to the center of the church, where they developed under the control of the ecclesiastical and theological authorities. Abraham is said to have introduced a distinct tonsure and dress for the monks of his new movement, thus distinguishing them from Syriac Orthodox monks as well as from dissenters within the Church of the East.

Source: Lucas Van Rompay, “Abraham of Kashkar,” in Abraham of Kashkar, edited by Sebastian P. Brock, Aaron M. Butts, George A. Kiraz and Lucas Van Rompay, gedsh.bethmardutho.org.