The life of Isaac, Dalmatius and Faustus
Toward the end of his own life Isaac handed leadership of the community to his closest disciple, Dalmatus, a former imperial guardsman under Theodosius the Great who had come to the monastery together with his own son, Faustus, and been tonsured alongside him. Dalmatus governed the monastery that would come to bear his name for decades afterward, and in 431 traveled to Ephesus for the Third Ecumenical Council, where his forceful opposition to the teaching of Nestorius was influential enough that the assembled bishops elected him archimandrite over the monasteries of Constantinople as a body. Faustus, tonsured alongside his father in his youth, is remembered chiefly through that shared beginning and his place in the community his father and Isaac had shaped; little of his own individual life beyond this survives in the sources consulted here. Together the three represent, in a single feast, the founding and the first two generations of a monastery that stood at the center of the Constantinopolitan Church's fifth-century councils.
