The Kiev Caves and Saint Sergius

Russian monasticism has two great founts: the Kiev Caves Lavra of the eleventh century, where Sts. Anthony and Theodosius planted the Athonite and Stoudite traditions in the newly baptized Rus’, and St. Sergius of Radonezh in the fourteenth, whose renewal of the coenobitic life sent his disciples to found hundreds of monasteries across the forests of the “Northern Thebaid.” This file traces those two founts and defers the founders themselves to their own collections.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Kiev Caves: The Mother of Russian Monasticism

Russian monasticism begins in earnest with the Kiev Caves Monastery (the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra), founded in the mid-eleventh century, within two generations of the Baptism of Rus’ under St. Vladimir in 988. Its two founders are complementary. St. Anthony of the Kiev Caves (c. 983–1073), after living as a monk on Mount Athos, returned to Rus’ and settled as a hermit in a cave in the hills above the Dnieper near Kiev, drawing disciples by his ascetic example — the eremitic and Athonite root of Russian monasticism. St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves (c. 1029–1074) gave the growing community its organized coenobitic form: he obtained and adopted the Stoudite typikon from Constantinople as the governing rule, establishing strict common life, common property, obedience, and the full liturgical cycle, and thereby setting the coenobitic pattern for Russian monasticism (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, Harvard, 1946, on Anthony, Theodosius, and the Stoudite typikon at the Caves; the Life of Theodosius by Nestor and the Kiev Caves Paterikon are the primary sources). The two founders are deferred to their own collections: St. Anthony of the Kiev Caves and St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves; on the Stoudite typikon they received, see Theodore the Studite and the Stoudion.

The Caves monastery became the mother house of Russian monasticism and one of the wellsprings of Russian Christian culture. From it came bishops for the young Russian Church, the chronicler-monk St. Nestor (traditionally associated with the Primary Chronicle), the iconographer St. Alypius, and the Kiev Caves Paterikon, the collection of the lives and sayings of the early Caves monks that became a classic of Russian spiritual literature (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, 1946; and The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, trans. Muriel Heppell, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, 1989). The monks lived and were buried in the caves (pechery) dug into the hillside, where the relics of the early saints remain a major pilgrimage site to this day. The distinctive contribution of the Caves was to fuse the Athonite eremitic-ascetic impulse of Anthony with the ordered Stoudite coenobitism of Theodosius — the two streams of the tradition, planted together at the source of Russian monastic life.

The Long Interval and the Mongol Devastation

Between the Kievan flowering and the fourteenth-century renewal lay a long and difficult interval. The Mongol conquest of the 1230s–1240s shattered Kievan Rus’, sacked Kiev (1240), and disrupted monastic life across the southern lands; the center of Russian life shifted northward to the region of Vladimir and then Moscow. It was in that diminished and threatened world that the second great fount of Russian monasticism arose, no longer in the caves of a river-city but in the forests of the north (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, Harvard, 1966, on the post-Mongol monastic revival; Pierre Kovalevsky, Saint Sergius and Russian Spirituality, SVS Press, 1976).

Saint Sergius of Radonezh

St. Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1314–1392) is the most beloved saint of Russia and the father of its monastic renewal. Withdrawing as a young man into the forest wilderness north of Moscow, he settled with his brother at a remote place where he built a wooden cell and a little church of the Holy Trinity; disciples gathered, and there grew up the monastery that became the Trinity–Sergius Lavra (the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra), the spiritual heart of Russia (the Life of St. Sergius by Epiphanius the Wise, early fifteenth century, is the primary source; see Kovalevsky, Saint Sergius and Russian Spirituality, 1976, and Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, 1966). Sergius’ great institutional act was the restoration of the strict coenobitic life — common property, common table, obedience — which had lapsed in much of Russian monasticism during the years of disruption; his adoption of the coenobitic rule (traditionally with the encouragement of the patriarch of Constantinople) re-founded Russian communal monasticism on firm ground (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, 1966). His life, his humility and manual labor, his mystical experiences, and his role in the national awakening — including the tradition that he blessed Prince Dmitry Donskoy before the victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo in 1380 — are deferred to his own collection, St. Sergius of Radonezh.

The Northern Thebaid

Sergius’ deepest historical influence was through his disciples and their disciples, who carried the monastic life outward from the Trinity monastery into the vast forests and lakelands of the Russian north — Vologda, Beloozero, the shores of the White Sea and beyond — founding hundreds of monasteries and hermitages in what came to be called, by analogy with the Egyptian Thebaid, the “Northern Thebaid” (Severnaya Fivaida) (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, 1966; The Northern Thebaid: Monastic Saints of the Russian North, comp. and trans. Seraphim Rose and Herman Podmoshensky, St. Herman Brotherhood, 1975). This colonization of the wilderness by monks — Sts. Cyril of White Lake, Nil Sorsky, Savvaty and Zosima of Solovki, and a great company of others — was one of the formative movements of Russian history, at once a spiritual and a civilizing expansion: the monks went into the forest for solitude and prayer, and around their hermitages grew settlements, agriculture, and eventually towns. The Northern Thebaid is the Russian re-enactment of the desert: the flight to the wilderness for the Kingdom, now in the pine forests and frozen lakes of the north rather than the sands of Egypt (see The Angelic Life; The Northern Thebaid, 1975).

Within this northern flowering, however, two ideals of the monastic life came into tension — the great landed coenobia that fed the poor and served the Church and state, and the poor hesychast sketes that fled possession for the sake of interior prayer. That tension broke into open debate between two saints of the Northern Thebaid, St. Joseph of Volotsk and St. Nilus of Sora, and it is the subject of the next file (see Possessors and Non-Possessors).

See Also

References

  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946–66. (Vol. 1 on the Kiev Caves, Anthony, Theodosius, and the Stoudite typikon; vol. 2 on Sergius and the Northern Thebaid.)
  • The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Trans. Muriel Heppell. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The lives and sayings of the early Caves monks.)
  • Kovalevsky, Pierre. Saint Sergius and Russian Spirituality. Trans. W. Elias Jones. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. (The life and significance of St. Sergius.)
  • The Northern Thebaid: Monastic Saints of the Russian North. Comp. and trans. Fathers Seraphim (Rose) and Herman (Podmoshensky). Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1975. (The colonization of the Russian north by Sergius’ disciples.)
  • Epiphanius the Wise. Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh (early 15th c.). (The primary hagiographic source; deferred to the St. Sergius collection.)