The Repose of 1533

St. Alexander of Svir died on 30 August 1533, an old man of about eighty-five, having gathered his brethren and left them a final testament of humility and mutual love. He was buried at the Holy Trinity Monastery he had founded, and the day of his repose, 30 August, became one of his two feasts. The account rests on the near-contemporary Life by his disciple Irodion (c. 1545).

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Death of the Elder

The Life places St. Alexander’s death on 30 August 1533, when he was about eighty-five years old, reckoning from the traditional birth-year of 1448 (Irodion, Life of St. Alexander of Svir, c. 1545; “Venerable Alexander, Abbot of Svir,” oca.org/saints/lives/2021/08/30/102423, giving his repose on 30 August 1533 at the age of 85). He had by then spent nearly six decades in the monastic life — years at Valaam, years alone in the Svir wilderness, and the long labor of founding and governing the Holy Trinity Monastery — and he died as a very old man among the community he had raised.

Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, the date and the age are those the Life gives, reported as its near-contemporary testimony; here, however, the ground is comparatively firm, for the Life was written by Alexander’s disciple and successor within about a dozen years of the death it records, and the date of 30 August was fixed early as the day of his commemoration (see The Canonization of 1547). The repose is thus among the better-anchored dates of his life.

The Testament to the Brethren

The Life relates that Alexander, foreseeing his end, gathered the brethren and gave them his final counsel — a testament of the kind the great monastic founders were remembered to have left. The counsels the Life ascribes to him are those of the tradition: to keep humility and mutual love, to hold to the monastic rule and the common life, to guard against pride and dissension, and to preserve the poverty and simplicity in which the monastery had been founded (Irodion, Life of St. Alexander of Svir, c. 1545; oca.org). The Life also preserves that Alexander gave direction concerning his own burial, seeking in death, as in life, the lowly place — asking, in the tradition’s telling, that he be buried humbly and without honor, in keeping with the self-abasement that had marked his whole life (Irodion, Life, c. 1545).

This final humility is of a piece with the whole portrait the Life draws — the man who fled honor at every turn, who accepted the priesthood and abbacy only under obedience, and who labored among his monks as the least of them (see Abbot Against His Will). The testament is reported here as the Life attests it: a deathbed exhortation in the received monastic form, faithful to the character the whole Life displays (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Burial at the Monastery

Alexander was buried at the Holy Trinity Monastery on the Svir, in the place of his labors. His tomb became at once a center of veneration; the wonders reported at it, and the strength of the cult that formed around it, are part of what carried him so swiftly to canonization (see The Canonization of 1547 and Miracles and Prophecies). More than a century later, in 1641, the tomb would be opened during the rebuilding of the monastery’s church, and the relics found there would be reported incorrupt — the event that gave rise to his second feast and to the whole later history of his relics (see The Finding of the Relics 1641).

The Feast of 30 August

The day of Alexander’s repose, 30 August (in the Church’s calendar; 12 September on the civil calendar in the modern reckoning), became one of his two annual commemorations — the feast of his falling-asleep. His second feast, 17 April, commemorates the uncovering of his relics in 1641 (oca.org, “Uncovering of the relics of Venerable Alexander, Abbot of Svir,” oca.org/saints/lives/2010/04/17/101131; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander-Svirsky_Monastery). The two feasts together — the repose and the uncovering — frame the two poles of his cult: the holy death, and the incorrupt relics that became its enduring sign.

His death in 1533 thus closes the story of his earthly life and opens the story of his veneration. The saint who had sought all his life to be hidden was, within a generation of his death, glorified by the whole Russian Church; and the humble burial he had asked for gave place to one of the most venerated tombs of the Russian North.

See Also

References

  • Irodion (Herodion Kochnev). Life of St. Alexander of Svir. Composed c. 1545. In the Great Menaion Reader of Metropolitan Macarius. (The death on 30 August 1533 at age 85; the final testament; the direction concerning burial.)
  • “Venerable Alexander, Abbot of Svir.” Orthodox Church in America. oca.org/saints/lives/2021/08/30/102423. (Repose 30 August 1533, age 85; the feasts.)
  • “Uncovering of the relics of Venerable Alexander, Abbot of Svir.” Orthodox Church in America. oca.org/saints/lives/2010/04/17/101131. (The 17 April feast.)
  • “Alexander-Svirsky Monastery.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander-Svirsky_Monastery.