Kievan Rus After the Baptism

When St. Anthony returned from Athos to Kiev, he entered a land that had been officially Christian for barely two generations and whose church was still, in its higher structures, a Greek transplant governed by metropolitans sent from Constantinople. Monasteries of a sort already existed, founded by princes and endowed from princely wealth, but native ascetic monasticism — the monasticism “of tears, fasting, and prayer” — was effectively absent, and the Primary Chronicle itself says so. This file sets that scene: the church of Rus under its Greek hierarchs, the princely foundations, and the solitary precedent of the priest Hilarion’s cave on the Berestov hill, the seed from which the Caves monastery would grow.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Kievan; father of Russian monasticism)

The Baptism and Its Aftermath

The conversion of Rus is conventionally dated to 988, when Prince Vladimir of Kiev received baptism and ordered the mass baptism of the Kievans in the Dnieper (PVL, s.a. 988; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text; see The Baptism of Rus). The Povest’ vremennykh let — the Russian Primary Chronicle, the indispensable narrative source for this whole period — frames the event as the decisive turn of the Rus from paganism to the faith of the Greeks, complete with the celebrated tale of Vladimir’s “testing of the faiths” and the envoys who, standing in Hagia Sophia, “knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth” (PVL, s.a. 987; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). However stylized that account, the structural fact behind it is firm: the Rus church was established as a daughter of Constantinople, and it would be governed for most of the following centuries by a metropolitan of Kiev who was, with rare exceptions, a Greek appointed by the patriarch.

It is essential to recognize how thin a layer of Christianization the Baptism initially represented. Vladimir died in 1015, only twenty-seven years after his baptism; Anthony, by the most common reckoning, was born around 983 — that is, before the official conversion (see Lyubech and the Early Life). The generation that built the Caves monastery in the middle of the eleventh century was thus the first or second generation of Christians in the land, and the institutions of church life — sees, parishes, schools, and above all monasteries — were still being assembled from imported materials. G. P. Fedotov, surveying this period, stresses that the spiritual culture of Kievan Rus was at first overwhelmingly a culture of reception: liturgical books, canon law, hagiography, and the monastic ideal all came in translation, primarily through Bulgaria and Byzantium (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, “The Christian Background”). Native creativity in the monastic sphere — the appearance of homegrown ascetics rather than imported forms — is precisely what the Caves story is about.

The Church Under the Greek Metropolitans

The organizational shape of the early Rus church placed a Greek metropolitan at Kiev over a small number of bishoprics. The hierarchy, the higher liturgical culture, and the canonical norms were Byzantine; the metropolitan’s loyalties and often his language were Greek. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, in their authoritative survey of the period, describe a church administration that was for a long time an extension of Constantinopolitan ecclesiastical reach, with the metropolitanate of Kiev (Rhosia) inserted into the patriarchal lists and normally filled from Byzantium (Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, ch. 5–6). This dependence had a notable consequence for the Caves story: when, in 1051, Prince Yaroslav the Wise wished to install a native Rus churchman as metropolitan, the act was unusual enough that the Chronicle records it pointedly.

That churchman was Hilarion (Ilarion), and the Primary Chronicle‘s entry for 1051 reports that Yaroslav “appointed Hilarion metropolitan, a Russian by birth, in St. Sophia, assembling the bishops” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). Hilarion is independently famous as the author of the Sermon on Law and Grace, the first major original literary work of Rus, and his elevation marks an early high-water mark of native ecclesiastical confidence. For the history of monasticism, though, what matters is what the Chronicle says about Hilarion’s life before his elevation — for it is in that notice that the prehistory of the Caves monastery is told.

“Not Such as Are Founded by Tears”: The Absence of Native Monasticism

The single most important text for understanding the soil into which Anthony’s monasticism was planted is the Primary Chronicle‘s reflection, attached to its account of the Caves foundation, on the difference between princely monasteries and ascetic ones. The Chronicle observes that many monasteries had indeed been established in Rus by the wealth of rulers and nobles, but it sharply distinguishes these from the kind of monastery the Caves would be. In the Chronicler’s words, “many monasteries have been founded by emperors and nobles and magnates, but they are not such as those founded by tears, fasting, prayer, and vigil” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The Caves monastery, the Chronicler insists, “did not arise from imperial or princely wealth, but from the tears and fasting and prayer and vigil” of Anthony and those who came after him (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor).

This is a remarkable statement to find in a source so closely tied to the monastery itself, because it is an admission as much as a boast. It concedes that princely foundations existed — and indeed they did: Yaroslav had endowed the great churches and, by the Chronicle’s own account, built monasteries of St. George and St. Irene at Kiev, named for his and his wife’s patron saints (PVL, s.a. 1037; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). What the Chronicle denies is that these top-down, richly endowed houses represented genuine monastic life as the tradition understood it. Fedotov makes the same point from the side of the historian: the princely monasteries were, in effect, foundations of patronage and prestige, dynastic chapels with attached communities, and they did not generate the interior, penitential, world-renouncing monasticism that the Greek and Palestinian fathers had bequeathed to Byzantium (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Caves). The Chronicle’s contrast between wealth and tears is therefore not merely pious rhetoric; it registers a real historical lack. Before Anthony, Rus had monastery buildings but, by its own tradition’s reckoning, no true native monks.

It is worth stating the source-critical caution plainly. The Chronicle’s framing serves the interests of the Caves monastery, which had every reason to present itself as the true and original wellspring of Rus monasticism over against the princely houses. The contrast may be sharper in the telling than it was on the ground; some genuine ascetic life may have existed in or alongside the princely foundations that the tradition has simply not preserved. But the convergence of the Chronicle’s own admission with the general picture drawn by modern scholarship — that organized, indigenous, ascetically serious monasticism in Rus is first clearly visible at the Caves in the mid-eleventh century — makes the basic claim credible: Anthony arrived to fill a vacuum (Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, ch. 6; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). On the wider Orthodox understanding of monasticism as the church’s interior heart, see Monasticism and, for the Russian tradition specifically, Russian Monasticism.

Hilarion’s Cave on the Berestov Hill

The Primary Chronicle preserves a precise and historically valuable detail that ties the future metropolitan Hilarion directly to the physical origin of the Caves monastery. Before his elevation, the Chronicle says, Hilarion had been a priest of the church of the Holy Apostles at Berestovo, the prince’s country residence on the wooded hills above the Dnieper south of Kiev. A “good man, learned and an ascetic,” Hilarion “used to go from Berestovo to the Dnieper hill, where the old Caves monastery now stands, and there pray, for there was a great forest there. He dug a small cave, two fathoms deep, and coming from Berestovo would chant the hours there and pray to God in secret” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The Chronicle is explicit that this same cave is the one that would later become the nucleus of the monastery: “Then God put it into the heart of the prince, and he made him metropolitan in St. Sophia, and this cave remained” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor).

The literary and historical function of this notice is to set the stage for Anthony. When Hilarion was taken from his cave to become metropolitan in 1051, the cave stood empty — a hollow already dug for prayer in the forested hillside. It is into precisely this prepared but abandoned solitude that the Chronicle then introduces Anthony, returning from Athos and searching for a place to settle (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see The Cave on the Berestov Hill). The continuity is striking: the first genuinely ascetic gesture the Chronicle records — a learned priest digging a cave in the wilderness to pray in secret — is immediately superseded by Hilarion’s elevation to the highest office in the Rus church, leaving the cave for the man who would actually make a monastery of it.

A note of caution about Hilarion is required. The Primary Chronicle presents the priest of Berestovo, the cave-digger, and the metropolitan of 1051 as one and the same person, and most scholarship has followed it. Some historians have questioned whether the cave-digging ascetic and the metropolitan-author of the Sermon on Law and Grace are necessarily identical, since the Chronicle’s compressed entry telescopes events; but the identification is the plain sense of the text and the dominant scholarly reading (Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, ch. 6; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). What is not in doubt is the physical claim the Chronicle makes — that the original cave of the monastery on the Berestov hill predated Anthony’s arrival and had first been dug by a praying priest from the nearby princely church.

The Stage Set for Anthony

The picture that emerges is coherent and, for the meaning of Anthony’s career, decisive. By the mid-eleventh century Rus had a church that was institutionally Greek at the top, a small set of bishoprics, and a handful of monasteries founded and funded by princes. What it lacked — by the testimony of its own foremost source — was the interior, ascetic monasticism of tears, fasting, prayer, and vigil that the Orthodox East regarded as the genuine article. There was one solitary precedent: the cave dug for secret prayer by the priest Hilarion on the forested Dnieper hill above Berestovo, a cave left vacant when its digger became metropolitan in 1051. Into that vacancy, and into that very cave, the tradition places a returning Athonite monk named Anthony, and from that point the Primary Chronicle and the later Paterik trace the birth of a native Russian monasticism (see The Primary Chronicle Account; The Two Founders). Whether Anthony settled in Hilarion’s cave directly, or dug his own nearby, is a question the sources leave slightly open and is taken up in the discussion of the caves themselves (see The Cave on the Berestov Hill). What the present file establishes is the prior condition: a Christianized but as yet monastically barren land, ripe for the witness that would earn Anthony the title father of Russian monasticism (see Father of Russian Monasticism).

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Povest’ vremennykh let / PVL). Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. Cited by year-entry (sub anno): s.a. 987–988 (the Baptism and the testing of the faiths); s.a. 1037 (Yaroslav’s foundations of St. George and St. Irene); s.a. 1051 (Hilarion’s elevation; the cave on the Berestov hill; the contrast between princely monasteries and those “founded by tears, fasting, prayer, and vigil”; Anthony’s arrival).
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The Christian background of Kievan Rus; the character of the princely monasteries; the originality of the Caves.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London and New York: Longman, 1996. (The Greek metropolitanate of Kiev; church organization; Hilarion and the events of 1051; the early monastic landscape.)
Heppell, Muriel, trans. The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The hagiographical tradition of the monastery, used here for context and treated in detail elsewhere in this collection.)