Tonsure on the Holy Mountain

According to the Russian Primary Chronicle and the Kiev Caves Paterik, the future St. Anthony of the Kiev Caves (c. 983–1073) left the land of Rus’ for Mount Athos, received the monastic tonsure on the Holy Mountain, and was formed there in the Athonite ascetic discipline before being sent home. This file sets out what the two principal sources actually say, distinguishes the early Chronicle account from the later, expanded Paterik layer, and treats critically the well-known problem of how many times Anthony is supposed to have journeyed to Athos and under which prince’s reign.

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

The Sources and Their Layers

Almost everything that can be said about Anthony’s tonsure on Athos rests on two texts, written at different times and with different aims, and it is essential to keep them apart. The earliest is the Povest’ vremennykh let (the Tale of Bygone Years, conventionally the Russian Primary Chronicle), whose notice of the Caves monastery is entered under the year 1051 (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, Medieval Academy 1953). The Chronicle’s account is compact and was compiled, in its surviving form, in the early twelfth century, within living memory or near-memory of the monastery’s foundation. The second is the Kiev Caves Paterik (the Paterik of the Caves Monastery), a collection of monastic tales that took shape from the early thirteenth century onward out of an earlier correspondence between Bishop Simon and the monk Polycarp, and which incorporates and elaborates the older Chronicle material (trans. Muriel Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, Harvard 1989, Introduction).

The relationship between the two is genetic: the Paterik knows and reuses the Chronicle’s foundation narrative, but frames it within a developed hagiographical program in which Anthony is the spiritual root of the whole monastery and, through it, of Russian monasticism as such. The consequence for method is plain. Where the Chronicle is spare, the Paterik is fuller; and the fuller account is not necessarily the better-informed one, since its additions serve a later devotional and institutional purpose. G. P. Fedotov, surveying this material, stresses that the figure of Anthony reaches us already wrapped in the monastery’s memory of itself, so that the historian must read the early-life and Athos episodes as a thin and partly legendary stratum rather than as documentary biography (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Caves monastery). Franklin and Shepard likewise treat the Athos journey as traditional rather than securely datable, useful above all for what it tells us about how Kievan monasticism understood its own pedigree (Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, Longman 1996, ch. 6).

The Chronicle Account (s.a. 1051)

The Chronicle introduces Anthony in the course of explaining how the Caves monastery came to be. It relates that a man from the town of Lyubech, moved by the love of God, set out for foreign lands and came to the Holy Mountain. There, the Chronicle reports, he beheld the monasteries that were on Athos, and considered the monastic life led in them; and, loving the monastic way, he came to one of the monasteries and entreated the abbot to lay upon him the angelic habit (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The abbot, the Chronicle continues, fulfilled his request, tonsured him, gave him the name Anthony, and instructed him in the monastic discipline, charging him to live in a manner pleasing to God (PVL, s.a. 1051).

Three things should be marked in this account as it stands. First, the Chronicle does not name the monastery on Athos at which Anthony was tonsured; the identification of a particular house belongs to later tradition, not to the PVL text. Second, the Chronicle presents the tonsure as a single, decisive act framed by a single journey out of Rus’ to the Holy Mountain. Third, the narrative weight falls not on the Athonite years themselves — of which the Chronicle says almost nothing concrete — but on the abbot’s subsequent decision to send Anthony back to Rus’, which is the hinge on which the whole foundation story turns and which is treated in its own place (see Sent Back to Rus).

The name “Anthony” is itself significant, though the Chronicle does not comment on it. It is the name of the great father of Egyptian monasticism, Anthony the Great, and its bestowal at tonsure signals the lineage the Caves tradition claimed: the desert ascesis of the East, mediated through Athos, transplanted to the forests above the Dnieper. Whether the name was given precisely as a programmatic statement, or whether the tradition later read that programmatic sense into it, cannot be recovered from the source; the Chronicle simply records the name (PVL, s.a. 1051).

The Paterik Account and Its Elaborations

The Paterik retells the same basic story but with additions that betray its later composition. In the Paterik‘s narrative the Athonite abbot is given a more developed role: he tonsures Anthony, forms him in the discipline of the Holy Mountain, and, perceiving his progress, sends him back to Rus’ with a blessing and a prophecy that many monks would come from him (Heppell, The Paterik, the foundation narrative of the Caves monastery; cf. PVL, s.a. 1051). The Paterik thus preserves the Chronicle’s skeleton while supplying the motive force — the abbot’s discernment of Anthony’s vocation — that the older text leaves implicit.

It is in this later layer, and not in the Chronicle, that the more circumstantial details cluster: the characterization of Athos as the source from which the seed of monasticism was carried to Rus’, the heightening of the abbot’s commission into an explicit prophecy, and the framing of Anthony as a man already perfected on the Holy Mountain before he ever returned home. The Orthodox reader rightly receives these as the monastery’s confession of its own spiritual descent from Athos; the historian must record them as what they are — a thirteenth-century narrative’s interpretation of an eleventh-century event, pinned to the Paterik as the source that relates them (Heppell, The Paterik, Introduction and foundation narrative). They are reported here as the Paterik tells them, not asserted as biographical fact.

The Commission and Blessing of the Abbot

Both sources agree on the structurally essential point: Anthony did not remain on Athos but was sent back to Rus’ by his abbot, and he went under blessing. The Chronicle reports that the abbot, having tonsured and instructed him, charged him and sent him forth, saying — in the Chronicle’s reported speech — that he should go to Rus’, and that the blessing of the Holy Mountain would be with him (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The Paterik amplifies this into the prophecy that through Anthony monks would multiply in the land (Heppell, The Paterik, foundation narrative).

This commission is the load-bearing element of the entire episode. It is what makes the tonsure on Athos a beginning rather than a private vocation: Anthony is tonsured not merely for his own salvation but, in the sources’ telling, as the bearer of a discipline he is to plant in Rus’. The theological logic — Athonite hesychast and eremitic ascesis transmitted by an authorized hand to a new land — is the proper subject of the companion file (see Sent Back to Rus). What matters here is that the blessing and sending are already present in the earliest source (PVL, s.a. 1051) and are not a later invention, even if their elaboration into explicit prophecy belongs to the Paterik.

The Problem of How Many Journeys to Athos

The most debated point in the whole account is the number of Anthony’s journeys to the Holy Mountain, and it is bound up with a chronological tangle that the sources themselves do not resolve.

[Disputed: the Chronicle (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953) describes a single journey to Athos, a single tonsure, and a single return to Rus’, with no suggestion of two visits; later tradition, reflected in and developed from the Kiev Caves Paterik (Heppell, The Paterik) and in subsequent hagiography, came to speak of two Athonite sojourns — an early tonsure and return under Prince Vladimir, followed by a renewed withdrawal during a period of disturbance and a second return under Prince Yaroslav, by which point the Caves community could form.]

The difficulty arises because the dates do not sit easily together. The Chronicle enters the foundation narrative under the year 1051 and ties the maturing of the community to the reign of Yaroslav the Wise (d. 1054), in whose time the Caves monastery took shape (PVL, s.a. 1051). Yet the same tradition, reckoning Anthony’s long life and his Athonite formation backward, invites the supposition that his first contact with monasticism and perhaps his first tonsure fell earlier, in the generation of Vladimir, the baptizer of Rus’ (see The Baptism of Rus). The two-journey scheme is, in effect, a harmonizing solution: it reconciles an early Athonite vocation with a later, Yaroslav-era foundation by positing that Anthony went to the Holy Mountain twice.

The source-critical verdict is that the single-journey account is the earlier and the simpler, and that the two-journey scheme is a secondary development designed to smooth the chronology. Modern scholarship treats the matter as unresolved and probably unresolvable from the evidence. Franklin and Shepard note that the foundation tradition is more concerned with spiritual genealogy than with a dated itinerary, and that attempts to fix the number and timing of Anthony’s Athos journeys press the sources beyond what they can bear (Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, ch. 6). Fedotov, for his part, regards the early biography as legendary in texture and cautions against treating any single reconstruction of the Athos episodes as established fact (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Caves monastery). The honest position is therefore to record both the single-journey account of the Chronicle and the two-journey scheme of later tradition, to identify the latter as the later layer, and to leave the question open.

[Disputed: under which prince Anthony’s tonsure and decisive return fall. The Chronicle’s foundation entry is bound to the reign of Yaroslav (d. 1054), in whose time the Caves community formed (PVL, s.a. 1051); the two-journey tradition assigns an earlier tonsure and return to the reign of Vladimir (d. 1015), reserving the monastery-forming return for Yaroslav’s reign (Heppell, The Paterik; cf. Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, ch. 6). The sources do not permit a secure decision.]

What Can and Cannot Be Said

Stripped to what the earliest source attests, the secure core is modest: a man from Lyubech in the land of Rus’ went to Mount Athos, was there tonsured a monk with the name Anthony, was formed in the monastic discipline of the Holy Mountain, and was sent home under blessing — all of this as the Chronicle relates it under the year 1051 (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The naming of a particular Athonite monastery, the count of his journeys, the precise prince under whom each fell, and the verbatim content of the abbot’s prophecy belong to the later and fuller tradition of the Paterik and its descendants, and are reported here as that tradition’s account rather than as documented history (Heppell, The Paterik; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1).

This caution is not skepticism for its own sake. It is the discipline the Paterik itself invites once its layers are distinguished, and it leaves intact the one thing the sources most want to say: that the monasticism which would flower at the Caves was received, by an authorized tonsure and an explicit sending, from the Holy Mountain of Athos (see Russian Monasticism; Holy Tradition).

References

Povest’ vremennykh let (The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text), s.a. 1051. Trans. Samuel H. Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The earliest account of Anthony’s journey to Athos, his tonsure, and his sending back to Rus’.)
The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Trans. Muriel Heppell. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The later, expanded foundation tradition, including the abbot’s commission and prophecy.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Assessment of the legendary texture of the early-life and Athos episodes.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London and New York: Longman, 1996. (The Athos journey treated as spiritual genealogy rather than datable itinerary; the chronological problems.)