03 — The Caves

The heart of St. Anthony’s story: the wooded hillside above the Dnieper near the prince’s village of Berestovo, where a cave dug for solitary prayer by the priest Hilarion became — after Hilarion’s elevation to the metropolitan throne of Kiev in 1051 — the cell in which Anthony settled, enlarged, and lived as a hermit, and around which the first brethren gathered into the seed of the Kiev Caves monastery. This section sets out, on the earliest sources, both the cave itself and the gathering of disciples that began to turn a hermitage into a community.

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

The two files in this section cover the foundational episode of the whole collection, and they rest squarely on the earliest stratum of the record. The Povest’ vremennykh let, under the year 1051, narrates in a single connected passage how Hilarion dug a small cave on the Dnieper hill for hidden prayer, how he was raised to be metropolitan and left it empty, how Anthony returned from Mount Athos and settled there, and how men then gathered to him — the priest Nikon to tonsure them, the young Theodosius among the first, and the rest blessed by Anthony to dig their own cells while he himself withdrew into deeper seclusion (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Medieval Academy 1953). The much fuller and more devotional narrative of the Kiev Caves Paterik (trans. Heppell, Harvard 1989) and Nestor’s Life of Theodosius build upon, and sometimes diverge from, that core; this section reads the Chronicle as the primary layer and flags the later embellishments and genuine divergences as such, in keeping with the collection’s methodology.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Cave on the Berestov Hill The wooded slope above the Dnieper by the prince’s village of Berestovo; the cave dug by the priest Hilarion for solitary prayer; his elevation to metropolitan of Kiev in 1051; Anthony’s settling in and enlarging the empty cell; and the eremitical life he led there, exactly as the PVL, s.a. 1051, narrates it.
The Gathering of Brethren The first disciples drawn to the hermit: Nikon, the priest who tonsured the newcomers; Theodosius, the future abbot, arriving as a young man; Varlaam, Ephraim, and others; and Anthony’s settled rule — that he would not himself live in community, but blessed each brother to dig his own cell, with the episodes pinned to the Paterik, Nestor, and the Chronicle.

See Also

  • Russian Monasticism — the tradition the Caves foundation inaugurates and to which it gives its enduring shape
  • Monasticism — the eremitic and cenobitic forms of the monastic life that meet in Anthony and Theodosius
  • The Baptism of Rus’ — the conversion under Vladimir that prepared the ground for Kievan monasticism
  • The Russian Orthodox Tradition — the wider tradition of which the Caves are a fountainhead
  • Holy Tradition — the transmission of monastic practice from Athos and Byzantium into Rus’
  • St. Vladimir of Kiev — the prince whose seat at Berestovo gives the hill its name
  • St. Olga of Kiev — the earlier Kievan saint of the dynasty within which the Caves arose
  • St. Sergius of Radonezh — the later Russian father whose foundation echoes Anthony’s eremitic-then-communal pattern
  • St. Symeon the New Theologian — the Byzantine hesychast spirituality behind the Athonite monasticism Anthony brought home
  • METHODOLOGY — the citation and hagiography-pinning standard governing this section

References

  • The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let), s.a. 1051. Trans. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (Hilarion’s cave and elevation; Anthony’s settling and eremitical life; the gathering of brethren and Anthony’s withdrawal.)
  • The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Trans. Muriel Heppell. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The monastery’s fuller narrative of the foundation and of the early brethren.)
  • Nestor. Life of Theodosius (of the Caves). In Heppell, The Paterik (above). (The principal source for Theodosius’s coming to Anthony’s cave.)
  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Anthony’s importation of Athonite eremitism; founder but not organizer.)
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London and New York: Longman, 1996. (Historical setting, geography, and the chronology of the foundation.)