The Cave on the Berestov Hill

The earliest stratum of the Kiev Caves tradition does not begin with St. Anthony at all, but with a cave dug for solitary prayer by the priest Hilarion on the wooded slope above the Dnieper near the princely village of Berestovo. The Povest’ vremennykh let, s.a. 1051, records that when Hilarion was raised to the metropolitan throne of Kiev that year, the small hermit’s cell he had hollowed out stood empty — and that it was this cave which Anthony, returning from Mount Athos, found, settled in, and enlarged into the seed of Russian monasticism. This file sets out what the Chronicle and the Paterik actually say about that hillside, that cave, and the eremitical life Anthony led there.

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

The Hillside Above the Dnieper

The place where Russian cave-monasticism began is a specific and recoverable geography: the high right bank of the Dnieper south of the old city of Kiev, a steep, wooded slope falling away to the river, beside the prince’s country residence of Berestovo. Berestovo was a favored seat of the Kievan princes — it is where the Povest’ vremennykh let (hereafter PVL) places the death of St. Vladimir in 1015 (PVL, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Medieval Academy 1953) — and the church of the Holy Apostles stood there to serve the princely household. The slope below and around it was forested and uninhabited, the kind of ground to which a man seeking solitude would naturally withdraw without leaving the orbit of the city. Franklin and Shepard locate the future monastery exactly here, on the bluffs just downstream of Kiev, and stress that its first life was hidden, sub-surface, and individual rather than institutional (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, London 1996).

The Russian word that gives the monastery its name — pechera, “cave” — is the governing fact of the whole foundation. This was not, at its origin, a walled compound of churches and refectories but a system of dug-out chambers and passages in the soft, workable loess of the riverbank. The later Lavra would rise above ground; the holy beginning was beneath it. To understand Anthony’s settlement, one must hold onto that physical austerity: a hole dug into a hillside, dark, narrow, and silent, with the river below and the prince’s village at the crest.

Hilarion’s Cave

The PVL is unambiguous that the first man to dig in that hillside was not Anthony but Hilarion. Under the year 1051 the Chronicle relates that the prince Yaroslav the Wise loved Berestovo and the church of the Holy Apostles there, and that among its priests was “a man of good life, learned and ascetic,” named Hilarion (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). This Hilarion, the Chronicle continues, “used to go out from Berestovo to the Dnieper, to a hill where the old monastery of the Caves now stands, and there he would pray in secret, for there was a great wood there.” On that wooded hill he “dug a small cave, two fathoms deep, and coming there from Berestovo, would chant the Hours and pray to God in secret” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The cave, in the Chronicle’s own framing, was a private oratory — a place a parish priest of the princely church withdrew to for hidden prayer, not yet a monastic foundation in any formal sense.

The same year-entry then records the event that emptied the cave: “Then God put it into the heart of the prince, and he made him metropolitan in the church of St. Sophia” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The elevation of Hilarion to the metropolitan see of Kiev in 1051 is itself a landmark — he is the first native Rus’ to hold that throne, and the author of the celebrated Sermon on Law and Grace (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 1996; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, Cambridge, Mass. 1946). For the history of the cave, the consequence is simple and decisive: the man who had dug it was now drawn up into the highest office of the Kievan Church, and his solitary cell on the Dnieper hill was left vacant.

It is at precisely this point — the empty cave — that the PVL turns to Anthony.

Anthony Finds the Cave

The Chronicle narrates the transition without seam. Having recounted Hilarion’s cave and his elevation, the PVL, s.a. 1051, immediately tells how a man “from the town of Lyubech” had been drawn to the monastic life, had journeyed to Mount Athos and been tonsured there, and had then been sent back to Rus’ by his abbot with a blessing, the elder foretelling that many monks would come from him (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). Returning to Kiev, this monk — Anthony — sought a place to live, and “came to the hill where Hilarion had dug the cave, and he loved that place and settled in it” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The Chronicle has him pray there, “God’s grace be upon this place and upon the prayer of the holy fathers of the Mountain who tonsured me,” and take up residence in the cell Hilarion had abandoned for the metropolitan throne.

Two points of source-criticism deserve emphasis here, because the later tradition tends to blur them.

First, in the earliest stratum — the PVL itself — Anthony is explicitly the second occupant of an already-dug cave. He does not create the Caves out of nothing; he inherits Hilarion’s small oratory and, the Chronicle says, “began to live there, praying to God, eating dry bread, and that every other day, and drinking water in moderation, digging the cave, and giving himself no rest day or night, enduring in labours, in vigils, and in prayers” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The “digging” Anthony does is the enlargement of an existing hollow, not the first breaking of ground.

Second, the relationship between this Chronicle account and the much longer narrative of the Kiev Caves Paterik is one of expansion. The Paterik — in the form translated by Muriel Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, Harvard 1989 — opens its foundation narrative with Anthony’s Athonite tonsure and return, and recounts his settling in the cave on the hill; but it is working up a story whose skeleton is already present, far more soberly, in the PVL (Heppell, Paterik, 1989; cf. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, 1946, who treats the Paterik as a later, edifying elaboration of the Chronicle’s core). Where the two diverge in detail, the methodological rule of this collection is to privilege the Chronicle’s earlier layer and to flag the Paterik’s additions as such (see METHODOLOGY, §3.5 on pinning hagiography to its earliest attestation).

[Disputed: whether Anthony settled in Hilarion’s cave on a single Athonite journey or on a second return. The PVL, s.a. 1051, as transmitted, gives a single sequence — Athos, return, settling in Hilarion’s cave (trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The Kiev Caves Paterik, however, preserves a tradition of two journeys to the Holy Mountain, Anthony first returning to find Rus’ disturbed by the strife following Vladimir’s death and going back to Athos a second time before finally settling (Heppell, Paterik, 1989). Franklin and Shepard note the resulting chronological tangle and the difficulty of squaring a c. 983 birth with the 1051 cave-settling if only one journey is allowed (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 1996). The sources genuinely diverge; this collection reports both and asserts neither as settled fact.]

The Eremitical Life in the Cave

What the cave on the Berestov hill housed, in its first years, was not a community but a hermit. This is the heart of the matter and the feature that most sharply distinguishes Anthony’s foundation from the cenobitic monasteries of the later Russian Church. The PVL, s.a. 1051, describes a life of extreme physical austerity sustained in solitude: the dry bread eaten every other day, the measured water, the unbroken round of vigil and prayer, the continual labor of digging (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The model is the desert anchorite transplanted to the Dnieper bluffs — and that transplantation is deliberate, for Anthony had received his tonsure and his rule on Mount Athos, the living center of Byzantine eremitical and hesychast monasticism (see Russian Monasticism).

Fedotov reads this rightly as the importation into Rus’ of the most rigorous form of Eastern asceticism. Anthony, he observes, brought back from Athos not a written charter or a built monastery but a way of life — the solitary, penitential, prayer-saturated existence of the cave-dweller — and it was this personal ascetic example, rather than any organizing genius, that drew others to him (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, 1946). The Caves monastery would become the mother of Russian cenobitism, but its founder was by temperament and vocation a hermit, and he remained one even as the community grew around him (a tension treated in The Gathering of Brethren, and at length elsewhere in the collection’s eremitic-versus-cenobitic discussions).

The Paterik elaborates this hidden life with the pious detail characteristic of hagiography: Anthony’s unceasing prayer, his fasting, his digging by night, his refusal of consolation. These accounts are to be received as the Paterik presents them — as the monastery’s own memory of its founder’s sanctity, pinned to the thirteenth-century text in which they are written down, not asserted as bare biographical fact (Heppell, Paterik, 1989; cf. METHODOLOGY, §3.5). The Chronicle’s restraint is the more eloquent witness: a man digging in the dark above the river, eating once in two days, giving himself “no rest day or night” (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor).

Why the Cave Matters

The significance of the Berestov hill is that it is the physical origin-point of Russian monasticism as a native, self-propagating reality. There had been monks in Rus’ before Anthony — Yaroslav had founded the monasteries of St. George and St. Irene in Kiev, and the PVL itself notes that “monasteries began to multiply” in his reign (PVL, s.a. 1037; 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). But those were princely foundations, established and endowed from above. The Caves began from below, from a single hermit in a borrowed cave, and grew by the gravitational pull of his ascetic life rather than by princely decree. Nestor, in his Life of Theodosius, and the Paterik after him, both grasp this and make it the theological center of their narrative: the greatest monastery in Rus’ was not built with silver and gold but dug with the labor and tears of holy men (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, in Heppell, Paterik, 1989; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, 1946). The PVL draws the same contrast explicitly, observing that many monasteries have been set up by emperors and nobles with wealth, “but they are not such as those set up by tears, fasting, prayer, and vigil,” and naming Anthony’s foundation as the second kind (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor).

That contrast — the cave against the endowment, the hermit’s tears against the prince’s gold — is the seed of everything the Kiev Caves Lavra would become, and it begins on a wooded slope above the Dnieper, in a small cell dug by a priest who became a metropolitan and inherited by a hermit who became the father of Russian monks.

See Also

References

  • The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let), s.a. 1015, 1037, 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 on the Berestov hill and his elevation to metropolitan in 1051; Anthony’s return from Athos and settling in the cave; the contrast between princely and ascetic foundations.)
  • 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 own narrative of Anthony’s tonsure, return, and life in the cave; the tradition of two Athonite journeys.)
  • Nestor. Life of Theodosius (of the Caves). (As discussed in Heppell, Paterik, 1989, and Fedotov below; the earliest hagiographic source for the foundation milieu.)
  • 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 eremitical asceticism; the Paterik as later elaboration of the Chronicle’s core.)
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London and New York: Longman, 1996. (Geography of the Caves on the Dnieper bluffs near Berestovo; Hilarion as first native metropolitan; the chronological problems of Anthony’s journeys.)