Anthony’s Withdrawal

At the very moment his community took institutional shape, St. Anthony stepped away from it: he declined the abbacy, set one of the brethren, Varlaam, over the house as its first superior, and withdrew to dig a fresh cave on a neighboring slope — the burrow that would become the Near Caves — leaving the growing monastery to others. When Varlaam was removed to another house, Anthony named Theodosius abbot, under whom the Studite cenobitic rule was introduced. The founder’s refusal of administration is not a footnote to the foundation but one of its governing themes: a hermit who shaped a monastery precisely by recession from its government.

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

A Founder Who Would Not Rule

The most striking feature of St. Anthony’s role in the Kiev Caves Monastery is that, having drawn the community into being, he refused to govern it. The pattern is consistent across the sources of his own century. The Primary Chronicle, gathering the foundation-narrative under the year 1051, presents Anthony as the magnet around whom the brethren collected and the authority whose blessing they sought at every step — and yet, when the community needed a superior, it was not Anthony who took the office (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). He had come to Rus’ to live as a solitary, formed in the eremitic discipline of Mount Athos, and he held to that vocation even as a cenobitic institution grew up around his cave. The founder of the greatest monastery of Kievan Rus’ was, by his own deliberate choice, not its abbot.

This is worth stating sharply because it cuts against the natural expectation. We assume that the man who gathers a community will lead it, and that the prestige of the founder will translate into the office of superior. Anthony’s life inverts the assumption. His authority was real — the Chronicle and the Paterik agree that nothing of moment happened in the early community without his word — but it was the authority of the spiritual father and the holy solitary, not the administrative authority of the abbot. He governed, to the extent he governed at all, by blessing and by example, and then by departure. The refusal of office is thus not a single episode but a settled disposition, visible at each of the foundation’s turning-points.

Varlaam, the First Abbot

The first exercise of this disposition came when the surface community required a head. The Chronicle records that Anthony, declining to be superior himself, appointed Varlaam as abbot over the brethren, and then withdrew (PVL, s.a. 1051; the Paterik gives the same sequence, with Anthony naming Varlaam and retiring into seclusion; trans. Heppell). Varlaam was, in the tradition, one of the well-born early disciples — the son of a leading boyar — whose entry into the cave community against his father’s will is one of the dramatic episodes of the early brotherhood (the Paterik relates the conflict between Varlaam and his powerful father over his tonsure; trans. Heppell). His appointment gave the new monastery what it had lacked: a designated superior, distinct from the founder, charged with the ordering of the common life.

Varlaam’s abbacy at the Caves was not long. The Chronicle and the Paterik record that Grand Prince Izyaslav, having founded his own princely monastery of St. Demetrius in Kiev, took Varlaam from the Caves and set him as abbot over that house — a transfer that drew the senior monk of the Caves into the orbit of the princely foundation (PVL, s.a. 1051; the Paterik gives the removal of Varlaam to St. Demetrius; trans. Heppell). The episode is double-edged: it testifies to the prestige the Caves community had already acquired (its abbot was worth poaching for a princely house), and it left the Caves Monastery once more in need of a superior. It is at this second vacancy that Theodosius comes to the abbacy.

[Disputed: the order and manner of the early abbacies. The eleventh-century sources agree that Varlaam was the first abbot of the Caves, appointed by Anthony, and that Theodosius succeeded to the office after Varlaam was removed to St. Demetrius (so the PVL, s.a. 1051, trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, and the Paterik, trans. Heppell — both naming Varlaam first and Theodosius second). The succession Anthony → (appoints) Varlaam → (Varlaam removed) → Theodosius is the form the primary record gives, and the claim sometimes met in later popular accounts that Theodosius was the first or sole abbot of Anthony’s foundation is not supported by these sources. What the record leaves less than fully clear is the agency of Theodosius’s elevation: the narrative ties it to Anthony’s continued authority over the house even in seclusion, while Nestor’s Life of Theodosius foregrounds the choice of the brethren and Theodosius’s own reluctance, so that the appointment is presented now as Anthony’s act and now as the community’s election (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; cf. PVL, s.a. 1051). The two emphases are not strictly contradictory — Anthony’s blessing and the brethren’s choice could both stand — but the sources weight them differently.]

The Second Withdrawal and the Near Caves

The act that most fully expresses Anthony’s character is what he did after naming an abbot. He did not remain in the surface monastery as its revered elder-in-residence; he withdrew again, more deeply. The sources record that Anthony, leaving the growing community to its superior, dug himself a new cave on a nearby slope and shut himself into it for the solitary life — the burrow that the later tradition came to call the Near Caves (blizhni pechery), to distinguish it from the older complex that became the Far Caves (the Paterik relates Anthony’s removal to a fresh cave and his renewed enclosure; trans. Heppell; cf. PVL, s.a. 1051). The geography of the monastery thus came to bear the imprint of its founder’s recession: two cave-systems, the older abandoned by him for a newer solitude, each the eventual resting-place of generations of the brethren.

The pattern is unmistakable and, in the Athonite and Egyptian monastic tradition behind it, entirely intelligible. The seasoned hermit gathers disciples; the gathering becomes a community; the community needs ordering; the hermit, who sought solitude in the first place, hands the ordering to another and goes deeper into the silence. Anthony reproduces in Kiev a rhythm as old as the desert — the rhythm of Antony the Great of Egypt, his namesake and model, who repeatedly fled the crowds that his sanctity drew to him (the parallel to the great Egyptian Antony is drawn out at The Ascetic Pattern). The digging of the new cave is not a retirement in the modern sense but a return to the proper work: the founder withdraws because the foundation has succeeded, the success itself being the threat to the solitude he came for.

This is the precise sense in which it can be said that Anthony governed by withdrawal. His departures were not abdications of responsibility but exercises of a particular kind of authority — the authority of the one who, by stepping back, forces the community to stand on its own institutions: an abbot, a church, a rule. A monastery whose founder insisted on ruling it would have remained, in a sense, an extension of his person; a monastery whose founder withdrew was compelled to become a thing with a life of its own. The recession made the institution.

Theodosius and the Studite Rule

The fruit of that recession is most visible in the abbacy of Theodosius. Appointed superior after Varlaam’s removal — by Anthony’s blessing, by the brethren’s choice, or, as the sources together suggest, by both — Theodosius gave the Caves Monastery the thing it still lacked: a written cenobitic rule. He obtained, through the agency of a monk sent to Constantinople, the typikon of the Stoudios monastery, the great cenobitic house of the capital, and introduced its discipline at the Caves: common property, common refectory, a regulated round of services and obediences, and the abolition of the older every-man-his-own-measure pattern of the eremitic nucleus (PVL, s.a. 1051 and 1074; Nestor, Life of Theodosius, on the procuring and introduction of the Studite typikon; trans. Hollingsworth). With this, the transformation begun by the move to the surface was completed: the Caves house became a fully organized cenobium, and it became the model upon which other Russian monasteries were patterned (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, on the Studite rule as the foundation of the cenobitic tradition in Rus’; the rule itself is treated at The Eremitic vs. Cenobitic Question).

There is a deep irony, and a deliberate one in the sources’ telling, in the fact that the cenobitic charter of the Caves Monastery was the work of Theodosius rather than of Anthony, the hermit who founded it. Anthony’s vocation was solitary; the rule that shaped the house was communal. The two men thus stand at the foundation as complementary opposites — the eremitic founder and the cenobitic organizer — and the later tradition’s habit of naming them together, “Saints Anthony and Theodosius of the Caves,” registers exactly this complementarity (the pairing and its meaning are taken up at The Two Founders). Anthony did not impose his own form of life on the community; by withdrawing, he left room for Theodosius to give it another. The Caves Monastery is, in this sense, the joint work of a man who would not rule and a man who did.

The Theme of Refusal

It remains to draw the theme together, because the refusal of administration is more than a biographical curiosity; it is the key to Anthony’s significance in the Russian tradition. He is remembered as the father of Russian monasticism, and yet he wrote no rule, founded no order, and governed no house. His paternity is of a different kind. He transmitted to Rus’ the authentic eremitic and Athonite spirit — the conviction that the monastic life is, at its root, a matter of solitude, silence, and the ascetic struggle of the single soul before God — and he embodied that conviction so completely that he would not let even the success of his own foundation draw him out of it (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, on Anthony as the bearer of the Athonite eremitic ideal to Rus’). The institution he founded needed organization, and he supplied organizers; but what he himself supplied was the spirit, and the spirit was inseparable from the withdrawal.

The Gospel logic of this is not far to seek, and the tradition has not been slow to find it: “Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant” (Matthew 20:27); “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 23:11). The hermit who flees office and digs himself deeper into the hillside is, in the monastic reading, not abandoning his brethren but serving them in the only way proper to his calling — by guarding the source from which the whole foundation drew its life. Anthony’s withdrawal is thus presented, in the sources and in the tradition that received them, not as detachment but as a form of fatherhood: the founder who gives his community everything except himself, and in that very reservation hands it the thing it most needs (cf. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; on the meaning of the eremitic ideal within Orthodox monastic life see Monasticism and the wider treatment of the unwritten transmission of the monastic way at Holy Tradition).

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Povest’ vremennykh let). Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. (S.a. 1051: Anthony’s refusal of the abbacy, the appointment of Varlaam, his removal to St. Demetrius, Anthony’s withdrawal to a new cave, and the succession of Theodosius; s.a. 1074: the cenobitic life of the monastery under and after Theodosius.)
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. (Varlaam’s tonsure and the conflict with his father; Anthony’s appointment of Varlaam and his renewed enclosure in a fresh cave.)
Nestor. The Life of Our Holy Father Theodosius, Abbot of the Caves. In The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’, trans. Paul Hollingsworth. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (Theodosius’s reluctant elevation to the abbacy and his procuring and introduction of the Studite typikon.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Anthony as bearer of the Athonite eremitic ideal; the Studite rule and the cenobitic tradition in Rus’.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London and New York: Longman, 1996. (The early Caves community and its place in the monastic landscape of eleventh-century Rus’.)
The Holy Bible, Matthew 20:27; 23:11. On the inversion of authority through service.