From Hermitage to Monastery

The decisive institutional turn in the story of the Kiev Caves: the brotherhood that had gathered in the burrows of the Berestov hillside outgrew its underground cells, came up onto the surface, secured the hill above from Grand Prince Izyaslav, and raised a wooden church of the Dormition with cells around it — the moment at which a company of hermits became an organized monastery. The earliest connected account is the Primary Chronicle’s, entered under the years 1051 and 1074; the later Kiev Caves Paterik elaborates it, and the two must be read together with care.

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

The Limits of the Cave

The community that formed around St. Anthony began, by every account, as a strictly eremitic one: men who came to a man living alone in a cave dug into the bluff above the Dnieper near the princely village of Berestovo, and who, with his blessing, dug cells of their own nearby. The Chronicle’s retrospective notice of the foundation, gathered under the year 1051, describes exactly this pattern of accretion — brethren coming to Anthony one by one, receiving the tonsure, and burrowing out cells and a place of prayer in the hillside (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The form of life was not communal in the developed sense: each man had his own cell, his own labor, and his own ascetic measure, bound to the others chiefly by their common reverence for Anthony and their shared subjection to the discipline of the place.

Such an arrangement has a natural ceiling. A warren of cave-cells can hold only so many men before the difficulties of a wholly subterranean existence — the cramped quarters, the want of light and air, the impossibility of assembling any large number in one space for the services — begin to tell. The Chronicle marks the threshold plainly: when the brethren had increased to the number of about fifteen (the figure the PVL gives for the community as it stood when the move was contemplated), the cave could no longer contain them, and Anthony’s disciples, with his blessing, resolved to build above ground (PVL, s.a. 1051). The growth of the brotherhood is thus presented not as an ambition for grandeur but as a practical pressure: the eremitic nucleus had simply become too numerous to remain entirely below the earth.

It is worth noticing what the move did not abolish. The caves were not abandoned. They remained the heart of the foundation’s ascetic identity — the place of Anthony’s own seclusion, the site of the burials that would make the monastery a great reliquary, and the perpetual reminder that the surface buildings rested, quite literally, on an eremitic foundation. The Caves Monastery took its name from the burrows even as its visible life moved into the daylight above them.

The Petition to Izyaslav

The hill into which the caves were dug, and the land above it, were not the monks’ to dispose of. They lay in the orbit of Berestovo, a princely demesne associated with the house of the Kievan grand princes; the cave that Anthony had enlarged was itself, in one strand of the tradition, the former hermitage of the priest Hilarion of Berestovo before his elevation to the metropolitan see (PVL, s.a. 1051). To raise a church and an enclosed monastery on the surface required the grant of the ground, and that meant an appeal to the prince.

The Chronicle records that Anthony sent to Grand Prince Izyaslav Yaroslavich — the son of Yaroslav the Wise, who held Kiev — asking that the hill above the cave be given to the brethren for their monastery, and that Izyaslav granted the request (PVL, s.a. 1051). The detail is significant in several ways. First, it locates the foundation within the framework of princely patronage that governed nearly every public institution of Kievan Rus’: the monastery exists on land conceded by the ruling house, and its legal footing is a princely grant rather than a purchase or an ancient title. Second, it shows Anthony — for all his withdrawal from the world — acting, at the necessary moment, as the responsible head of a community that needed a settled site, petitioning the secular power directly. The Paterik preserves the same essential transaction, casting it in its characteristic register of the holy man whose request the prince cannot refuse (the Paterik relates the grant as the natural deference of the ruler to Anthony’s sanctity; trans. Heppell). The Chronicle’s plainer notice is the more reliable witness to what actually passed: a request, and a grant of the hill (PVL, s.a. 1051).

There is a wider context here, treated more fully elsewhere in this collection. The Caves house was not the only monastery in eleventh-century Kiev, nor even the first to enjoy princely favor. Izyaslav himself was patron of the monastery of St. Demetrius, which he founded and endowed and into which he drew monks — a house that, with its princely wealth, stood in pointed contrast to the poverty of the Caves. The Chronicle’s account of the foundation is shaped in part by an implicit comparison: the Caves Monastery was raised “not by the wealth of princes” but by the prayers and labors of the monks themselves, a point the chronicler presses with evident approval (PVL, s.a. 1051; cf. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, on the chronicler’s contrast of the two foundations). The grant of the hill, in other words, gave the monks a place to stand; it did not make them a princely foundation in the manner of St. Demetrius.

The Wooden Church of the Dormition

With the hill granted, the brethren built. The first structures of the surface monastery were of timber, as nearly all building in early Rus’ was: a wooden church dedicated to the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God — in the later Slavonic usage the Uspensky church — and cells around it, with the whole enclosed (PVL, s.a. 1051). This modest wooden Dormition church is to be sharply distinguished from the great stone Dormition cathedral (the Uspensky Sobor) raised at the Caves in the following generation, whose construction belongs to the abbacy of Theodosius and after, and which the Paterik surrounds with a celebrated cycle of building-legends (the Paterik narrates the stone church’s foundation through visions, relics from Constantinople, and the apparition of the Mother of God to Greek master-builders; trans. Heppell). The church of Anthony’s own lifetime was the small wooden one. The confusion of the two is easy and common, and the sources themselves invite it by giving the same dedication to both; the dating and the material keep them apart.

The dedication to the Dormition is itself worth a moment. It binds the foundation to the great Marian theology of the Byzantine world from which Anthony had brought his monastic formation on Athos, and it would prove enduring: the Mother of God was received as the special patroness of the Caves house, and the Paterik’s foundation-cycle for the stone church makes her the architect and protectress of the place (the Paterik relates that the Mother of God herself commissioned the church and supplied its builders and its relics; trans. Heppell). Whatever weight one gives those later legends, the original wooden Dormition church of c. 1051 already set the house under her name.

[Disputed: the date of the move to the surface. The Primary Chronicle gathers the whole account of the foundation — the cave, the gathering of brethren, the move above ground, and the building of the church — under the single year-entry s.a. 1051 (trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor), but this entry is plainly a retrospective digest assembled to explain “whence the Caves Monastery had its beginning,” not a record of events all occurring in that year; the PVL s.a. 1074 supplies a second, partly overlapping account from the angle of Theodosius and the monastery’s later growth. Scholars therefore treat 1051 as the date under which the chronicler placed the foundation-narrative rather than a firm date for the surface church, and assign the building of the wooden Dormition church and cells to the early-to-mid 1050s on the strength of the same entries (so Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, on the compressed and retrospective character of the PVL’s foundation notice). The Chronicle does not date the surface move independently of the foundation-digest.]

From a Company of Hermits to an Organized Monastery

The building of a common church and an enclosed precinct was more than a change of address. It marked, and to a degree it caused, a change in the form of the common life. A scattered set of hermits, each in his own burrow, praying his own rule and bound to the others only loosely, is one kind of thing; a brotherhood gathered around a single church on a defined site, with a recognized head and a settled discipline, is another. The move to the surface is the visible sign of the second emerging from the first.

The Chronicle and the Paterik together let us watch the institution take on its constituent parts. There is now a fixed site, held by princely grant. There is a church, and therefore a common liturgical center where the whole brotherhood can assemble — something the cave-cells could never fully provide. There is, before long, an abbot: Anthony, declining the office for himself, appointed one of the brethren, Varlaam, to be the first superior of the surface community, a step treated in its own file because it belongs as much to the theme of Anthony’s withdrawal as to the theme of organization (see Anthony’s Withdrawal). And there is, in due course, a rule: under Theodosius, the third great figure of the foundation, the Caves house received the cenobitic typikon of the Stoudios monastery of Constantinople, which converted the brotherhood into a fully communal monastery with shared property, common meals, and a regulated round of services (PVL, s.a. 1074; the introduction of the Studite rule is treated at The Eremitic vs. Cenobitic Question). The PVL’s entry under 1074, framed around the death of Theodosius, looks back over precisely this development and presents the Caves Monastery as, by then, a flourishing cenobium whose discipline was a model for other Russian houses (PVL, s.a. 1074; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor).

It is important not to collapse these stages into a single founding act. The historical sequence the sources give is one of layered growth: an eremitic nucleus around Anthony; a move to the surface under pressure of numbers; the grant of the hill and the building of the wooden Dormition church; the appointment of an abbot; and only then, under Theodosius, the adoption of a written cenobitic rule that gave the community its mature shape. The Chronicle’s foundation-digest under 1051 compresses the earlier part of this sequence into a single backward glance, while the 1074 entry supplies the later part (PVL, s.a. 1051 and 1074). Modern historians read the two together as evidence of a process spread across the third quarter of the eleventh century rather than a moment (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, on the staged development of the Caves community; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, on the passage from eremitism to the Studite cenobium).

Why the Foundation Mattered

The significance of this unglamorous sequence — a petition, a land-grant, a wooden church — is that it produced the institutional matrix of Russian monasticism. The Caves Monastery became the great seed-bed from which monks went out to found or reform houses across the Rus’ lands, and its prestige as the senior native foundation, raised by the labor of its own monks rather than by princely endowment, gave it a particular moral authority in the Kievan Church (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; on the monastery’s role in the wider Christianization of Rus’ see Russian Monasticism and The Baptism of Rus’). That this seed-bed grew, in the sources’ telling, from a hole in a hillside into an organized monastery within a single generation is the burden of the Chronicle’s two notices, and it is the reason the move from hermitage to monastery is rightly read as the hinge of Anthony’s public legacy — even though, as the next file shows, he met that very transition by stepping back from it.

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: the cave, the gathering of brethren to about fifteen, the petition to Izyaslav for the hill, and the building of the wooden Dormition church and cells; s.a. 1074: the later growth of the cenobium and the death of 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. (The foundation and the building-cycle of the stone Dormition church; to be distinguished from the wooden church of Anthony’s lifetime.)
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.
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The chronicler’s contrast of the Caves house with the princely monastery of St. Demetrius; the passage from eremitism to the Studite cenobium.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London and New York: Longman, 1996. (The retrospective and compressed character of the PVL’s foundation notice; the staged development of the Caves community.)