05 — Sources: The Paterik and the Chronicle
Everything we can say about St. Anthony of the Kiev Caves (c. 983–1073) rests on two bodies of medieval Slavonic writing: the Povest’ vremennykh let (the Russian Primary Chronicle), whose foundation narrative under the year 1051 is the earliest and most nearly contemporary account, and the Kiev Caves Paterik, a devotional compilation assembled in the thirteenth century out of an exchange of letters between Bishop Simon of Vladimir-Suzdal and the monk Polycarp of the Caves, together with Nestor’s Life of Theodosius and the chronicle tale of the founding. This section establishes what these sources are, how and when they were made, what layers and redactions they passed through, and — most importantly — how securely they can be read, since both are later, devotional, and to be handled by the verification discipline of METHODOLOGY §3.5.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Kievan; father of Russian monasticism)
The figure of Anthony is, paradoxically, both the founder of Russian monasticism and one of the most thinly documented of the great Kievan saints. He left no writings; no contemporary vita of him survives, and it is doubted that one was ever composed; and the two principal witnesses to his life were both shaped, redacted, and in part composed long after his death in 1073. This makes source criticism not an optional supplement to his story but its very foundation. A reader who takes the Paterik’s miracle-tales as straightforward biography, or who reads the Chronicle’s 1051 entry as a stenographic record, will mistake the nature of the evidence. The purpose of this section is to lay that evidence open: to describe the Povest’ vremennykh let and the Kiev Caves Paterik as the human, datable, and layered documents they are, to distinguish what is plausibly early from what is demonstrably late, and to name the places where serious scholars disagree.
The two files below treat the two sources in turn. The Paterik file examines the Patericon’s formation in the 1220s from the Simon–Polycarp correspondence, its later Arsenian and Cassian redactions of the fifteenth century, and its reliability as a thirteenth-century compilation of eleventh-century memory and miracle. The Chronicle file examines the Povest’ vremennykh let‘s foundation narrative under the years 1051 and 1074, the question of which layers are early and which editorial, and the Shakhmatov hypothesis that monks of the Caves monastery were themselves among the Chronicle’s redactors.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Kiev Caves Paterik | The Patericon of the Kievan Caves Monastery: its formation in the thirteenth century from the correspondence of Bishop Simon of Vladimir-Suzdal and the monk Polycarp (c. 1220s), incorporating Nestor’s Life of Theodosius and the chronicle founding-tale; its layers and the Arsenian and Cassian (Kassian) redactions of 1460–1462; and its reliability as a late, devotional compilation of eleventh-century memory — read with Heppell’s introduction and Fedotov, and handled per METHODOLOGY §3.5. |
| The Primary Chronicle Account | The Povest’ vremennykh let on the founding of the Caves: the long foundation entry s.a. 1051 (Hilarion’s cave, Anthony’s Athonite tonsure and return, Varlaam, Theodosius, the move to the surface) and the entry s.a. 1074 (Theodosius’s death and the elders); what is plausibly early or contemporary versus later editorial or legendary matter; and the Shakhmatov hypothesis of Caves-monastery redaction of the Chronicle, handled cautiously. |
See Also
- Kievan Rus After the Baptism — the church and the (near-absent) monasticism into which these sources were written
- The Two Founders — how the Paterik and Chronicle hold Anthony and Theodosius together
- Father of Russian Monasticism — the legacy these texts transmit and shape
- Russian Monasticism — the tradition the Caves sources stand at the head of
- Holy Tradition — how the Church reads devotional and hagiographical sources
- METHODOLOGY — the citation and verification standard governing these files (esp. §3.5 on hagiography)
References
- The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Translated by Muriel Heppell. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (Translation with introduction on the formation and redaction history of the Paterik.)
- The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Translated and edited by Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953.
- Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.
- Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996.