The Kiev Caves Paterik

The Kiev Caves Paterik (Patericon, Church Slavonic Pateryk Pecherskii) is the great devotional book of the Kievan Caves monastery: a collection of saints’ tales, miracle-stories, and monastic exempla that grew up around an exchange of letters between Bishop Simon of Vladimir-Suzdal and the Caves monk Polycarp in the 1220s, and that came to absorb Nestor’s Life of Theodosius and the Primary Chronicle‘s tale of the monastery’s founding. It is the principal narrative source for the cult of St. Anthony, but it is also a thirteenth-century compilation of eleventh-century memory and miracle, repeatedly re-edited down to the fifteenth century — a late, devotional witness that must be read with its formation-history in view and handled per METHODOLOGY §3.5.

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

What the Paterik Is

A paterik (from the Greek paterikon, “book of the fathers”) is a recognized genre of Eastern Christian monastic literature: a collection of edifying tales and sayings about the monks of a particular place or tradition. The classic models are the Apophthegmata Patrum (the sayings of the Egyptian desert fathers), the Lausiac History of Palladius, and John Moschos’s Spiritual Meadow — all of which circulated in Slavonic translation in Kievan Rus and furnished the literary pattern that the Caves monks consciously imitated (Heppell 1989, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Kievan Caves). The Kiev Caves Paterik is the first major original work of this genre in Rus: not a translation of foreign desert lore but an indigenous “book of the fathers” of one Russian monastery, the Caves (Pecherskii) Lavra at Kiev.

As a literary object the Paterik is therefore not a biography of Anthony, nor a chronicle, nor a continuous history. It is an anthology of discrete tales — most of them about individual monks of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, their virtues, their temptations, their ascetic feats, and the wonders associated with them — bound together by the shared setting of the monastery and by the editorial frame supplied by its two original authors. Anthony appears in it as the monastery’s founding father and as a figure of authority and prophecy in a number of the tales, but the Paterik nowhere offers the sustained, ordered vita of Anthony that it offers, through Nestor, of Theodosius. This asymmetry is itself a historical datum and is discussed in The Two Founders.

The Simon–Polycarp Correspondence: The Core, c. 1220s

The historical kernel of the Paterik is an exchange of letters in the 1220s between two churchmen, and the collection’s whole shape descends from it. The first is Simon, a former monk of the Caves who had become bishop of Vladimir and Suzdal (he held the see from 1214 until his death in 1226); the second is Polycarp, a monk of the Caves monastery, ambitious for ecclesiastical advancement, to whom Simon wrote (Heppell 1989, introduction). Simon’s letter to Polycarp is partly a rebuke: he reproves the younger monk for his discontent and his hankering after a bishopric, and he holds up against that ambition the example of the holy monks of their own house, whose memory Simon recounts in a series of edifying tales. To this letter Simon appended a group of narratives — the so-called “Tales of Simon” — about the building of the monastery’s great church of the Dormition and about various Caves saints (Heppell 1989, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1).

Polycarp, in turn, addressed his own collection of tales to Akindinos, abbot (igumen) of the Caves, recounting further stories of the monastery’s fathers that he had heard or knew (the “Tales of Polycarp”). Thus the original double core of the Paterik is two clusters of monastic tales, written down in the 1220s by two named men, each with an identifiable purpose: Simon writing to chasten and instruct Polycarp, Polycarp writing to edify his abbot and the brethren. Both wrote roughly a century and a half after Anthony’s death in 1073, and both drew on the monastery’s living oral tradition, its written notices, and one another (Heppell 1989, introduction). This is the foundational fact of source criticism for the Paterik: its earliest stratum is already a secondhand devotional literature, composed in the early thirteenth century about events of the eleventh.

The Absorbed Materials: Nestor and the Chronicle

The Simon–Polycarp tales did not remain a freestanding pair of letters for long. Over the following centuries, as the two clusters were copied together and edited into a single book, other Caves materials were drawn into the collection. Two are of the first importance for Anthony.

The first is Nestor’s Life of Theodosius (Zhitie Feodosiia), composed at the Caves monastery probably in the 1080s by the monk Nestor — the same Nestor traditionally (and disputably) associated with the Primary Chronicle. This vita of Theodosius, the second founder and the organizer of the monastery’s cenobitic life, is by a wide margin the earliest and richest narrative source connected with the Caves, and although its subject is Theodosius rather than Anthony, it contains the bulk of what can be said about Anthony’s role as Theodosius’s elder, tonsurer, and the hermit-founder of the community (Heppell 1989, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; on its content see The Eremitic vs. Cenobitic Question). When Nestor’s Life of Theodosius was incorporated into the Paterik, it gave the collection a biographical anchor far older than the Simon–Polycarp letters.

The second absorbed material is the Primary Chronicle’s founding-tale, the long entry under the year 1051 recounting Hilarion’s cave, Anthony’s Athonite tonsure and return, and the gathering of the first brethren. This narrative — examined in its own right in The Primary Chronicle Account — was taken up into the Paterik tradition as the canonical story of the monastery’s origins, so that the Paterik came to transmit, side by side, the Chronicle’s foundation account, Nestor’s Life of Theodosius, and the thirteenth-century tales of Simon and Polycarp. The result is a layered book in which materials of the 1080s, the 1110s, and the 1220s lie together, redacted into a continuous devotional whole.

Layers and Redactions

Precisely because it grew by accretion, the Paterik exists not as one fixed text but as a series of redactions, and the relationships among them are a technical problem of Slavonic textual scholarship. The broad outline, following Heppell’s introduction and the standard handbooks, is as follows.

The two original clusters (Simon’s letter and tales, Polycarp’s letter and tales) circulated and were combined during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By the early fifteenth century the materials had been gathered into more formal recensions. The two best-known are named for the men associated with them:

The Arsenian redaction (Arsenievskaia redaktsiia), conventionally connected with one Arsenius and dated to the earlier fifteenth century (frequently to 1406), which arranged the tales into a more orderly sequence and is one of the principal medieval forms of the text.
The Cassian (Kassian) redactions, associated with the Caves monk Cassian and dated to 1460 and 1462 — two closely related recensions, the second a revision of the first, which became the basis of the later manuscript tradition and, eventually, of the printed Paterik (Heppell 1989, introduction).

[Disputed: the dating and mutual relationship of these redactions are debated. Heppell (1989, introduction) sets out the Arsenian (early 15th c.) and the two Cassian redactions of 1460 and 1462 as the principal recensions underlying the printed text; the broader Slavonic-textual scholarship (the tradition descending from D. Abramovich's critical edition of the *Paterik*, *Kyievo-Pecherskyi pateryk*, 1930) distinguishes a more complex stemma of "Basic," "Arsenian," and "Cassian" redactions with contested dates, and not all scholars agree on which materials belong to the earliest stratum. The keyword conclusion — that the surviving Paterik is a fifteenth-century redaction of thirteenth-century letters incorporating eleventh-century materials — is secure; the precise filiation is not.]

The first printed edition appeared at the Caves monastery’s own press in 1661, in a further reworked form; and it was this later, expanded, and liturgically elaborated text that shaped the popular cult of the Caves saints in the early-modern and modern periods (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). For the historian of the eleventh century, the printed Paterik is thus a witness several removes from the events: a seventeenth-century edition of a fifteenth-century redaction of thirteenth-century letters about eleventh-century men.

Reliability: A Thirteenth-Century Compilation of Eleventh-Century Memory

The single most important thing to hold in mind about the Paterik is the distance, in time and in genre, between the events it narrates and the text that narrates them. Its earliest stratum (the Simon–Polycarp letters) is c. 1220s — roughly a century and a half after Anthony’s death; its surviving redacted form is fifteenth-century; its popular printed form is seventeenth-century. At every stage the controlling purpose was devotional and edificatory, not documentary. Simon wrote to chasten Polycarp’s ambition; Polycarp wrote to edify his abbot; the redactors compiled to nourish the piety and corporate memory of the monastery. None of them wrote to satisfy a modern test of historical evidence, and it would be an anachronism to fault them for it (Heppell 1989, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1).

G. P. Fedotov, whose long treatment of the Caves in The Russian Religious Mind remains the classic spiritual reading of the Paterik, took its tales seriously as evidence for the religious mind of Kievan monasticism — for what these monks believed about holiness, asceticism, demons, miracle, and the unseen world — while being clear that they are hagiographical compositions and not annals (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Kievan Caves). This is the right key. The Paterik is excellent evidence for the spirituality and self-understanding of the Caves monastery and for the shape of its corporate memory in the thirteenth century; it is weaker, and must be used with great caution, as evidence for the bare external facts of the eleventh.

Several specific cautions follow, all required by METHODOLOGY §3.5, under which hagiographical claims are never “verified” as historical fact but pinned to their earliest written attestation and reported as what the source attests:

The miracle-tales — the visitations, prophecies, demonic combats, healings, and wonders that fill the collection — are reported by the present account as what the Paterik attests, named to the Paterik (and where possible to the Simon or Polycarp stratum), not asserted as independently established events. The wonders associated with Anthony in particular (his gift of prophecy, his foreknowledge of the building of the Dormition church, the tales of his blessing and his withdrawals) are the testimony of a thirteenth-century devotional collection drawing on monastic tradition, and are treated as such in Miracles and Prophecy.
The chronology and the hard externals — dates, the sequence of abbots, the precise course of Anthony’s relations with the princes — are better controlled by the Primary Chronicle and by Nestor’s Life of Theodosius than by the later Paterik tales, and where the Paterik diverges from those earlier strata, the earlier are to be preferred.
Later accretions — material that enters only in the fifteenth-century redactions or the 1661 print, and is absent from the thirteenth-century core, carries correspondingly less weight for the eleventh century and should be identified as late when it can be.

How to Read It

The constructive use of the Paterik, then, is not to mine it for “facts about Anthony” as though it were a deposition, but to read it as the monastery’s own memory of its founder, layered and datable, and to ask of each element when it entered the tradition. Heppell’s English translation, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery (Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, 1989), is the indispensable starting point in English: her introduction lays out the Simon–Polycarp origin, the absorbed materials, and the redaction history, and her translation makes the tales accessible with their structure visible. Fedotov’s chapter on the Kievan Caves in The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, supplies the spiritual and interpretive reading — what the tales reveal about the ideal of holiness the monastery cultivated. Together they allow the reader to honor the Paterik as Holy Tradition (see Holy Tradition) while assessing it with the historical sobriety the sources themselves demand.

Read this way, the Paterik becomes a precious thing: not a flawed biography to be corrected, but the living self-portrait of the house that Anthony founded — the first Russian monastery telling, in the genre of the desert fathers it revered, the story of how holiness came to take root in the Rus (see Father of Russian Monasticism; on the wider tradition, Russian Monasticism and Monasticism).

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; the Simon–Polycarp correspondence as the core; the “Tales of Simon” and “Tales of Polycarp”; the incorporation of Nestor’s Life of Theodosius and the chronicle founding-tale; the Arsenian and Cassian/Kassian redactions of the fifteenth century, 1460 and 1462.)
Kyievo-Pecherskyi pateryk. Edited by Dmytro Abramovych. Kyiv, 1930. (The standard critical edition of the Slavonic text, distinguishing the principal redactions; cited here for the redaction stemma, not by page.)
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. (The foundation tale s.a. 1051, absorbed into the Paterik tradition.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Chapter on the Kievan Caves; the Paterik as evidence for the Kievan monastic mind; the hagiographical character of the tales and the printed tradition.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (Context for the monastery and its literary culture.)