Miracles and Prophecy

The healings and foretellings that the Kiev Caves Paterik and the Primary Chronicle attach to St. Anthony of the Kiev Caves — chief among them his gift of healing through blessed food given as medicine, his reported foreknowledge of the catastrophic defeat on the river Alta in 1068, and his prophecies concerning the brethren and the great church. This file reports each of these strictly as what its source attests, pinned to the Paterik or the Chronicle and never asserted as bare historical fact; it keeps before the reader that these are, for the most part, thirteenth-century devotional tales of an eleventh-century memory (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

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

How These Wonders Stand in the Record

The wonders gathered in this file are not facts the present account asserts. They are the claims of the sources — what the Kiev Caves Paterik and the Primary Chronicle report of Anthony, set down by named compilers for the edification of the faithful — and they are received here as exactly that: testimony, named to its witness, weighed for its date, and never converted into a flat historical assertion (METHODOLOGY §3.5; on the model of pinning reported wonders to “the letter reports” see The Martyrium Polycarpi). This discipline is not skepticism toward the holy; it is honesty about the kind of evidence we have.

That kind is, for most of the Anthony-wonders, late. The principal source is the Kiev Caves Paterik, whose earliest stratum — the exchange of tales between Bishop Simon of Vladimir and the monk Polycarp — was written in the 1220s, roughly a century and a half after Anthony’s death in 1073, and whose surviving redacted form is fifteenth-century and whose popular printed form is seventeenth-century (Heppell 1989, introduction; see The Kiev Caves Paterik). Its controlling purpose throughout was devotional, not documentary. Where a wonder is also, or instead, reported by the Primary Chronicle — compiled at Kiev around 1113, within two or three generations of Anthony — it stands on earlier and firmer ground, and the difference is flagged wherever it bears on a particular tale (see The Primary Chronicle Account). The fundamental rule of reading, then, is to ask of every wonder: which source attests it, and when did it enter the tradition? Fedotov’s reading is the right frame: these tales are excellent evidence for the religious mind of the Caves — for what its monks believed about holiness, prophecy, healing, and the unseen world — and weaker, used with great caution, as evidence for the bare external events of the eleventh century (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Kievan Caves).

The Gift of Healing: The Blessed Food Given as Medicine

The Caves tradition remembers Anthony as a healer, and remembers the manner of his healing with a striking particularity. According to the Kiev Caves Paterik, Anthony tended the sick of the monastery and of the city by giving them, as their medicine, food from his own table — blessed bread, or a herb or vegetable from the monks’ fare — so that the sick who ate what the holy elder had blessed were restored to health (Heppell 1989). The Paterik presents this not as ordinary nursing but as the working of God through His servant: the cure lay not in any property of the food but in the blessing and the prayer of Anthony, the humble bread becoming the vehicle of a grace that the physicians’ arts could not supply.

This motif is bound up, in the Caves tradition, with the figure of Agapit the Unmercenary Physician (Agapit the Leech), one of the most celebrated of the Paterik’s healer-saints, whom the collection presents as a disciple within the line of Anthony’s healing charism: Agapit too cured the sick by giving them to eat of the boiled herbs from his own meager fare, and his tales explicitly set his God-given, payment-refusing cures against the failures of the trained, fee-taking physicians of Kiev (Heppell 1989; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). The continuity is deliberate. The Paterik presents the gift of healing-through-blessed-food as something that descends from Anthony, the founding father, into the house he established, so that the monastery becomes a place of unmercenary healing on the model of its first elder.

Two cautions belong here. First, the whole of this material is Paterik material — thirteenth-century and later devotional narrative — and is reported as the Paterik‘s testimony to Anthony’s sanctity, not as a documented clinical record; the early Chronicle, our firmer witness, does not give us Anthony as healer in this developed form (Heppell 1989, introduction; on the source-layers, The Kiev Caves Paterik). Second, the particular elaboration of the healing-tales — the named patients, the contests with Armenian or Greek physicians, the dialogue — is the stock-in-trade of the hagiographical genre, and the more circumstantial the tale, the more it bears the marks of literary shaping (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1).

[Disputed: how much of the "blessed-food healing" belongs to Anthony specifically, as against the Caves tradition generally, is uncertain. The *Kiev Caves Paterik* (Heppell 1989) attaches the unmercenary-healing-through-blessed-food motif both to Anthony as founder and, in its fullest narrative form, to the later monk Agapit the Physician; some of the Anthony-coloring may be the retrojection onto the founder of a charism the monastery prized in its healer-saints. The secure conclusion is that the Caves remembered Anthony as the source of a healing tradition; the precise historical content of his own cures is not recoverable from the late sources.]

The Foreknowledge of the Disaster at the Alta (1068)

The best-known prophecy attributed to Anthony concerns the catastrophe of 1068. In that year the three sons of Yaroslav the Wise — Izyaslav of Kiev, Svyatoslav of Chernigov, and Vsevolod of Pereyaslavl, the ruling triumvirate of the Yaroslavichi — went out against the invading Polovtsy (Cumans/Kipchaks) and were heavily defeated at the river Alta, a rout that precipitated the uprising in Kiev and the temporary expulsion of Izyaslav (PVL, s.a. 1068; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200). The defeat at the Alta is a securely attested historical event, recorded by the Chronicle and central to the political crisis of the late 1060s.

What the Caves tradition adds is that Anthony foretold this defeat. According to the tradition, the three princes, before going out to battle, came to Anthony to ask his blessing, and the holy elder — by the gift of prophecy — foretold to them that they would be defeated by the Polovtsy, and that they would be defeated because of their sins; the disaster at the Alta then fulfilled his word (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; Heppell 1989). The tale belongs to the recurring hagiographical pattern of the holy man who reads the future and warns the powerful — and whose warning, unheeded or simply confirmed, is vindicated by events.

Here the source-question is sharp and must be stated plainly. The event — the defeat at the Alta — is in the early Chronicle s.a. 1068. The prophecy attributed to Anthony is the more difficult element, and its attestation is the crux:

[Disputed: whether Anthony's foretelling of the Alta defeat belongs to the early stratum or is a later devotional layer is genuinely contested in the dossier. The defeat itself is firmly recorded in the *Primary Chronicle s.a.* 1068 (trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor), with the Chronicle drawing the lesson that the disaster came upon Rus for its sins — but the Chronicle's "for our sins" framing is the chronicler's own providential theology, not necessarily a prophecy spoken by Anthony. The ascription of a specific foretelling to Anthony, addressed to the three Yaroslavichi who came for his blessing, is carried by the Caves hagiographical tradition (Fedotov, *The Russian Religious Mind*, vol. 1; the Paterik tradition, Heppell 1989) and reads as a hagiographical development that attaches the Chronicle's providential interpretation of 1068 to the person of the holy founder. The conservative reading is that the historical kernel is the 1068 defeat and the providential "for their sins" interpretation, and that the personal prophecy by Anthony is a later crystallization of that interpretation around the saint; it is reported here as the tradition's testimony, not as an established act.]

The point for an Orthodox reader is not to strip the saint of his charism but to see exactly what the sources give: a securely historical disaster, a providential reading of it already in the early Chronicle, and a prophecy ascribed to Anthony that the tradition framed around both. Reported as the tradition’s witness, the Alta prophecy expresses the Caves’ memory of Anthony as a seer who stood, in the manner of the prophets, over against the sins of princes (on Anthony’s troubled relations with Izyaslav see The Prince and the Monk).

The Prophecy Concerning the Brethren and the Great Church

A further strand of foretelling in the Caves tradition concerns the future of the monastery itself. The Paterik and the broader tradition remember Anthony as having prophesied the growth and glory of the community he founded — that from the little band gathered in the cave a great multitude of monks would spring, and that the house would become a lamp to the whole land (Heppell 1989; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). This motif has its root already in the earliest source: the Primary Chronicle‘s foundation tale s.a. 1051 has the Athonite abbot, in sending Anthony back to Rus, foretell that “many monks” would come from him — a blessing-prophecy that the Caves tradition then extended into Anthony’s own foreknowledge of his monastery’s flourishing (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see Sent Back to Rus).

Most concretely, the Caves tradition surrounds the building of the monastery’s great church — the Dormition (Uspensky) cathedral, the central and most celebrated of the “Tales of Simon” in the Paterik — with a cluster of wonders and foretellings, in which Anthony (with Theodosius) figures as foreseeing and blessing the building of the church that would crown the monastery (Heppell 1989; on the tales of the church’s construction see The Kiev Caves Paterik). The Paterik presents the construction of the Dormition church as ringed about with divine signs and prophetic foreknowledge, and binds the founders into that providential history.

These foretellings about the brethren and the church must be weighed by their layer. The seed — the Athonite abbot’s “many monks” — is in the early Chronicle, though it is itself a recognizable hagiographical topos of the founder commissioned and foreseen (see the disputed note on the blessing-prophecy in The Primary Chronicle Account). The fuller prophecies of the monastery’s glory and the elaborate wonder-cycle around the Dormition church are Paterik developments, thirteenth-century and later, and are reported here as the testimony of that devotional collection — the monastery’s own retrospective sense, cast as prophecy, that its greatness had been foreseen from the beginning (Heppell 1989, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1).

The Wider Pattern of Wonder in the Paterik

Anthony’s healings and prophecies do not stand alone but belong to a whole world of wonder that the Paterik and the Chronicle’s 1074 elder-tales depict: the cave-monastery as a place of visions, of combat with demons, of clairvoyant elders and miraculous cures and prophetic warnings (Heppell 1989; PVL, s.a. 1074, trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor — the tales of Damian the healer, of Jeremiah and Matthew the seers, of Isaac the recluse and his demonic trials; see The Primary Chronicle Account). Anthony stands at the head of this charismatic tradition as its founding father, the elder from whom the gifts of healing and prophecy are remembered to descend into the house.

To read these tales rightly is to read them as Fedotov read them: as the authentic self-portrait of the Kievan monastic mind, precious evidence for what these monks believed about the nearness of the unseen world, the reality of demonic assault, the gift of prophecy, and the power of a saint’s blessing — and as hagiography, not annal, in their reporting of particular events (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Kievan Caves). Held this way, with each wonder pinned to its source and weighed for its date, the miracle-tradition around Anthony is neither dismissed nor flattened into fact: it is honored as the living memory of the house he founded, telling, in the genre of the desert fathers it revered, how holiness and its gifts came to dwell in the caves of the Dnieper (see Holy Tradition and Father of Russian 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 “Tales of Simon” on the building of the Dormition church; the healer-saints of the monastery, including Agapit the Unmercenary Physician and the motif of cure through blessed food; the wonder- and prophecy-tales attaching to Anthony as founder; the redaction history establishing the collection’s thirteenth-to-fifteenth-century formation.)
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 defeat of the Yaroslavichi by the Polovtsy at the Alta s.a. 1068 and the chronicler’s “for our sins” interpretation; the Athonite blessing-prophecy of “many monks” s.a. 1051; the elder-tales and wonders of the Caves s.a. 1074.)
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 miracle- and prophecy-tales as evidence for the Kievan monastic mind; the healer-saints and the unmercenary-healing motif; Anthony as the founding figure of the monastery’s charismatic tradition; the hagiographical, non-annalistic character of the wonder-tales.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The political crisis of 1068, the Polovtsian defeat at the Alta, and the Kievan uprising and expulsion of Izyaslav; the Caves monastery in its eleventh-century setting.)