The Ascetic Pattern

The discipline by which St. Anthony of the Kiev Caves lived and by which he taught Rus to live: the dug cave as cell and ideal, a fast reduced to bread and water and taken only every other day, prayer made ceaseless, and the labor of his own hands. This file describes that Athonite-eremitic pattern, transplanted from the Holy Mountain to the hill above the Dnieper, and shows how Anthony’s solitary asceticism both grounded and differed from the Studite cenobium that Theodosius built upon it — and how the cave (pechera) became the defining symbol of Russian holiness.

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

A Pattern, Not a Teaching

Anthony left no writings, no rule, no recorded sayings of his own. Unlike Theodosius, who is the subject of Nestor’s full Life and whose words and acts are reported at length, Anthony survives almost entirely as a form of life glimpsed through the Primary Chronicle’s foundation tale s.a. 1051 and through the later, devotional refractions of the Kiev Caves Paterik (see The Primary Chronicle Account and The Kiev Caves Paterik). What the sources hand us is not a doctrine of asceticism but a pattern of it — the bare outline of how one man lived in a hole in a hillside, and how that way of living became the seed of a tradition (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Kievan Caves).

This is a constraint to be respected rather than papered over. The asceticism described below is reconstructed from the earliest narrative (the Chronicle), supplemented by Nestor’s near-contemporary Life of Theodosius — which preserves much about Anthony in his capacity as Theodosius’s elder and tonsurer — and by the later Paterik, whose tales must be weighed for their thirteenth-century date (Heppell 1989, introduction). Where the description rests on the early Chronicle it stands on firm ground; where it draws on the Paterik it carries the weight of devotional memory, and is named as such.

The Cave as Cell and Ideal

The defining fact of Anthony’s asceticism is the cave. The Chronicle’s narrative begins not with Anthony but with the priest Hilarion of Berestovo, who, before his elevation to the metropolitan see, used to climb the wooded hill above the Dnieper and dig himself a small cave — “two fathoms” deep, in the Chronicle’s measure — in which to withdraw and pray (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). When Hilarion was made metropolitan the cave stood empty, and Anthony, returning from Athos and finding the existing princely monasteries not to his taste, settled in it (see The Cave on the Berestov Hill). From that occupied pit the whole monastery grew: as brethren gathered, they did not first build but dug — enlarging the cave, hollowing out cells and a church within the earth, and living the hidden, subterranean life of the hill until their numbers forced them up to the surface (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see The Gathering of Brethren).

The cave was thus not a temporary expedient awaiting proper buildings but Anthony’s chosen and abiding mode. Even after the community had risen to the surface and become a monastery, Anthony’s own preference was to withdraw again into a fresh-dug cave to live alone, and the Chronicle records exactly this: when the brethren numbered about twelve, he appointed Varlaam over them and retreated into solitude, later moving to another hill and digging a new cave — the origin of the distinction between the “Near” and “Far” caves of the later Lavra (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see Anthony’s Withdrawal). The cave was the place to which Anthony always returned.

In the spirituality that grew from this, the pechera — the dug cave — became charged with meaning far beyond the practical. It was at once tomb and womb: a descent into the earth, a living burial, a deliberate enclosure in darkness and narrowness for the sake of prayer; and, at the same time, the matrix from which a whole people’s monasticism would be born. Fedotov reads the cave as the central symbol of the Kievan ascetic ideal and as the physical sign of a holiness understood as self-burial, hiddenness, and humble descent (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Kievan Caves). The very name the monastery would bear — Pecherskaia, “of the Caves” — fixes the cave at the heart of its identity, and through it at the heart of the Russian monastic imagination that took the Caves as its mother-house (see Father of Russian Monasticism).

Fasting: Bread and Water, Every Other Day

The most concrete element of the pattern is the fast. The Chronicle says of Anthony, upon his settling in Hilarion’s cave, that he gave himself to a life of extreme abstinence — prayer, fasting, and vigil — and the tradition consistently remembers his diet as reduced to its barest possible form: dry bread and water, and that taken sparingly (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). The remembered measure of his abstinence is the every-other-day rule — eating only on alternate days, and on those days only bread and water — a discipline that belongs to the severe eremitic tradition of the Christian East and that the Caves tradition associates both with Anthony and with the ascetic elders who followed his pattern (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; on the broader Orthodox theology of the fast see Monasticism).

The character of this fasting is important. It is not penitential self-punishment for its own sake but the classic ascetic instrument: the subjugation of the body’s appetites so that the whole man may be free for prayer, on the pattern of the desert fathers whose Apophthegmata and Lives circulated in Slavonic in Kievan Rus and furnished the Caves monks their models (Heppell 1989, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). Anthony’s namesake and prototype, Anthony the Great of Egypt — whose name he bore in religion — set the measure of this kind of abstinence, and the deliberate echo of the great Egyptian eremite in the Kievan Anthony is part of how the tradition understood him: a new Anthony for a new land, repeating the desert fast in the caves of the Dnieper (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1).

That this fasting tradition was transmitted as Anthony’s living example, rather than merely admired, is shown by the Paterik’s many tales of Caves monks who carried the same regime to extremes — the recluses and faster-ascetics whose every-other-day or even weekly eating the collection celebrates (Heppell 1989). These are later, devotional narratives and are weighed as such (see Miracles and Prophecy); but they witness, at least, to what the monastery believed its founder’s discipline had been and to the standard he was held to have set.

Ceaseless Prayer and the Hidden Life

Inseparable from the fast is the prayer. The Chronicle’s compressed notice of Anthony in his cave joins prayer to fasting and vigil as the threefold content of his life: he “gave himself to prayer,” persevering in the cave by day and night (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The ideal at work here is the patristic ambition of unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17) — the labor of holding the mind in continual converse with God — which the eremitic tradition of the East pursued through the long night-vigil, the recitation of the Psalter, and the simple repeated invocation of the name of Jesus that would, in time, flower into the developed hesychast practice (on the Athonite and hesychast inheritance see Symeon the New Theologian; for the broader frame, Monasticism).

The setting of the cave is itself an instrument of this prayer. The darkness, the silence, the narrow enclosure, the nearness of the earth — all serve the gathering of the mind inward and away from the world, the withdrawal (anachoresis) that is the eremite’s whole strategy. Fedotov stresses that the Kievan ideal, as it crystallized around Anthony and the Caves, prized exactly this hiddenness: a holiness that hides itself, that flees notice, that buries itself in the earth and in humility rather than seeking the visible offices of the Church (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Kievan Caves). Anthony’s repeated flights into deeper solitude — his withdrawal from the very community he had gathered, his retreat to a separate cave the moment the brethren grew numerous — express this prizing of the hidden life of prayer over the visible life of governance, and they mark the deepest difference between him and Theodosius (see below, and Anthony’s Withdrawal).

Manual Labor

To fasting and prayer the pattern joins labor. The Chronicle’s account of the cave’s enlargement shows the monks themselves doing the digging — hollowing out the cells and the church with their own hands — so that the very fabric of the monastery was the product of ascetic toil (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). Manual labor belongs to the ancient monastic synthesis inherited from Egypt and Palestine: work as a guard against idleness, as a discipline of the body parallel to the fast, as the means of the monk’s self-support and of his almsgiving, and — in the digging of the caves — as a literal cooperation in the making of the holy place (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; Heppell 1989, introduction). The Caves tradition preserves the memory of monks who labored at the bake-oven, in the garden, at copying, and at the building of the great Dormition church; and the founder’s own digging of cave after cave stands at the head of this remembered labor (Heppell 1989).

The Athonite Transplant

What gives Anthony’s discipline its particular shape and its historical weight is that he did not invent it. The Chronicle is explicit that Anthony’s formation was Athonite: the man of Lyubech journeyed to Mount Athos, was tonsured there, lived the monastic life among its monks, and was sent back to Rus by his abbot with a blessing and the charge to plant monasticism among his own people (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see Tonsure on the Holy Mountain and Sent Back to Rus). Anthony’s asceticism is therefore a transplant: the eremitic and semi-eremitic discipline of the Holy Mountain, carried whole to the hill above the Dnieper and rooted there.

This Athonite descent matters for what kind of monasticism Anthony established. The form he embodied was eremitic and anchoritic — the way of the solitary cave-dweller who lives alone or in a loose gathering of solitaries, each in his own cell, bound by ascetic likeness rather than by a regulated common life. Mount Athos in Anthony’s time held both the great cenobitic houses and a vigorous eremitic and lavriotic tradition of cells and sketes around them; it was the latter strand — the cave, the cell, the solitary fast and vigil — that Anthony brought home (Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). The Caves monastery began, accordingly, not as an ordered cenobium but as a colony of cave-ascetics gathered around a hermit-elder — which is exactly the picture the Chronicle paints (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The deep connection between the Caves and the Holy Mountain, sealed by Anthony’s tonsure, is one of the founding facts of Russian monasticism and a permanent thread of its history (see Russian Monasticism).

[Disputed: the number and course of Anthony's Athonite journeys are not fixed in the sources. The *Primary Chronicle s.a.* 1051 (trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor) relates a single tonsure on Athos and a single return; Nestor's *Life of Theodosius* and the later Paterik tradition (Heppell 1989, introduction) preserve elements that have been read as implying two visits to the Holy Mountain or a more complicated itinerary. The crux is treated where the journeys are narrated, in [Tonsure on the Holy Mountain](../02-athos-and-return/tonsure-on-the-holy-mountain.md); for the present purpose the secure point is that Anthony's discipline was Athonite in formation, eremitic in character.]

Eremitic Ground, Cenobitic Building: Anthony and Theodosius

Anthony’s asceticism is rightly called the ground of the Caves, but it was not the building. The decisive development of the monastery into a regulated cenobium — a community of monks living a fully common life under a written rule, sharing a common table, common property, common obedience, and common worship — was the work not of Anthony but of Theodosius, who as superior introduced the Studite Rule (the typikon of the Constantinopolitan monastery of St. John Stoudios), procured for the Caves through Constantinople (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, in Heppell 1989; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; see The Studite Rule — and within this collection, The Two Founders).

The relation between the two disciplines is one of foundation and superstructure. Anthony’s eremitic asceticism — the cave, the solitary fast, the withdrawal — grounded the monastery: it gave it its origin, its first ascetics, its sanctity, its Athonite pedigree, and its abiding eremitic strand (the recluses and cave-dwellers never disappeared from the Caves, and the caves themselves remained a place of solitary askesis). But that eremitic discipline, of its nature, does not organize a large community; it tends rather to flee community, as Anthony himself fled it the moment the brethren multiplied (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see Anthony’s Withdrawal). The cenobitic order that could hold hundreds of monks together in a single regulated life had to be supplied from elsewhere — and it was Theodosius who supplied it, grafting the Studite cenobium onto the eremitic root Anthony had planted (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; on the structural tension see The Eremitic vs. Cenobitic Question).

This is why the tradition gives the two founders distinct and complementary characters: Anthony the hermit-father whose sanctity and withdrawal opened the way, Theodosius the organizer-father whose rule made of the cave-colony a true monastery (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1). Anthony’s asceticism is the more austere and the more hidden; Theodosius’s the more social, more moderate in its bodily rigor, and more concerned with the common life and with charity toward the world outside the walls. The Caves held both in a single house — eremitic depth and cenobitic order — and bequeathed that double inheritance to all of Russian monasticism after it (see The Two Founders).

The Cave and the Russian Ideal of Holiness

The lasting significance of Anthony’s pattern is that it set, at the very origin of Russian monasticism, an ideal of holiness as descent, hiddenness, and humble self-burial — an ideal Fedotov gathered, in a famous and influential reading, under the rubric of the kenotic: a sanctity that empties and lowers itself, that hides in the earth, that prizes humility and self-effacement over visible achievement or office (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, ch. on the Kievan Caves). The cave is the perfect material emblem of this ideal: to enter it is to go down, to be enclosed, to be hidden, to be in some sense already buried — and the Caves monks completed the symbolism by burying their dead in the very caves where they had lived, so that the pechery became at once cells and tombs, and the monastery a place where the living ascetics and the venerated dead dwelt together in the earth (see Relics in the Near Caves).

[Disputed: Fedotov's "kenotic" reading is an interpretive synthesis, not a datum of the sources. Fedotov (*The Russian Religious Mind*, vol. 1) reads the Kievan ascetic and the Caves ideal as expressions of a distinctively Russian *kenotic* holiness of humility and self-emptying; the framework has been enormously influential but is a twentieth-century interpretation, and later scholarship (e.g., the more institutionally and politically grounded reading of the Caves and its literary culture in Franklin & Shepard, *The Emergence of Rus 750–1200*) cautions against reading a single national-spiritual "type" out of the hagiographical sources. The cave-symbolism and the austerity are securely in the sources; the "kenotic" interpretation of them is Fedotov's contribution and is named as such.]

Through this ideal, planted by an Athonite hermit in a borrowed cave on the Dnieper hill, Russian monasticism received its founding image. The line runs from Anthony’s pechera to the forest hermitages of later centuries — to the solitaries and cave-dwellers and forest-founders who would repeat, again and again, the pattern of withdrawal into the wilderness for the sake of prayer (on that later flowering see St. Sergius of Radonezh and Russian Monasticism). That Anthony left no words and yet shaped so much is itself fitting: his teaching was his pattern, and the cave he dug taught Rus what holiness looked like.

References

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 narrative s.a. 1051: Hilarion’s cave at Berestovo and its measure; Anthony’s Athonite tonsure and return; his life of prayer, fasting, and vigil in the cave; the digging of cells and church within the earth; the appointment of Varlaam and Anthony’s withdrawal into solitude and a second cave.)
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. (Introduction on the monastery’s Athonite formation, its desert-father models, and the redaction history; the tales of the ascetic elders and their fasting and labor; Nestor’s Life of Theodosius as transmitted in the collection.)
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 cave as the central symbol of the Kievan ascetic ideal; the bread-and-water and every-other-day fast; the prizing of hiddenness and withdrawal; the “kenotic” reading of Russian holiness; the complementary roles of Anthony and Theodosius.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The Athonite connection and the eremitic strand of monasticism transplanted to Rus; the Caves monastery in its eleventh-century context; caution against reading a single spiritual “type” from the sources.)