07 — Conflict with Izyaslav
The one episode in St. Anthony’s external career that brought the hermit of the caves into open collision with the secular power: his tonsuring of two of Grand Prince Izyaslav Yaroslavich’s well-born servants — Varlaam, son of the boyar Ioann, and Ephraim, the prince’s chamberlain — without the prince’s leave, and the fury this provoked, with its threat to scatter the brethren and destroy the cave (PVL, s.a. 1051). The same dossier preserves a later, harder-to-date tradition of Anthony’s withdrawal to the territory of Svyatoslav of Chernigov amid the political upheavals of 1068–1069, where he is said to have dug the Boldina Hills caves; this section sets out both, and is careful to keep the early anger-episode and the later political flight apart where the sources conflate them.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Kievan; father of Russian monasticism)
The relationship between the monastery and the prince is one of the structural themes of early Russian monastic history, and in Anthony’s life it surfaces as conflict. The Caves community grew up not under princely patronage but, in its first generation, in a certain tension with it: Anthony settled in an abandoned hermit’s cave rather than in one of the princely monasteries (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor), and the first recorded crisis of the community is a quarrel with the Grand Prince himself. The cause was the monastery’s claim to receive whom it would — to tonsure men into the angelic life on the strength of their own desire and God’s call, without first securing the consent of the lord whose household they left. To Izyaslav this looked like the theft of his servants; to the tradition it became a founding instance of monastic freedom against the reach of secular power.
This section treats two things that the sources tend to run together and that careful reading must separate. The first is the anger-episode narrated by the Primary Chronicle under the year 1051: a quarrel over tonsures, threats, and a reconciliation in which the prince’s mother is said to have intervened. The second is a withdrawal of Anthony to the Chernigov lands — associated in the tradition with the turmoil of 1068–1069 (the defeat on the Alta, the Kiev uprising, Izyaslav’s expulsion and return), and with the founding of a monastery in the Boldina Hills near Chernigov under the protection of Svyatoslav. The dating and the relation of these two moments are genuinely disputed, and the files below flag the dispute rather than smoothing it over.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Prince and the Monk | The s.a. 1051 episode: Anthony’s tonsure of Varlaam (son of the boyar Ioann) and Ephraim (Izyaslav’s chamberlain/eunuch) without the prince’s leave; Izyaslav’s fury and his threat to scatter the brethren and dig up the cave; the reconciliation; and the deeper theme of monastic freedom against princely power in early Rus. |
| Withdrawal to Chernigov | Anthony’s temporary flight from Kiev to the lands of Svyatoslav of Chernigov, associated especially with the 1068–1069 upheavals; the Boldina Hills caves he is said to have dug and the monastery founded there; his eventual return — with the dating and historicity carefully disputed, since the early Chronicle’s 1051 anger and the later political withdrawal are often conflated. |
See Also
- The Primary Chronicle Account — the s.a. 1051 entry that is the controlling source for the conflict
- The Kiev Caves Paterik — the later devotional tradition that shaped the Varlaam and Ephraim stories
- Anthony’s Withdrawal — Anthony’s habitual recession from his own foundation, the disposition behind the Chernigov flight
- St. Vladimir of Kiev — the dynasty of which Izyaslav and Svyatoslav were grandsons
- The Russian Orthodox Tradition — the tradition in which church and princely power were continually negotiated
- Russian Monasticism — the monastic movement whose independence the episode tested
References
- The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Povest’ vremennykh let). Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (S.a. 1051: the tonsures of Varlaam and Ephraim, Izyaslav’s anger and threats, the reconciliation; s.a. 1068–1069: the Alta defeat, the Kiev uprising, Izyaslav’s expulsion and return.)
- 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 devotional development of the Varlaam and Ephraim narratives.)
- Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The Caves monastery and the princes; the spiritual reading of the conflict.)
- Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The Yaroslavichi, the 1068 Kiev uprising, and the politics into which Anthony’s withdrawal falls.)