The Prince and the Monk

When St. Anthony’s cave-community tonsured two of Grand Prince Izyaslav Yaroslavich’s well-born servants — Varlaam, son of the boyar Ioann, and Ephraim, the prince’s chamberlain — without first asking the prince’s leave, Izyaslav flew into a rage and threatened to scatter the brethren and dig up their cave. The Primary Chronicle, gathering the foundation-narrative under the year 1051, makes this quarrel the first recorded crisis of the monastery, and the tradition has read it ever since as a founding test of monastic freedom against princely power in early Rus. This file sets out the episode as the Chronicle tells it, names the two men, and weighs the deeper question it raises about the claims of God and the claims of the lord over the same man.

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

The Setting: A Monastery Without a Patron

The Kiev Caves community did not begin as a princely foundation. The Primary Chronicle, in its long retrospective entry under the year 1051, is careful to mark the difference: Anthony, returning from his tonsure on Mount Athos, found the existing monasteries of Kiev — houses established and endowed by the wealth of princes — not to his liking, and chose instead to settle in the abandoned hillside cave once dug by the priest Hilarion above the village of Berestovo, where he gave himself to extreme asceticism (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see The Primary Chronicle Account). The chronicler underlines the point with a famous saying placed in the monastery’s memory: that the great house of the Caves was raised not by the wealth of princes but by tears, fasting, prayer, and vigil (PVL, s.a. 1051; the contrast is one the Chronicle itself draws between the Caves and the princely monasteries; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The community grew, in its first generation, on the strength of Anthony’s sanctity and the labor of the brethren, outside the circuit of princely patronage.

This independence is the background to the conflict. A monastery founded and endowed by a prince stood in a relation of obligation to its founder; its monks were, in a sense, his monks. The Caves house owed Izyaslav nothing of the kind: it had grown up on land near, but not given by, the prince, and it received whom it would. When it began to receive men of the prince’s own household, the latent tension between a self-standing monastic community and the secular power around it became an open quarrel.

The Two Tonsures: Varlaam and Ephraim

The occasion of the quarrel, as the Chronicle relates it under 1051, was the tonsuring of two men of high standing in the prince’s service (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor).

The first was Varlaam, the son of a leading boyar named Ioann (Ivan) — one of the great men of Izyaslav’s court. Drawn to the monastic life, Varlaam came to the cave and asked to be received; Anthony received him, and he was tonsured into the brotherhood. The Chronicle and, at greater length, the Kiev Caves Paterik dwell on the cost of this step: Varlaam’s powerful father came to the cave with armed men, dragged his son out, stripped the monastic habit from him by force, and clothed him again in the rich garments of a boyar’s son, trying by every means — and his wife by hers — to break the young man’s resolve, until Varlaam’s steadfastness at last prevailed and his father let him return to the monastery (the Paterik develops the conflict between Varlaam and his father, with the violence of the father’s attempt and the son’s perseverance; trans. Heppell; cf. PVL, s.a. 1051). Varlaam would become the first abbot of the Caves, appointed by Anthony when the community needed a superior, and later was removed by Izyaslav himself to head the prince’s own monastery of St. Demetrius (PVL, s.a. 1051; see Anthony’s Withdrawal).

The second was Ephraim (Efrem), described in the tradition as a man of the prince’s household — his chamberlain or steward, and in the sources a eunuch of the court, one of the trusted personal servants who managed a prince’s domestic affairs and stood close to his person (PVL, s.a. 1051; the Paterik names Ephraim the eunuch among the early brethren tonsured by Anthony and Nikon; trans. Heppell). For such a man — bound by office and intimacy to the prince’s service — to leave the court for the cave was a more direct affront than the loss of a boyar’s son, because it touched the prince’s own household. This Ephraim is traditionally identified with the monk who later traveled to Constantinople and eventually became bishop of Pereyaslavl, a figure of standing in the Russian church of the next generation (the identification is the tradition’s; the Paterik follows Ephraim’s later career; trans. Heppell). The man whom Izyaslav lost to the monastery thus rose, in the tradition’s telling, to the episcopate.

It was the priest Nikon, one of the senior monks of the early community, who performed the actual tonsures at Anthony’s direction, and on Nikon the prince’s first wrath would fall (PVL, s.a. 1051; the Paterik makes Nikon the tonsurer of Varlaam and Ephraim; trans. Heppell). The distinction matters for the narrative: Anthony was the elder whose blessing drew the men and under whose authority they were received, but the rite itself was Nikon’s act, and Izyaslav’s summons named Nikon first.

Izyaslav’s Fury

The Chronicle relates that when Izyaslav learned that two men of such standing — the son of his boyar and a servant of his own household — had been tonsured at the cave without his knowledge or consent, he was enraged (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). He had Nikon brought before him and demanded by what right he had tonsured the men without the prince’s leave. Nikon answered, in the words the tradition preserves, that he had done it by the grace of God and at the call of the King of Heaven, and that he would not undo what God had done — the monk setting the command of the heavenly King against the will of the earthly one. To this the prince responded with a threat: either let these men return to their homes, or he, Izyaslav, would send Nikon and those with him into exile and dig up their cave — that is, destroy the very hermitage and scatter the community (PVL, s.a. 1051; the threat to disperse the brethren and tear up the cave is the Chronicle’s; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The monks’ answer, in the spirit the Chronicle gives them, was that the prince might do as he pleased, but they would not abandon their calling; Anthony and the brethren, it is said, prepared to leave the place rather than yield, gathering to depart for another land.

The threat is worth weighing for what it reveals. To “dig up the cave” was to undo the physical fact of the monastery — to expel the monks and obliterate the cell — and it lay fully within a Grand Prince’s power to carry out. The crisis was therefore real, not rhetorical: the survival of the Caves community hung, in the Chronicle’s telling, on the prince’s anger. That the foremost monastery of Kievan Rus could be threatened with destruction in its first generation, over a quarrel about who might enter it, shows how undefined the boundary between secular and monastic authority still was in the eleventh-century Rus.

The Reconciliation

The breach did not last. The Chronicle records that the prince’s anger was turned aside — and the tradition assigns a particular agency to the turning. According to the narrative, the prince’s wife (in the tradition a Polish princess, daughter of the Polish king) intervened, warning her husband against the sin and danger of driving holy men into exile and reminding him of the calamity that had once befallen her own homeland when monks were expelled — counsel that moved Izyaslav to relent (PVL, s.a. 1051; the intercession that reconciles the prince to the monks is the Chronicle’s, attributing the warning to the prince’s wife and the example of Poland; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The prince sent to recall the monks who had set out to leave, asked their pardon, and let them return to their cave; from that point the Chronicle presents Izyaslav as a benefactor rather than an enemy of the house — the same prince who would later found St. Demetrius and take Varlaam to head it (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor).

[Disputed: the agent of the reconciliation. The Primary Chronicle (s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor) attributes the turning of Izyaslav’s anger to the intercession of the prince’s wife, who is said to have warned him by the example of misfortune that followed the expulsion of monks from Poland; some retellings in the later Caves tradition and in popular hagiography instead foreground the prince’s mother or simply Anthony’s own steadfast refusal to comply, and compress or omit the Polish-queen motif. The Chronicle’s version — the wife’s intercession and the Polish example — is the earliest and controlling account; the variants are later devotional shaping. The historicity of the specific speech attributed to the queen is of the kind the Chronicle reports as narrative rather than establishes as record (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

The Deeper Theme: Monastic Freedom and Princely Power

The episode is small in compass and large in meaning, and the tradition has read it as a paradigm. At its center is a collision of two claims over the same men. The prince claimed them by the bonds of secular order: Varlaam was a boyar’s son whose service and lineage belonged to the prince’s world, and Ephraim was a servant of the prince’s own household, bound by office and oath. The monastery claimed them by a higher bond: the call of God to the angelic life, which the monks held to override every earthly obligation, so that a man who heard it might give himself to the cave whatever his lord desired. Nikon’s answer to the prince — that he had acted at the command of the King of Heaven and would not undo it — states the principle exactly (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The right of the monastery to receive whom God called, against the claim of the secular lord to dispose of his men, is the issue on which the whole quarrel turns.

This is, in Fedotov’s reading, an early and characteristic instance of the way the Russian monastic ideal asserted a freedom over against the world’s order — not a political program but a spiritual independence, the conviction that the call to renounce the world could not be vetoed by the powers of the world (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, on the Caves monastery and its relation to the princely power, and on the monastic ideal of freedom from worldly obligation). The Caves community, founded outside princely patronage and willing to abandon its cave rather than surrender its right to tonsure, embodied that independence at its origin. The Gospel logic the tradition hears beneath the quarrel is the saying that one cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24) and the warning that whoever loves father or mother, or by extension lord and office, more than Christ is not worthy of Him (Matthew 10:37) — the renunciant’s charter, which the monastery set against the prince’s claim.

Yet the tradition does not read the episode as a simple victory of church over state, and a sober account must keep both sides in view. Izyaslav’s anger was not mere tyranny: a prince had a real interest and a recognized right in the disposition of his household and his magnates, and the unannounced loss of trusted servants to a monastery touched the ordering of his court and the honor of his rule. The monks, for their part, acted without consulting him in a matter that, by the conventions of the day, he might reasonably have expected to be consulted on. The conflict is genuine on both sides, and the resolution, in the Chronicle, comes not by either party crushing the other but by the prince’s repentance and the monks’ restoration — a reconciliation rather than a conquest (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The relation of the Caves to the princes that follows from it is one of negotiated coexistence: Izyaslav becomes a patron, founds his own monastery, draws Varlaam to head it, and the house that nearly fell to his anger flourishes under the dynasty’s later favor.

What the Episode Establishes

For Anthony’s own portrait the episode is revealing precisely because of his place in it. He is the elder under whose authority the men are received and around whom the community gathers, but the active confrontation with the prince falls to Nikon, and the decision to abandon the cave rather than yield is the community’s. Anthony’s role is that of the still center — the holy solitary whose presence makes the monastery worth defending, but who governs by blessing and by the readiness to withdraw rather than by direct contest with the power of the world. The same disposition that led him to refuse the abbacy and dig himself deeper into the hill (see Anthony’s Withdrawal) shows here as a readiness to leave the place altogether rather than surrender the principle. It is this readiness to withdraw, raised now to the scale of the city’s politics, that connects the anger-episode of 1051 to the later and harder-to-date tradition of Anthony’s flight to the Chernigov lands (see Withdrawal to Chernigov).

What the episode establishes for the tradition is the standing of the monastery as a thing not at the prince’s disposal — a community whose right to receive the called belongs to God and not to the secular lord, and which would rather be scattered than concede that right. That principle, dramatized at the very origin of Russian monasticism in the quarrel between the prince and the monk, became part of the inheritance the Caves handed to the houses that grew from it (on that inheritance, Russian Monasticism; on the monastic life as a calling that overrides worldly obligation, Monasticism).

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, son of the boyar Ioann, and Ephraim the chamberlain; Nikon’s summons before the prince and his answer; Izyaslav’s threat to exile the monks and dig up the cave; the brethren’s readiness to depart; the intercession of the prince’s wife and the example of Poland; the reconciliation and Izyaslav’s later patronage; the contrast of the Caves with the princely monasteries.)
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. (Nikon as tonsurer of Varlaam and Ephraim; the violent attempt of Varlaam’s father Ioann to reclaim his son and Varlaam’s perseverance; Ephraim the eunuch and his later career, traditionally toward the see of Pereyaslavl.)
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 in its relation to the princely power; the monastic ideal of freedom from worldly obligation; the spiritual reading of the conflict.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (Izyaslav Yaroslavich and the politics of his reign; the court household and the place of boyars and chamberlains in the prince’s service.)
The Holy Bible, Matthew 6:24; 10:37. On the impossibility of serving two masters and the renunciant’s preference of Christ above every earthly bond.