The Two Founders

The Kiev Caves monastery is remembered as the joint work of two men whose vocations are distinct and complementary: St. Anthony (c. 983–1073), the Athonite hermit who dug the cave and gave the community its eremitic seed, and St. Theodosius (Feodosii, d. 1074), the abbot who built the surface monastery and gave it the Studite typikon and a structured common life. The tradition venerates both as founders, but its principal sources weight them differently — Nestor’s Life of Theodosius and the Paterik center Theodosius the organizer, while the Primary Chronicle gives Anthony the priority of foundation.

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

Two Names at the Head of the Caves

When later Russian tradition looks back to the source of its monastic life, it does not name one founder of the Kiev Caves Lavra but two, and it does not rank them so much as pair them. The liturgical memory keeps them together, “our venerable fathers Anthony and Theodosius of the Caves,” and the Paterik — the monastery’s own collection of foundation memories and monastic tales — treats the early history as a single story carried by two protagonists (Heppell, Paterik, Discourses on the founding and early abbots). The pairing is not a later harmonization imposed on rival traditions; it is already the way the eleventh- and twelfth-century sources present the house. Yet the two men did genuinely different things, and the difference is the substance of why the tradition needs both names.

Anthony is the eremitic seed. He brought back from Mount Athos the anchoritic ideal of withdrawal, found a hillside cave above the Dnieper at Berestov, and lived there in solitude and prayer until men began to gather around his reputation for holiness (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). Theodosius is the cenobitic builder. Having entered under Anthony, he was the one who, as abbot, led the brethren up out of the caves into a built monastery, regulated their common life by a written rule fetched from Constantinople, and turned a cluster of cave-dwelling ascetics into an ordered community with a gate, a refectory, a hospice, and a place in the social life of Kiev (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I). The cave and the surface monastery, the hermit and the abbot, the charismatic father and the legislator of the common life — these are the two poles the founding holds together.

Anthony: the Cave, the Withdrawal, the Charismatic Father

The shape of Anthony’s contribution is best read from what the Chronicle says he carried home. The Primary Chronicle, under the year 1051, tells how a man of Liubech went to the Holy Mountain, was tonsured there, and was sent back to Rus’ by his own abbot with the blessing that “many monks shall come from you” — the eremitic charism of Athos planted, by deliberate transmission, in Kievan soil (PVL, s.a. 1051; cf. Franklin & Shepard, Emergence of Rus, on the Athonite link). Anthony did not found by building. He founded by withdrawing: he settled in a cave dug into the Berestov hill, the same hillside where the priest Hilarion had earlier dug a small cave for solitary prayer, and there he gave himself to fasting, vigil, and unceasing prayer (PVL, s.a. 1051). His holiness was magnetic precisely because it was hidden; the community formed not because he organized it but because disciples were drawn to a man visibly given to God.

This is the pattern of the charismatic father rather than the institutional superior. When the brethren grew to about a dozen and the caves had been enlarged into cells and a chapel, Anthony did not take the abbacy himself. He appointed others to govern — first Varlaam, then, in time, the leadership that would pass to Theodosius — and he withdrew further into solitude, sealing himself in a separate cave to recover the eremitic silence that the growing community threatened (PVL, s.a. 1051; Heppell, Paterik). The tradition reads this withdrawal not as abdication but as fidelity to his vocation: Anthony’s gift to the monastery was the hermit’s seed and the hermit’s example, and he protected that gift by stepping back from the very institution it had generated (see Anthony’s Withdrawal). Fedotov characterizes him as the bearer of the anchoritic, charismatic strain — the holy man whose authority is personal and spiritual rather than administrative (Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I, on Anthony and the Caves).

Two features of Anthony’s role matter for the joint founding. First, his authority is one of origin and blessing rather than of governance: he is the root from which the house grows, the one who received the brethren and “tonsured” the first generation, including Theodosius himself (PVL, s.a. 1051; Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth). Second, his model is intrinsically resistant to organization. The cave, the solitude, the flight from crowds — these are not the raw material of a great cenobium but its opposite. Something had to be added to Anthony’s seed for it to become a monastery in the full sense, and that something was Theodosius.

Theodosius: the Surface Monastery, the Studite Rule, the Social Outreach

Theodosius came to the caves as a young man already marked by an intense and somewhat irregular asceticism — Nestor’s Life dwells on his childhood austerities, his flight from his mother, and his longing for the monastic life before he ever reached Anthony (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; see St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves). Anthony received and tonsured him; but Theodosius’s historic work began when he became abbot. Under his leadership the community outgrew the caves, and he led the brethren to build a church and cells on the surface of the hill above, transforming the subterranean hermitage into a visible, walled monastery (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I). The very gesture is the inverse of Anthony’s: where Anthony went down into the earth and into hiddenness, Theodosius brought the life up into the light and into the city’s view.

The decisive institutional act was the acquisition of a written rule. Dissatisfied with governing by custom alone, Theodosius sought out and obtained the typikon of the Stoudios monastery of Constantinople — the great cenobitic rule of St. Theodore the Studite — and imposed it on the Caves community as its constitution (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; Heppell, Paterik; see Introducing the Studite Typikon). The Studite typikon gave the monastery what an eremitic settlement by its nature lacks: a regulated horarium of services, a common table, common possessions, an ordered hierarchy of obediences, and a disciplinary structure binding abbot and brethren alike (see The Shape of Cenobitic Life). This is the documentary, legislative dimension of the founding, and it belongs to Theodosius. Through it the Caves became the model house from which the typikon and the cenobitic pattern spread to other Rus’ foundations — the channel by which Studite cenobitism became normative for Russian monasticism (Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I; Franklin & Shepard, Emergence of Rus).

To the written rule Theodosius joined a marked social and charitable turn. Nestor presents him as a monk who did not let the wall of the monastery cut the brethren off from the suffering of the world: he built a hospice for the poor, the sick, and the maimed, set aside a portion of the monastery’s income for them, sent cartloads of bread to prisoners, and made the monastery a place of refuge and almsgiving (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I, on Theodosius’s “social Christianity”). He likewise engaged the princes directly, rebuking Sviatoslav for the unjust seizure of the throne from his brother Iziaslav and refusing to be silenced — a public, prophetic engagement with political power that is the corporate counterpart of the cenobium’s engagement with the city (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; see Social Witness and the Princes). Where Anthony’s holiness was hidden, Theodosius’s was deployed; where Anthony fled the prince, Theodosius confronted him. The contrast is not a contradiction but a division of labor across the one founding.

How the Tradition Holds Both as Founders

That the tradition keeps both names is, in part, a function of how the sources came down. The two principal early witnesses do not tell the same story or weight the two men the same way, and the result is a stereoscopic memory in which each founder is visible from a different angle.

The Primary Chronicle, under the year 1051, narrates the foundation as Anthony’s. It is Anthony who returns from Athos with the blessing, Anthony who settles in the cave, Anthony around whom the brethren gather, Anthony who appoints abbots and withdraws — and the Chronicle explicitly traces the monastery’s origin to him, the Holy Mountain, and the cave, giving him the priority of foundation (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). When the Chronicle later records Theodosius’s death under 1074, it honors him warmly, but the structural account of how the monastery began is anchored in Anthony (PVL, s.a. 1074). Nestor’s Life of Theodosius, by contrast, is a hagiography of Theodosius, and it naturally centers him: Anthony appears as the venerable elder who receives and tonsures the saint, but the narrative weight, the detail, and the constructive achievement — the surface monastery, the typikon, the social works — belong to Theodosius the organizer (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I, noting that Nestor’s portrait of Anthony is comparatively thin). The Paterik, drawing on both streams and on the monastery’s own oral memory, transmits both founders together and supplies the abundant cave-lore that fleshes out Anthony’s eremitic profile (Heppell, Paterik; see The Kiev Caves Paterik).

[Disputed: which founder has priority. The Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051, narrates the foundation as Anthony’s — the Athonite return, the cave, the gathering of brethren, the priority of origin (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor); Nestor’s Life of Theodosius and, following it, much of the Paterik center Theodosius as the effective founder of organized monastic life at the Caves, with Anthony as the receiving elder (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, trans. Hollingsworth; Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I). The tradition does not resolve the tension by subordinating one to the other but by venerating them jointly.]

The reason the tradition can hold both without strain is that “founder” means two different and equally necessary things here. Anthony is the founder by origination — the seed, the cave, the blessing, the spiritual paternity that begot the first generation. Theodosius is the founder by institution — the one who gave the seed a body, a rule, a wall, and a place in the world (Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind I). Neither founding is complete without the other: Anthony’s hermitage without Theodosius’s rule would have remained a holy curiosity rather than the mother-house of Russian monasticism, and Theodosius’s cenobium without Anthony’s anchoritic seed would have lacked the charismatic root and the eremitic ideal that the Caves never ceased to honor. The monastery’s own self-understanding — preserved most fully in the Paterik — is that its life flows from both men together, the hermit and the abbot, the cave and the church above it (Heppell, Paterik; see From Hermitage to Monastery).

It is worth adding that the joint veneration is itself a piece of theological judgment. By refusing to choose between the eremitic and the cenobitic founder, the tradition declares both ways of monastic life to be authentic and to belong together at the source. That refusal becomes a problem — a fruitful one — only when later generations have to decide which of the two ideals is the higher, the question to which the companion file turns (see The Eremitic vs. Cenobitic Question).

See Also

References

  • The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Povest’ vremennykh let). Trans. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. Cited s.a. 1051 (foundation, Anthony, the Athonite return and the cave) and s.a. 1074 (death of Theodosius).
  • Nestor. The Life of Theodosius. In The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’, trans. Paul Hollingsworth. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (Theodosius’s childhood, tonsure under Anthony, the surface monastery, the Studite typikon, the hospice and almsgiving, the rebuke of the princes.)
  • 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 monastery’s foundation memories; both founders held together; the cave-lore of Anthony.)
  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Anthony as the anchoritic/charismatic founder; Theodosius as the cenobitic organizer and exponent of “social Christianity”; the thinness of Nestor’s Anthony.)
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The Athonite link and the spread of the Caves’ Studite pattern.)