The Wilderness Years

The decades of solitude that made St. John the hermit of Rila: his withdrawal into the high massif of the Rila mountains; the cave and, in one strand of the tradition, the hollow tree; the diet of wild plants and the miraculous beans; the fasting, the vigils, and the demonic temptations of the ascetic life — the long hidden labor, attested in the Lives, out of which his fame and his community would grow.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

Into the Highest Mountains

When the robbers drove St. John from his first brushwood cell (see Skrino and the Call), he went deeper, and the place to which he finally came was the Rila massif — the highest mountains of Bulgaria and of the whole Balkan peninsula, a wilderness of granite peaks, glacial lakes, and dense forest in the southwest of the First Bulgarian Empire. There, far from any settlement, John passed the central and longest stretch of his life as a solitary anchorite, and from the mountain he takes his name: Ivan Rilski, John of Rila (Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki).

The Geography of the Massif

The Rila massif is no merely symbolic wilderness. It is the highest mountain range of the Balkan Peninsula and of southeastern Europe, crowned by Musala at 2,925 meters — the loftiest summit between the Alps and the Caucasus — and spreading across some 2,600 square kilometers of granite peaks, glacial cirques, more than a hundred mountain lakes, and dense conifer forest in the southwest of the old Bulgarian realm (Rila, Wikipedia; Rila Monastery, Wikipedia). Into the deep valley of the Rilska River, at about 1,150 meters, the later monastery would be set, some 117 kilometers south of Sofia (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia). The harshness of such a place is essential to the Lives’ portrait: the cold, the altitude, the long winters, the scarcity of food are not incidental hardships but the very matter of John’s asceticism, the wilderness against which the warfare of the solitary is waged. That the highest, least habitable ground in the whole region should become the cradle of Bulgaria’s holiest monastery is itself a parable the tradition relishes — the kingdom built where no kingdom could be.

The Lives describe a progression of dwellings rather than a single fixed hermitage. He lived for a time, the tradition holds, in the hollow of a tree, and for a long period in a cave — the cave that is still shown and venerated at the site called the Old Hermitage (Starata Postnitsa), some distance from the later monastery, where the Church of the Dormition of St. John of Rila now stands (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; Rila Monastery, Wikipedia; Life of St. John of Rila, rilskimanastir.org). The monastery’s own published Life records that John spent the last twelve years of his life in this cave (Life of St. John of Rila, rilskimanastir.org). [Disputed: the number of years John dwelt in the Rila cave is variously given — the monastery’s official Life says twelve years, while other devotional retellings give shorter spans (around five or seven years); the figures are hagiographical estimates, not documented record.]

The Asceticism

The portrait the Lives draw is of an asceticism carried to its limit. John ate what the mountain gave — wild herbs and plants, and (in the best-known motif) beans or wild legumes that God, the vita reports, caused to grow near his dwelling for his sustenance (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki). To these beans is attached a characteristic hagiographical episode, reported here as the vita’s account and not as documented fact (per METHODOLOGY §3.5): shepherds who had stumbled on the hermit were given some of the beans, but those they tried to carry off and keep by stealth vanished from their bags, reappearing only when they returned to John honestly — the saint’s poverty defending itself against acquisitiveness. The story is, in miniature, the whole moral of his life and of his later Testament: that the monk possesses nothing and grasps at nothing (see The Counsels).

The discipline of food was matched by the discipline of prayer and vigil. The Lives present John in the classic mold of the desert fathers transposed to the Balkan highlands — unceasing prayer, long fasting, sleeplessness, exposure to cold and hardship — the regimen by which the body is subdued and the heart made still. The continuity is deliberate: John’s hagiographers, and especially Euthymius of Tarnovo in his fourteenth-century literary Life, set him consciously in the lineage of the great monastic founders of the Christian East, so that the Rila wilderness becomes a new Egypt, a new Sinai (John of Rila, Wikipedia; on the Lives, see The Sources). The Slavic and Athonite ascetic stream into which he is placed is the same one carried through the wider tradition (see Russian Monasticism for its later transmission).

A New Egypt in the Balkans: The Desert Pattern Transposed

The “new Egypt” is not loose rhetoric. The forms of John’s life map precisely onto the monastic vocabulary the Christian East had inherited from the deserts of Egypt and Palestine. The fourth century had produced two great patterns: the anchoritic or eremitic, the solitary withdrawal pioneered by St. Antony the Great in the Egyptian desert; and the cenobitic, the common life under a rule founded by St. Pachomius. Between them stood a third, characteristic of Palestine — the lavra, a loose colony of solitaries living each in his own cell but gathered around a spiritual father and a common church, as at the great lavras of St. Sabas and St. Euthymius in the Judean desert (compare the desert archetype in St. Antony the Great). John’s career recapitulates this whole development in compressed form on Balkan ground: he begins as a pure anchorite in the cave, the most extreme Antonian solitude; and around him, against his will, a lavra-like colony of disciples gathers, which will in time become the cenobitic monastery of Rila (see The Community Forms). The hagiographers, especially Euthymius, draw the parallel deliberately, so that the Rila wilderness stands as a new Thebaid and John as a new Antony — the Egyptian desert relocated to the Bulgarian highlands (John of Rila, Wikipedia; on the framing, see The Sources). What was novel was the setting, not the form: the same ascetic grammar, written now in granite and snow rather than sand.

What the Asceticism Means

The fasting, the vigils, and the demonic combat are not, in Orthodox theology, ends in themselves nor feats of endurance for their own sake. They are the instruments of praxis — the active stage of the spiritual life — whose goal is apatheia, dispassion: the freeing of the soul from the tyranny of the passions so that the nous, the heart’s eye, may be purified and turned wholly toward God. Fasting disciplines the body and through it the appetites; the vigil, the long night of wakeful prayer, breaks the dominion of sleep and self and keeps the watch the Gospel commands; and the warfare of thoughts (logismoi) — the inner combat against the suggestions that rise unbidden in the mind — is, for the desert tradition that John inherits, the true battlefield, more decisive than any outward hardship. When the Lives show John subduing the body and resisting the demons, they are depicting, in the iconographic language of hagiography, exactly this interior labor: the slow transfiguration of a man through ascetic struggle into a vessel of grace (the spirituality of poverty and detachment that crowns it is treated in The Counsels). The point of the regimen is never the suffering but the stillness it is meant to win.

Hesychast Stillness Before the Name

That stillness has a name in the later Orthodox tradition — hesychia, “quiet” — and the spirituality built upon it, Hesychasm, would become the great current of Byzantine and Slavic monastic theology, formalized in the fourteenth-century controversies around St. Gregory Palamas and carried into Bulgaria by the very Tarnovo school that gave John his fullest Life. John of Rila lived in the tenth century, four hundred years before that articulation, and it would be an anachronism to call him a Hesychast in the technical sense. Yet the tradition rightly senses in him a Hesychast avant la lettre: the flight to solitude, the unceasing prayer, the pursuit of inner stillness as the condition of communion with God are the lived substance of which Hesychasm would later be the developed doctrine. It is no accident that Euthymius, a Hesychast partisan, recognized in the Rila hermit a forerunner of his own spirituality and wrote him up accordingly (John of Rila, Wikipedia; on Euthymius and Hesychasm, see The Sources). The later tradition reads John backward through Palamas; the historian must say only that John embodied, in act, what a later age would name in thought.

The Temptations

No account of an anchorite’s wilderness would be complete, in the hagiographical grammar, without the assaults of the demons, and the Lives give John his share. They report demonic temptations and physical hardships during the cave years — the spiritual warfare in which the solitary, stripped of all human company and consolation, is tested directly (Repose of Venerable John, OCA). These passages follow the established topos of ascetic literature, the same warfare narrated of St. Antony the Great and the desert fathers, and the tradition reads John’s victory over them as the proof and seal of his sanctity. They are to be received as what the vita attests — the standard testimony of holiness in this genre — rather than as a chronicle of particular events (METHODOLOGY §3.5; compare the desert-monastic pattern in St. Antony the Great).

Of a different order, but in the same key, are the robbers who recur in the early stratum: having driven John from his first cell, brigands and the violence of the wild remain a presence in the wilderness narrative — the literal dangers of the mountain standing alongside the spiritual ones (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki).

The Hidden Years and What Came of Them

The whole point of the wilderness years, in the logic of the tradition, was their hiddenness: John fled precisely to be unknown, to be alone with God. Yet the same Lives insist that holiness of that intensity cannot finally be hidden. Word of the hermit spread; shepherds and then monks sought him out; and against his own desire for solitude a community began to gather at the edge of his hermitage — the seed of the great monastery (this is the subject of the next section; see The Community Forms). The same renown drew the attention of the Bulgarian tsar himself (see The King and the Hermit). The decades in the cave are thus the hinge of the whole life: the herdsman becomes the hermit, and the hermit, against his will, becomes a father of monks and the patron of a people.

References

Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, August 18. (The Rila wilderness; the cave; wild plants and the beans; demonic temptations; the robbers; renown spreading despite his withdrawal.)
John of Rila. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (The progression of hermitages; the diet of wild plants; the ascetic regimen.)
John of Rila. Wikipedia. (The Rila massif; the hermit’s cave at the Old Hermitage; the hagiographical framing in the Lives, especially Euthymius.)
Life of St. John of Rila (Zhitie na sv. Ioan Rilski). Rila Monastery official site (rilskimanastir.org). (The cave at the Old Hermitage as the dwelling of John’s last twelve years.)
Rila; Rila Monastery. Wikipedia. (The Rila massif as the highest range of the Balkans; Musala at 2,925 m; the Rilska River valley and the monastery’s location — used to locate the geographical data.)
Ivanov, Iordan (Йордан Иванов). Жития на св. Иван Рилски [Lives of St. John of Rila]. Годишник на Софийския университет, vol. 32 (1936). The critical edition underlying the wilderness narrative.