The Community Forms

How a monastery grew from a hermit’s cave: the disciples who climbed into the Rila wilderness and begged to stay; the story of John’s young nephew Luke; the building of a first church and dwellings near the hermitage; and the long-debated question of whether St. John himself organized a community in his lifetime or whether the great monastery took shape, around his cave and his relics, chiefly after his death.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Disciples Who Would Not Be Sent Away

The pattern by which a Rila monastery came into being follows the classic Byzantine shape: a solitary of great holiness, sought out against his will, who finally yields and allows a community to gather around him (see The Holy Man and the Wild). The Lives report that monks came to John in the wilderness and begged to be allowed to stay with him; that as their number grew, a church was built and a monastic settlement formed near his hermitage (Light of Bulgaria, Russian Orthodox Church Abroad sources; Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki). The hermit who had fled all company became, by the same holiness that drove his flight, an abba — a father of monks.

It is from this development that John bears, in the Orthodox calendars, the title “Abbot of Rila” (igumen) (Repose of Venerable John, OCA). The title is a founder’s honorific as much as a description of office, and how literally to take it is precisely the question the historical sources leave open (see below).

The Byzantine Pattern: A Community Around a Holy Man

The Rila story is not an isolated curiosity but a particularly clear instance of a pattern that runs through the whole of Eastern Christian monasticism — what Peter Brown, in his classic 1971 study, called the social “rise and function of the holy man.” The ascetic withdraws to the desert or the mountain precisely to escape human society; his very withdrawal, and the reputation for holiness it earns, draws society after him, until the solitary finds himself surrounded by the disciples, supplicants, and dependants he had fled (Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61, 1971, pp. 80–101). The desert father is sought as healer, arbiter, intercessor, and spiritual father, and a settlement crystallizes around his cell. This is the trajectory of Antony the Great in the Egyptian desert as Athanasius tells it, of the Palestinian lavra founders, of Athanasius the Athonite on the Holy Mountain — and of John at Rila. Read against this background, the detail that the monks “begged to be allowed to stay” and would not be sent away is not pious embroidery but the recurring grammar of the type: the community is founded against the founder’s stated wishes, by the holiness that he had sought to hide (Brown, JRS 61, 1971; Repose of Venerable John, OCA). The Slavic monastic world inherited this pattern directly from Byzantium, and John of Rila stands at its head as the first great Bulgarian instance of it.

This frame also clarifies why the “founder” question (below) is so resistant to resolution. In the Brownian pattern the holy man does not, as a rule, draft a constitution and recruit a community; the institution accretes around him and, more importantly, around his tomb, often reaching its mature organized form only after his death, when the relics become the fixed centre of a cult and the disciples become the custodians of an inheritance (Brown, JRS 61, 1971). That the great cenobitic monastery of Rila took shape substantially after 946, around John’s cave and his grave, is therefore exactly what the model would predict — which is one reason the critical-historical reading (below) has the weight it does, without thereby diminishing the devotional truth that the house is the holy man’s own.

Luke

The most personal episode in the gathering of disciples is the story of John’s young nephew Luke (Luka), preserved in the devotional Lives and reported here as the vita’s account rather than as documented event (per METHODOLOGY §3.5). The boy, the tradition holds, secretly left his parents and made his way into the wilderness to join his uncle. John, seeing a figure approach from afar, at first feared a demonic temptation and prayed; recognizing the boy, he received him. But Luke’s father — John’s brother — came in anger, accused the hermit of stealing his son, and forcibly carried the boy back home. On the journey, the vita relates, a snake bit Luke and he died. John, told of it, glorified God that the child’s bodily death had spared him “the future death of the soul,” and afterward often went to pray at Luke’s grave, which became, in the Lives’ phrase, his favorite place of solitude (Repose of Venerable John, OCA; John of Rila, OrthodoxWiki).

The story is at once a tender domestic episode and a hard ascetic lesson in the tradition’s own terms — the renunciation of natural kinship for the sake of God carried to its sharpest point. It is among the best-known scenes of the Rila cycle, and a chapel and the site associated with Luke are venerated in the monastery’s environs; the popular “Skete of St. Luke” along the path between the Old Hermitage and the main monastery is dedicated to Luke the Evangelist, and the equation of that later skete with the nephew’s grave is a devotional association rather than a documented identity (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia; the skete dedication is to Luke the Evangelist).

The First Foundation and the Present Site

Where the original community stood is not the site of the monastery one visits today. The earliest settlement formed at or near John’s hermitage — the Old Hermitage (Starata Postnitsa), with the cave, the saint’s first grave, and the later Church of the Dormition, some four to five kilometers from the present complex (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia; Life of St. John of Rila, rilskimanastir.org). [Disputed: the distance of the Old Hermitage from the present monastery is given as roughly 4 km (Wikipedia) or 5 km east (the monastery’s own site); the precise figure varies by source.] The monastery is reported to have changed its location more than once between the tenth and fourteenth centuries before settling, in the first half of the fourteenth century, on its present site — the great complex re-erected there by the feudal lord Hrelja (see The Heart of Bulgaria) (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia; rilamonastery.info).

The Old Hermitage as it stands today preserves, within a single small compound, the topography of the whole foundation legend. Its centre is the Church of the Dormition of St. John of Rila, a monolithic stone church of narthex and naos in nearly equal proportions; the year of its building is unrecorded, but the site is documented from 1385 and again in 1742 and 1746, and the church was renovated in 1820 with the funding of the hieromonk hajji Cornelius, its partly surviving frescoes painted by Samokov masters of the school of Hristo Dimitrov (The Old Hermitage, Rila Monastery official site [rilskimanastir.org]). In a room at the western corner of the narthex lies the first grave of St. John — the tomb from which his relics were later translated — still a place of prayer for pilgrims; behind the church is the cave in which, the tradition holds, the saint passed the last twelve years of his life, and nearby are a holy spring said to have sprung up at his prayer and a rock where he kept vigil (The Old Hermitage, rilskimanastir.org). The Old Hermitage is thus the original sacred core of Rila, the place of the cave, the first burial, and the earliest gathering, around which the later and grander complex four to five kilometres to the west is, in the deepest sense, a translation.

Did John Found a Monastery? — The Honest Question

Here the historical record and the devotional tradition pull in different directions, and the methodology of this collection requires that the tension be named rather than smoothed over (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4).

The devotional reading, carried in the Orthodox Lives, presents John as the active founder and first abbot of a community he organized in his lifetime and to whose monks he left a Testament of governance (see The Zavet). On this reading the monastery is his deliberate foundation, and he is its first hegumen.

The critical-historical reading, reflected in the more cautious reference sources, is that John lived and died essentially a hermit, in a cave and without possessions, and that the organized cenobitic community and the physical monastery were built by his disciples and grew chiefly around his cave and his relics, substantially after his death around 946. As the English-language reference summary puts it, “the hermit actually lived in a cave without any material possessions not far from the monastery’s location, while the complex was built by his students” (Rila Monastery, Wikipedia). [Disputed: the devotional tradition presents John as the active founder and first abbot of a cenobitic community organized in his lifetime, while the critical-historical reading holds that he remained a hermit and that the organized monastery was formed by his disciples, largely after his death (c. 946); the two readings are not easily reconciled, and the founder-titulature (“Abbot of Rila”) sits between them.] What both agree on is that the monastery is his monastery in the deepest sense — that it exists because of him, around him, and in his name — and that this is the foundation of the entire Rila tradition (see Rila Monastery: The Heart of Bulgaria).

See Also

References

  • Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, August 18. (Disciples gathering and begging to stay; the building of a church; the story of the nephew Luke; John as “Abbot of Rila.”)
  • John of Rila. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (The forming of the community; the Luke narrative.)
  • Rila Monastery. Wikipedia. (The hermit in a cave “without any material possessions,” the complex “built by his students”; relocations of the monastery between the 10th and 14th centuries; the Old Hermitage c. 4 km distant; Hrelja’s 14th-century re-erection.)
  • Life of St. John of Rila (Zhitie na sv. Ioan Rilski) and monastery history. Rila Monastery official site (rilskimanastir.org); rilamonastery.info. (The Old Hermitage “5 km east”; the changes of site.)
  • Ivanov, Iordan (Йордан Иванов). Свети Иван Рилски и неговият манастир [St. John of Rila and His Monastery]. Sofia, 1917. On the early community and the foundation.
  • Brown, Peter. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101. The classic study of the social pattern by which a community accretes around an ascetic — and around his tomb after death.
  • The Old Hermitage (Starata Postnitsa). Rila Monastery official site (rilskimanastir.org). The Church of the Dormition of St. John of Rila; first documented 1385, renovated 1820; the saint’s first grave, the cave of the last twelve years, the holy spring and prayer-rock; the site “5 km east” of the present monastery.