The Monastery Grows: The Trinity in His Lifetime

A portrait of the Holy Trinity monastery as it grew around Sergius in his own lifetime — the modest wooden buildings, the spring drawn forth at the brethren’s need, the stream of visitors from princes to peasants, and the daily image the Life preserves of the abbot in a patched riassa, mistaken for a beggar by a peasant who had come to see the famous saint. From this community came the disciples who would carry his rule across the Russian north.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized by 1452)

A Wooden Monastery in the Forest

The Trinity monastery of Sergius’s lifetime bore little resemblance to the great stone Lavra it would later become. It remained a foundation of timber — a wooden Trinity church (rebuilt and enlarged over the years), wooden cells arranged around it, a refectory, workshops, and a wattle fence enclosing the clearing on Makovets hill (Epiphanius, Life of Sergius; Borisov, Sergii Radonezhskii; Trinity-Sergius Lavra materials, stsl.ru). Poverty was so acute in the early years that Epiphanius reports the Liturgy served with wooden vessels and the books written on birch bark for want of parchment (Epiphanius, Life of Sergius; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, ch. 7). The growth of the place was the growth of a community, not of a building program; the stone construction and the monastery’s emergence as a national shrine belong to the generations after his repose.

The Water Miracle

Among the miracles the Life attaches to the monastery’s growth is the bringing forth of water. As the brotherhood increased, the distance to the nearest stream became a hardship, and some murmured that the site had been ill-chosen. Sergius, the Life recounts, prayed over a small amount of rainwater in a forest hollow, and a spring issued forth to supply the community; for a time the brethren called it “Sergius’s spring,” until the abbot, shrinking from the honor, forbade the use of his name for it (Epiphanius, Life of Sergius; Borisov, Sergii Radonezhskii). The spring is commemorated to the present day at the chapel-at-the-well at Sergiyev Posad (Trinity-Sergius Lavra materials, stsl.ru, cited as locator). Reported here as the Life attests it, the episode is of a piece with the bear of the wilderness years (see Makovets Beginnings): the saint’s holiness drawing creation itself into his service.

Princes and Peasants

As Sergius’s reputation spread, the forest monastery became a place sought out across the whole range of Russian society. Princes came for counsel and blessing — most famously Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy, whom Sergius blessed before the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, an episode treated in The Mongol and Muscovite Periods — and Metropolitan Alexius leaned on him in the affairs of the Church and the Muscovite state. Peasants and ordinary pilgrims came in equal need, for healing, for prayer, for bread in time of want (Epiphanius, Life of Sergius; Klyuchevsky, “The Significance of St. Sergius”; Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, ch. 7). The monastery’s significance, Klyuchevsky argued, lay precisely in this: that it became a moral center for a people demoralized by generations of Mongol domination, a place where the high and the low met on the common ground of the abbot’s humility.

The Patched Riassa and the Peasant

No story captures that humility more sharply than the one Epiphanius preserves of the visiting peasant. A countryman came from afar, having heard of the great Sergius, and asked to see him. Told the abbot was at work in the garden, he went and found there only a man in poor, patched clothing digging the soil like any laborer, and could not believe this was the famous saint; he returned to the brethren feeling mocked. As he persisted, a prince arrived with his retinue and, on reaching the abbot, bowed low to the ragged gardener and asked his blessing — to the peasant’s astonishment, for the one he had sought had been before him all along. When the prince had gone, the peasant fell at Sergius’s feet begging forgiveness; the saint embraced him and, in the words the tradition records, comforted him as the one man who had judged him truly while others were deceived into taking him for something great (Epiphanius, Life of Sergius; Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics; the saying also widely circulated through Velimirović, The Prologue of Ohrid, cited as a later devotional locator, not as the primary source). The patched riassa, the abbot indistinguishable from a beggar, is the Life’s deliberate emblem of the man — the visible form of the same self-emptying that made him haul logs and make shoes for his monks (see Cenobitic Reform).

The Forming of Disciples

What grew most consequentially at the Trinity monastery was neither its buildings nor its renown but its disciples. Sergius formed a generation of monks in the cenobitic discipline and the life of prayer, and these men went out — some during his lifetime, many after — to found monasteries of their own across the forests of the Russian north, the movement later named the Northern Thebaid (Fedotov, vol. 2, ch. 7; and see Russian Monasticism). Among them stand St. Cyril of Belozersk and the many founders who traced their spiritual descent to Makovets, together with Sergius’s own successor at the Trinity, St. Nikon of Radonezh. The formation of these disciples — the transmission of Sergius’s rule and spirit into a whole monastic network — is the subject of the collection’s later treatment of his spiritual progeny, of which this is the preview.

See Also

References

  • Epiphanius the Wise. The Life of Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1417–18; reworked by Pachomius the Serb, mid-15th c.). English selections in Zenkovsky, below.
  • Zenkovsky, Serge A., ed. and trans. Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. Rev. ed. New York: Dutton, 1974 (“The Life of St. Sergius”).
  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. 2: The Middle Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, ch. 7.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, ch. 7.
  • Klyuchevsky, Vasily O. “The Significance of St. Sergius of Radonezh for the Russian People and State” (1892).
  • Borisov, Nikolai S. Sergii Radonezhskii [Sergius of Radonezh]. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (ZhZL series).
  • Velimirović, St. Nikolai. The Prologue of Ohrid (later devotional retelling; locator for the peasant saying).
  • Trinity-Sergius Lavra, stsl.ru (institutional locator; the spring and chapel-at-the-well).