Kievan Rus and the Monastic Vacuum

When Theodosius came to Kiev around the middle of the eleventh century, the Baptism of Rus under Prince Vladimir (988) was barely two generations old: the faith was young, the hierarchy largely Greek, and organized monastic life — above all the native, communal, cenobitic life — had scarcely begun on Rus soil. This file sets that scene, sketching the spiritual landscape into which the Kiev Caves (Pechersk) monastery emerged out of hermit cells dug into the hills above the Dnieper, and the vacuum that native Russian monasticism would come to fill.

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

A Young Christianity

The conversion of Rus is conventionally dated to the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev and the mass baptism of the Kievans in the Dnieper, placed by the Russian Primary Chronicle under the year 988 (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Whatever the precise chronology — the Chronicle’s own account of Vladimir’s “testing of the faiths” and his Cherson campaign is itself a composed narrative rather than a transcript — the decisive turn toward Byzantine Christianity as the religion of the Kievan state belongs to the last decade or so of the tenth century (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996; on the event and its reception see The Baptism of Rus and the collection on St. Vladimir of Kiev).

This means that the Rus into which Theodosius was born, around 1029, and the Kiev to which he came as a young man, knew a Christianity that was at most a single long lifetime old. Vladimir’s son Yaroslav “the Wise” (reigned in Kiev from 1019 to 1054) presided over the consolidation of that new Christian order: it was under Yaroslav that the great stone Cathedral of St. Sophia was raised in Kiev, that books were gathered and translators set to work, and that — as the Chronicle pauses to celebrate — “the Christian faith [was] fruitful and increasing, and monks [began] to multiply, and monasteries to appear” (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1037; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The Chronicle’s own placement of that flowering under Yaroslav, four to five decades after the baptism, is itself a quiet admission of how recent and how shallow-rooted the institutional Church still was.

The hierarchy that governed this young Church was, for the most part, not native. The metropolitan of Kiev was as a rule a Greek sent from Constantinople, and the higher clergy and the liturgical and architectural culture were imports of the Byzantine oikoumene (Franklin and Shepard 1996; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, 1946). The faith had been received “from the Greeks,” in the Chronicle’s own phrase, and its forms — its books, its chant, its canon law, its very alphabet by way of the Slavonic mission — came in as a finished inheritance to be assimilated, not invented (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). On the place of this whole inheritance within the Church’s living memory, see Holy Tradition.

Monasticism Barely Begun

Within that young Church, monasticism was the youngest growth of all. By the time of Vladimir’s death and through the reign of Yaroslav there were monks and even monasteries connected with Kiev, but they were, in the main, attached to the prince and the hierarchy — princely foundations endowed and patronized from above — and the monks themselves were frequently Greeks, or men who had taken the habit abroad on Athos or in Constantinople and returned (Fedotov 1946; Franklin and Shepard 1996). What had not yet appeared was a native monastic life grown from Russian soil and, still more pointedly, a communal monastic life — the disciplined, property-renouncing, common life of the cenobium under a rule and an abbot.

Nestor, the eleventh-century monk of the Caves who is our principal source for Theodosius, makes exactly this claim at the outset of his account of the monastery’s origins: there were monasteries in the land, he says, but they had been established by the wealth of princes, whereas the Caves monastery was founded not by riches but by tears, fasting, prayer, and vigil (Nestor, The Life of Our Holy Father Theodosius, Abbot of the Caves; trans. in Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989; and in Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948). The contrast Nestor draws — between the monastery founded by princely gold and the monastery founded by ascetic labor — is a literary and theological judgment, and it should be read as such; but it also preserves a real historical memory of how thin and how dependent the existing monastic culture was. The Primary Chronicle makes the same point in its own voice, observing of the Caves community that “many monasteries have indeed been founded by emperors and nobles and magnates, but not such as those founded by tears and fasting and prayer and vigil,” and noting that monks elsewhere had been established by the prince’s wealth while these were established by the prayers of holy men (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953).

It is against this background that Fedotov frames the whole significance of the Caves and of Theodosius within it: that here, for the first time, Russian Christianity produced not merely converts and not merely transplanted Greek monks but a school of native ascetic life with its own distinctive coloring — the strand Fedotov famously named Russian kenoticism, the imitation of the self-emptying, humble, laboring Christ (Fedotov 1946). That development is the subject of later sections (see Building the Monastery and the broader survey of Russian Monasticism); what matters here is simply the starting point — a Church with monasteries on paper and almost no living cenobitic tradition of its own.

The Caves: Cells Dug Above the Dnieper

The way the Kiev Caves monastery actually began could hardly be further from a princely foundation, and the sources are emphatic about it. The name itself — Pechersk, from pechera, “cave” — records the origin: the community grew up out of caves dug into the wooded hills on the right bank of the Dnieper, a little distance south of the city of Kiev (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Fedotov 1946).

The Chronicle’s account, entered under the year 1051, traces the origin to a priest named Hilarion (Ilarion) of the village of Berestovo, a man of holy life who, it says, used to go out to a wooded hill above the Dnieper and there dig himself a small cave, two fathoms long, in which to chant the hours and pray to God in secret (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). When this same Hilarion was made metropolitan of Kiev by Yaroslav — the first Rus-born man to hold that see — the little cave was left empty. Into it, the Chronicle continues, came a man whose monastic life had been formed not in Rus but on the Holy Mountain: Anthony, a native of Liubech who had gone to Athos, received the monastic habit there, and been sent back by his abbot with the blessing that “many monks shall spring from thee” (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Anthony settled in Hilarion’s abandoned cave on the Berestovo hill, took up a life of extreme asceticism, and there, the sources agree, the Caves community properly began — first as a cluster of hermit cells dug deeper into the hillside as disciples gathered to him, and only later, as their numbers grew, as an organized monastery with a church and cells built above ground (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Nestor, Life of Theodosius, in Heppell 1989).

Two features of this origin deserve emphasis, because they set the terms for everything Theodosius would do. First, the foundation was eremitic and subterranean before it was anything else: it began as individual men praying alone in dug-out caves, in deliberate hiddenness, not as a chartered institution. Second, the one fully formed monastic model available at the source — Anthony — was Athonite and, characteristically, drawn toward the solitary, hesychast pattern of the Holy Mountain rather than toward the organization of a large common life. Anthony, Nestor tells us, loved solitude and withdrawal, and when the brethren multiplied he eventually walled himself up in a separate cave and gave the brotherhood over to others to govern (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, in Heppell 1989; Fedotov 1946). The relationship between Anthony’s eremitic gift and Theodosius’s organizing, cenobitic vocation is itself a theme of this collection (see Coming to Anthony); the point for the present file is that the raw material out of which Russian cenobitic monasticism would be built was, at the start, a few hermits in caves and no rule.

[Disputed: the Russian Primary Chronicle places its retrospective notice of the monastery’s beginnings under the year 1051, but this is the Chronicle’s narrative arrangement and need not date the first digging of Anthony’s settlement precisely; scholars treat the 1051 entry as a composed origin-account rather than a strict annal, and the early chronology of the Caves’ founding (the relation of Hilarion’s elevation, Anthony’s return from Athos, and the gathering of the first brethren) is reconstructed only approximately (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, notes; Franklin and Shepard 1996; Fedotov 1946).]

A Vacuum to Be Filled

The phrase “monastic vacuum” should be understood with care: it does not mean that no monks existed in Rus before the Caves, for some did, nor that the impulse to monastic life was absent, for it plainly was not. It means rather that the specific thing that the Caves would become — a large, native, communal monastery living under a written rule, generating its own saints, abbots, and eventually bishops, and radiating that pattern across the Rus lands — had no precedent on Russian soil. The institutional forms of Christianity had been received whole from Byzantium; the monastic forms had not yet been received in their cenobitic fullness, nor naturalized.

Nestor and the Chronicle alike present the Caves precisely as the moment this changes. The Chronicle’s notice under 1051 ends by tracing the spread: from this monastery, it says, came monks throughout all the monasteries of the Rus land, so that the Caves stood as the mother-house of Russian monasticism (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Nestor’s whole Life of Theodosius is built to show how that came about through one man’s labor in particular — how a hermit-foundation on the Dnieper hills was turned into an ordered cenobium, governed by the Studite rule, that would become the school and seedbed of native Russian holiness (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, in Heppell 1989; Fedotov 1946). The introduction of that rule, and the transformation it worked, belong to their own sections (see Introducing the Studite Typikon and Building the Monastery).

What remains, before any of that, is the man himself: born in the years when the Primary Chronicle was still recording that monks had only just “begun to multiply,” carried as a boy from a town near Kiev to the frontier town of Kursk, and drawn from childhood toward exactly the laboring, self-effacing piety that would, in time, give Rus its first great cenobitic father (see Vasilkov, Kursk, and the Early Life).

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let). Trans. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The Baptism of Rus, s.a. 988; the multiplication of monks under Yaroslav, s.a. 1037; the origin of the Caves monastery, Hilarion’s cave, and Anthony’s return from Athos, s.a. 1051.)
Nestor. The Life of Our Holy Father Theodosius, Abbot of the Caves. Trans. in Muriel Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery (Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Also translated in G. P. Fedotov, ed., A Treasury of Russian Spirituality. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1948. (Nestor’s contrast of the Caves with princely foundations; the gathering of the first brethren; Anthony’s withdrawal into solitude.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The Greek hierarchy and dependent monasticism of early Rus; the Caves as the cradle of native monastic life; Russian “kenoticism.”)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The political and ecclesial setting of eleventh-century Rus; the reign of Yaroslav; the Byzantine character of the early Kievan Church.)