Coming to Anthony

Having fled Kursk, Theodosius reaches Kiev in the 1050s and seeks out the hermit Anthony, who had returned from Mount Athos to live in a cave above the Dnieper; Anthony receives the young man, and — in the account of Nestor’s Life and of the Russian Primary Chronicle — directs that he be tonsured by the priest-monk Nikon. This file traces Theodosius’s reception into the nascent Caves brotherhood, his early years of severe cave-asceticism, and the arrival of his mother, who follows him to Kiev and, by Nestor’s account, herself enters monastic life — and it sets the reception by Anthony at the head of the partnership that would shape the monastery.

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

Arrival at Kiev

When Theodosius reached Kiev, Nestor’s Life relates, he was a young man — the chronology of the Vita and the Chronicle place the arrival in the early or middle 1050s — without standing or acquaintance in the great city, and he went about its monasteries asking to be received (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, in Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948). The Life says that the monasteries, seeing his poverty and his mean clothing, turned him away, until he was directed to the hermit living in a cave above the river Dnieper: Anthony, of whom it was reported that he led a life of great austerity in the earth (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The detail that the established houses would not have him, and that only the cave-hermit took him in, belongs to the Life’s larger picture of a city whose churches were many but whose true monastic life had hardly begun (on that vacancy, see Kievan Rus’ and the Monastic Vacuum).

Anthony the Hermit

Anthony is the founder behind the founder, and his story is told both in Nestor’s Life of Theodosius and, more fully for the monastery’s origins, in the Russian Primary Chronicle under the year 1051. The Chronicle relates that Anthony, a man of the region of Liubech, had gone to Mount Athos, been tonsured and trained in the monastic life there, and returned to Rus’ under a charge from his Athonite elder to plant monasticism in his homeland; settling above the Dnieper, he took over a cave that had been dug by the priest Hilarion before Hilarion’s elevation to the metropolitan see, and there lived in prayer and severe abstinence (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051, trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, 1953; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996). Men began to gather to him, and as the brethren multiplied the cave was enlarged into a warren of cells, a church, and a refectory hollowed from the earth — the beginnings of the Caves Monastery (Pechersky), the house that would become the mother of Russian monasticism (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953).

Anthony’s vocation was eremitic — solitary, hidden, ascetic in the Athonite manner — and this matters for understanding what Theodosius would later do. Anthony gathered disciples but did not impose a common cenobitic rule of the developed kind; the community grew around his person and his cave rather than around a written typikon. It would fall to Theodosius to make the brotherhood a true coenobium, organized under the Studite Rule, and the difference between the two men — the hermit who founded and the legislator who organized — is the axis of the partnership on which the monastery rested (on the rule, see Introducing the Studite Typikon; on the partnership, The Complementary Founders).

The Reception and the Tonsure by Nikon

Nestor’s Life gives the reception of Theodosius as a scene of mutual recognition. Theodosius comes to the cave, falls down before Anthony, and begs to be allowed to stay; Anthony, the Life says, warns the young man of the hardness of the place — “the cave is gloomy and narrow,” the life severe — but Theodosius answers that God Himself has led him there, and Anthony, perceiving the youth’s resolve and (in the Life’s telling) foreseeing something of what he would become, receives him with joy (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The tonsure follows. Both Nestor’s Life and the Primary Chronicle agree that Anthony did not himself perform the tonsure but directed that it be done by the priest-monk Nikon, the learned elder of the early brotherhood, who clothed Theodosius in the monastic habit (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051, Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The detail is consistent across the two earliest sources and reflects a real division of function in the cave community: Anthony the spiritual father and founder, Nikon the priest who administered the rites and whose learning the Chronicle elsewhere stresses (Franklin and Shepard 1996).

Theodosius’s age at the tonsure is given by neither source with precision; the Life makes him a young man, and the modern reckoning, working back from his death in 1074 and a birth around 1029, places the tonsure in his early twenties (Fedotov 1948; Franklin and Shepard 1996). The point the sources press is not the age but the completeness of the renunciation: the youth who had fought his mother for the right to flee the world now puts on the habit at the hands of Nikon, under the eye of Anthony, and enters the hidden life of the cave.

The Early Years in the Caves

Of Theodosius’s first years as a monk Nestor’s Life tells little in the way of event and much in the way of ascetic intensity. He is shown surpassing the brethren in labor and abstinence: keeping vigil while others slept, grinding grain and baking the bread for the community, drawing water and carrying it to the cells, wearing the meanest clothing, giving his body no rest (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The bread-baking carries forward the prosphora-service of his boyhood — the labor his mother had judged shameful is now the form of his monastic obedience (on the prosphora episode, see The Conflict with His Mother). The Life adds the ascetic motif of his giving his body to be bitten by gnats and flies through the summer nights while he kept vigil and spun wool, a feat of endurance reported as the brethren’s testimony to his hidden austerity (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). These early-years notices are hagiographic in form — they are the Vita’s witness to the saint’s ascetic stature, not a dated chronicle of his days — and are received as such (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

This first period unfolded under Anthony’s spiritual direction and within a still-tiny brotherhood. The Primary Chronicle and the Life together suggest a community that grew slowly at first and then more rapidly as Anthony’s reputation spread, until the press of numbers led Anthony, who loved solitude, to withdraw deeper into seclusion and to set one of the brethren over the rest as superior — a sequence that would, after an interval, bring Theodosius himself to the headship (the election is told in Election as Hegumen). The years in the caves are thus the formation of the man who would govern: the severe asceticism Nestor records is the discipline out of which the later abbot’s authority and humility both grew.

The Mother’s Pursuit and Tonsure

Nestor does not close the mother-conflict at the gates of Kiev. The Life relates that the mother, after long searching, learned where her son had gone and came after him to the city; finding the cave, she begged Anthony to let her see Theodosius, who at first — bound now by his monastic withdrawal — would not come out to her, until Anthony persuaded him (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). In the meeting the mother pleads with her son to return home, weeping and embracing him; Theodosius answers with the steadiness the Life has prepared, urging her not to draw him back but to follow him in the renunciation of the world, and warning her that she will see him no more in the body if she will not (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The Gospel logic of the boyhood conflict — that the love of mother must yield to the love of Christ (Matthew 10:37) — here reaches its resolution: the son will not return to the mother, but he draws the mother after him into the life he has chosen.

She is persuaded. Nestor relates that the mother, won over at last, entered a convent of women in Kiev — the Life names the monastery of St. Nicholas — received the monastic tonsure, and lived out her remaining years there as a nun, ending in peace (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1, 1946). This is the conversion that completes the near-tragic portrait Fedotov drew of her: the strong-willed woman who had beaten and chained her son to keep him from the monastic life embraces that life herself (Fedotov 1946). For the structure of Nestor’s Life the mother’s tonsure is also the closing of the source-circle: it is from the mother, returned and reconciled and now within the orbit of the monastery’s memory, that Nestor traces the intimate testimony of the childhood episodes (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; on the source-chain, see Nestor the Chronicler and the Vita).

[Disputed: the mother's pursuit to Kiev and her tonsure are attested only by Nestor's *Life* and cannot be corroborated; Fedotov (1946) accepts the episode as substantially historical and as the warrant for Nestor's intimate knowledge of the childhood, while noting that it also serves the Life's literary design — completing the kenotic arc by converting the chief opponent of the saint's vocation. The naming of the convent (St. Nicholas) is given by the Life; it is not independently confirmed. As with the childhood episodes, the issue is the proportion of remembered fact to hagiographic shaping, not resolvable from the single source.]

Anthony, Nikon, and the Shape of the Brotherhood

The reception of Theodosius is the moment at which the two formative relationships of his monastic life are set: his sonship under Anthony and his tonsure at the hands of Nikon. Both men recede, in the long run, before Theodosius — Anthony into deeper seclusion, Nikon for a time into a temporary departure from Kiev recorded in the Chronicle — and it is Theodosius who gives the community its enduring form by importing the cenobitic Studite Rule from Constantinople and organizing the brotherhood as a coenobium (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Franklin and Shepard 1996; on the rule, Introducing the Studite Typikon). But the founding charism is Anthony’s, brought from Athos, and the Caves Monastery understood itself as resting on both men together — the hermit who planted and the legislator who built — a complementarity that the tradition would express by naming Anthony and Theodosius jointly as the founders (on which see The Complementary Founders).

That the earliest monasticism of Rus’ should issue from a cave above the Dnieper, dug first by Hilarion and made a community by an Athonite hermit, is the historical fact on which the whole later tradition of Russian monastic life is built: the Caves Monastery became the model and the seedbed of the houses that followed, and Theodosius’s reception by Anthony is the hinge between the eremitic beginning and the cenobitic institution (Franklin and Shepard 1996; on the tradition, see Russian Monasticism and The Russian Orthodox Tradition).

See Also

References

  • Nestor. The Life of Our Holy Father Theodosius, Abbot of the Caves. In G. P. Fedotov, ed., A Treasury of Russian Spirituality. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1948. (The arrival at Kiev; the rejection by the monasteries; the coming to Anthony and Anthony’s warning of the cave; Anthony’s direction that Nikon perform the tonsure; the early years of cave-asceticism; the mother’s pursuit, the meeting, her persuasion and tonsure at the convent of St. Nicholas.)
  • The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. (The sub anno 1051 account: Anthony’s training on Mount Athos and return; Hilarion’s cave; the gathering of the brotherhood; the priest-monk Nikon and the tonsure of Theodosius; the early Caves community.)
  • Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The reading of the mother’s conversion as the completion of the kenotic arc; the place of Theodosius in Kievan monasticism.)
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (Anthony, Nikon, and the foundation of the Caves Monastery; the chronology of the early brotherhood; Theodosius’s organization of the coenobium.)
  • Heppell, Muriel, trans. The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The Caves tradition of Anthony, Nikon, and the early monastery.)
  • The Holy Bible. Matthew 10:37; Luke 14:26. (The Gospel sayings invoked across the mother-conflict and resolved at the mother’s tonsure.)