Election as Hegumen

How Theodosius came to be chosen hegumen (abbot) of the Caves community around 1062: the threefold succession in which Anthony withdrew into solitude, Varlaam was the first appointed superior and was then transferred by Prince Izyaslav to the new monastery of St. Demetrius, and Theodosius was set over the brethren in his place. This file follows Nestor’s Life of Our Father Theodosius and the Primary Chronicle for the sequence, the growth of the community from a handful of monks to roughly a hundred under his rule, and the portrait Nestor draws of his leadership through manual labor, humility, and personal example.

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

The Community Before the Election

The monastery that Theodosius would govern began not as an institution but as a hole in a hillside. The Russian Primary Chronicle, in a long retrospective entry placed under the year 1051, tells how the priest Hilarion — before his elevation to the metropolitan see of Kiev — had dug himself a small cave in the wooded hill above the Dnieper at Berestovo for solitary prayer, and how, after Hilarion was made metropolitan, that cave was found and settled by Anthony, a monk newly returned from Mount Athos (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Around Anthony’s solitude a community slowly gathered. The Chronicle names the early companions who came to him in the cave — among them Nikon, an ordained priest who tonsured the newcomers, and the youth from Kursk who would become Theodosius — and records that when the brethren had grown to about twelve, they had enlarged the cave-dwelling and excavated a church and cells within the earth (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953).

This is the setting in which the question of governance first arose. Anthony was a hermit by vocation, not an organizer; his gift was the cave and the example of ascetic withdrawal, not the daily administration of a growing body of monks. Nestor’s Life of Theodosius, our fullest narrative source, presents the same picture from the inside of the community: Anthony as the spiritual father who draws men to the place, but who, as the numbers increase, deliberately steps back from the burden of ruling them (Nestor, Life of Theodosius, in Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948; and in Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989). Theodosius’s coming to Anthony, his tonsure, and his early years in the caves belong to the preceding part of the story (see Coming to Anthony); what concerns this file is how, out of that cave-community, a hegumen came to be set over the brethren.

The Threefold Succession

Both Nestor and the Chronicle agree that Theodosius was not the first to be charged with the governance of the community, and the sequence by which the office passed to him is one of the better-attested administrative details of early Russian monasticism.

When the brethren had multiplied and could no longer all be contained in the original cave, Anthony withdrew. The Primary Chronicle records that he appointed Varlaam as superior (hegumen) over the others and then, characteristically, retired into deeper solitude: he shut himself into a separate cell, and later moved to a neighboring hill where he dug a new cave for himself, so as to live apart from the community he had founded (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The pattern is the one the Life repeats throughout: Anthony founds and blesses, then steps aside into the eremitic life that was his true calling, leaving the cenobitic ordering of the house to others (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The double vocation embodied in the two founders — Anthony the hermit, Theodosius the cenobiarch — became the defining tension and the defining strength of the monastery, and it is examined in its own right under section 08 of this collection.

Varlaam, then, was the first appointed hegumen. He did not hold the office for long at the Caves. The Chronicle relates that Prince Izyaslav Yaroslavich, who had founded a new monastery in Kiev dedicated to St. Demetrius (his own baptismal patron), wished to honor it and to draw to it the prestige of the Caves community, and so took Varlaam from the Caves and installed him as hegumen of the monastery of St. Demetrius (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The episode is characteristic of the relation between the princes and the monasteries of eleventh-century Rus: a prince’s foundation gained legitimacy by being supplied with a superior of proven holiness, and the Caves, even this early, was the reservoir from which such men were drawn (on the broader pattern, see Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996). The transfer of Varlaam is thus not merely an internal monastic matter but an early instance of the Caves monastery’s role as a nursery of abbots and bishops for the whole land.

With Varlaam gone to St. Demetrius, the brethren of the Caves were left without a superior. They went, the Chronicle says, to Anthony in his solitude and asked him to give them a hegumen; and Anthony named Theodosius, “because he was obedient to all and adorned with every virtue” (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Nestor’s Life gives the same outcome with the same emphasis: Theodosius was chosen not by ambition or faction but on the testimony of his obedience and humility, the very qualities that the Life makes the keynote of his whole career (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell 1989).

The Date of the Election

The precise year in which Theodosius became hegumen is not given an unambiguous figure in the sources, which narrate the early history of the monastery in a single retrospective block rather than under successive annual entries. [Disputed: the *Primary Chronicle* gathers the foundation, the superiorship of Varlaam, and the choice of Theodosius into its retrospective notice under the year 1051 (Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953), which is the date of Anthony's settling rather than of the election; modern scholarship dates Theodosius's accession to the abbacy to c. 1062, the year usually associated with his becoming superior and with the community's move above ground, while some treatments give c. 1057–1062 as the range — see Fedotov, *The Russian Religious Mind* I (1946), and Franklin & Shepard, *The Emergence of Rus* (1996)]. What the sources establish securely is the order of events — Anthony, then Varlaam, then Theodosius — and the principle of the choice, not a dated charter. The conventional date of about 1062 is a scholarly inference from the chronology of the reign of Izyaslav and the building activity that followed, and it is given here as such.

Growth of the Community Under Theodosius

The most concrete measure of Theodosius’s abbacy in the sources is numerical. Where Anthony’s community had numbered around a dozen when it first outgrew its cave, Nestor reports that under Theodosius the brethren multiplied until the monastery counted about a hundred monks (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell 1989). The Primary Chronicle’s parallel notice agrees that the community grew greatly under his rule and attributes the growth directly to his example and to the order he imposed on the common life (The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1051; Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). This is a tenfold increase within a single generation, and it transformed the character of the place: a cave that had held a hermit and a handful of disciples became, under Theodosius, a populous cenobium that could no longer be housed underground at all.

That growth is inseparable from the change in the form of the life. It was Theodosius who sought out and introduced the cenobitic rule of the Studite monastery of Constantinople, replacing the loose, semi-eremitic arrangement of the cave years with a fully communal discipline — common refectory, common property, common liturgy, and a defined order of offices (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The introduction of the Studite typikon is the subject of its own section and is not rehearsed in detail here (see Introducing the Studite Typikon and The Shape of Cenobitic Life). For the present purpose the point is that the swelling of the numbers and the imposition of the rule were two aspects of a single achievement: Theodosius did not merely attract more monks, he gave them a structure within which a large community could live as one body. This is why the Russian tradition remembers him as the father of organized cenobitic monasticism in Rus rather than as one more holy hermit (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946; and see Russian Monasticism).

Leadership by Example: Labor, Humility, Manual Work

Nestor’s portrait of Theodosius as superior is built almost entirely out of scenes of self-abasement and physical work, and this is the heart of what the Life wants its readers to grasp about his governance. The hegumen, in Nestor’s telling, ruled not by command from above but by going lower than the lowest of the brethren.

The Life dwells on his manual labor. Theodosius is shown carrying water and chopping wood for the community, working in the bakery, drawing the loads that the younger and stronger monks might have been expected to bear (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell 1989). A recurring type of episode has him performing in secret, or by night, the menial service that no one else wished to do: he grinds the brethren’s portion of grain when others sleep, or carries firewood to a monk who had asked a servant to fetch it, so that the request is fulfilled by the abbot himself (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). Nestor frames such scenes as the deliberate pedagogy of a man who taught obedience by being the most obedient, and who could ask labor of the brethren only because he outworked them. The point is consistently moral rather than merely picturesque: the authority of the hegumen, in this account, is the moral authority of one who has made himself everyone’s servant.

His humility is shown in the same register. The Life describes his clothing as deliberately poor — a coarse hair garment worn under plain outer dress — so that visitors who did not know him took the abbot of the great monastery for one of its kitchen-hands or laborers (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell 1989). A celebrated episode, which became one of the best-loved scenes of Russian hagiography, has Theodosius returning from the prince’s palace by cart; the driver, not recognizing the shabby monk as the renowned abbot, orders him down to walk and takes the comfortable seat himself, and Theodosius obeys without a word, even tending the man and feeding him on arrival at the monastery (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell 1989). The story is told to display a humility that did not break under public slight, and Fedotov treats it as the very type of the Russian ideal of kenosis, the self-emptying that the Caves tradition made central to its spirituality (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946).

These episodes are hagiography, composed by Nestor to edify and to present Theodosius as a model, and they must be read as the Life‘s portrait rather than as a transcript of events (METHODOLOGY §3.5). But they are not therefore historically empty: the consistency of the portrait, its early date — Nestor wrote within roughly a generation of Theodosius’s death, drawing on the testimony of monks who had known him — and its convergence with the independent notice in the Primary Chronicle give us a reliable sense of the kind of superior Theodosius was remembered to have been, and of the ideal of leadership he stamped on Russian monasticism (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989).

Firmness Beneath the Gentleness

The same Life is careful not to reduce Theodosius’s humility to softness. Nestor shows him as a superior who could be exacting in matters of the rule: he is said to have made nightly rounds of the cells, listening at the doors, and to have rebuked monks whom he found in idle conversation after the night office or keeping private possessions contrary to the common life (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948; Heppell 1989). The Life presents the discovery of hoarded food or property in a cell as an occasion for the abbot to teach, sometimes by burning the forbidden item before the offender, the absolute renunciation of private ownership that the cenobitic rule required (Nestor, Life of Theodosius; Fedotov 1948). The portrait that emerges is integrated: the man who carried water for the brethren and yielded his seat to a careless driver was the same man who held the community to a strict common discipline, and Nestor sees no contradiction between the two. The humility was the ground of the authority; the discipline was its exercise.

It is this combination — a superior who governs by descending beneath those he governs, while holding them firmly to a common rule — that the Caves monastery handed on as the model of Russian abbacy, and that later founders, Sergius of Radonezh above all, would consciously revive (see St. Sergius of Radonezh; on the Studite background of the discipline itself, St. Theodore the Studite). Theodosius’s election as hegumen, in the sources’ own framing, was the moment at which the cave of a hermit became the school of a monastic nation.

References

Nestor. The Life of Our Holy Father Theodosius, Abbot of the Caves. Trans. in G. P. Fedotov, ed., A Treasury of Russian Spirituality. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1948. (The principal narrative source: Anthony’s withdrawal, the choice of Theodosius on his obedience and humility, the growth of the brethren to about one hundred, and the episodes of manual labor, poor clothing, the cart-driver, the night rounds, and the renunciation of private property.)
Nestor. The Life of Theodosius, in Muriel Heppell, trans., The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. (Translation and apparatus of the Caves Paterik, in which Nestor’s Life and the building-traditions of the monastery are transmitted.)
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 retrospective notice s.a. 1051: Hilarion’s cave, Anthony’s settling, the digging of the church and cells, Anthony’s appointment of Varlaam and withdrawal into solitude, Izyaslav’s transfer of Varlaam to the monastery of St. Demetrius, and the brethren’s request that yielded Theodosius as hegumen.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Theodosius as founder of organized cenobitic monasticism in Rus; the cart-driver episode and the kenotic reading of his humility; the chronology of his abbacy.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London and New York: Longman, 1996. (The princely patronage of monasteries, Izyaslav and the monastery of St. Demetrius, and the Caves monastery as a nursery of superiors and bishops.)