The Sermons and Instructions to the Brethren

A small corpus of short homilies and instructions (Slavonic poucheniya) addressed by St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves (c. 1029–1074) to the monks of his community — on obedience, humility, attendance at the services, fasting, patience, brotherly love, and the danger of leaving the monastery. Several of these instructions are generally accepted by scholars as genuinely his and stand among the earliest surviving works of original prose in Rus; one or two are doubtful. This file describes their content, tone, and value as the first native Russian spiritual writing, and pins the texts to the manuscript tradition in which they survive.

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

The Corpus and Its Setting

St. Theodosius is remembered first as an organizer of monastic life — the abbot who transplanted the Studite cenobitic rule to the Caves (see The Shape of Cenobitic Life) — but he is also, on the judgment of his editors, one of the first native authors of Kievan Rus to leave a body of original prose. Attributed to him under the heading poucheniya (“instructions,” “teachings”) is a small cluster of short addresses to the brethren of his monastery: catechetical exhortations a hegumen would deliver to his monks, most of them brief, occasional, and tied closely to the discipline of the common life he had instituted (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946). They are not treatises. They are the spoken word of an abbot to his community, preserved in writing — sermones in the strict sense, instruction given within the monastery walls.

The number of pieces and their precise boundaries vary in the manuscripts and in the modern editions, but the set conventionally credited to Theodosius runs to roughly half a dozen or so short instructions to the monks, together with the writings addressed to Prince Izyaslav, which are treated separately because their authenticity raises distinct problems (see The Letters to Izyaslav). The monastic instructions form a recognizable group of their own: addressed to “brethren,” concerned with the keeping of the rule, and uniform in tone and idiom. Among the subjects the instructions take up are obedience to the abbot and to one another; humility; the duty of attending the church services and standing through them attentively; fasting and bodily restraint; patience in adversity; love among the brethren; and — a recurring Theodosian anxiety — the spiritual danger of a monk’s leaving the monastery, whether for the world or merely for idle wandering (Fedotov, Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946).

Content and Themes

The instructions are governed throughout by the logic of the cenobium. Theodosius had built the Caves into a common-life house on the Constantinopolitan model, and the virtues he presses on the brethren are the virtues that hold such a house together. Obedience stands near the center: the monk has renounced his own will, and the instructions return to the surrender of self-will as the substance of the monastic vocation, echoing the Studite and earlier monastic insistence that obedience is the ground of all the other virtues. The Lord Himself, the homilies remind the brethren, “humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death” (cf. Philippians 2:8), so that the monk’s obedience is conformity to Christ and not mere submission to a superior.

Humility is the temper in which the whole corpus is pitched. The instructions warn against pride and self-display, against judging a brother, against the monk who reckons himself further along than his fellow; they commend the lowliness that Theodosius is everywhere said to have practiced himself, going about in coarse clothing and laboring with his hands. Closely bound to humility is patience — the bearing of insult, hardship, and the discipline of the rule without murmuring — and brotherly love, the mutual charity that the common table and common property of the Studite house were meant to embody. The instructions repeatedly set the keeping of the services and the keeping of the fast within this frame: standing in church, keeping vigil, and fasting are not athletic feats but acts of obedience and love, owed to God and to the community.

The warning against leaving the monastery recurs with particular force, and it reflects a real pastoral problem in a young monastic culture where the boundary between the monk and the world was still being drawn. To abandon the monastery, in the instructions’ view, is to abandon the place of one’s salvation and to expose oneself to the world’s snares; the stability of the monk in his house is treated as a spiritual good in itself. Scripture is woven through these exhortations rather than expounded systematically: the instructions quote and allude to the Gospels and the Psalter and to the Pauline counsels on humility and obedience (e.g., the call to bear one another’s burdens, Galatians 6:2; the exhortation to obey those set over the community, Hebrews 13:17), in the manner of a preacher whose mind is steeped in the liturgical text he and his hearers sing daily.

Tone and Style

What strikes every reader of the instructions is their simplicity. The Slavonic is plain, the constructions are short, and the rhetoric is the rhetoric of direct address — “brethren,” “my children” — rather than of literary display. There is little of the elaborate Byzantine homiletic ornament that the Kievan Church would later cultivate in writers such as Metropolitan Hilarion or Cyril of Turov; Theodosius’s instructions are closer to the speech of the desert fathers as the Slavs received them, aphoristic, scriptural, and intensely practical (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946). This plainness is part of why the corpus is valued: it preserves, with little mediation, the voice of a working abbot addressing his monks about the keeping of the rule he had given them.

G. P. Fedotov made these instructions a cornerstone of his portrait of Theodosius and, through him, of what Fedotov called the kenotic strain in Russian piety. For Fedotov, the dominant note of Theodosius’s spirituality — visible in the instructions and even more in Nestor’s Life — is self-emptying humility, an imitation of the kenosis of the incarnate Christ who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7). Theodosius’s voluntary poverty, his manual labor, his coarse dress, and his refusal of honor were, in Fedotov’s reading, the lived form of this kenotic humility, and the instructions are its verbal expression: a spirituality that descends rather than ascends, that finds God in lowliness and service rather than in visionary height (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946; Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948). Whether or not one accepts Fedotov’s larger thesis that kenoticism is the master key to Russian religion — a thesis later scholars have qualified — his framing has shaped the reading of the Theodosian instructions for generations.

Value as the Earliest Native Russian Spiritual Writing

The instructions matter out of proportion to their length because of when they were written. Rus had received Christianity only in 988 (see St. Vladimir of Kiev), and for the first generations the Church’s literary culture was overwhelmingly a culture of translation — Scripture, liturgical books, patristic texts, and lives of saints carried over from Greek into Slavonic. Original composition in Rus was just beginning in the eleventh century. Theodosius’s instructions belong to that first moment of native authorship: they are among the earliest surviving works of original (non-translated) prose written in Rus, the spiritual counterpart of the earliest Kievan historiography and oratory (Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, 2002; Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996). They show a native Christian voice already formed within a single lifetime of the conversion — proof that the new Church of Rus had begun not only to receive but to generate its own spiritual literature.

That literature is, characteristically, monastic and practical rather than speculative. Theodosius did not write theology in the Byzantine technical sense; he wrote rules for living, addressed to men trying to keep a difficult common life. This is itself revealing of the shape early Russian Christianity took — a Christianity whose first great native author was an abbot teaching obedience and humility, not a controversialist or a systematician. The instructions thus stand at the head of a long tradition of Russian monastic and ascetic writing that runs through the Caves Paterik to the elders of much later centuries, and they are routinely cited as its fountainhead (see Russian Monasticism).

Securely His and Doubtful: The Scholarly Assessment

Not everything transmitted under Theodosius’s name in the manuscripts is held to be his with equal confidence. Scholarship distinguishes a core of instructions generally accepted as authentically Theodosian from a smaller number of pieces regarded as doubtful or wrongly ascribed — the ordinary situation of a medieval corpus that accumulated material under a famous name over centuries of copying.

[Disputed: the boundaries of the genuine corpus — several of the monastic instructions (*poucheniya*) addressed to the brethren are generally accepted as authentically by St. Theodosius of the Caves and are treated as such by Fedotov, *The Russian Religious Mind* I (1946) and *A Treasury of Russian Spirituality* (1948); but a minority of the pieces transmitted under his name are judged doubtful or later attributions, and the question of which writings are securely his is reviewed in the standard handbook, Podskalsky, *Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus'* (1982/2000), where the authentic instructions are separated from the contested writings — chief among the contested being the anti-Latin epistle treated in the companion file]

The grounds for distinguishing the authentic instructions are partly internal and partly text-historical: the genuinely Theodosian pieces share the plain idiom, the monastic subject matter, and the address to the brethren described above, and they fit the setting of an eleventh-century abbot in the Caves; pieces that depart from this profile in style, content, or manuscript context are treated with caution (Podskalsky, Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus’, 1982/2000; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind I, 1946). The most serious of the contested attributions — the anti-Latin Slovo addressed to Prince Izyaslav — is a genuine scholarly dispute in its own right and is examined separately (see The Letters to Izyaslav). For the monastic instructions specifically, the prevailing view is that a real Theodosian core survives, even where the exact list of pieces is debated at the margins.

The Manuscript Tradition

The instructions do not survive in Theodosius’s own hand or in eleventh-century copies; like nearly all early Rus literature, they reach us through later medieval Slavonic manuscripts. The most important channel is the Kiev Caves Paterik (Russian Pateryk), the collected lore of the monastery, whose manuscript redactions transmit Theodosian material alongside Nestor’s Life and the tales of the early Caves monks (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989; and see The Paterik Portrait). The instructions and the writings to Izyaslav are also preserved in other Old Russian collections and sborniki (miscellanies), and it is from these — chiefly late-medieval copies, with the earliest witnesses considerably postdating Theodosius — that the modern editions are reconstructed (Podskalsky, Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus’, 1982/2000; Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, 2002).

This transmission history is exactly why provenance is a topic and not an embarrassment (METHODOLOGY §2.4): a text first attested in copies several generations younger than its supposed author requires that authenticity be argued rather than assumed, on grounds of style, content, and manuscript context. For the core monastic instructions the argument is generally judged to succeed; for the anti-Latin epistle it does not, and the dispute is left open. The reader who wishes to read the instructions in English will find a representative selection of Theodosius’s material, with the Life, in Fedotov’s A Treasury of Russian Spirituality (1948), the standard English gateway to the corpus, supplemented by Heppell’s translation of the Paterik (1989).

References

Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Discusses Theodosius’s instructions, their kenotic humility, and the question of the authentic corpus.)
Fedotov, G. P., ed. A Treasury of Russian Spirituality. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1948. (Includes Theodosius material — the Life and instruction — in English; the standard English gateway to the corpus.)
Heppell, Muriel, trans. The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (English translation of the Paterik, the principal manuscript channel for Theodosian material.)
Franklin, Simon. Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. (Early Rus literacy and original composition; the place of the earliest native prose.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The literary culture of early Rus and the beginnings of native authorship.)
Podskalsky, Gerhard. Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus’ (988–1237). Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982; 2nd ed. 2000. (The standard handbook on Kievan theological literature; treats the authenticity and transmission of the writings attributed to Theodosius.)