Canonization and Relics

The path by which St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves (c. 1029–1074) passed from a foretold death in his cave monastery to a place among the first formally venerated saints of Rus: his repose on 3 May 1074, the uncovering of his relics on 14 August 1091 — described by Nestor, who took part — and the entry of his name for general commemoration in the early twelfth century, conventionally dated to 1108. The relic-translation and incorruption claims are reported here as the testimony of Nestor and the Paterik, the documents that preserve them, not as certified historical fact.

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

The veneration of Theodosius rests on three datable moments and a single body of testimony. The moments are his death in 1074, the uncovering and translation of his relics in 1091, and the formal entry of his name into the general commemoration of the Rus Church in the early twelfth century. The testimony is overwhelmingly that of one man — the monk Nestor, author of the Life of Theodosius and a participant in the events of 1091, whose account stands behind the Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery and, for the bare chronology, behind the Russian Primary Chronicle. Because so much depends on a single early witness who was also a partisan of the saint’s cult, the historian’s task and the chronicler’s part company here, and this file keeps them apart: the dates can be argued from the sources; the wonders attached to the relics are recorded as what those sources attest (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Repose: 3 May 1074

Theodosius died on 3 May 1074, in the monastery he had built outside Kiev on the heights above the Dnieper. Both the Russian Primary Chronicle (s.a. 6582 = 1074) and Nestor’s Life place his death in that year, and the liturgical tradition has fixed the day as 3 May, which remains his principal feast (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle, 1953, s.a. 1074; Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948, the Nestorian Life). The Chronicle’s notice for that year is itself one of the longer hagiographical insertions in the annals, drawing on the same material Nestor worked into the Vita, so that the “two” sources are at root one tradition.

Nestor’s narrative of the death is built around a set of motifs the reader of saints’ lives will recognize, and which the Life presents as marks of holiness rather than as bare reportage. Theodosius foretold his own death. Falling ill, he is said to have known the day he would depart and to have announced it to the brethren, so that the community could gather. He gave a farewell instruction — a final exhortation to the monks to keep the rule, to hold to obedience and to common life, and to preserve the discipline he had planted — the testamentary discourse that is a standard and theologically weighty feature of the abbatial vita, the dying father committing the community to the way of life he had given it (Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948, Life of Theodosius). And he named his successor: before his death he designated Stephen (Stefan), the choirmaster of the monastery, to be hegumen after him, and the brethren are said to have received him at Theodosius’s word — an orderly succession that the Life presents as the founder’s last act of governance over the house he had shaped (Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948; on the cenobitic order Theodosius established see The Shape of Cenobitic Life and Building the Monastery).

These are hagiographical commonplaces, and the Life deploys them as such; that they are conventional does not make them false, but it does mean they are reported here as the shape Nestor gave the death, not as independently verifiable detail. What is securely datable is the year and the kept day: 3 May 1074.

The Burial in the Cave

According to Nestor, Theodosius had himself chosen the place of his burial — a cave he had selected, where he was accustomed to withdraw and where he wished his body to be laid. The Life presents this as the saint’s own provision, of a piece with the cave-dwelling origins of the monastery itself, which had begun as the eremitical settlement of Anthony in the hillside above the Dnieper before Theodosius drew the community up onto the surface and gave it a cenobitic rule (on the two founders and the move from cave to coenobium see The Cenobitic Legacy and The Complementary Founders). He was buried there at his death in 1074, and for the next seventeen years his body lay in the cave — the period that frames the second moment, the uncovering of the relics.

The Translation (Uncovering) of the Relics: 14 August 1091

On 14 August 1091 — the eve of the feast of the Dormition — the relics of Theodosius were uncovered from the cave and translated into the great Dormition (Uspensky) cathedral of the monastery, the stone church begun in his own lifetime and completed after his death. The Russian Primary Chronicle records the translation under that year (s.a. 6599 = 1091), and Nestor wrote a separate account of the uncovering, preserved in the Paterik, in which he writes as a participant — one of those who took part in the digging-out and removal of the body (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle, 1953, s.a. 1091; Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, Harvard, 1989). This is unusually direct testimony for an eleventh-century relic-translation: the hagiographer is not reporting a tradition received at second hand but describing an event he says he attended.

Nestor’s account, as the Paterik preserves it, narrates the practical and the wondrous together. Hegumen John (Ioann) and the brethren resolved to move the founder’s body into the cathedral church so that it might rest among the community at worship. Nestor describes the brethren coming with mattocks to the cave by night, the labor of opening the place where Theodosius lay, the sweet fragrance reported at the uncovering, and the finding of the body whole — the relics described as incorrupt, the joints unbroken, the hair still upon the head. The body was carried up and laid in the western part of the Dormition cathedral, near the doors, on 14 August, the day before the great feast (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989; Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, 1948).

On the status of these claims. The fragrance, the incorruption, and the wonders surrounding the uncovering are reported in this file exactly as the Paterik and Nestor’s account report them: as the testimony of the monastic community and its hagiographer, written down within living memory of the event by a man who says he was present, and transmitted as part of the cult. They are not asserted here as certified historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5, on hagiographical and miracle claims pinned to their attestation). What the sources establish at the documentary level is that a translation of Theodosius’s relics into the Dormition cathedral took place and was dated to 14 August 1091, and that from that translation the cult acquired a fixed shrine and a second annual day. The wonders are the form the monastery gave its memory of the uncovering; the chronicle entry and the dedicated Paterik narrative are their earliest written attestation. For the place of the Paterik and the Life among the sources for Theodosius, and the critical problems they raise, see Nestor the Chronicler and the Vita.

The Canonization, c. 1108

The third moment is the formal canonization — the entry of Theodosius’s name into the general commemoration of the Church of Rus, conventionally dated to 1108. The initiative is attributed to the joint action of prince and metropolitan: Prince Svyatopolk (Svyatopolk II Izyaslavich) of Kiev and the metropolitan of Kiev are said to have ordered that Theodosius’s name be entered in the synodikon and commemorated throughout the Rus Church, so that the local cult of the Caves monastery became a general veneration prescribed for all the dioceses (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, Harvard, 1946; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, Longman, 1996). This act is what historians mean by the “canonization” of Theodosius in the strict sense: not the beginning of his veneration — which had been continuous in the monastery since his death — but its formal generalization by the highest ecclesiastical and princely authority.

That generalization placed Theodosius among the earliest formally canonized saints of Rus. The young Church, baptized under Vladimir little more than a century before (see The Baptism of Rus), had until this period venerated almost no native saints; the first to be raised to general commemoration were the murdered princes Boris and Gleb, the passion-bearers, whose cult had been promoted across the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Theodosius joined them as the first monastic saint of Rus to receive general canonization — so that the earliest native sanctity recognized by the whole Church of Rus is represented by two complementary types: the innocent suffering of the princely passion-bearers, and the ascetic, cenobitic holiness of the abbot of the Caves (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, 1946; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 1996). Theodosius is thus, with Boris and Gleb, among the very first saints the Rus Church canonized for general veneration — a foundational fact for the whole later history of Russian sanctity.

On the date. The 1108 date is the one most commonly given for the formal, general canonization, and it is the date this file uses; it should be understood as the date of the prescribed general commemoration, not of the cult’s origin. [Disputed: the formal entry of Theodosius’s name for general commemoration is conventionally dated to 1108 under Prince Svyatopolk and the metropolitan of Kiev (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, 1946; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 1996); but his local veneration at the Caves monastery is continuous from the translation of his relics in 1091, and some accounts treat the cult as effectively established from 1091, so that “the date of his canonization” depends on whether one means the local cult (from 1091) or the prescribed general commemoration (c. 1108).] The substance, on which the sources agree, is that within a generation of the translation Theodosius had passed from the founder venerated by his own community to a saint commemorated throughout Rus.

The Relics in the Near Caves

After the Mongol devastation of Kiev (1240) and the long disruptions of the monastery’s history, the relics of Theodosius are venerated in the Near Caves of the Lavra — the Blizhnie peshchery, also called the Antoniev (Antonian) caves, the older of the two cave-systems of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, traditionally associated with Anthony and the first generation of the community. The Near Caves hold the relics of a large number of the monastery’s saints, the “venerable fathers of the Near Caves,” among whom Theodosius is reckoned; the cave complex remains a pilgrimage destination where the relics are kept and shown (Heppell, The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, 1989, on the caves and the fathers buried in them). The later movements of the relics over the centuries of war, fire, and political upheaval are not all securely documented, and this file does not attempt to certify the continuous physical identity of the remains across nine centuries; what the tradition maintains, and what the pilgrim venerates today, is the cult that the translation of 1091 established and the canonization of c. 1108 generalized.

For Theodosius’s enduring status, his feast days, and the present situation of the Lavra that holds his relics, see Model of Russian Monasticism.

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. (Death of Theodosius, s.a. 6582 = 1074; translation of the relics, s.a. 6599 = 1091.)
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 and Ward, 1948. (The foretold death, farewell instruction, designation of Stephen, and burial.)
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. (Nestor’s account of the 1091 uncovering and translation, as a participant; the relics and the caves.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Theodosius’s canonization and its meaning; the first Rus saints.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The early canonizations of Rus: Boris and Gleb, and Theodosius.)