The Cave-Dweller of Mgvime

St. Shio of Mgvime, the Antiochene disciple of St. John of Zedazeni who withdrew to the caves of Sarkineti in the Mgvime gorge near Mtskheta and became one of the great hermit-founders of Georgian monasticism. This file follows the tradition’s account of his ascetic life — the twenty years under St. John, the barren caves, the dove that fed him and the wolf that guarded the donkeys, the visit of King Parsman, and his final reclusion in a pit — pinning the sixth-century particulars to the later Life.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Disciple of St. John

St. Shio is remembered as an Antiochian by birth and among the closest of St. John’s disciples. The Life relates that his devout parents entered monastic life, and that Shio became a disciple of St. John of Zedazeni, laboring under him — in the tradition’s reckoning, for some twenty years — before the mission to Georgia and after it (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Repose of Venerable Shio of Mgvime”; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, London: Allen & Unwin, 1956, which translates the Life of St. Shio). His Life is one of the fuller of the individual Lives in the cycle, and it was among those David Marshall Lang selected for translation, so that Shio is one of the Fathers most accessible in English (Lang, Lives and Legends, 1956, introduction and the Life of Shio).

As with the whole cycle, the details are those of a Life written centuries after the sixth century and are reported here as the tradition’s (see The Lives and Their Dating). What the Life fixes is Shio’s identity as the type of the hermit-founder: the disciple who, sent out in the dispersal, chooses the most extreme solitude and yet becomes, against his own intention, the father of a great community.

The Caves of Sarkineti

When St. John dispersed the disciples (see The Dispersal of the Disciples), Shio was directed — at his spiritual father’s command — to the region of Sarkineti, in the Mgvime (“cave”) gorge northwest of Mtskheta, and there “settled in the Sarkineti caves near Mtskheta and began to lead a strict ascetic life” (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Shio of Mgvime”). The place was severe: “There was no water there and many wild animals made their home in the caves” (ibid.). The choice of so harsh a site is characteristic of the Syrian eremitic ideal the Fathers carried — the deliberate embrace of the desert place, the eremos, as the arena of ascetic struggle (Loosley Leeming, Architecture and Asceticism, Brill, 2018, on the Syrian eremitic forms).

The Life surrounds Shio’s solitude with the miracles proper to the hermit-saint, and reports them as such. Like the Prophet Elijah at the brook Cherith (1 Kings 17:6), Shio is said to have received his food from the mouths of birds — a dove bringing him sustenance in the waterless caves (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Shio of Mgvime”). And in the best-known of his stories, a wolf that had been ravaging the donkeys which carried supplies to his grotto is tamed at the saint’s word and set to guard the herd it had preyed upon — the predator transformed into the protector, a miniature of the peace of paradise restored around the holy man (ibid.; the wolf-and-donkeys story is among the vivid details Lang highlights from the Georgian Lives, Lives and Legends, 1956). These are hagiographic topoi — the raven-fed hermit, the tamed beast — and are received as the tradition’s witness to Shio’s holiness, in accordance with METHODOLOGY §3.5, not as documented natural history.

King Parsman and the Growth of the Community

The Life relates that Shio’s holiness could not stay hidden. Disciples gathered to the caves, and the reigning king — named in the tradition as Parsman — came to see the hermit, witnessed the manner of his life and the signs around it, and became the monastery’s benefactor, granting land and resources for the building of a proper community (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Shio of Mgvime”; on King Parsman and the dating, Matitashvili, “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia,” Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]: 4–39). The tradition remembers the community swelling to a great number of monks under royal patronage — the devotional Lives give a figure of nearly two thousand — so that the hermit’s cave became the nucleus of one of the largest monastic centers of central Georgia (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Shio of Mgvime”). [Disputed: the figure of "nearly two thousand" monks at Shiomgvime is given by the devotional Life and is best read as a traditional expression of the community's greatness rather than a census; the number, like the reign of Parsman, reaches us through the later hagiography (Machitadze, *Lives of the Georgian Saints*; on the source-critical status of such figures, see [The Lives and Their Dating](../02-sources-and-attestation/the-lives-and-their-dating.md)).] The growth of the lavra itself is treated in The Lavra and the Rule.

The Reclusion in the Pit

The final movement of Shio’s Life reverses the growth of the community: having founded and led the lavra, the saint withdrew from its governance into a still deeper solitude. The Life relates that he entered reclusion in a pit or well that he had dug for himself, and there spent his last years — the tradition gives fifteen — in prayer and fasting until his death (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Shio of Mgvime”). This return from abbacy to the pit is the Life’s culminating image and its theological point: the community was never the goal, only the fruit; the hermit’s heart remained set on the hidden struggle, and Shio ended as he had begun, alone with God in a hole in the ground. He appointed a successor to govern the brotherhood and gave himself wholly to the reclusion in which he reposed, his relics remaining at the lavra as its treasure (ibid.; on the monasteries as reliquaries, see The Feast and the Cult).

Held to its sources, the Life of St. Shio is the fullest single portrait the cycle offers of the hermit-founder — the disciple who sought the desert and found himself the father of a lavra, and who left the lavra to find the desert again. Its miracles are hagiography; its shape is the enduring monastic paradigm of solitude bearing fruit in community and community surrendered again for solitude. That the Shiomgvime lavra still stands and prays in the Mgvime gorge is the tradition’s own answer to the question of what, behind the topoi, was real.

See Also

References

  • Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria. Lives of the Georgian Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006 (also at OrthoChristian.com / Pravoslavie.ru). (“Repose of Venerable Shio of Mgvime”: the Antiochene birth and discipleship under John; the caves of Sarkineti and their harshness; the dove and the wolf; King Parsman and the community’s growth; the reclusion in the pit.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956; 2nd ed. SVS Press, 1976. (The translated Life of St. Shio; the wolf-and-donkeys episode; the character of the Georgian Lives.)
  • Matitashvili, Shota. “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia: The Rise of Monasticism in Sixth-Century Georgia.” Studies in Late Antiquity 2, no. 1 (2018): 4–39. (King Parsman; the dating; Shiomgvime as a religious center.)
  • Loosley Leeming, Emma. Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural Interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity. Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 13. Leiden: Brill, 2018. (The Syrian eremitic forms.)
  • Scripture: 1 Kings 17:6 (Elijah fed by ravens at the brook), the type behind the dove-feeding.