Abramius of Smolensk

Birth and youth

He was born at Smolensk about the middle of the twelfth century, the son of rich and devout parents who had been given twelve daughters and no son, and who had begged God for one; the Life is careful to say that they were charitable people who kept an open house for the poor before ever their prayer was answered. The boy was raised in that house, taken to church, and — the significant thing in a principality that had had letters for less than two centuries — given books.

When he came of age his parents pressed marriage on him and he refused it. At their death he came into a considerable inheritance, and disposed of it in the classical manner: he distributed it to monasteries, churches and the poor, and went about the city in poor clothing, "as one of the beggars," praying that God would show him the way of salvation.

Selishche: thirty years among books

He received the monastic tonsure at the monastery of the Most Holy Theotokos at Selishche, some five versts from Smolensk, under the abbot who then governed it, and there he remained for more than thirty years. What he did in them is stated exactly and is the reason his memory matters: he copied books, and he read them.

The library he assembled in his own head is visible in the Life and in the two things we are told he taught from. He knew the Greek fathers in Slavonic — John Chrysostom, the Paterica, Ephrem the Syrian, the Ladder — and he knew the Kievan writers; and the learning was not decorative. Ephraim's account of Abramius's reading is, incidentally, the best single source we possess for what education actually consisted of in the remote north-west of Rus' in the generation before the Mongol invasion, and it is on that ground, quite apart from the sanctity of its subject, that the Life is a document of the first rank.

He was ordained presbyter in 1198, and thereafter served the Liturgy daily. He would not eat before serving, and he served with tears.

The preacher of the Dread Judgement

Abramius did what few Russian monks of his century did: he preached, and he preached to laypeople, in numbers, continually. His subject was repentance and the Last Judgement. To make it visible he had two icons painted and set up where they would be seen — one of the Dread Judgement at the Second Coming, and one of the trial of souls at the aerial toll-houses — and he expounded them. The townspeople of Smolensk, of every condition, came out to Selishche to hear him; some abandoned their own parishes to do it; penitents besieged his cell.

This is exactly the kind of success that in a small ecclesiastical city produces enemies, and it did. The clergy and the monks of the town accused him of taking their people, of heresy, of reading forbidden and apocryphal books, and — the standard charge against a confessor whom women came to in numbers — of seducing women. The abbot of Selishche, worn down, drove him out; he went into the city, to the monastery of the Holy Cross, where he was received, and continued exactly as before.

The trial, the interdict, and the drought

The accusations were carried to the bishop, Ignatius of Smolensk, and to the prince, and a formal hearing was held. The Life describes a mob scene: clergy shouting that he should be exiled, or drowned, or burnt. At the trial itself nothing was proved, and the princely and boyar judges who heard the evidence acquitted him. But the ecclesiastical authorities, to quiet the city, forbade him to serve as a priest and sent him back to Selishche under an interdict. Two men are named as having defended him and refused to join the outcry: the priest Luke and the monk Lazarus, afterwards himself bishop of Smolensk.

Then the rain stopped. A drought settled on Smolensk and its fields and did not break; processions and prayers were made and nothing came of them. It was said to the bishop that the land was suffering for the wrong done to Abramius. Ignatius — whom the Life treats with real sympathy, as a man who had acted under pressure and knew it — sent for him, asked his forgiveness, lifted the ban and restored him to the priesthood and to his preaching. Abramius prayed, and before the people had reached their homes the rain fell on Smolensk. The city thereafter held him in a reverence it never withdrew.

Archimandrite of the Placing of the Robe

Bishop Ignatius, to give him a house of his own and to put him beyond the reach of the old quarrel, built and endowed a monastery of the Placing of the Robe of the Most Holy Theotokos (the Rizopolozhensky monastery) outside the city, and set Abramius over it as its archimandrite. He governed it for the rest of his life.

The house never grew. The Life records without embarrassment that the brotherhood numbered seventeen, and says why: he received novices with extreme strictness, tested them long, and tonsured few — the discipline of a man who had watched what happened when zeal outran formation. He continued to preach and to hear confessions, and the city continued to come out to him.

He died after 1224, having spent about fifty years in the monastic habit. The exact year is not transmitted; the Life was written when those who had known him were still alive, and does not give one.

Veneration

The cultus began at once and locally, in the Smolensk land, where he is joined with Mercurius — the soldier-martyr of the Tatar invasion — as one of the two patrons of the city; the two are shown together on the classic Smolensk icons, with the wonderworking Smolensk icon of the Mother of God above them. A proper liturgical service for him, in which his disciple Ephraim is commemorated with him, was in use by the later thirteenth century, which is very early indeed for a Russian saint and is itself the strongest evidence of how he was regarded. The veneration was confirmed for the whole Russian Church in the sixteenth century among the saints reviewed under Metropolitan Macarius, and he is named in the synaxis of the Saints of Smolensk.