Agapitus of the Kiev Caves

A disciple of Anthony

Agapitus was born at Kiev and entered the caves above the Dnieper in the lifetime of St Anthony, the founder of Russian monasticism, whose novice and disciple he became. The Paterikon — the collection of Caves lives assembled in the first third of the thirteenth century, largely from the letters of Bishop Simon of Vladimir and the writings of the monk Polycarp — sets him among the earliest Pechersk fathers, in the generation of Anthony and Theodosius.

St Anthony himself had the gift of healing, and the tradition is that Agapitus learned it of him: not the art of medicine as a science, but the practice of praying over the sick and giving them, with the prayer, the herbs of his own monastic food, boiled in his cell. He accepted no fee whatever, and the Paterikon insists on the point with care, because the taking of fees was precisely what distinguished the physicians of the city. Whence his title in Slavonic, врач безмездный — the physician without reward — and the Greek books' ὁ Ἀνάργυρος καὶ Ἰαματικός, the unmercenary and the healer.

The Armenian physician

The centre of his Life is the long contest with an unnamed Armenian who practised medicine at Kiev with great reputation, and who could tell by looking at a man whether he would live or die, even naming the day. The Paterikon is careful not to deny his skill; what it denies is that skill is the whole of healing.

A man of standing in the city, given up by the Armenian, was carried to the monastery, where Agapitus prayed over him and gave him to eat of the herbs from the monastic table; and he recovered. The Armenian, hearing of it, was seized with envy, and reproached the monks that an unlettered monk should presume upon his art. He then contrived to test — and, the account says, to destroy — Agapitus: he sent a man under sentence of death by poison to the saint, or (in the fuller telling) mixed a deadly draught and had it given to him; and Agapitus, taking it in the name of Christ, was unharmed. Neither the poison nor the mockery had any effect, and the Armenian was left to reckon with a power he could not measure.

Vladimir Monomakh

The prince Vladimir Vsevolodovich Monomakh, then ruling at Chernigov and afterwards Great Prince of Kiev (1113–1125), fell dangerously ill, and the Armenian's treatment failed. He sent to the Caves monastery to beg that Agapitus come to him. The saint refused to leave his cell — he had never in his life gone out of the monastery for such a purpose — but sent the prince some of his boiled herbs, with a word of prayer; and the prince recovered.

Restored, Vladimir came himself to the Lavra laden with gifts, to see and thank his healer. Agapitus hid himself, and would neither be seen nor take anything; the gold was left with the abbot, and the saint, when the prince's servants finally found and pressed him, told them to give it to the poor, since he had not healed by his own power and had nothing to sell. The refusal is the hinge of his veneration: in the Russian tradition Agapitus is remembered less for the cures than for the fact that he took nothing for them.

Repose

At last Agapitus himself fell ill. The Armenian came to visit him — whether in charity or in curiosity the account does not say — examined him, and pronounced that he would die on the third day, swearing that if it fell out otherwise he would himself become a monk. Agapitus answered that the Lord had made known to him that he would be taken after three months; and so it was. He reposed on 1 June, no later than 1095, exactly at the term he had foretold.

The Armenian, confronted with a foreknowledge that no inspection of the body could give, kept his oath: he came to the Caves, was received, confessed the Orthodox faith, and was tonsured a monk, ending his days in the monastery where he had once come to mock. The Paterikon gives this conversion as the seal of Agapitus's sanctity — the physician of bodies who could not read a soul, healed at last by the monk who took no fee.

Relics and veneration

Agapitus was buried in the Near or Antoniev Caves of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, where his relics rest incorrupt among the fathers of the Near Caves and where the faithful — and, by long custom, physicians and the sick — come to venerate them. His cult was at first local to the Lavra, carried by the Paterikon; in the later eighteenth century the Holy Synod approved the insertion of his name, with those of the other Caves fathers, in the general church calendars, and his veneration became general in the Russian Church. He is honoured as the protopatron of Russian medicine, and Ukrainian and Russian piety invokes him for the sick and for those who care for them; he is commemorated on June 1 and again with all the fathers of the Near Caves on September 28.