Antony of the Kiev Caves

Origins and early life

Antony was born in 983 at Liubech, a town on the Dnieper in the principality of Chernigov, and received in baptism the name Antipas. The sources say almost nothing of his family or his childhood beyond the note that the fear of God was in him from his youth and that he desired the monastic habit while still young. He belonged to the second generation after the baptism of Rus' under Vladimir in 988: a Church existed, with bishops, clergy and princely foundations, but there was as yet no native monasticism worth the name — the few communities attached to city churches were, in the judgement of the chronicler, houses set up by princes rather than by tears and labour.

Mount Athos

Antipas left Rus' and travelled south to Mount Athos. There he was received, tonsured with the name Antony, and formed in the Athonite discipline. The Kievan Caves Paterikon names the monastery only vaguely; the later tradition — accepted at Esphigmenou, where a cave on the shore is shown as his — identifies it with that house, and the Paterikon has him tonsured by an abbot commonly given as Theoktistos. Whatever the house, the decisive fact is the one on which all the sources agree: Antony learned to be a monk on the Holy Mountain, and what he brought back to the Dnieper was Athonite, not improvised.

When he was formed, his abbot sent him home. The words are given in the Paterikon in substance thus: go back to Rus', and let the blessing of the Holy Mountain be upon you, for from you many shall become monks. It is the hinge of the whole story. Russian monasticism does not begin with an institution founded by a prince, but with one man carrying a tradition across two thousand miles and putting it into a hole in the ground.

The cave above the Dnieper

Antony came to Kiev, looked over the monasteries then existing, and was not satisfied by any of them. He went out to the wooded hills above the river near the princely village of Berestovo, and found there a small cave that had been dug by the priest Hilarion, who used to withdraw to it for prayer — the same Hilarion whom Yaroslav the Wise raised to the metropolitan throne of Kiev in 1051, the first native-born metropolitan and the author of the Sermon on Law and Grace. The cave being empty, Antony took it, and there began the life that the Paterikon describes with a kind of awe: dry bread and water, and that not daily but every other day, and sometimes a whole week without food; digging; psalmody; and no rest by day or night.

He was found out, as such men are. Word of him spread through Kiev; people came for his blessing and his prayers; the prince Izyaslav Yaroslavich himself came with his retinue. And men came to stay. The first of note was Nikon, already a priest, who became Antony's right hand and, being in orders, could tonsure those whom Antony received. Through Nikon's hand Antony clothed Theodosius, a young man of Kursk, in about 1032 — the disciple who would give the community its rule and its shape — and Barlaam, son of the boyar Ioann, and Ephraim, a eunuch of the prince's household, whose tonsures brought the anger of Izyaslav down on the brotherhood for a time.

The founding of the monastery

When the brethren numbered twelve, they dug out a larger cave, with a church and cells within the earth. Antony then did the thing that most defines him: he handed the community over. He set Barlaam at their head as abbot and withdrew to dig himself a fresh cave in a neighbouring hill — the origin of the distinction, still kept at the Lavra, between the Near (Antoniev) Caves and the Far (Feodosiev) Caves. When Barlaam was taken away by the prince to head the new monastery of St Demetrius in the city, the brethren came again to Antony, and with his blessing chose Theodosius, meek and unsparing of himself, who governed the house until his death in 1074 and under whom the brotherhood grew to something near a hundred and received the cenobitic rule of the Studion.

The community had outgrown the earth. Antony sent to Izyaslav to ask for the hill above the caves; the prince gave it, and a wooden church and cells were raised on the surface, and the place was walled. From the caves the monastery took, and keeps, its name.

The building of the Great Church

The most celebrated tradition of Antony's later years concerns the Great Church of the Dormition, the stone cathedral of the monastery. The Paterikon relates that four Greek master-builders of Constantinople were summoned to the Blachernae church by two elders who gave them gold for three years' work and sent them to Kiev to build a church to the Mother of God; that the Queen of Heaven herself appeared and promised to come and dwell in it; and that when the masters reached Kiev and were brought to Antony and Theodosius they recognised them at once as the two elders who had hired them — though neither had left the monastery. The tradition is joined to a second: that the Varangian Shimon (Simon), delivered from death in battle by the prayers of Antony, gave to the monastery the golden belt and crown from a crucifix of his father's house, and that the belt served as the measure by which the church was laid out. The foundation was laid in 1073, in Antony's last year; the church was finished under his successors and consecrated in 1089, and the relics of Theodosius were translated into it in 1091.

Prophecy, exile and return

Antony was held to have the gift of foresight, and it cost him. In 1068, before the battle on the river Alta against the Polovtsy, he foretold to the princes of Yaroslav's house that they would be defeated — as they were. When Izyaslav returned to Kiev in 1069 after the brief usurpation of Vseslav of Polotsk, the elder fell under the prince's suspicion of having favoured Vseslav. Svyatoslav Yaroslavich, prince of Chernigov, had Antony brought away by night to his own city for safety. There Antony did what he always did: he found a hill — the Boldin Hills above the Desna — and dug a cave, and out of that cave grew the Yeletsky Dormition monastery of Chernigov. Reconciled with Izyaslav, he returned to Kiev and to his own cave.

Repose and the hidden relics

Antony reposed in 1073, at the age of about ninety, and was buried in the cave in which he had lived, in the Near Caves that bear his name. What follows is peculiar to him among the fathers of the Caves. The relics of nearly all his disciples lie open and venerated in the two cave systems; Antony's have never been uncovered. The tradition of the Lavra holds that this was his own asking and God's granting of it, and that the attempts made to dig for them were stopped — by fire bursting out upon the diggers in one telling, by water rising in another. The monastery has been content to leave him where he put himself. It is a fitting end for a man who twice gave away a community he had founded in order to get back underground.

Veneration

The Church of Rus' called him from early on the first founder (nachal'nik) of monastic life in the Russian land, and the Caves monastery — the Kiev Caves Lavra — became the model and the seed-bed of Russian monasticism: the Paterikon counts the bishops it gave to the sees of Rus' by the dozen. His name stands with that of Theodosius in nearly every Russian and Ukrainian office where the fathers of the Caves are invoked, and the pair are commemorated jointly on September 2 as well as on their own days.