Cornelius of Pereyaslavl

Konon of Ryazan

He was born in the middle of the seventeenth century in Pereyaslavl-Ryazan (the modern city of Ryazan) to pious parents named Gordius and Theodora, merchants of the town, and was baptised Konon. The household was devout, and the boy took its piety further than his father intended: at about fifteen he left home secretly for the monastic life.

His first refuge was the Lukianov Hermitage, where he lived five years under the elder Paul, learning obedience. When his elder moved, Konon went with him and then settled in the Monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb on the Sands at Pereyaslavl-Zalessky. There he served five further years in obedience before the abbot judged him ready, and he was tonsured with the name Cornelius.

The thirty years' silence

What followed is the substance of his sanctity, and it is almost entirely a matter of what he refused to do. Cornelius took upon himself complete silence, and kept it for about thirty years. He answered no one; he made no explanation; the brethren concluded that he was deaf and dumb, and treated him accordingly, which is to say that he received the contempt and the heavy work that fall to such a man in a working monastery. This is the ascetic feat the Russian tradition calls molchalnichestvo — the silence of the tongue undertaken as a discipline of the heart — and it borders in his case on the foolishness for Christ, since he allowed a false report of himself to stand unchallenged for three decades.

Meanwhile he laboured. The accounts list the work with the particularity of monastic memory: he dug wells, he planted and tended the monastery's orchard, he carried water, he worked in the bakehouse. To this he joined a fast so extreme that, in the phrase of the Life, his body was entirely emaciated, and long standing at prayer through the night. He wore what he was given and asked for nothing.

Discernment and healings

God, the tradition says, repaid the hiddenness with gifts that could not be hidden. Cornelius received clairvoyance — knowledge of what was in the minds of those who came to him and of what was to come — and the grace of healing, exercised especially over sick infants brought to the monastery by their mothers. That a man reputed deaf and mute should be sought out for such things is the paradox on which his cultus rests, and it seems to have been through these gifts that the truth about him became known in the monastery and the town.

Repose

He fell into his last illness in the summer of 1693. At the end his silence was broken: he made his confession, received the Holy Mysteries, and was clothed in the great schema, and so reposed on 22 July 1693. He was buried at the monastery.

Relics

In 1701, when the brotherhood were digging foundations for a new stone church on the site, his grave was opened and his body was found incorrupt. In 1705 Saint Dimitry, Metropolitan of Rostov — the compiler of the great Russian Menology, and the ordinary of the district — came, examined the relics, attested them, and had them enshrined. Healings were reported at the shrine thereafter, and it is from this uncovering that his local veneration dates. The relics rested at the Boris and Gleb monastery and afterwards, when that house was suppressed, at the Saint Nicholas convent in Pereslavl-Zalessky, where they are kept today.