Dionysius of Suzdal
Our Father among the Saints Dionysius, Archbishop of Suzdal, Nizhny Novgorod and Gorodets
Venerable · Bishop · b. c. 1300, baptised David — d. 15 October 1385, in captivity at Kiev
Commemorated 26 June — Principal commemoration in the Russian calendars
Dionysius was the cave-dwelling founder of the Pechersky (Caves) monastery of the Ascension at Nizhny Novgorod, the teacher of a generation of northern ascetics, and one of the most formidable churchmen of the age of Sergius of Radonezh and Dmitry Donskoy. Tonsured at the Kiev Caves and coming north to the Volga with an icon of the Mother of God from that monastery, he dug himself a cave in the bank above Nizhny Novgorod about 1335 and gathered a brotherhood that produced Saints Euthymius of Suzdal and Macarius of Unzha. Made bishop in 1374, he preached against the Strigolniki, survived a Tatar arrow, and stood almost alone against the attempt of Grand Prince Dmitry to impose his confessor Mityai on the metropolitan throne. He went twice to Constantinople, was raised to archbishop in 1382, and in 1384 was named metropolitan of Russia by the Patriarch — but on his way home was seized and imprisoned at Kiev by Prince Vladimir Olgerdovich, and died there on 15 October 1385, buried in the cave of Saint Anthony where his own monastic life had begun.
Origins and the Caves of Kiev
Of Dionysius's birth and family nothing certain is preserved; he was born about the turn of the fourteenth century and given the baptismal name David. He was tonsured in the Kiev Caves Lavra, the mother-house of Russian monasticism, and received there both the name Dionysius and the formation — literate, ascetic, and rooted in the memory of Saints Anthony and Theodosius — that he carried north.
The caves above the Volga
Some time in the 1320s or early 1330s he left Kiev for the Volga, bringing with him an icon of the Mother of God from the Caves monastery, which the tradition says had been blessed by Anthony and Theodosius themselves. About three versts downstream from the young town of Nizhny Novgorod, in the steep right bank above the river, he hollowed out a cave for himself and lived in it as a solitary. Disciples came, as they always did; and about 1335 the community he had gathered was constituted a monastery in honour of the Ascension of the Lord — the Pechersky, or Caves, monastery of Nizhny Novgorod, named after the Kievan house whose discipline it reproduced.
The monastery became one of the great schools of the northern ascetic revival. Among those formed there were Euthymius, afterwards archimandrite of Suzdal, and Macarius, afterwards of Zheltovodsk and Unzha; the Nizhny Novgorod chronicle-writing of the period, including the copying in 1377 of the manuscript now known as the Laurentian Chronicle — the oldest surviving copy of the Tale of Bygone Years — was undertaken at Dionysius's direction by the monk Lavrenty, and is his most enduring service to Russian letters.
Bishop of Suzdal
In 1374 Dionysius was consecrated bishop of Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod by the Metropolitan Alexis of Moscow. His episcopate fell in the harshest years of the Tatar yoke and of the struggle between Moscow, Suzdal-Nizhny and the Horde. In 1375, the tradition relates, a Tatar commander shot an arrow at him; the arrow pierced only his mantle, and he was unhurt. He worked at the conversion of the pagan peoples of the middle Volga, and against the Strigolniki, the anticlerical movement of Novgorod and Pskov that rejected the ordained hierarchy — Dionysius carried to Novgorod the patriarchal letters against them and preached there in person.
The Mityai affair and the embassies to Constantinople
On the death of Metropolitan Alexis in 1378, Grand Prince Dmitry Ivanovich (Donskoy) determined to have his own confessor Michael, called Mityai, elected metropolitan, and had him vested and installed at Moscow before any canonical confirmation. Dionysius refused to acknowledge the appointment, insisting that a metropolitan of Russia be consecrated by the Patriarch of Constantinople. He was arrested and held; released on the surety of Sergius of Radonezh, he gave his word not to leave for Constantinople before Mityai — and then, judging the Church's order to weigh more than his parole, went at once, in 1379. The breach of promise is recorded against him in the chronicles and remains the one shadow on his memory; the chronicles equally record that his intervention was decisive and that Mityai died at sea before reaching the imperial City.
At Constantinople Dionysius impressed the Patriarch Neilos and the synod by his learning in the Scriptures and the strictness of his life; he was created archbishop in 1382, receiving for his see the rare privileges of the stauropegion and the crossed polystaurion vestment. He returned bearing relics and, according to the Nizhny tradition, a copy of the Hodegetria of Constantinople.
Sent again in 1383 to settle the disputed succession to the metropolitan throne — the long quarrel of Pimen and Cyprian — he was, in 1384, appointed by the Patriarch metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia.
Imprisonment and repose
He never entered on the office. Passing through Kiev on his way home, he was seized by Prince Vladimir Olgerdovich of Kiev — who held for Cyprian, and would not let a rival metropolitan pass — and kept in confinement. There Dionysius died, on 15 October 1385, after something over a year of captivity. He was buried in the cave of Saint Anthony in the Kiev Caves monastery, in the place where he had begun as a monk.
Veneration
Veneration began early at Nizhny Novgorod and Suzdal, sustained by the Pechersky monastery he had founded and by the memory of his disciples Euthymius and Macarius, who were themselves glorified. He is numbered among the Saints of Vladimir and among the fathers of the Kiev Caves, and is honoured in the Russian Church as a hierarch, a founder of monasteries, a defender of the canonical order of the Church against princely convenience, and a patron of Russian book-copying.
Feast and commemoration
June 26 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 9), kept in the Russian Church and by the Orthodox Church in America; the commemoration is Russian and local, and is not on the Greek or Antiochian calendars. His repose on October 15 is also observed, and he is commemorated collectively in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir (June 23) and in the synaxis of the fathers of the Kiev Caves who lie in the Near Caves.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of Thy hierarch Dionysius direct our life in peace.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Kontakion — Tone 8 (common of a hierarch and ascetic)
Having hollowed out for thyself a cave in the hill and thy heart for a dwelling of the Holy Spirit, thou didst gather a flock in the wilderness and shepherd it as a father, and didst keep the Church's order unbent before princes, O holy hierarch Dionysius; wherefore, having finished thy course in bonds, thou hast received the crown, and dost pray for our souls.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Dionysius is written as a Russian hierarch of the fourteenth century: an elderly man with a long, narrowing grey or white beard, in phelonion or (in the later Nizhny Novgorod tradition, reflecting the Constantinopolitan privilege granted him) the crossed polystaurion, with the omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left, sometimes with the archbishop's mitre. The Nizhny Novgorod images give him the Pechersky Ascension monastery in the background, on its bluff above the Volga, and occasionally the cave mouth at his feet; the icon of the Mother of God he is said to have brought from Kiev may be shown in his hands. He also appears as one figure among many in the composite icons of the Saints of Vladimir and of the Fathers of the Kiev Caves.
No pre-1900 image of Dionysius alone has been located for this collection: a Wikimedia Commons media search under both his Russian and English names returns nothing for him, and the Menologion of Basil II — the first-resort source for minor saints — covers only September to February and in any case predates him by four centuries. He is therefore listed in the the list of icons still being sought index.
Disputed questions
- The date of the feast. Dionysius reposed on 15 October 1385, and the Kiev Caves and some Russian calendars keep his memory on that day; the general Russian and OCA calendars, however, give June 26 as his principal commemoration. No source consulted for this entry explains the June date — it is not the day of a known translation of his relics, which were never moved from the Antoniev cave. The discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved; this entry follows the calendars in ranking June 26 primary and notes the October day in prose.
- The broken parole. That Dionysius pledged to Sergius of Radonezh not to sail before Mityai, and then sailed, is in the chronicles and is not defended here. Russian ecclesiastical historians have divided over whether it was an act of ecclesiastical conscience or of ambition; the sources allow both readings and the tradition has kept the charge in view while venerating the man.
- Not to be confused with Dionysius of Radonezh (archimandrite of the Trinity Lavra, †1633), nor with the other Dionysii of the Russian calendar (Dionysius of Glushitsa, †1437), nor with the sixteenth-century Metropolitan Dionysius I of Moscow, who is a different person.