Methodius of Peshnosha
Our Venerable Father Methodius, Founder and Abbot of the Peshnosha Monastery of Saint Nicholas
Venerable · d. 1392
Commemorated 4 June — Repose (1392), 14 June — Second commemoration in the Russian calendar
Methodius was a disciple of Sergius of Radonezh and the founder of the Nicholas-Peshnosha monastery on the river Yakhroma, north of Moscow near Dmitrov. Having spent some years under Sergius' direction, he withdrew with his blessing to a marshy solitude beyond the river and built himself a cell there; disciples gathered, and Sergius himself came to visit and counselled him to build a church and gather them into a coenobium. Methodius carried the timber for it on foot through the shallows, and it is from that — peshnosha, "carrying on foot" — that the monastery took its name. He became its abbot in 1391 and reposed in 1392, and was buried in the house he had founded. The spot two versts off where he and Sergius used to talk together is called to this day Beseda, the "conversation-place." His local veneration begins in the late seventeenth century; he is commemorated on June 4 and again on June 14.
Under Sergius of Radonezh
Nothing is transmitted of Methodius' birth, family or country. He enters the record as a young man who went to Sergius of Radonezh — the central figure of the Russian monastic revival of the fourteenth century — and spent several years in obedience under him at the Trinity monastery. He belongs, therefore, to that first generation of Sergius' disciples who were sent out or went out from Radonezh and covered the forests north and east of Moscow with monasteries: the movement that made the Russian north a monastic country.
The desert beyond the Yakhroma
With Sergius' blessing Methodius withdrew to a solitary place beyond the river Yakhroma, in the boggy woodland of the Dmitrov district, and built himself a cell in the forest. The place was chosen for its difficulty, and the account keeps insisting on the marshiness of it. As always in these Lives, solitude did not last: disciples came, wishing to imitate his manner of life, and a small settlement of cells grew round his own.
Sergius came to visit him there. His counsel was the ordinary and decisive one — that the gathering should be regularised: that Methodius should build a church and establish a monastery. Methodius did so, and worked at the building with his own hands, both church and cells. The detail the tradition has kept, and from which the house takes its name, is that he carried the timber himself on foot, wading, through the water along the little river: пешь ноша, "a burden borne on foot," whence Peshnosha — the monastery of Saint Nicholas "on the Peshnosha." The church was dedicated to Saint Nicholas, and the river beside it took the monastery's name in turn.
Abbot, and the conversation-place
In 1391 Methodius became igumen of the community he had founded. He did not abandon the solitude that had brought him there: the account says that he would withdraw about two versts from the monastery to struggle in prayer alone, and that Sergius would come out to him at that spot for spiritual conversation. The place is called Beseda — "the Conversation" — and a chapel came in time to mark it. It is one of the small number of concrete traces the Russian tradition preserves of Sergius' friendships with his own disciples, and it is the detail by which Methodius is chiefly remembered.
He reposed in 1392, the same year as Sergius himself, and was buried in his monastery.
Relics and veneration
His relics remained at the Peshnosha monastery, and over them a church was built in 1732 dedicated jointly to Saint Sergius of Radonezh and Saint Methodius of Peshnosha — the dedication itself recording the relation between master and disciple. The beginning of his local veneration is placed in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, which is also when his name enters the Russian calendars; his cultus was and remains chiefly that of the Moscow diocese and of the monastery, which was restored at the end of the twentieth century.
Feast and commemoration
June 4 (church date; New Calendar civil June 4, Old Calendar civil June 17) is the day of his repose and his principal commemoration; June 14 (Old Calendar civil June 27) is kept as a second memory. He is honoured in the Russian Orthodox Church and in the Orthodox Church in America, and is named among the disciples of Saint Sergius of Radonezh in the synaxis of the Radonezh saints. In the Greek lists that translate the Russian calendar he appears simply as "Ὅσιος Μεθόδιος ὁ ἐκ Ρωσίας," Methodius of Russia. He is not in the Antiochian or Greek universal calendars of the day.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren wilderness to bring forth; and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; and thou wast a beacon to the whole world, shining with miracles, O Methodius our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Methodius is painted as a Russian monastic founder: an elder of middle years to old age in the dark mantiya and cowl, with a moderate pointed beard, holding a scroll or blessing, and — as the founder of a house — very often holding a model of his monastery, the church of Saint Nicholas with its walls, in the crook of his arm or presented on his open palms. Where he is shown with Saint Sergius, the two stand together in the manner of the 1732 dedication over his relics, sometimes with the Peshnosha church between them; a second composition shows him wading with the timber on his shoulder, the etymological scene of the monastery's name. He appears also in the great composite icons of the Radonezh saints and of All the Saints of Russia.
No pre-1900 icon of him has been located for this collection, and two candidates were examined and rejected. The illustrated pre-1911 Russian Lives of the Saints plate captioned "Methodius" for June 14 depicts a bishop in omophorion and sakkos and is the Patriarch Methodius the Confessor, not the abbot of Peshnosha. A photograph on Wikimedia Commons of a fresco of Saint Methodius of Peshnosha in the refectory church of the Trinity–Saint Sergius Lavra is uploaded as the photographer's "own work": the declared licence covers the photograph only, and the date of the underlying wall-painting — the refectory's decoration having been repainted more than once — could not be established as pre-1900, so it was not stored.
Disputed questions
- Two feast days. He is commemorated on June 4 and also on June 14, both in the Russian calendar and in the calendars that depend on it. The Russian Lives record the duplication without explaining it; the two dates are most simply understood as the day of repose and the day of a later local celebration or of the uncovering of the relics. Neither date is a translation of the other between calendars: both are church dates in the same reckoning.
- Not to be confused with Methodius of Moravia, the Equal-to-the-Apostles and enlightener of the Slavs (April 6, and May 11 with his brother Cyril), nor with Methodius the Confessor, Patriarch of Constantinople (June 14, †847) — the latter confusion being an easy one, since Methodius of Peshnosha's second feast falls on the very day of the patriarch's, and the illustrated Russian Lives of the Saints for June 14 print a Methodius vested as a bishop, who is the patriarch and not the abbot of Peshnosha. Nor with Methodius of Patara, the hieromartyr of Lycia and opponent of Origen (†c. 312, June 20) — the third Methodius of this same month, and the third hierarch of the name.
- Origins. Some later accounts make him a native of the Dmitrov region, or connect him with the Kolomna lands; none of this is in the early record, which begins with his arrival at Radonezh.