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Moses the Wonderworker of the Kiev Caves

Our Venerable Father Moses the Wonderworker, of the Far Caves of Kiev

Venerable · Wonderworker · d. 13th–14th century, at the Kiev Caves

Commemorated 28 July — Principal commemoration, 28 August — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far (Theodosian) Caves

Moses was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, one of the ascetics of the Far (Theodosian) Caves, remembered for an austerity of body that the Caves tradition records in a single hard image: he wore iron chains and a heavy copper cross on his flesh, and gave the whole of his strength to the psalter and to prostrations without number. For this labour he was granted the gift of wonderworking, and his incorrupt relics lie in the Far Caves to this day. Of his birth, his family, his country and the year of his repose nothing whatever is transmitted.

The Caves in the age after the Mongols

Moses belongs to the second great generation of the Kiev Caves monastery — not to the age of Anthony and Theodosius and the Paterikon, whose fathers are named and storied, but to the obscurer centuries after the Mongol sack of 1240, when the Lavra was impoverished, its chronicles broken, and its monks lived and died without a biographer. The Caves catalogues place him in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries and say no more. The names of a considerable number of such fathers survive only because their bodies survive: the dry, cool passages of the Near and Far Caves preserved them incorrupt, and each was labelled with the name and the one line of memory that the brotherhood had kept.

Chains, the psalter, and prostrations

The line kept for Moses concerns his ascetic discipline, and it is unusually specific. He bound himself with chains — the verigi of the Russian ascetic tradition, iron bands worn under the habit against the skin — and carried on his breast a copper cross of great weight. Beneath this burden his unceasing occupation was psalmody, the recitation of the psalter by day and night, joined to prostrations past counting. The combination is the classic Caves pattern: not the eremitical wandering of the Egyptians nor the learned labour of the Studites, but a bodily struggle carried on in a fixed place, in the dark, until the flesh gave way. Through it, the notice says, he received from God the power of working miracles — the epithet chudotvorets, wonderworker, being attached to his name in the catalogues and never afterwards separated from it.

Relics

His relics rest in the Far Caves, also called the Theodosian Caves after the second founder, and are venerated there with those of the other fathers of that half of the monastery. He is commemorated with them in the general Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves on August 28, and with the whole brotherhood in the movable Synaxis of All the Venerable Fathers of the Kiev Caves kept on the second Sunday of Great Lent.

Feast and commemoration

July 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 10). His memory is kept by the Russian and Ukrainian Churches and by the OCA, and not by the Greek calendars; on the same day the universal calendar keeps the four deacons of Acts 6, and the Slavonic books head July 28 with the appearance of the Smolensk "Hodigitria" icon, so that Moses is a minor notice on a full day. He is kept again on August 28 in the synaxis of the Fathers of the Far Caves, and on the second Sunday of Great Lent in the synaxis of all the Caves fathers. The day falls in the open season between the Apostles' Fast and the Dormition Fast.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and by thy sighs from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; and thou becamest a beacon, shining upon the world by thy miracles, O Moses our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Original translation from the Slavonic

Iconography

Moses is not represented alone. His image belongs to the great composite icon of the Fathers of the Far Caves — the rows of tonsured, dark-habited monks ranged in tiers above the mouth of the caves, each with his name inscribed beside his head, that was engraved and painted at the Lavra from the seventeenth century onwards and sold to pilgrims in thousands of copies. In such a composition Moses appears as an elder in the schema, hands crossed on the breast or raised in prayer. Where a painter has chosen to distinguish him, the attribute is the one thing his notice gives: the chains across the habit and the great copper cross hanging on the breast. No securely inscribed pre-1900 image of this Moses alone has been located for this collection, and none should be adopted without a legible inscription, since images captioned simply "St Moses" far more often depict Moses the Ethiopian or Moses the Hungarian.

Disputed questions

  • His day is July 28, not June 28. Some derivative English calendars have printed this Moses under June 28, where the Greek synaxarion keeps a quite different and much earlier ascetic, Moses the Anchorite, of unknown country and century. The two are not the same man and their days are not the same day; the Kiev Caves wonderworker belongs to July 28, as the Lavra's own catalogues and the OCA calendar have him. This entry and the June 28 entry carry reciprocal notes.
  • Not to be confused with Moses the Hungarian, the other and far better-known Moses of the Kiev Caves (July 26), the Hungarian servant of the passion-bearer Boris who endured mutilation in Poland rather than break his chastity; nor with Moses the Ethiopian (August 28), the robber turned abba of Scetis; nor with Moses of Novgorod the archbishop (January 25), Moses of Optina (June 16), or the prophet Moses the God-seer (September 4).
  • The century. "XIII–XIV" is the whole of the transmitted dating, and it is a palaeographic and archaeological estimate rather than a memory. This entry indexes him under the fourteenth century as the later and more commonly printed limit, without any claim to precision.

Sources

  1. The catalogues and pilgrim guides of the Kiev Caves Lavra to the relics of the Far (Theodosian) Caves — the source of the whole transmitted notice: the chains, the copper cross, the psalmody and prostrations, the gift of miracles, and the resting-place.
  2. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, July 28: "Venerable Moses, Wonderworker of the Kiev Caves" (consulted live) — the XIII–XIV century dating, the detail of the chains and cross, the relics in the Far Caves, and the express warning not to confuse him with Moses the Hungarian of July 26.
  3. The Kiev Caves Paterikon — for the ascetic pattern of the monastery, though it does not name this Moses; his generation falls after the Paterikon's horizon.
  4. This repository's June 28 entry for Moses the Anchorite, which established the misdating of the Caves wonderworker to June 28 in derivative calendars.