Onesimus the Recluse of the Kiev Caves
Our Venerable Father Onesimus the Recluse, of the Near Caves of Kiev
Venerable · d. 12th–13th century (no year transmitted)
Commemorated 21 July — Commemoration of the recluse of the Near Caves, 4 October — Second commemoration, kept with the venerable Elladius of the Near Caves
Onesimus was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra who enclosed himself in the Near (Antonian) Caves and lived out his life there as a zatvornik, a recluse, in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Nothing of his history is transmitted beyond the vocation and the place: his relics were buried where he had struggled and are venerated in the Near Caves still. He is commemorated on July 21, together with Onuphrius the Silent of the Kiev Caves, and again on October 4 with the venerable Elladius of the same caves.
A recluse of the Near Caves
From the first generation at Kiev the recluse was a recognised order of life in the monastery. Antony, the founder, had himself lived walled in a cave, and after him a succession of the brethren asked and received the blessing to be enclosed: sealed into a cell cut in the rock, receiving bread and water through a small opening, seeing no one, and coming out — if at all — only to communicate. The Caves paterikon is frank about the danger of it. The stories it tells of Isaac the Recluse, deceived by demons in the form of angels, and of others who were broken by the enclosure, exist precisely to warn that the vocation is not to be entered on a beginner's enthusiasm; it was granted sparingly and under obedience.
It is to this order that Onesimus belonged. He shut himself in the Near Caves of St Antony and remained there to the end. The tradition adds nothing: no year, no provenance, no miracle, no saying. His relics lie in the place of his ascetic contest, in the Near Caves, and his name is read among the fathers of that house.
The record is genuinely this short, and the entry does not lengthen it. What the Church transmits about him is a name, a manner of life, a place of burial and a day; the individual notices of most of the Caves fathers derive from the burial inscriptions in the galleries and from the canon sung over the relics, not from any written vita, and after the sack of Kiev in 1240 the monastery's own records were largely destroyed.
Feast and commemoration
July 21 (church date; New Calendar civil July 21, Old Calendar civil August 3), with a second commemoration on October 4. The observance is proper to the Russian, Ukrainian and OCA calendars and is not in the Greek or Antiochian Menaia; the day's service is carried by the Prophet Ezekiel and Symeon the Fool-for-Christ of Emesa. He has no separate office and is named in the Canon to the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
Shutting the door of thy cell upon the world, thou didst open the door of thy heart unto Christ, O our father Onesimus; and hidden in the rock thou wast found a dwelling-place of the Spirit: pray for us who venerate thy holy relics.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Onesimus is painted as a Caves recluse: an ascetic of middle or advanced years in the great schema, the cowl drawn over the head, the analavos with its crosses on the breast, the hands crossed or holding a small scroll, standing against the dark ground of the cave. Where the painters mark out the recluse from his brethren they set him within an arched opening in the rock or show the sealed cell behind him.
His proper setting is the composite icon of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, in which the whole company stands in tiers about the Theotokos and the founders Antony and Theodosius, each named in a small inscription — a type engraved and printed at the Lavra from the seventeenth century for pilgrims. No pre-1900 image identifying this Onesimus alone has been located; in the printed Lavra compositions he is one small inscribed figure among dozens, which is not sufficient for identification here.
Disputed questions
- Century. The Caves lists place him in the twelfth to thirteenth century; this entry indexes him under the thirteenth with the uncertainty stated, and no year is asserted.
- Not to be confused with Onesimus the Apostle of the Seventy, the runaway slave of Philemon (February 15), nor with Onesimus of Magnesia. The name was given in the Slavic monasteries out of veneration for the apostle, and English calendars that list simply "St Onesimus" in July are to be read of this recluse.
- His pairing with Onuphrius. July 21 carries the memory of Onesimus together with Onuphrius the Silent. They are distinct fathers of different generations and different vocations — one enclosed, one silent — who share a day and a cave system and nothing else; OCA and the Slavonic calendars print them under one heading, which should not be read as a joint life.
- The October commemoration. The second day, October 4, is kept in the Kievan lists together with the venerable Elladius of the Near Caves. Which of the two dates is the older is not determinable from the sources available here.