Onuphrius the Silent of the Kiev Caves
Our Venerable Father Onuphrius the Silent, of the Near Caves of Kiev
Venerable · d. 12th century (no year transmitted)
Commemorated 21 July — Commemoration of the silent one of the Near Caves, 28 September — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves
Onuphrius, called the Silent (molchalivy), was a monk of the Near (Antonian) Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra in the twelfth century, whose whole recorded ascesis is the one contained in his epithet: he kept silence. Nothing else of his history survives. His relics rest in the Near Caves among the incorrupt relics venerated there, his name is read in the Canon to the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, and he is commemorated on July 21 and with the whole company of that house on September 28.
A silent one of the Near Caves
The Caves monastery of Kiev, founded in the eleventh century by Antony and Theodosius, kept two systems of caves — the Near (Antonian) and the Far (Theodosian) — and within both a range of ascetic vocations lived side by side with the common life: the recluse walled into his rock cell, the faster, the labourer, and the molchalnik, the man who had taken silence as his particular discipline.
Silence in this tradition is not merely the absence of speech but a specific ascesis with a specific aim. The fathers of the Caves, following the Egyptian and Palestinian teaching they had received through the Studite books, understood the tongue as the last member to be brought under obedience and speech as the readiest channel of vainglory, judgement of the brethren, and dispersion of the mind. The one who took molchanie undertook to speak only what obedience or charity required, so that prayer might become continuous; and where the Caves paterikon records nothing else of a father but that he was molchalivy, it is recording a lifetime's work and not a peculiarity of temperament.
Of Onuphrius himself the tradition preserves the name, the epithet, the century, and the place of the relics. He belonged to the twelfth century — the generations between the founders and the Mongol sack of 1240, when the monastery was at the height of its numbers and its influence over the Church of Rus'. His body was buried where he had struggled, in the Near Caves, and is venerated there still.
This entry does not extend the record beyond that. For a great many of the Caves fathers the honest content of the tradition is a name, a manner of life, a century, and a place of burial; the Church commemorated them as a body long before it catalogued them singly, and their individual notices are drawn from the burial inscriptions and from the canon sung over their relics rather than from any vita.
Feast and commemoration
July 21 (church date; New Calendar civil July 21, Old Calendar civil August 3), and with the whole company of his house at the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves on September 28. The commemoration is proper to the Russian, Ukrainian and OCA calendars and is not in the Greek or Antiochian Menaia; on the same day those calendars keep the Prophet Ezekiel and Symeon the Fool-for-Christ of Emesa, whose services carry the day. He has no separate office: he is commemorated within the service of the day and named in the Canon to the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
Having bridled thy tongue, thou didst set free thy mind for prayer, O our father Onuphrius; and keeping silence in the darkness of the cave, thou wast made a vessel of the Spirit who speaketh without words: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Onuphrius the Silent is painted as a Caves monk: an ascetic in the great schema, the cowl over the head and the analavos with its crosses on the breast, the face gaunt, the hands crossed on the breast or holding a scroll, against the dark ground of the cave. Where the painters distinguish him at all from his brethren, the sign of the silent one is a hand raised to the lips or a closed and unread scroll. He must be kept apart in the painters' manuals from his great namesake Onuphrius the Great of Egypt, whose type is utterly different — a naked hermit covered only by his own hair and a girdle of leaves — and the two are never confused in the images, however easily they are in the calendars.
His proper setting is not an individual panel but the composite icon of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, in which the whole company is ranged in tiers about the Theotokos and the founders Antony and Theodosius, each father named in a small inscription. That type was engraved and printed in quantity at the Lavra from the seventeenth century onwards for pilgrims. No pre-1900 image identifying this Onuphrius 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
- Not to be confused with Onuphrius the Great, the fourth-century hermit of the Egyptian desert (June 12), whose fame is the reason the name was given at all in the Slavic monasteries; nor with the several later Russian bearers of the name.
- Century. The Caves lists place him in the twelfth century; no year, and no event by which a year could be fixed, is transmitted. Some printed calendars give "twelfth–thirteenth century" for the whole group of Near Caves fathers commemorated in July, and the boundary between them cannot be drawn.
- His pairing with Onesimus. July 21 carries in the Slavonic and OCA calendars the memory of Onuphrius together with Onesimus the Recluse of the Kiev Caves. The two are distinct fathers, of different generations and different vocations, sharing a day and a cave system but not a life; the pairing is a fact of the calendar, not of their history.