Paisius of the Far Caves
Our Venerable Father Paisius, of the Far Caves of Kiev
Venerable · d. 14th century
Commemorated 19 July — Principal commemoration, 28 August — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves
Paisius was a monk of the Kiev Caves monastery, of the fourteenth century by the usual reckoning, whose whole memory rests on a single fact of the sort the Caves Paterikon is best at preserving: he and Mercurius were inseparable. The two shared one cell through their lives, were laid in one grave at their deaths, and were venerated together; their relics were afterwards divided into separate reliquaries, in which they rest today in the Far (Theodosian) Caves. Nothing else of his life is transmitted — no origin, no office, no miracle-story — and the entry does not invent any. He is commemorated on July 19 and among the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.
What is known
The Kiev Caves tradition preserves Paisius entirely through his friendship. He was a monk of the Caves monastery at Kiev, living in the Far Caves — the older cave system, dug by Anthony and called Theodosian after the great abbot — and his companion was the venerable Mercurius of the Caves, commemorated on November 24.
The two were bound by what the Slavonic notices call spiritual brotherhood. They lived in one cell; they were of one mind in the ascetic labour; and when they died they were buried in one grave, an arrangement so unusual in a monastery where each father was ordinarily enclosed in his own niche that it is the thing the tradition chose to remember about them both. In later centuries, when the relics of the Caves fathers were sorted, identified and enshrined for veneration, the two were separated into distinct reliquaries, and it is in that state that they are venerated now.
Nothing further is transmitted: neither the place of his birth, nor his monastic office, nor the year of his repose, nor any miracle in his lifetime. The Kiev Caves Paterikon in its developed form, and the seventeenth-century catalogues of the relics on which the modern calendar of the Caves saints rests, give his name, his companion, and the fact of the shared cell and grave, and no more.
Feast and commemoration
July 19 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 1) is his principal day, kept by the Russian and Ukrainian Churches and by the Orthodox Church in America. He is commemorated again in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves on August 28, and in the general Synaxis of All the Venerable Fathers of the Kiev Caves, which is kept on the Second Sunday of Great Lent and is movable. He is not carried by the Greek or Antiochian calendars. He has no independent office; on his day he is sung under the common of a venerable father of the Caves, and at the Far Caves synaxis his name is simply read in the roll.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father of the Caves)
Thou didst dwell in the caves as in the courts of heaven, and there in one cell with thy fellow didst wear out thy life in fasting and prayer, O venerable father Paisius; wherefore Christ has glorified thee with the choir of the fathers of the Caves. Intercede with him that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Paisius has no independent iconographic type. He appears in the great composite icons of the Venerable Fathers of the Kiev Caves — the assemblies, developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and engraved and reproduced in enormous numbers by the Lavra's own press, in which the fathers of the Near and Far Caves are ranged in tiers below the Dormition church and each is identified by a small inscription. In these he is a monk among monks: dark mantia and koukoulion, scroll or prayer-rope, hands raised or crossed, without any attribute of his own. Where the composition pairs the fathers who were buried together, he is placed beside Mercurius.
The Lavra engravings and the printed Paterikon illustrations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the natural source for a public-domain image. None showing Paisius with a legible inscription has been located and confirmed for this collection.
Disputed questions
- His century. The calendars assign him to the fourteenth century; this rests on the place of his relics in the Far Caves and on the arrangement of the Caves catalogues rather than on any dated notice, and thirteenth-century datings are also found. The uncertainty is general to the later Caves fathers, and is not peculiar to him.
- Which Mercurius? The Mercurius who shared his cell is the venerable Mercurius of the Caves (November 24), a monk of that house — not Mercurius of Smolensk, the martyred warrior (November 24 also), nor Mercurius of Caesarea, the great-martyr (November 24), nor the hieromartyr Mercurius, bishop of Smolensk, buried in the Near Caves. The coincidence of the November 24 date across several of these has caused confusion in English lists.
- Not to be confused with the many later monastic Paisiuses — Paisius the Great of Egypt (June 19), Paisius Velichkovsky (November 15), and Paisius of Uglich (June 6) — with none of whom this father has any connection beyond the name.