Pimen the Faster of the Kiev Caves

Our Venerable Father Pimen the Faster, of the Far Caves of Kiev

Venerable · d. 12th century

Commemorated 8 May — Principal commemoration, 27 August — Second commemoration in Russian usage, 28 August — Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves

Pimen the Faster (twelfth century) was a monk — and, by the Russian calendar's styling, an abbot — of the Kiev Caves Lavra, remembered for one thing only, but that a great one: the severity of his fasting, from which he took his surname Postnik. His incorrupt relics rest in the Far (Theodosius's) Caves of the Lavra, and he is commemorated on May 8 and among the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

Pimen belonged to the Kiev Caves monastery — the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra of Saints Anthony and Theodosius — in the twelfth century, the age in which the community was at the height of its influence over the Christian life of the Rus'. The Russian service-books and calendars style him igumen, abbot, which would place him among the superiors of the Lavra in that century; the Paterikon preserves no life of him, and the notice of his sanctity rests on the veneration of his relics and on the memory of his abstinence rather than on any narrative.

That memory is precise about its one point: he "won renown by the labour of fasting." The surname Postnik was given in the Lavra only to those whose abstinence was conspicuous even among monks vowed to abstinence, and it is the same epithet borne by Macarius the Faster of the Near Caves in the same century. Beyond it, nothing of Pimen's origin, family, or years is transmitted, and no miracle is recorded of his lifetime; the tradition honours him as one of the great company of ascetics whose graves in the caves became the principal relic-shrine of the Russian Church.

Feast and commemoration

Pimen the Faster is kept on May 8 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 21) in the Russian calendar and by the Orthodox Church in America, on the day of the second feast of John the Theologian and of Arsenius the Great, whose service governs the day. 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 on the second Sunday of Great Lent. He is not found in the Greek calendars.

Iconography

Pimen is depicted as a monk of the caves in the dark tunic, mantle and koukoulion, gaunt and hollow-cheeked as befits the surname of a faster, holding a scroll or a prayer-rope, and identified by inscription. His usual appearance is not as a single figure but in the tiered companies of the composite icons of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves and of "All the Saints of the Kiev Caves," which are among the most characteristic productions of Ukrainian and Russian engraving and painting from the seventeenth century onward. No pre-1900 image identified with certainty as this Pimen, distinct from his namesakes, was located for storage; the entry is noted as wanting an icon.

Disputed questions

Abbot or simple monk? The Slavic calendars call him igumen of the Caves; the monastery's own abbatial lists for the twelfth century cannot be squared with the title with any confidence, and some notices give him without it. Recorded as transmitted, without resolving it.
Not to be confused with Pimen the Much-Ailing of the Kiev Caves (†1110, commemorated August 7), a monk of the Near Caves who lay sick for years and was tonsured by angels — a wholly distinct father with whom the shared name, house, and century make confusion easy, the more so because several calendars (including the OCA's) list both Pimens on August 7; nor with Poemen (Pimen) the Great, the Egyptian desert father of the Apophthegmata (August 27) — on which day this Pimen the Faster is himself commemorated, together with the hieromartyr Kuksha, whose martyrdom among the Vyatichi he announced aloud in the monastery church and immediately reposed; nor with Poemen of Palestine, also kept on August 27; nor with the later Russian hierarchs named Pimen.