Simon of Vladimir

The Caves and Vladimir

Simon was formed in the monastery of the Caves at Kiev in the second half of the twelfth century, the house that gave the Russian Church a great part of its early episcopate. From there he was called north, into the rising principality of Vladimir-Suzdal, and made igumen of the monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Vladimir — the princely foundation which was then the first monastery of the north-east and which would, two generations later, receive the body of Alexander Nevsky.

Until 1214 the whole of the north-east lay in the vast diocese of Rostov. In that year the Grand Prince George (Yuri) Vsevolodovich, son of Vsevolod the Big Nest, obtained the division of the see and had his own capital made a bishopric: Simon was sent to Kiev and consecrated by the Metropolitan Matthew as the first bishop of Vladimir and Suzdal. The Illustrated Chronicle of the sixteenth century still shows the two scenes side by side — the prince sending Simon to the metropolitan, and the metropolitan laying hands on him.

The bishop

His twelve years in the see fall in the last quiet decade before the Mongol catastrophe, and the chronicles record of them chiefly what they record of good bishops: building and consecrating. He consecrated churches in 1218 at Vladimir and in 1225 at Suzdal — the latter the cathedral of the Nativity of the Theotokos, rebuilt in stone, whose foundation belongs to his episcopate and which stands, much altered, to this day. He kept the peace between the sons of Vsevolod when it could be kept, and he remained, in the judgement of every Russian account of him, a monk of the Caves who happened to wear the omophorion.

The Paterikon and the letter to Polycarp

Simon's lasting work is literary. Among the strata that make up the Paterikon of the Kiev Caves — the collection of narratives of the monastery's fathers which, with the Primary Chronicle, is the foundation of Russian monastic literature — a group of chapters is attributed to him: accounts of the wonders and the ascetics of the Caves, written down for a younger monk's instruction. And at the head of the whole collection, in the manuscript tradition, stands his Epistle to Polycarp.

Polycarp was a monk of the Caves who chafed under his abbot, wanted advancement, and had hopes — through the patronage of a princess — of a bishopric of his own. Simon, himself a bishop, wrote to him to tell him what that ambition was worth. The letter's force lies in its reversal of the ordinary hierarchy of honours: Simon says that for all his own episcopal dignity he would gladly count it nothing to be cast out as rubbish in the Caves monastery and trodden underfoot there, or to be a beggar at its gates, rather than hold the honours he holds; that the glory of the Caves is not in its walls but in the fathers who lie in them; and he sets out for Polycarp, one after another, the ascetics whose obedience he should be imitating. The Russian Church has read it ever since as the classic statement of the monastic estimate of preferment, and it is the reason Simon is remembered as a spiritual writer and not merely as a diocesan.

Repose and relics

Before his death Simon received the great schema, laying down the bishop's state for the monk's. He died in 1226 — the repose is generally dated to the twenty-second of May — and was buried in the cathedral church at Vladimir. But he had asked to lie at the Caves; and his relics were afterwards translated to Kiev and placed in the Near (Antoniev) Caves of the Lavra, where they remain and where he is numbered among the fathers commemorated together on September 28. The printed Paterikon of 1661, the book he had helped to make, carried a woodcut of him among the Caves saints — the image stored with this entry.