Theodore the Silent of the Kiev Caves
Our Venerable Father Theodore the Silent, of the Kiev Caves
Venerable · d. 13th century
Commemorated 17 February — Commemoration of the venerable, 28 August — Synaxis of the Fathers of the Kiev Far Caves
Theodore the Silent (thirteenth century) was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra, one of the venerable fathers who rest in the Far Caves (the Caves of Saint Theodosius). His surname records his ascetic labour: he kept a strict silence (molchanie), guarding his lips as a discipline of the heart and a means of unceasing inner prayer, and by this and his other struggles was granted, the tradition holds, a gift of wonderworking. Little else of his life is recorded. He is commemorated on February 17, and among the assembly of the venerable fathers of the Far Caves.
Of Theodore the Silent almost nothing survives beyond his name, his surname, and the witness of his relics. He belonged to the community of the Kiev Caves Lavra in or about the thirteenth century, and is numbered among the ascetics buried in the Far Caves, where his incorrupt relics are venerated. His epithet — molchalivy, "the silent" or "the taciturn" — marks the particular form of his podvig: the keeping of silence, the deliberate restraint of speech that the fathers of the Caves, in the tradition of the desert, prized as a guard upon the mind and a school of prayer, that the monk who has stilled his tongue may hear God in the heart. The tradition remembers him as one whose silence bore the fruit of grace, and who was granted the working of wonders. His honest short memory is that of a hidden monk whose whole life was his prayer.
Feast and commemoration
Theodore the Silent is commemorated on February 17 (church date; New Calendar civil February 17, Old Calendar civil March 2), and again in the collective commemoration of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves (kept on August 28) and of all the saints of the Kiev Caves. His veneration belongs to the Russian and Ukrainian tradition and is kept in the OCA calendar.
A note on the name. He is properly Theodore the Silent (molchalivy), the Kiev Caves monk; the form "Theodore the Silentiary" is sometimes used of him in English, borrowing the Byzantine court title silentiarius (an usher who kept silence at the imperial court), but he was a monastic ascetic of silence, not a court official, and is not a martyr.
Iconography
Theodore the Silent is depicted as a monk of the Caves in the schema, in the manner of the venerable fathers of the Lavra — often with a finger to the lips or otherwise signed as a keeper of silence — and appears among the ranks of the Caves fathers in the composite icons of the Synaxis of the Kiev Caves saints. No pre-modern storable icon of him alone has been identified for this entry; the wanting image is noted for a later pass.