Kievan Caves Patericon

KIEVAN CAVES PATERICON

The Kievan Caves Patericon is a monastic collection of tales about monks of the Caves Monastery of Kiev. It reflects the rich monastic practice and theology of the learned monks of the Kievan Caves Monastery. The core of the patericon is the epistolary works of Bishop Simon of Vladimir-Suzdal, a former Caves monk, and the monk Polikarp, to whom Simon addresses an epistle and accompanying stories, written between 1225 and his death in 1226. Ostensibly, Simon writes to Polikarp because he is appalled at the latter's ambition for a see and feels he must instruct him to remain in the holy Monastery of the Caves. Attempting to convince Polikarp to stay at the Caves, Simon attaches nine stories to his letter, which are intended to illustrate the holiness of the monastery and its inhabitants. There is no recorded response to Bishop Simon, but sometime prior to 1240, Polikarp wrote to his superior, the archimandrite Akindin, and attached to his brief missal eleven tales recounting the exploits of thirteen more monks.

To this core were added in various editions a number of disparate works associated with the Caves Monastery, including the Life of Theodosius. It is not clear when the collection began to be called a patericon (paterik ), a word used to designate a number of Byzantine monastic collections translated into Slavic, but this title was not used in the oldest extant manuscript, the Berseniev Witness, which was copied in 1406 at the request of Bishop Arseny of Tver. A printed version appeared in 1661, which, though seriously flawed, was apparently quite popular, as it was reprinted many times up to the nineteenth century.

See also: caves monastery; kievan rus

bibliography

Fedotov, George P. (1965). The Russian Religious Mind. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. (1989). Tr. and intro. Muriel Heppell. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

David K. Prestel