SAINT ANTHONY OF PECHERSK

Sometimes you become someone without knowing what you are becoming. This is what happened to Saint Anthony. The years of his conscious life coincided with the heyday of Christianity in Ancient Russia, shortly after the baptism of Prince Vladimir. According to the chronicles, Kiev was a city of “a thousand churches” and monasteries. Anthony went to Athos, but for some unknown reason, he returned from there. None of the monasteries in Kiev accepted him, or perhaps he himself did not want to. He began living in an underground cave, where Varangian brigands had previously lived. He thus became a great reformer. Anthony bore the name of Anthony the Great, founder of all Christian monasticism. Saint Anthony of the Caves, whom the Church reveres as the founder of Russian monasticism, became what he never expected to become.

1 Saint Anthony of Kiev is venerated as the founder of monasticism in the Russian Church. The similarity of his name to that of Anthony the Great, the founder of all Christian monasticism, is remarkable. This is a sign of God’s intervention in history.

2 Anthony was born around 983, five years before the baptism of Rus’ in 988 by Prince Vladimir. He died in 1073, on July 23 according to the Julian calendar, the eve of the commemoration of Saint Olga (†969), considered the Apostle of Russia.

3 During Anthony’s lifetime, the Eucharistic communion between the Roman and Constantinople churches was broken (1054), and Byzantium lost the famous Battle of Manzikert against the Seljuks (1071). These two events had tragic consequences.

4 Contemporaries believed it was merely a conflict between the Patriarch and the Pope, as had occurred many times before. But this mutual excommunication was literally signed with the Eucharistic blood from the Holy Chalice, which was subsequently placed on the altar of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Communion between the churches was never restored and probably will not be until the end of history.

5 “The empire has lost another battle, so what?” contemporaries thought. But the consequences were comparable to those that would have occurred if Charles Martel had not won but lost to the Arab armies in the famous Battle of Poitiers (732). Then the Arab army would have advanced unhindered to Aachen, Paris, and beyond. With the defeat of 1071, Byzantium ultimately lost all of Asia Minor. This process was gradual.

6 The life of Antony exists in various, even contradictory, versions. Just as later historians interpreted the events of 1054nd viewed the reasons for the defeat of 1071 differently, the writing of Anthony’s life soon became a way to decipher the divine plan for the fate of all Russian Orthodoxy.

7 Over the centuries, the Russian Church grew, achieved independence, and developed into a truly multinational ecumenical body. But at the time of Anthony, at the turn of the first and second millenniums, it was “merely” a new missionary ecclesiastical metropolis within the Church of Constantinople. Unlike the Bulgarian and Serbian churches, which emerged roughly at the same time and somewhat earlier, the head of the Russian Church never had the status of an archbishop, that is, an independent ecclesiastical entity. It didn’t even claim it at the time.

8 At a young age, Anthony went to Mount Athos, where he took monastic vows, gained ascetic experience, and then returned to his homeland. Later traditions assume that the Athos monks had a special plan for him. This is why he supposedly received the monastic name “Anthony.” However, monasticism is a complete devotion to God, not grandiose projects. Incidentally, Saint Olga was given the name Helena at her baptism. And that was most likely a project. But Olga’s son Svyatoslav didn’t become a new Constantine; he remained a conscious pagan and almost conquered Constantinople!

9 Athos was one of the four holy monastic mountains, three of which were located in Asia Minor. The defeat of Byzantium at Manzikert meant the inevitable downfall of these three monastic republics.

10 Only Mount Athos, located in Europe, survived. Anthony’s youth coincided with the period of activity of Saint Athanasius of Athos. He tragically died during the construction of the temple precisely in the year 1000. The golden age of Mount Athos and its future glory as a stronghold of Orthodoxy were just beginning. Mount Athos was the youngest of the holy mountains of Byzantium. We do not know whether the monks had missionary plans for a new, distant ecclesiastical metropolis. Unlike Western monasticism, which aspired to missionary expansion, Eastern monasticism was a contemplative phenomenon. Ultimately, Eastern monks saw the guarantee of their salvation in celibacy, renunciation of the world, and obedience. Western monks saw it merely as a means of saving the world through preaching. Anthony returned to where he came from, which is atypical for the monasticism of Athos, where the monks remained in their monasteries. Why did this happen? We will never know.

11 Not only the historical chronicles of this period, but also the life of Anthony himself, record that monasteries already existed in Rus’. But he found no place for himself in any of them. So, he began living in a cave, and his first monastery only arose later, spontaneously, perhaps contrary to the author’s original plan, but still during his lifetime. Living underground in a vast city with “a thousand churches,” as Kiev was described by contemporaries, was a sign of a completely conscious choice. It was an expression of the pursuit of extreme poverty. In the caves, Anthony found a place to lay his head but remained in the hands of nature—that extension of the divine hands. This conscious poverty and renunciation of all certainty help us at least partially understand his astonishing image.

12 In the Creed, the Church is described as “apostolic.” The apostolic Church is the Church founded by the Apostles themselves; it is the Church whose episcopate is a direct descendant of apostolic ordination; it is the Church that shares the faith of the Apostles. After all, the apostolic Church is a poor Church. Wasn’t this true apostolicity precisely what Saint Anthony was seeking?