Sergius of Radonezh

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sergius of Radonezh was baptized Bartholomew, a boyar's son from a village near Rostov Veliky, and he died on the 25th of September 1392 as the most influential figure the Russian Orthodox Church had ever produced. He lived through the Mongol grip on Russian lands, the rise of Moscow, and the single most decisive battle of his era. He turned down the chance to lead the entire church. He built a monastery in a forest clearing that became a town. His relics survived an execution plot in the Soviet Gulag. What kind of person refuses both power and comfort at every turn, yet still bends history?

• 2. A Boy Who Could Not Read

  ›

  Bartholomew's birth year is disputed: the sources give 1314, 1319, or 1322 as possibilities, a fitting uncertainty for a saint whose life would resist tidy accounting. Despite being an intelligent child, he struggled badly with reading. His medieval biography records that a starets, a spiritual elder, met him and gave him a piece of prosphora, holy bread, to eat. From that day, according to the biography, he could read. Orthodox Christians read this as an angelic visitation. The family's circumstances shifted when the Rostov principality fell to Ivan I of Moscow, leaving his parents Kirill and Maria impoverished. They relocated with their three sons, Stefan, Bartholomew, and Peter, to the village of Radonezh, the place whose name Bartholomew would one day carry to every corner of Russia.

• 3. The Forest at Makovets Hill

  ›

  At Khotkovo near Moscow, Bartholomew found his older brother Stefan already living as a monk. He persuaded Stefan to seek a more secluded life. Deep in the forest at Makovets Hill, the two brothers built a small cell and a church dedicated to the Trinity. Stefan eventually moved away to a monastery in Moscow. Bartholomew was tonsured, given the monastic name Sergius, and spent more than a year alone in the forest as a hermit. Other monks began arriving and building their own cells around him. They pressed him to become their hegumen, or abbot, and he was ordained to the priesthood. Every monk was required to live by physical labor, his rule from the start. The settlement grew; nearby a posad took shape and then expanded into what is now the town of Sergiev Posad. Patriarch Philotheus of Constantinople, hearing of the monastery's reputation, sent a formal monastic charter to Sergius.

• 4. Forty Monasteries

  ›

  Patriarch Philotheus's charter arrived during the reign of Dmitri Donskoi, and Sergius's disciples spread outward across central and northern Russia during that same reign. They chose deliberately difficult terrain and founded new monasteries in remote places. Borisoglebsky, Ferapontov, Kirillo-Belozersky, and Vysotsky monasteries all trace their origins to his students. In Moscow itself, Sergius was connected to the founding of both Andronikov and Simonov monasteries. The total count of monasteries his disciples founded reached about 40. Metropolitan Alexius, the Metropolitan of Moscow, asked Sergius to become his successor. Sergius declined, preferring, as one Episcopal source notes, to remain a simple monk rather than become a bishop. The refusal was not passivity; it was a deliberate choice about where his authority should rest.

• 5. Blessing for Kulikovo

  ›

  Sergius kept clear of political life as a matter of principle. When Dmitry Donskoy sought his blessing before the Battle of Kulikovo against the Tatars, Sergius gave it only after he was satisfied that Dmitry had exhausted every peaceful option. He is said to have given the prince two warrior-monks, Alexander Peresvet and Rodion Oslyabya, to fight alongside the Russian forces. Some historians read Sergius's political stance across his whole career as an effort to make peace and draw the Russian lands under Moscow's leadership. The blessing at Kulikovo became one of the most-cited moments of his life, a saint who opposed violence until all other roads were closed, then stepped forward.

• 6. Relics and Survival

  ›

  Sergius died on the 25th of September 1392. His body was found incorrupt in 1422 and placed in a new cathedral at Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra, the monastery he had founded. The exact year the Russian Orthodox Church canonized him is uncertain, either 1448 or 1452. The church marks his memory twice each year, on September 25 and on July 5, when his relics were uncovered. His titles accumulated over centuries: among them the "Abbot of Russia" and "valiant voivod" of the Russian land. The Catholic Church recognized him as well; in 1940 he entered the liturgical calendar authorized for Russian Catholics, and the most recent edition of the Roman Martyrology lists him under September 25. Anglican churches of the Communion also honor him, and the ecumenical Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius carries his name. The relics themselves faced a more violent chapter. In December 1937, Pavel Florensky, a theologian, mathematician, philosopher, and priest born in 1882, died in the Soviet Gulag. It is believed he was condemned by an extrajudicial NKVD troika under NKVD Order No. 00447, having refused to reveal where Sergius's head was hidden. The Bolsheviks wanted it destroyed. Florensky and others are rumored to have organized a plot to save the relics. Pavel Golubtsov, later known as Archbishop Sergius, returned the relics to the cathedral of Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra in 1946 when the monastery reopened.

• 7. Memory and the Written Record

  ›

  Historian Serge Aleksandrovich Zenkovsky placed Sergius at the center of a cultural awakening, grouping him with Epiphanius the Wise, Stephen of Perm, and the painter Andrei Rublev as figures who together signified, in Zenkovsky's words, "the Russian spiritual and cultural revival of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century." Much of what is known about Sergius derives from the hagiography written by Pachomius the Serb, also known as Pachomius Logothetes, composed in the 15th century and surviving in numerous manuscript copies made through the 20th century. The original manuscript is held in the National Library of Russia. That a text produced centuries after his death still shapes understanding of his life is itself a measure of how thoroughly he shaped Russian religious identity. Andrei Rublev, named alongside him by Zenkovsky, painted his famous Trinity icon, which was created for the cathedral at Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra.