Spiritual Portrait
The synaxarion notice for Paphnutius centers on his possession of the gift of tears. Drawing on the teaching of Saint John of the Ladder (Step 6:1), it relates that this gift is preceded by the remembrance of death.
Where the contemplation of mortality might provoke fear in those bound to worldly things, in Paphnutius it led toward constant prayer and the guarding of the mind. By meditating on death and divine judgment, he is said to have freed himself from worldly distractions and the passions through prayer, repentance, and fasting, and from this discipline the gift of tears followed.
Historical Context
The Kiev Caves Lavra (Kyiv Pechersk Lavra) was co-founded in the mid-eleventh century, around 1051, by Anthony of Kiev and Theodosius of Kiev. Anthony established cave-dwelling monasticism at Kyiv and, even as the communal monastery grew, withdrew to the Far Caves to maintain a solitary, hermitic life, so that the tradition of reclusion (zatvornichestvo) was foundational to the monastery from its origins.
The cave complex comprises two systems, the Near Caves and the Far Caves, connected by narrow underground corridors with living cells and underground chapels. More than a hundred burials of saints are housed within them. As a recluse of the thirteenth century, Paphnutius would have lived roughly a century and a half to two centuries after the monastery's founding, in a period when the Mongol invasion of Rus' (1237–1241) disrupted monastic life across the region. The anchoritic discipline he continued traces back to the example of Anthony himself.
