Ecumenical Commemoration
Monastic Elder of Radonezh
September 25 · d. 1392
also known as Sergius of Radonezh, Sergei Radonezhskii, Sergios, Sergiy
Sergius was a forest hermit who became the patron saint of Russia. Sergius gave away his inheritance to seek God alone in the woods, and a monastery grew up around him against his will. He refused high office, lived in patched clothes, did manual labor, and in 1380 blessed Prince Dmitry on his way to break the long Mongol domination at Kulikovo. The poor wooden hermitage he founded became the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the beating heart of Russian Christianity.
Sergius was born about 1314 and named Bartholomew. He was the son of a landholding family near Rostov, in a subjugated Russia that lay under the heel of the Mongol khans. There is a tender story of his boyhood that every Russian schoolchild would know: as a boy Sergius struggled to learn to read. However, he tried and wept, until one day he met a mysterious old monk praying in a field and begged his prayers on his behalf. The elder gave him a morsel of holy bread, and from that hour, the tradition says, Bartholomew read the Scriptures as though he had always known them. The Russian faithful have loved that scene for six hundred years.
When his parents died, Bartholomew gave away his inheritance and went with his brother into the deep forest at Makovets, some forty miles northeast of Moscow, to seek God in the silence. They raised a little wooden church to the Holy Trinity. His brother could not bear the loneliness and left; Bartholomew stayed, took the monastic name Sergius, and lived alone among the wolves and the cold, praying, chopping wood, and growing his own bread. He did not advertise himself. But holiness in the wilderness is somehow hard to hide, and one by one other men came to share his life, until a monastery grew up around him almost against his will.
Sergius governed it by example rather than command. He wore patched clothes, took the meanest tasks, and once labored as a carpenter for a fellow monk in exchange for a few stale loaves to fairly contribute. He did not beg for alms and prohibited his monks from doing so. They trusted in God’s providence and received gifts but they did not pursue them. He refused high office: when the church wished to make him Metropolitan (similar to an arch-bishop in the west) of all Russia, he declined, content to remain a monk among monks. The tradition remembers his mystical graces, above all a visit from the Mary, who appeared to him with the apostles Peter and John and promised her protection over his house.
His most famous hour came in 1380. The Grand Prince Dmitry of Moscow, gathering his forces to face the Golden Horde in open battle for the first time in living memory, rode out to the forest monastery to ask the holy man's blessing. Sergius blessed him, foretold his victory, and sent two of his own monks to ride with the army. At Kulikovo the Russians won, and the long night of Mongol domination began, at last, to lift. Sergius died in 1392, and the poor hermitage in the woods became the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, where pilgrims still kneel, the beating heart of Russian Orthodoxy still today.
Sergius is known chiefly through the Life written by his disciple Epiphanius the Wise within a generation of his death, later reworked by Pachomius the Serb. It is a work of devotion as much as of record, rich in visions and wonders, and the historian must read it as the believing memory of a community rather than as a modern biography.
The hard outline, though, is secure: a monk who founded the Trinity monastery in the forest in the mid-fourteenth century, who refused the office of metropolitan, and who stood close to the princes of Moscow in the years around the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. The Russian chronicles independently attest his standing and the part the church played in rallying resistance to the Horde. The Trinity-Sergius Lavra he founded has stood on the same spot ever since, the most important monastery in Russia, which is itself a kind of evidence.
Sergius of Radonezh is venerated across the Orthodox world and commemorated in this calendar on September 25, the day of his repose. He is the patron saint of Russia and the model of the Russian monastic ideal, the holy elder whose authority flowed from sanctity and self-denial rather than from rank.
His monastery became the mother of dozens of others as his disciples carried the common life into the northern forests, an expansion sometimes called the monastic colonization of the Russian north. The vision of the youth Bartholomew receiving the gift of learning, painted most famously by Mikhail Nesterov, is among the most beloved images in Russian art. Above all he is remembered as the monk who blessed a nation at the moment it found the courage to stand, and who is honored as a builder and intercessor of Russia itself.
The Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh(Church Slavonic, c. 1418)
The foundational life, written by a disciple within a generation of the saint's death.
Saint Sergius and Russian Spirituality(English, 1976)
A modern study placing Sergius at the center of Russian monastic spirituality.
Further reading. The primary source is Epiphanius the Wise, The Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh, available in modern English translation. For the saint in his setting, see Pierre Kovalevsky, Saint Sergius and Russian Spirituality (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976), and the chapters on Sergius in G. P. Fedotov's The Russian Religious Mind.
Online resources. An English account of Sergius and his Life is available through the Orthodox Church in America.
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Sergius, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Sergius /ˈsɜːr.dʒi.əs/; Sergios /ˈsɜːrdʒiɒs/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31