Life of Sergius of Radonezh
The life of the founder of the Trinity monastery near Moscow, written by a monk of that house who had known him, about twenty-five years after his death, and revised a generation later. It is a saint’s life, and the chief source for Sergius.
The introduction to the edition used here explains how the text came down. Epiphanius the Wise, a monk of the Trinity monastery and a disciple of Sergius, wrote the first Life in 1417–1418, twenty-six years after the saint’s death, having gathered recollections and notes for twenty years. His version does not survive on its own. It is known through the reworking by Pachomius the Serb, a monk from Athos who lived at the Trinity monastery from 1440 to 1459 and revised the Life more than once. In the seventeenth century Simon Azaryin divided the text into chapters and added later miracles. The first thirty-two chapters are the Life proper, ending with Sergius’s death.
It is hagiography, written within the Russian Orthodox tradition to show a holy man: it tells of signs before his birth, of visions, healings and foreknowledge, and it draws on the pattern of earlier saints’ lives. It also carries the memories of a community whose older members had lived under Sergius. Its chronology is loose. The editors point out that the rulers it names at his birth do not fit together and that the age it gives him at death does not agree with the events it mentions.
Cited in
- c. 1337–1345, estimated date