The Life
Saint Sergius of Radonezh is the most beloved saint in all of Russian Orthodoxy. His name comes up in every prayer, every conversation about Russian spirituality, every story about how the faith took root in that country. He was born Bartholomew in 1314 to a noble family near Rostov, but his family lost its lands and had to move to a quiet village called Radonezh. As a boy he could not learn to read, no matter how hard he tried. His brothers learned easily; he failed. Then one day he met an angel disguised as an old monk in a field, who blessed him with a piece of prosphora, and after that the boy could read perfectly. After his parents died he and his brother went into the deep forest, built a cell and a small wooden church to the Holy Trinity, and lived as hermits. Other monks gathered. The community grew. By the time he died at the end of a long life, he had quietly become the spiritual father of the entire Russian Land.
When Bartholomew was seven his parents sent him to school with his brothers Stephen and Peter. Stephen and Peter learned quickly. Bartholomew could not. He sat in the classroom while his teacher chastised him, his classmates made fun of him, and his parents scolded him at home. He went off by himself and prayed in tears for the Lord to give him the ability to read. One day his father sent him out into the field to look for the horses. Walking along, he came upon an old monk standing at prayer beneath an oak tree. The boy stopped and waited respectfully for the monk to finish. When the prayer was over, the monk turned, smiled, and asked what he wanted. Bartholomew said: with all my soul I want to learn to read. Pray to God for me. The monk prayed, blessed him, and gave him a small piece of prosphora to eat as a sign of God’s grace. From that day on, Bartholomew read better than any of his brothers. The famous Russian painter Mikhail Nesterov’s Vision to the Youth Bartholomew shows the moment.
When Bartholomew’s parents died, he buried them and decided to leave the world entirely. His older brother Stephen, recently widowed, came with him. They walked twelve versts north of Radonezh into the deep forest, found a clearing on a hill called Makovets, built two rough cells with their own hands, and then a small wooden chapel. They had it consecrated in honor of the Most Holy Trinity. Stephen could not bear the loneliness, the bitter cold, the wild animals, the lack of food. He left for a monastery in Moscow. Bartholomew stayed alone. The forest was full of bears and wolves. One bear came to his cell day after day. The saint shared his last piece of bread with it. The bear became his companion. For years Bartholomew lived completely alone in that forest, with only God, the wild animals, and the small wooden church to the Holy Trinity. In 1337, when he was twenty-three, an abbot named Metrophanes came and tonsured him a monk. He took the name Sergius after the holy martyr.
Word about Sergius slowly spread. Other monks started coming to his hermitage and asking if they could stay. He let them. The forest cell grew into twelve cells, then more. He built each new cell with his own hands. He carried water from the spring. He chopped wood. He baked bread. He sewed clothing for the brothers. He prepared their meals. He worked harder than anyone in the monastery, slept less than anyone, ate less than anyone, and never asked anyone to recognize what he was doing. The monks were amazed that with so little food and sleep his health did not break down but actually improved. They begged him to become their abbot. He refused. He said he was unworthy. They begged again. Eventually a bishop came and ordained him a hieromonk and made him their igumen against his protests. Even then he kept working with his own hands like the lowest novice. That was always his pattern. The abbot of Russia served his monks as their slave.
For more than a hundred years the Russian Land had been under the Mongol Yoke, paying tribute, suffering raids, watching their cities burn. In 1380 the Grand Prince Demetrius of the Don gathered an army to face the Mongol Khan Mamai at Kulikovo Pole on the Don River. Before he marched, Demetrius rode out to the Holy Trinity monastery to ask Saint Sergius for his blessing. Sergius blessed him, told him that his cause was just, and prophesied his victory. Then he did something remarkable. He gave the prince two of his own monks — Schemamonks Andrei Oslyaba and Alexander Peresvet — to fight in the army. Sergius removed their black cassocks and put them in armor. He gave Peresvet a great cross to wear instead of a helmet. Sergius told them: this is the spiritual armor that will save your souls if your bodies fall. On September 8, 1380, the feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos, the battle was joined. Peresvet rode out alone before the armies and fought a Mongol champion in single combat; both died. Then the armies clashed. The Russians won. While the battle was being fought, Sergius stood in the chapel at his monastery and prayed without ceasing. He saw, in spirit, every Russian soldier who fell, and he commemorated each one by name. The Battle of Kulikovo was the beginning of the end of the Mongol Yoke. The Russian Land has remembered ever since that the victory came through the prayers of a humble forest monk.
Saint Sergius foresaw his own death six months in advance. He gathered the brothers, designated his disciple Saint Nikon to be the next igumen, and quietly began preparing himself. On the night before he died, he called all the monks together one final time and gave them his last instruction. It was four sentences long. He said: brothers, be attentive to yourselves. Have first the fear of God, purity of soul, and unhypocritical love. He did not give them a long sermon on theology. He did not leave them with a complicated set of monastic rules. He gave them four short principles, each of them as simple and as as the Gospel itself. Be attentive. Fear the Lord. Keep your soul pure. Love each other without hypocrisy. The next morning, September 25, 1392, he fell asleep in the Lord. The Russian Land has been trying to live by those four sentences for six hundred years.
These were Sergius’s last four sentences, delivered the night before his death to the monks who had gathered around him for sixty years. The Russian Orthodox tradition has carried them like a lamp through six centuries. They are the simplest possible summary of the Orthodox spiritual life. Pay attention to your own soul. Fear God. Keep your heart pure. Love each other without pretending. Anyone who tries to live by even one of these four sentences will find that it contains the entire Gospel within it.
Saint Sergius founded a monastery in the deep forest dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity. He chose this dedication because he believed that the Christian life is supremely about communion: communion of the soul with God, communion of the brethren with each other, communion of the human person with the inner life of the three divine Persons who are one God. The Lord’s promise in Matthew 18:20 — that wherever two or three are gathered in his name, he himself is in the midst of them — became the foundation of Sergius’s entire monastic vision. The brotherhood at Holy Trinity was not merely a community of like-minded ascetics; it was a living icon of the Trinitarian communion at the heart of all reality. Saint Andrei Rublev later painted this insight into his famous icon of the Trinity, which still hangs at the Lavra Saint Sergius founded.
After giving his final instruction to the brothers, Saint Sergius received Holy Communion and quietly fell asleep in the Lord on September 25, 1392. He was seventy-eight years old. Sixty of those years he had spent in the forest at Makovets. The brothers buried him in the small wooden church to the Most Holy Trinity that he had built with his own hands. Thirty years later, in 1422, the brethren wanted to build a larger stone cathedral. They opened his grave to move his relics. They found him completely incorrupt, his body and even his clothing perfectly preserved despite the water that had seeped into the grave. The Church commemorates this discovery every year on July 5. The relics were placed in a silver shrine in the new cathedral, where they remain to this day. The Holy Trinity-Sergius Lavra near Moscow has been the most beloved pilgrimage site of the entire Russian Orthodox world for six hundred years.
Saint Sergius matters to every Orthodox Christian because he shows us what an entire nation can become when one quiet monk goes into the forest and starts praying. He never preached great sermons. He never wrote books. He never sought any position of authority. He just spent his entire adult life in a forest hermitage, working with his own hands, sleeping a few hours a night, eating very little, praying without stopping, and serving the brothers who gathered around him. Out of that hidden, hand-built, prayer-soaked monastic life came the spiritual transformation of the entire Russian Land. The Battle of Kulikovo was won through his prayer. Russian iconography reached its supreme expression in the work of his spiritual grandson Saint Andrei Rublev. Russian monasticism for the next six hundred years took the pattern that he established. The Russian Orthodox Church, in many real ways, became Russian through what Saint Sergius did in his forest. He is a friend to every Christian who has ever felt small, hidden, and inconsequential. The Lord can work through the smallest soul that gives itself entirely to him.