Russia

Born in or around 1322, ¹⁷ the second of three brothers, he was christened Bartholomew. His parents were on their way down in the world. His father, a boyar who served the Prince of Rostov, belonged to the local elite. But Rostov was an enclave surrounded by the Principality of Moscow and being swallowed by it. In the course of his wars with Tver, Ivan had sent men to occupy parts of it and collect resources from its hapless people. But Ivan’s government was offering tax exemptions to people who would settle on wastelands north of Moscow, so the family moved there, to a place called Radonezh. ¹⁸The boy’s life there began when he was seven, but he was a child of the outdoors, physical rather than bookish. He learned to read only years later. The state of the world was soon borne in on him, however, through both hearsay and experience.

His elder brother, Stefan, a widower with two small sons, entered a nearby monastery (what happened to his little boys is not recorded). Then his parents died, at which Bartholomew settled what remained of the family’s assets on his younger brother and set out into the forest, accompanied by Stefan the monk. The hagiographer states that Bartholomew had long wanted to become a monk, but he was not tonsured immediately. Perhaps he could not afford to enter a monastery. He had no assets to bring, and his older brother’s decision to leave his monastery and go with him may also have been prompted by the family’s straitened circumstances. The brothers decided to live as hermits in the wilderness, fending for themselves. Why they did so is not entirely clear. A sense of adventure may have counted; they may have felt an urge to escape the world.

They erected a brushwood hovel to shelter in, then built a little church. But Stefan could not stand the solitude, and soon headed off to Moscow. There he entered the Monastery of the Apparition. Its abbot, Aleksei, was to become metropolitan. Stefan himself was to rise to become an abbot and chaplain to the Grand Prince. He was in the world now, if not of it. But Bartholomew remained a hermit in his wilderness, living a life of hard physical toil, prayer and meditation. He was to remain there in solitude for two years. A vision of the Devil he had about this time reflected concerns which were as much political as religious, however, for ‘the evil forces’ appeared before him ‘clothed and hatted in the Lithuanian style’- the style, that is, of the Catholic West. The future saint was a patriot.

Word of the pious hermit spread, and people came to him in the forest bringing little gifts. Three or four even came to join him. He built ‘cells’ for them. But he also began to make occasional forays into the world he had forsaken. On one he persuaded a monk, who was also a priest, to shave his head and rechristen him a monk. His new name was Sergei, or Sergius. More and more young men came to live near Sergius as hermits, until, — reluctantly, so we are told - he agreed to the transformation of the settlement of separate hermitages into a monastery, and to his own installation as its abbot. He was to supervise the community and enforce strict discipline over the monks. The year was 1353—4 and he was thirty-one or thirty-two.

This would hardly have been done without the blessing of Metropolitan Aleksei. The Church had recognized the popularity of Sergius’s initiative, and set out to capture and direct the trend. Sergius was encouraged to organize an expansion of the movement, to found new monasteries further out into the Russian ‘wilderness’. Aside from the benefits of charity and piety that it would bring, putting the energies of so many displaced or undirected young men to productive account turned out to be of strategic economic significance too. So monks were sent out to form communities of their own, and all the time fresh recruits came in wanting the peace of mind and solace that came of prayer and physical labour. A twelve-year-old orphan of Sergius’s brother became a novice, then a monk with the name of Fedor. He was later to found a monastery in Moscow and become archbishop of Rostov. But most of the monks who went out founded monasteries in the ‘wilderness’ of the countryside, not, as convention until that time dictated, at the edge of towns.