St. Paul of Obnora, Hermit of the Russian North

Who was St. Paul of Obnora?

St. Paul of Obnora was one of the great hermits of the Russian North, a disciple of St. Sergius of Radonezh who carried his teacher's way of prayer into the deep forests beyond the Volga. He lived as a recluse, then three years in the hollow of a linden tree, then as a hermit on the little Nurma River near Vologda. The monks who gathered around him became the Pavlo-Obnorsky Monastery. He died in 1429 at the age of 112, and the Orthodox Church keeps his feast on January 10.

Almost everything we know comes from his Life, written by an unnamed monk around 1546, more than a century after his death. The Russian Biographical Dictionary judged that it was probably drawn from the memories of the second generation of monks and deserves a historian's attention, "though not unconditionally." We read it in that spirit, grateful for what it preserves.

From Moscow to St. Sergius

Paul was born in Moscow in 1317 to a wealthy family who planned a worldly life for him. The OCA's life says that from his youth he was known for kindness to the poor and the suffering. At twenty-two, pressed to marry, he left home in secret and received the monastic tonsure at the Nativity Monastery on the Volga.

From there he went to the Holy Trinity Monastery in the forests of Radonezh, where St. Sergius was gathering disciples. Paul obeyed the elder in everything. With Sergius's blessing he moved into a separate cell near the monastery and lived there alone for fifteen years without going out. When at last he asked leave to go into the wilderness, Sergius blessed him and gave him a copper cross, which the monastery still guarded in the nineteenth century.

Three years in a linden tree

Paul wandered for years through the forests and hermitages of the north. He stayed for a time with St. Abraham of Chukhloma and finally settled in the Komel forest. On the bank of the Gryazovitsa River he found an old linden tree with a hollow trunk, made it his cell and lived in it for three years in complete silence, "not giving his body rest, that he might receive future rest," as the OCA's account puts it.

Then he moved a little farther, to the Nurma River, built a hut and dug a well. He kept vigil and prayed. For five days of the week he ate nothing; on Saturday and Sunday he took a little bread and water.

A monastery in the forest

A hermit who prays like that is soon found. People came to him for counsel, and Paul, for all his love of solitude, never sent anyone away without comfort. St. Sergius of Nurma, another disciple of Radonezh, lived in the same forests and became his close friend.

The brothers needed a rule. Paul went to Moscow to ask Metropolitan Photius for a blessing to found a monastery. According to the Life, the blessing did not come at once, but only after Photius was moved by a vision. The community dates its founding to 1414, when the Trinity church was built. Paul wrote a strict rule, handed the leadership to his disciple Alexis and went back to his solitary cell on a hill, coming down to the monastery only now and then.

He died on January 10, 1429. His last words to the brothers, as the OCA gives them, were: "Brethren, have love one for another and keep to the rule of the monastic community."

About seventy years after his death, Dionisius, the finest Russian icon painter of his day, and his workshop painted icons for the monastery's Trinity church. Several of them, including this Crucifixion, are now in Moscow.

Miracles and glorification

The Life tells of many traditional miracles at his tomb, and a later version adds a whole cycle of them; we have no independent record of these. What we do know is how his feast came to be kept across Russia. When the monks dug trenches for a new stone church over his grave in the 1540s, they found his body incorrupt, a reported finding recorded in the dictionary's summary of the Life. In 1547 the council of Moscow under Metropolitan Macarius added him to the saints honored throughout the Russian land. Macarius's circular letter to Vologda ordered that the feast be sung "on the 10th day of January" for "the venerable Paul of Obnora, the new wonderworker."

His relics were not placed on view. The dictionary says they lie "under a bushel," hidden beneath the church floor. The Tatars sacked the monastery in 1538, the Soviet state closed it in 1924, and monks returned in 1994. Pilgrims now pray at a wooden shrine over his resting place.

Symbols of St. Paul of Obnora in art

Russian icons show him as a very old monk with a long white or gray beard, in the dark mantle and schema of a hermit. Look for:

• The hollow linden tree: his three years of silence. Some icons place him standing inside the trunk.
• An unrolled scroll: usually lettered with words of counsel to his monks.
• The forest, a hut or a well: his hermitages on the Gryazovitsa and Nurma Rivers.
• A copper cross: the blessing of St. Sergius.

He often appears beside other disciples of St. Sergius and the hermits of the Vologda forests on icons of the northern saints.

Prayer to St. Paul of Obnora

The Orthodox service for his feast includes this troparion, in the translation of the Orthodox Church in America:

Inflamed with divine love from your youth, O venerable Paul, and despising all earthly attractions, you came to love Christ alone, / and for His sake, you settled in the inner wilderness / and lived with the wild animals, entirely for Christ. / Thus, the All-Seeing Eye, having beheld your labors, / enriched you with the gift of miracles, even after your repose. / Therefore, we cry out to you: / Pray unceasingly for us who always revere your honorable memory with hymns of praise.

Let us ask St. Paul to pray for all who seek silence with God, and for every community that tries to keep his last counsel: love one another and keep the rule.