Arsenius of Komel

Saint Arsenius of Komel (died 1550) was abbot of the Holy Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius, then a hermit in the Komel forest and founder of the Arseniev monastery near Vologda, a wonderworker of the Vologda land. He is venerated in the Russian Church as a venerable saint; the sources do not give the date of canonization. He is commemorated on 24 August.

Beginnings

He was born in Moscow, of the boyar family of Sukharusov. The main source for his life is the "Tale of the Life and Part of the Miracles of our Venerable Father Arsenius, the Abbot who Built the Monastery of the Mother of God in the Komel Forest", written by the monk John. While still young he was tonsured at the monastery of Saint Sergius of Radonezh. There, in 1506, he copied the Gospel from a manuscript brought by Prince Yuri. This Gospel, later kept in his monastery at Komel, is valuable because it is written without word division, with a full stop and a colon, and so is a faithful copy of a very ancient original.

Abbot and hermit

In 1525, for his strict monastic life, he was ordained priest and made abbot of the monastery of Saint Sergius. Although the monastery was rich and Grand Prince Basil asked him not to leave it, since he kept it in exemplary order, Arsenius gave up the abbacy and, at the end of 1527 (1529 according to another source), withdrew to the Komel forest. On the empty banks of the rivers Kakhtyzh and Lezha he planted a cross and made himself a hut. The place was visited by woodcutters and hunters from Vologda. The peasants disliked his cell and killed the old man who attended him. Arsenius then moved to the neighbouring Shilegov forest, on the river Ingir, or Maslyanka, where he laboured.

Soon zealots of piety began to come there seeking guidance. During a raid of the Tatars on the Vologda land the inhabitants fled in crowds from the villages to the Shilegov forest, and the quiet of the desert that Arsenius loved was disturbed. He entrusted the hermitage he had founded to one of his disciples and settled again in his former place in the Komel forest.

The monastery

In 1530 he received a charter from Grand Prince Basil Ivanovich and built the monastery named after him (the Arseniev-⁠Komel monastery of the Deposition of the Robe of the Mother of God, which has not survived), thirty-⁠eight kilometres from Vologda, where he lived with his beloved disciple Gerasimus. On 13 July 1539 Grand Prince Ivan Vasilievich gave him a charter of exemption from jurisdiction, by which the monastery and all peasants settled within five kilometres were freed from obligations toward the secular authority. In 1543 he received a new charter that widened the monastery's rights still more.

After long days of ascetic labour in the Komel forest, the venerable one reposed at a great age on 24 August 1550 in the Arseniev monastery. His relics rested under a stone in the monastery's stone church of the Deposition of the Robe of the Mother of God, in a side chapel built in his honour.