Arsenius the Hard-⁠worker

Venerable Arsenius the Hard-⁠worker was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra, who lived at the end of the thirteenth century and in the fourteenth. He is a saint of the Russian Church, venerated among the venerable. His commemoration is, by the old calendar, on 8 May (21 May on the new style) and on 28 August, in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves of Kiev.

Arsenius is known from the inscription on his gravestone, kept in the lavra until 1941, and from the Teratourgima of the monk Athanasius Kalnofoisky, of 1638. His local veneration began at the end of the seventeenth century, when the archimandrite of the lavra Barlaam (Yasinsky), the future metropolitan of Kiev, established the celebration of the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Far Caves. In the service composed then, Arsenius is mentioned in the fourth troparion of the fourth ode of the canon, praised as an image of the hard-⁠worker, with the gift of wonderworking. The Description of Russian Saints, known from copies of the late seventeenth century, numbers him among the saints of the city of Kiev.

Veneration throughout the Church began after the permission of the Holy Synod, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to enter the names of a number of Kievan saints in the church calendars. The commemoration of Arsenius on 8 May was set in honour of his sharing a name with Venerable Arsenius the Great. The Icon Painters' Manual of the late eighteenth century says that he is to be depicted grey, with the beard of Sergius, a black klobuk on his head, in monastic vestments. The Serbian source says that he never rested but worked without ceasing, that he took food only once a day, after sunset, and that he struggled and fell asleep in the fourteenth century.