Dorotheus of Radonezh

Venerable Dorotheus of Radonezh (also called Dorotheus of the Trinity or Dorotheus the Bookman) was a monk of the Trinity-⁠Saint Sergius Lavra and died about the year 1613. He is a saint of the Russian Church. His commemoration is on 19 July (6 July by the old calendar), in the Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh.

Almost no information has been preserved about his childhood and life in the world, and the other information is very scanty. It is taken mainly from the Life of Venerable Dionysius, from the chapter On Dorotheus the Monk and His Strict Life, and rests on the accounts of Dionysius himself and on the manuscripts of the Moscow bookman Ivan Nasedka. Dorotheus is also mentioned in the narrative of the appearance of Venerable Dionysius and Dorotheus to the priest Theodore. The author of the Life is Simon (Azaryin).

It is known that in his youth Dorotheus was beset by sinful thoughts and, to get rid of them, he mortified his flesh: he neither drank nor ate for days on end, which in the end led to great exhaustion. Ivan Nasedka wrote that illness came upon him from excessive fasting and great thirst, and his legs swelled from standing at the service entrusted to him. Besides this, he read the Psalter daily, made a thousand prostrations a day and did not sleep lying down. For this he was often the object of reproaches and sometimes mockery from the brethren, but he bore it all with submission.

Venerable Dorotheus was the closest associate and cell attendant of the archimandrite of the Trinity Lavra, Dionysius of Radonezh, and zealously helped him in the work of aid to those struck in the Time of Troubles and who had found shelter in the monastery. It is said that by night he was always conversing with the sick, the naked and the maimed and reporting all to the archimandrite, and for the poor and infirm he did everything useful and good. In the chronicles Dorotheus is called a great labourer.

At the time of the publication of the Russian Biographical Dictionary of Saints, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Dorotheus was not yet canonized, although an early local veneration of him is shown by the mention of his name, without a date, in the Menology of Simon (Azaryin), printed in the seventeenth century, in which Dorotheus is called venerable. In 1981 Dorotheus was included in the Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh, and with the latter his day of commemoration is also kept. Dorotheus the Bookman died about 1613 at the Trinity-⁠Saint Sergius Lavra, where he was also buried.