Hieromonk Arseniy (Worldly Aleksandr Minin) — Founder of the New Athos Monastery Named After Simon the Canaanean

Abstract

The article presents an outline of the life of Hieromonk Arseniy (worldly Aleksandr Minin) — founder and first builder of the New Athos Monastery named after Simon the Canaanean. According to the preserved sources, his path is traced, which preceded the trip to Athos. Upon arrival at the Holy Mountain of Athos, Aleksandr Minin carried out various assignments of the elders in the monastery. The return to Russia was associated with a new taking of God’s orders by collecting donations for Panteleimon Russian Monastery on Athos. Vigorous activity about Arseny consisted in the arrangement of a permanent monastery courtyard in Moscow, a chapel, where the Athonite shrines brought by him were preserved. Fr. Arseny stood at the origins of the publishing activity of the Athos Saint Panteleimon Monastery, founded in 1878 in Moscow its periodical “The Soul-Saving Reflections” (“The Soul-Saving Interlocutor”). He himself wrote a lot, mainly spiritual and moral instructions, instructive letters. In the mid- 1870s Fr. Arseniy’s taking of God’s orders was supplemented with one more, more difficult one — the response to the oppression of the Russian monks on the Holy Mountain, he was instructed to find a place on the Black Sea coast where a monastery could be built, a certain prototype of Russik, where its monastic traditions and Rule would be observed. Fr. Arseniy found such a place near Sukhumi, where there was a destroyed church in the name of St. the Apostle Simon the Canaanean. In 1875 the dispensation of the New Athos Monastery named after Simon the Canaanean began. For the history of the monastery, information about its founder is of absolute value.