Possessors and Non-Possessors

The sharpest debate in the history of Orthodox monasticism pitted two canonized saints against each other: St. Joseph of Volotsk, who defended the right of monasteries to own lands and wealth for the sake of charity, culture, and the Church’s mission, and St. Nilus of Sora, who taught that monks should own nothing and live by their own labor in poor sketes given to interior prayer. This file presents the controversy from both sides without adjudicating it — a genuine and unresolved tension between two authentic monastic ideals — and follows the thread to the eighteenth-century Paisian revival that renewed the Non-Possessor, hesychast strand.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

Two Saints, Two Ideals

The controversy of the “Possessors” (stiazhateli / iosifliane, the Josephites) and the “Non-Possessors” (nestiazhateli, literally “non-acquirers”) arose in the Russian Church at the turn of the sixteenth century, and it remains the classic Orthodox statement of a permanent tension: can a monastery, vowed to poverty, rightly own lands, villages, and dependent peasants? Both protagonists are saints of the Church, and the tradition has canonized both — which is itself the deepest lesson of the affair, that here two authentic and holy ideals of the monastic life came into real and unresolved conflict (George P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, Harvard, 1966, the classic treatment; and the primary studies in the references below). This file follows METHODOLOGY §4: it names the positions and their proponents and does not pronounce a winner.

Saint Joseph of Volotsk and the Possessor Position

St. Joseph of Volotsk (Iosif Volotsky, 1439–1515), founder of the Volokolamsk monastery, was the great abbot-organizer of the landed coenobium. His monastery was a model of strict communal discipline, elaborate liturgical order, and large-scale social service: it fed thousands in times of famine, ran charitable institutions, educated, copied books, and stood as a pillar of the Church and of ordered Christian society (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, 1966; David M. Goldfrank, ed. and trans., The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, Cistercian, 1983). Joseph’s case for monastic property, the Possessor position, ran essentially thus:

Monasteries need lands and endowments not for the private enrichment of monks — who individually own nothing and live under strict poverty and obedience — but corporately, so that the community can feed the poor, care for the sick, offer hospitality, ransom captives, educate, and sustain the beauty and fullness of the liturgy (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 1983; Fedotov, vol. 2, 1966).
A wealthy, well-ordered monastery can attract and support men of rank and learning, supply the Church with capable bishops, and serve the Christian commonwealth; monastic poverty is real at the level of the individual monk even where the community is rich.
The Church’s dignity and mission in the world require material means; to strip monasteries of their lands would cripple their charity and their service to society.

Joseph is also remembered for his firm alliance of Church and state and his zeal against the “Judaizer” heresy — dimensions of his career that belong to his own collection, St. Joseph of Volotsk.

Saint Nilus of Sora and the Non-Possessor Position

St. Nilus of Sora (Nil Sorsky, c. 1433–1508), who had spent time on Mount Athos and drunk deeply of the hesychast tradition, founded a poor skete on the river Sora in the northern forests and became the master of the contemplative, Non-Possessor ideal (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, 1966; George A. Maloney, Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorskij, Mouton, 1973; Nil Sorsky, The Complete Writings, trans. George A. Maloney, Paulist Press, 2003). Nilus’ case, the Non-Possessor position, ran essentially thus:

Monks profess poverty, and the profession must be real: a monastery that owns villages and lords it over peasants contradicts the renunciation at the heart of the vocation. Monks should live by the labor of their own hands and by modest alms, owning nothing beyond necessity (Maloney, Russian Hesychasm, 1973; Nil Sorsky, Skete Rule and the Tradition to the Disciples).
The purpose of the monastic life is inner transformation — watchfulness over the thoughts, the cutting off of the passions, and the prayer of the heart — and the management of great estates entangles monks in worldly cares that choke the interior life; the small, poor skete is the setting proper to hesychast prayer (Maloney, Russian Hesychasm, 1973; and see Hesychasm and the Prayer of the Heart).
Nilus was also notably merciful in the parallel question of how to treat heretics, counseling persuasion rather than execution — a stance often linked with the broader Non-Possessor sensibility (Fedotov, vol. 2, 1966; on which see the two saints’ collections).

Nilus’ spirituality, his Skete Rule, and his teaching on the eight thoughts and the prayer of the heart are deferred to St. Nilus of Sora.

The Debate and Its Uncertain History

The two ideals came into public collision in the reign of Ivan III. The traditional narrative places the decisive confrontation at a Church council in Moscow in 1503, at which — the older accounts say — Nilus (supported by the “Trans-Volga elders”) argued that monasteries should renounce their landed villages, and Joseph and the majority prevailed in defending monastic property (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, 1966, giving the traditional account). Here honesty requires a source-critical note.

[Disputed: the exact course of the 1503 council and Nilus of Sora's role in it. The traditional narrative — that the 1503 council directly debated a proposal to secularize monastic lands, with Nilus leading the Non-Possessor side against Joseph — rests on later and partly polemical sources, and several modern scholars have questioned how much of it is retrospective construction. Donald Ostrowski and others argue that the sharp, programmatic "Possessor vs. Non-Possessor" opposition, and Nilus' dramatic leadership at the council, were shaped and hardened by later writers (notably in the disputes of the mid-sixteenth century and by the publicist Vassian Patrikeev, Nilus' disciple), so that the neat schema flattens a more tangled reality (Donald Ostrowski, "Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy," *Slavonic and East European Review* 64, 1986; and the discussion in the studies of Nilus). The traditional account is given by Fedotov, *The Russian Religious Mind*, vol. 2, 1966. This file reports the controversy as a real and substantial one — the two ideals and the two saints are historical — while flagging that the precise events of 1503 and the tidiness of the two "parties" are debated among historians.]

What is not in serious doubt is that a genuine difference of monastic ideal existed and was consequential, and that it long outlived the two saints. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Stoglav (“Hundred Chapters”) council of 1551 again took up the question of monastic landholding and largely upheld the monasteries’ possessions, and the polemics continued through the writings of Nilus’ disciple Vassian Patrikeev and, later, Maximus the Greek (Fedotov, vol. 2, 1966; Ostrowski, 1986). The Possessor outcome broadly prevailed in institutional terms — the great landed monasteries remained until the state itself secularized them under Catherine II in 1764 (see Persecution and Revival).

Two Authentic Ideals, Not a Verdict

The enduring significance of the controversy is precisely that the Church declined to resolve it by condemning either side. Both Joseph and Nilus are glorified saints; both ideals — the socially engaged, charitable, landed coenobium and the poor, withdrawn, hesychast skete — are recognized as authentic forms of the one monastic vocation. The debate restates in Russian terms a tension as old as Byzantine monasticism and its wealth (see The Monasteries of Byzantium), and as old, indeed, as the coexistence of the coenobitic and eremitic streams from the desert onward. It is not that one side was right and the other wrong, but that the monastic vocation genuinely contains both a summons to serve the world through ordered, resourced community and a summons to flee the world into poverty and stillness — and that these can pull against each other. The tradition holds both in an unresolved tension rather than collapsing one into the other (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, 1966; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 2015).

The Paisian Revival

The Non-Possessor, hesychast strand, institutionally overshadowed for centuries by the great landed monasteries and then battered by the secularizations of Peter and Catherine, was powerfully renewed in the eighteenth century by St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794). After formation on Mount Athos, Paisius gathered a large community in Moldavia (at Dragomirna, then Secu and Neamț) built around obedience to a spiritual father, the prayer of the heart, and the study of the Fathers, and he undertook the labor of translating the hesychast texts of the Philokalia into Slavonic — the Dobrotolubie, published at Moscow in 1793 (Fedotov, vol. 2, 1966; Ware, introduction to the Philokalia, vol. 1, Faber, 1979; and see St. Paisius Velichkovsky). Through Paisius’ disciples this revival of contemplative, elder-centered, “non-possessing” monasticism spread into Russia and gave rise to the great nineteenth-century flowering of the startsy (elders), above all at Optina Pustyn (see The Optina Elders and The Elder and the Disciple). In the Paisian revival the ideal of St. Nilus — poverty, the skete, and the prayer of the heart — returned to the center of Russian spiritual life, not by defeating the Josephite ideal but by renewing the other pole of the tradition’s abiding polarity.

References

Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The classic account of the Possessor/Non-Possessor controversy, Joseph, Nilus, and the traditional narrative of the 1503 council.)
Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1983. (Joseph’s Rule; the Possessor position.)
Maloney, George A. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorskij. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (Nilus’ hesychasm and the Non-Possessor ideal.)
Nil Sorsky. The Complete Writings. Trans. George A. Maloney. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 2003. (The Skete Rule and the Tradition to the Disciples.)
Ostrowski, Donald. “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy.” Slavonic and East European Review 64, no. 3 (1986): 355–79. (The source-critical questioning of the traditional 1503 narrative.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (The two ideals held in tension; the Paisian revival.)
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Philokalia, vol. 1. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (Paisius Velichkovsky and the Dobrotolubie.)