The Counsels

The actual teaching of the Testament of St. John of Rila, set out in its own words: the charge to keep the received faith pure and undivided; the warning that gold and silver are the monk’s great enemies; the refusal of dependence on kings and princes; the call to humility, to manual labor wedded to the Jesus Prayer, and above all to unity of heart. Whatever its date, the Zavet is one of the great statements of Slavic monastic spirituality, and its counsels are the working charter of the Rila tradition.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

Reading the Counsels

This file presents the substance of the Testament (Zavet) — what it actually teaches — as distinct from the question of when and by whom it was written, which is treated in The Zavet. The quotations below follow the English translation by Ilija Iliev, based on the standard edition of Iordan Ivanov (Свети Иван Рилски и неговият манастир, Sofia, 1917). Because the text’s authorship is contested, these are given as the counsels of the Testament — the teaching the Rila tradition has received as St. John’s — and not asserted as verbatim tenth-century words of the saint (per METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Zavet for the full authenticity discussion).

The Scriptural Texture of the Testament

Before the individual counsels are taken up, it is worth noticing how the Testament speaks. It does not argue; it exhorts in the cadence of Scripture, weaving its teaching out of a small, deliberate set of biblical texts so that each counsel rests on an apostolic or prophetic word rather than on the saint’s bare authority. This is itself a mark of the monastic literary tradition, in which the elder’s voice is validated precisely by its transparency to the Word of God. Four citations carry the architecture of the whole. The warning on poverty is anchored in 1 Timothy 6:10, “the love of money is the root of all evil” (Greek philargyria, literally “love of silver” — the very vice the monk renounces); the counsel against earthly patronage is sealed with Jeremiah 17:5, “Cursed be the man that hopeth in man”; the charge to humility turns on the dominical word of Mark 9:35, “If one would be first, he must be last of all, and servant of all”; and the climactic appeal to unity invokes Psalm 133 (132 LXX), “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity” (Testament of St. John of Rila, trans. Iliev). To these the “royal road” image (below) joins the Deuteronomic and Proverbial language of turning “neither to the right nor to the left” (cf. Deut. 5:32, Prov. 4:27). The effect is that the Testament reads less as a personal memoir than as a tissue of Scripture applied to the monastic life — the standard texture of the genre, and one reason its individual counsels feel less like novelties than like the distillation of the common patristic-monastic mind.

Keeping the Faith Pure

The first and governing counsel is fidelity to the received faith, undivided and unaltered. The Testament charges the brethren to “preserve the holy faith immaculate and unaffected by any false teaching, just as we received it from the holy fathers,” and, in an image that would recur through Orthodox spiritual writing, to “walk along the royal road,” deviating “neither to the right, nor to the left” (Testament of St. John of Rila, trans. Iliev). This is the bedrock: not innovation but transmission, the handing-on of what was handed down — the same instinct that makes John, in the later Bulgarian memory, a guardian of the nation’s Orthodoxy (see The Bulgarian Church).

The image of the “royal road” (Latin via regia) carries a long ascetic pedigree and is doing precise work here. From Cassian and the desert fathers onward, the spiritual masters used it to name the middle way of discretion that avoids the twin ditches of excess and deficiency — too much austerity and too little, presumption and despair — keeping to the king’s highway that runs straight between them. In the Testament‘s “neither to the right, nor to the left,” the figure is applied above all to doctrine: Orthodoxy as the narrow, royal middle that turns aside neither into one heresy nor into its opposite, holding the received faith without addition or subtraction. The counsel has a particular edge in the tenth-century Bulgarian setting, for John’s lifetime coincided with the rise of the Bogomil dualist heresy, which took root in Bulgaria during the reign of Tsar Peter I (r. 927–969) — the very tsar of John’s own gold-refusal — and against which the contemporary Presbyter Cosmas wrote his Sermon Against the Heretics (Bogomilism and Cosmas the Priest, Wikipedia). The charge to keep the faith “immaculate and unaffected by any false teaching” reads naturally as a guard set against exactly such innovation, and it is consonant with the later Bulgarian memory of John as a bulwark of the nation’s Orthodoxy (see The Bulgarian Church). To keep the royal road is therefore not bland moderation but fidelity under pressure — the refusal to be drawn off the highway of the apostolic faith by the heresies crowding its verges.

Gold and Silver, the Enemies of the Monk

The most famous and most concentrated theme of the Testament is its absolute teaching on poverty. The monk is to “keep yourselves away from the avaricious snake, ‘for the love of money is the root of all evil’” (1 Tim. 6:10), and the Testament states the matter as bluntly as it can be stated: “gold and silver are great enemies of the monk” (Testament, trans. Iliev). True wealth, it teaches, lies in the opposite — “in perfect poverty, in the denial of his personal will.”

It is within this teaching that the Testament narrates, in the first person, the episode of Tsar Peter’s gold: “the pious king sent to me a lot of gold… For the sake of God I refused to see him… I did not accept it, but returned it,” with the rhetorical clinch, “If I wished to have gold and silver… why came I into this terrible and impenetrable wilderness?” (Testament, trans. Iliev). This first-person narration of the gold-refusal is exactly why the Testament is entangled with the Tsar Peter tradition and its authenticity debate (the episode is treated in full in The King and the Hermit).

Not Looking to Kings and Princes

Tightly bound to the teaching on gold is the Testament‘s counsel against dependence on earthly power. The brethren are warned: “Nor look to be recognized and beloved by earthly kings and princes, nor put your hope in them,” with the citation of Jeremiah, “‘Cursed be the man that hopeth in man’” (Jer. 17:5), and the further charge “do not allow them to live among you” (Testament, trans. Iliev). The monastery is to be free — sustained by its own labor and the providence of God, not by the patronage of the great and not entangled in their world. This is the principle the Rila tradition would invoke through the Ottoman centuries and the National Revival as the founder’s charter of monastic independence (see Holiness and Power). The explicit textual target is dependence on secular rulers and on landed wealth; a formal claim of independence from Church authority is a later interpretive gloss rather than a clause of the text (see The Zavet).

Humility

Against the appetite for precedence the Testament sets the Gospel reversal. “Do not seek the first place and authority,” it charges, “but remember the words of the Lord: ‘If one would be first, he must be last of all, and servant of all’” (Mark 9:35) (Testament, trans. Iliev). The lowliness that John’s whole life dramatized — the herdsman who would not be a tsar’s guest — is here pressed on the community as its governing virtue.

Labor and the Jesus Prayer

For the daily fabric of monastic life the Testament gives the ancient counsel of work joined to prayer: “Manual labor must not be neglected by you… work must be in your hands, and the prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’ must be permanently on your lips” (Testament, trans. Iliev). The marriage of manual labor and the unceasing Jesus Prayer is the heart of hesychast practice; its presence here is both the spiritual core of the counsels and (for the critics) one of the markers that point the surviving text toward the fourteenth-century Hesychast milieu (see The Zavet).

Unity

The Testament rises to its climax in the counsel to unity. The community, it teaches, was gathered by the Holy Spirit and must therefore live as one: “as the grace of the Holy Spirit brought you together, so must you endeavor to live with one heart and one mind and one spirit.” And it issues the sharpest of warnings against the ambition that destroys common life: “if all of you begin to desire authority… be aware that Christ is not among you, for Christ is not the teacher of discord” (Testament, trans. Iliev). The endorsement of the common life follows directly — “communal living is in many ways more useful for monks than solitude” — sealed with Psalm 133 (132 LXX): “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity” (Testament, trans. Iliev; on the cenobitic implications see The Monastic Rule).

The Testament in Slavic Monastic Literature

Whatever its date, the Zavet occupies a distinctive place in the literature of Slavic monasticism. The genre of the monastic “testament” or farewell discourse is ancient — its archetype is the dying Antony’s parting words to his monks in Athanasius’s Life, and the form runs through Byzantine foundation-charters and the Hypotyposis of St. Theodore the Studite down to the great Slavic instances. Within that family the Rila Testament stands as the Bulgarian counterpart to the documents by which other founder-saints fixed the spirit of their houses: it belongs in the company of the rules and testaments of the Slavic monastic founders, even as it differs from the fuller juridical typika of St. Sava of Serbia, who left his houses detailed Athonite and Studenica constitutions (see The Monastic Rule). What sets the Rila text apart is its compression and its register: where Sava legislates, John exhorts; the Zavet is shorter, more purely spiritual, closer to a deathbed homily than to a code, and it is this homiletic intensity — the few load-bearing counsels driven home with Scripture — that has given it its long devotional life. If it is genuinely early, it is among the first monuments of original Bulgarian monastic prose, standing near the head of the Slavic Orthodox tradition of the spiritual testament; if it is a later composition, it is a studied and successful exercise in that same tradition, reaching back to clothe the convictions of a subsequent age in the founder’s voice (see The Zavet). On either reading it has functioned, across the Ottoman centuries and the National Revival, as the charter-text of the Rila tradition — the document the monastery has reached for whenever it needed to say what it was for.

The Shape of the Whole

Read together, the counsels form a coherent and demanding spirituality: a pure and undivided faith; a poverty so radical that gold is an enemy and the patronage of kings a snare; a humility that refuses precedence; a daily life of labor and unceasing prayer; and a unity of heart without which, the text insists, Christ is absent. This is the spiritual portrait the Rila tradition has carried as its founder’s, and it is the moral substance behind every later invocation of “the spirit of St. John” — in the monastery’s survival, its revival, and its place in Bulgarian Orthodoxy (see John of Rila in Bulgarian Identity). Whether John spoke these exact words or a later age spoke them in his name, they are the words by which his tradition has lived.

References

Testament of St. John of Rila, trans. Ilija Iliev. Pravoslavieto.com and OrthoChristian.com, based on the edition in Iordan Ivanov, Свети Иван Рилски и неговият манастир (Sofia, 1917), pp. 136–142. (All quoted counsels: faith, gold and silver, kings and princes, humility, manual labor and the Jesus Prayer, unity, the common life.)
Ivanov, Iordan (Йордан Иванов). Свети Иван Рилски и неговият манастир [St. John of Rila and His Monastery]. Sofia, 1917 (repr. 1990). The standard edition of the Testament.
Cholakov, Petko (Петко Чолаков). “Заветът на св. Йоан Рилски и неговата автентичност.” Littera et Lingua, 2013, nos. 3–4. On the hesychast features and the dating implications of the counsels.
Bogomilism and Cosmas the Priest (Sermon Against the Heretics). Wikipedia. On the rise of the Bogomil dualist heresy in Bulgaria under Tsar Peter I (r. 927–969), contemporary with St. John, and the tenth-century anti-Bogomil polemic of Presbyter Cosmas.