From Pafnuty of Borovsk to Volokolamsk

The formation of St. Joseph of Volotsk: his birth as Ivan Sanin into a service-gentry family near Volokolamsk (c. 1439/40); his long monastic apprenticeship under St. Pafnuty of Borovsk; his brief and stormy abbacy at Borovsk after Pafnuty’s death in 1477, where his attempt to impose a strict full cenobitic rule met the resistance of the brethren; and his departure, his tour of other monasteries (including Kirillo-Belozersk, the heritage of St. Cyril of White Lake), and the 1479 foundation of his own house near Volokolamsk under the patronage of Prince Boris of Volotsk. This file traces the break that produced Volokolamsk; the monastery and its rule are treated in their own section.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (cenobitic founder; “Possessors”)

Ivan Sanin: Birth and Family

The saint known to the church as Joseph (Iosif) of Volotsk was born Ivan Sanin, in or near the small town of Volokolamsk (Volok Lamsky) in the lands then disputed between Moscow, Novgorod, and Tver, to a family of the minor service gentry (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, rev. ed., 2000, biographical introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966). The Sanin family held a small estate, Iazvishche, and several of its members — Ivan’s father and a number of brothers and nephews among them — would in time also take the monastic habit, several at Joseph’s own monastery; the family’s involvement in his foundation is one of the marks of its gentry character.

The exact year of his birth is not certainly fixed by the sources. [Disputed: birth year — the *Lives* and much of the older and standard literature give **1439/1440**, with both 1439 and 1440 cited; Goldfrank (2000) and others note the year is inferred rather than documented, so that any single date is an approximation reconstructed from later vitae rather than a contemporary record]. What is secure is that he belonged to the generation that came to maturity in the reign of Ivan III, in the decades surveyed in the companion file (Muscovy in the Age of Ivan III), and that he was a man of the provincial service class rather than of the great boyar aristocracy — a social location that left its mark on his temperament, his organizing energy, and his eventual closeness to the princely power.

Tonsure and Formation under St. Pafnuty of Borovsk

After an early education in the local monastery (the Lives report a precocious literacy and a youthful inclination to the religious life), the young Ivan Sanin entered, around the age of twenty, the monastery of St. Pafnuty of Borovsk (Paphnutius of Borovsk, c. 1394 – 1 May 1477), where he was tonsured with the name Joseph (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 2000, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966, on Pafnuty and his disciple). Pafnuty, himself a disciple in the spiritual line descending from St. Sergius of Radonezh (see St. Sergius of Radonezh) and notably of Tatar descent on his grandfather’s side, had founded his monastery near Borovsk and governed it with a reputation for severe discipline, personal asceticism, and a fearless plain-speaking toward the powerful — qualities the disciple would conspicuously inherit.

Joseph’s apprenticeship under Pafnuty was long — on the order of eighteen years — and formative. The Lives and the Volokolamsk tradition dwell on his ascetic exertions, his labors in the most menial obediences (the kitchen, the bakery, the care of the sick), his liturgical zeal, and his attention to the dying elders of the house, whose remembered counsels he is said to have gathered (this hagiographical material, and the sources that transmit it, are weighed in The Volokolamsk Paterik and the Vitae; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 it is reported here as the testimony of those sources, not as bare biographical fact). What the formation gave him, and what is uncontested, is a thoroughly cenobitic ideal: a vision of the monastic life as a fully common life — common table, common dress, common labor, common obedience to a rule and a superior — over against the looser, more eremitic or idiorrhythmic arrangements then common in many Russian houses. This ideal, received from Pafnuty and the Sergian tradition, is the seed of everything Joseph later built (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 2000, on the cenobitic background; on the wider tradition, Russian Monasticism).

The Brief Abbacy at Borovsk and the Break

St. Pafnuty died on 1 May 1477. By his own designation, and apparently with the assent of the grand prince, Joseph succeeded him as abbot of the Borovsk monastery (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 2000, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966). The abbacy was short and stormy. Joseph, formed in the strict cenobitic ideal, attempted to reform the house onto a full and rigorous community rule — total community of goods, uniform discipline, the abolition of private possessions and of the laxer customs the brethren had grown used to. The reform met resistance.

The precise reason for the rupture is reported variously, and the sources are partisan: [Disputed: the cause of Joseph's departure from Borovsk — the Volokolamsk hagiographical tradition presents it as the resistance of the older brethren to his stricter full-cenobitic reform, so that, unable to carry the community with him, he left to found a house where the rule could be observed from the first (so the *Lives*; followed in substance by Fedotov, *The Russian Religious Mind*, vol. II, 1966); other accounts and several scholars give weight to friction with **Grand Prince Ivan III**, who is said to have wished to keep Joseph and the wealthy monastery under closer princely control, making the departure as much a flight from princely interference as from internal opposition (discussed in Goldfrank, *The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky*, 2000)]. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive, and the likeliest reading is that internal resistance to the reform and external pressure from the grand prince reinforced one another. Whatever the exact mix, the outcome is clear: Joseph judged that he could not realize the cenobitic ideal at Borovsk, and he left.

The Tour of the Monasteries

Rather than settle at once, Joseph undertook — according to the Lives, in the company of an elder named Gerasim “the Black” (Chorny) and traveling for a time in disguise as a simple monk — a tour of other Russian monasteries, to observe their customs and to test where the strict cenobitic life was best kept (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 2000, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966). The most important station of this tour was the great northern house of Kirillo-Belozersk (the Monastery of St. Cyril of White Lake), founded by St. Cyril (Kirill) of Belozersk / White Lake (1337–1427), itself a daughter-foundation of the Sergian revival and the most influential cenobitic monastery of the Russian north.

The visit to Kirillo-Belozersk mattered in two ways. First, it offered Joseph a living model of a large, well-ordered, fully cenobitic community keeping a strict common rule — a model he is reported to have admired above the others and to have drawn on directly when he came to legislate for his own house (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 2000, on the Kirillov influence on Joseph’s Rule; the rule itself is treated in The Strict Typikon). Second, the Beloozero region was also the heartland of the Trans-Volga hermits and the eremitic-hesychast current associated with St. Nilus of Sora — so that the same northern journey that confirmed Joseph in his cenobitic legislation also brought him into the orbit of the very milieu from which his great interlocutor would come (see St. Nilus of Sora). The encounter and the eventual disagreement between the two ideals are treated in their own section (The 1503 Council and the Two Ways); here it is enough to mark that Joseph’s tour set the cenobitic and the eremitic ideals side by side in his own experience.

The Foundation at Volokolamsk (1479)

Returning to his native district, Joseph sought and obtained the patronage of Prince Boris Vasilievich of Volotsk (Boris of Volok Lamsky), a brother of Grand Prince Ivan III and the appanage lord of the Volokolamsk lands, who granted him a site and material support for a new monastery (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 2000, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966; on the appanage princes of the period, The Mongol and Muscovite Periods). In 1479 — the date conventionally given for the foundation and broadly agreed in the literature, with the first wooden Dormition church reportedly raised that summer — Joseph established the Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God in the forest near Volokolamsk, the house that would bear his name and become, within a generation, one of the most influential monasteries in Muscovy.

The choice of patron is significant. By placing his foundation under an appanage prince — Boris of Volotsk, not the grand prince directly — Joseph secured the independence and the material endowment his cenobitic program required, while the close tie to the princely house from the outset prefigures the alliance of monastery and sovereign power that would mark his whole career (Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 2000; on the church-state model, Church Governance). The break with Borovsk had thus produced not merely a change of residence but a fresh start on Joseph’s own terms: a monastery founded from the ground up to embody the strict common life he had failed to impose on an existing community, endowed well enough to sustain the works of charity he believed monastic wealth existed to fund, and tied closely to a friendly prince. Everything that follows — the rule, the great famine-relief, the campaign against the heresy, the defense of monastic estates, the theology of the God-given sovereign — grows from this 1479 foundation, whose particulars are taken up next (see The Dormition Monastery).

References

Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (Biographical introduction: the Sanin family; tonsure and formation under Pafnuty of Borovsk; the abbacy at Borovsk and the departure; the monastic tour and the influence of Kirillo-Belozersk; the 1479 foundation under Boris of Volotsk; and the dating questions.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II: The Middle Ages, the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Ed. John Meyendorff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (Pafnuty of Borovsk and his disciple; the cenobitic ideal; the break and the foundation; the contrast with the Trans-Volga current.)
Meyendorff, John. Russia: Ritual Mind and Reality. (And Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, for the appanage and church-state context of the foundation.)
Lurie, Ya. S. (Lur’e). Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960. (The wider publicistic and ecclesial context of Joseph’s career.)