The Dormition (Uspensky) Monastery at Volokolamsk

In 1479 Joseph, having broken with his former house, founded a new cenobitic monastery dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God in the forest near Volok Lamsky (Volokolamsk), on land granted by the appanage prince Boris Vasilievich of Volotsk. Within a generation the house grew from a wooden hermitage into one of the wealthiest and most powerful monasteries of Muscovy, with a stone Dormition cathedral adorned by frescoes from the circle of the great painter Dionysius, vast estates accumulated through princely and boyar vklady (donation-commemoration gifts), a developed system of synodikon commemoration, and a library that made it a center of book culture. This file establishes the foundation, its patrons, the buildings, and the economic and cultural growth of the monastery as Joseph’s most concrete and enduring achievement.

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

The Foundation of 1479

Joseph Sanin left the Borovsk monastery of his teacher St. Pafnuty after a conflict over the introduction of a strict cenobitic rule under Pafnuty’s successor, and after a period of wandering through other houses to study their observance he resolved to found a monastery of his own (on this break see From Pafnuty of Borovsk to Volokolamsk). The traditional and scholarly date for the foundation is 1479, in the forest near the town of Volok Lamsky — Volokolamsk — within the appanage principality of Volotsk, from which Joseph takes the epithet Volotsky (Goldfrank 2000, introduction; Fedotov 1966, on the founding of Volokolamsk). The dedication was to the Dormition (Uspenie) of the Most Holy Mother of God, and from that dedication the house is known as the Iosifo-Volokolamsky or Volokolamsk Dormition (Uspensky) Monastery.

The foundation was not a private venture but a patronized one. The land and the initial support came from Prince Boris Vasilievich of Volotsk, brother of Grand Prince Ivan III, in whose appanage the site lay (Goldfrank 2000; Fedotov 1966). The hagiographical tradition — above all the Life by Savva Chorny and the Volokolamsk Paterik (see The Volokolamsk Paterik and the Vitae) — recounts that Joseph arrived with a small band of like-minded monks and that the first church was of wood, raised quickly so that the liturgical and communal life could begin at once. The choice of a princely appanage as the site, and of a prince as the first patron, set the pattern for everything that followed: Volokolamsk would be, from its first day, a house bound to the ruling family and the landed elite, and it would draw its wealth and its commemorative obligations from them.

That binding to the princely house was not static. The appanage of Volotsk did not long survive as an independent unit, and over the following decades the monastery’s principal patron shifted from the local appanage prince toward the grand-princely center at Moscow — a shift that is itself part of the story of how Joseph’s house became a national rather than a merely local institution and of the church-state alignment he came to champion (see The Josephite Ascendancy; on the wider political world, The Mongol and Muscovite Periods).

The Stone Dormition Cathedral and Its Frescoes

The first wooden church was replaced, as the community grew and its resources increased, by a stone cathedral of the Dormition. The building of a masonry cathedral was a major undertaking and a public marker of the monastery’s wealth and standing; it placed Volokolamsk in the architectural company of the great houses rather than the forest hermitages. The cathedral was decorated with a full program of wall-painting, and it is here that the monastery enters the history of Russian art.

The decoration is connected with Dionysius (Dionisii), the leading Muscovite icon-painter and muralist of the turn of the sixteenth century, the master whose surviving frescoes at the Ferapontov monastery (1502) are among the supreme monuments of Russian painting (on the theology of the image these works embody, see Icons and Iconoclasm). The relationship between Dionysius’s workshop and Volokolamsk is genuinely attested in the Muscovite record, but the precise extent of the great master’s personal participation is a matter on which caution is owed. [Disputed: that Dionysius and his sons/workshop executed wall-paintings and icons for the Volokolamsk Dormition cathedral is attested in the sixteenth-century sources surrounding the monastery and is accepted in the standard art-historical literature (Lazarev, *Russian Icon Painting*; Smirnova and the Dionysius scholarship); whether Dionysius himself personally painted at Volokolamsk, as opposed to supplying works and supervising a workshop that did, cannot be fixed with certainty, since the cathedral's original decoration does not survive in situ and the attributions rest on documentary and stylistic inference rather than a signed program]. What is secure is that Volokolamsk under Joseph was a patron of the first rank of Muscovite painting and that the names of Dionysius and his circle belong to its early decades.

The early inventories of the monastery — the opisi that survive from the sixteenth century — record a rich treasury of icons, liturgical vessels, vestments, and books, the material expression of the donations described below; these inventories are themselves a principal source for the monastery’s wealth and for the attributions of its art (Goldfrank 2000, on the sources; the Volokolamsk monastery inventories).

Growth Through Princely and Boyar Donations: The Vklady

The rapid growth of Volokolamsk in monks, lands, and wealth was driven by a specific Muscovite institution: the vklad — a donation given to a monastery in exchange for commemoration. A vklad might be money, liturgical objects, or, most consequentially, land and villages with their peasants; in return the monastery undertook to enroll the donor (and his named kin) in its commemorative books and to pray for them in perpetuity, and often to receive the donor for burial or as a monk at the end of his life (Goldfrank 2000; Ostrowski 1986). The system married the spiritual economy of intercession to the material economy of landholding, and it was the engine of monastic enrichment across late-medieval Russia.

Volokolamsk became one of its great beneficiaries. Princes — beginning with Boris of Volotsk and extending to members of the grand-princely house and the appanage families — and boyars of the leading Muscovite clans gave lands, money, and goods to the house, so that within a few decades of its founding the monastery had accumulated extensive estates and stood among the wealthiest in the realm (Fedotov 1966; Ostrowski 1986; Goldfrank 2000). This accumulation is precisely the fact that Joseph would later defend in principle against the Trans-Volga critics of monastic landholding: he held that the monastery’s corporate wealth was the necessary material basis of its charity, hospitality, liturgical splendor, and the maintenance of a learned and well-supported clergy (the full argument is treated in The Case for Monastic Estates; the contrast with St. Nilus of Sora in The 1503 Council and the Two Ways).

The accumulation of estates also placed Volokolamsk squarely within the broader Muscovite question of monastic landholding and its governance — the issue that would dominate church councils for the next half-century and that touched directly on the relation of church and ruling power (see Church Governance).

Synodikon Commemoration and the Spiritual Economy of the Vklad

The counterpart to the vklad was the synodikon (sinodik, pomiannik) — the commemorative book in which the names of donors and their kin were entered for liturgical remembrance. The Volokolamsk synodika and the related vkladnye knigi (donation books) and kormovye knigi (books regulating the commemorative meals, kormy, served on donors’ memorial days) are among the richest surviving witnesses to this practice in Muscovy, and they are a principal documentary source for the monastery’s economic and social history (Goldfrank 2000, on the monastery’s record-keeping; Ludwig Steindorff and others on the Volokolamsk commemorative books).

The system was integral to Joseph’s whole vision of the monastery’s purpose. The community of monks, freed from private property and ordered by a strict cenobitic discipline (see The Strict Typikon), existed in part to discharge an immense and perpetual liturgical debt of prayer for the living and the dead who had endowed it. Commemoration was not incidental to the donations; it was their consideration. The donor gave land; the monastery gave prayer — daily, named, in perpetuity — and the synodikon was the ledger of that exchange, binding the landed elite of Muscovy to the monastery in a relationship that was at once spiritual and economic. This is the concrete mechanism by which a house vowed to total poverty for each of its monks became, corporately, one of the richest landholders in the country — the very paradox at the heart of Joseph’s rule.

A Major Economic and Spiritual Center

By the early sixteenth century the Volokolamsk Dormition Monastery had become a major institution of the Muscovite church and state alike. Its estates supported a large community and an extensive economy of agriculture, milling, and trade; its granaries and resources underwrote a documented program of charity and, in time of dearth, of mass famine relief — the great test of Joseph’s principle that corporate wealth exists for the poor (see Charity and the Famine). Spiritually it was the mother-house of the Josephite movement: it formed monks who went out to become abbots and bishops, and through them the discipline and the church-political program of its founder spread across the Russian hierarchy in the decades after his death (see The Josephite Ascendancy).

The monastery stood within, and in a sense crowned, the cenobitic revival that St. Sergius of Radonezh had set in motion in the fourteenth century; Volokolamsk represents the wealthy, highly organized, estate-holding wing of that movement, as against the eremitic and “non-possessing” wing associated with the Trans-Volga elders (on the two currents, see Russian Monasticism; St. Sergius of Radonezh; St. Nilus of Sora).

Library and Book Culture

Volokolamsk was also, and notably, a center of book production and learning. Joseph was himself an author of major works — the polemical Enlightener (Prosvetitel) and his Monastic Rule, together with a large body of epistles (see The Prosvetitel) — and he built a monastery whose library and scriptorium matched that intellectual program. The monastery assembled one of the most important manuscript collections of sixteenth-century Russia, encompassing scriptural, patristic, canonical, liturgical, and polemical works, and its scriptorium produced and copied books on a considerable scale (Goldfrank 2000, on Joseph’s library and learning; Fedotov 1966).

This book culture was not incidental to the monastery’s mission but central to it. Joseph’s whole campaign against the Novgorod-Moscow heresy rested on the marshalling of patristic and scriptural authority, and that campaign was unthinkable without a working library and a community trained to read and copy it (see Joseph as Theologian). The same corporate wealth that endowed the cathedral and its frescoes endowed the library; the learned, well-resourced, polemically armed monastery was the institutional form Joseph gave to Russian Orthodoxy at the turn of the sixteenth century, and Volokolamsk was its model. The monastery’s later history — its fortunes after Joseph, its eventual fate, and its modern restoration — is treated with his canonization and legacy (see Canonization and Relics).

See Also

References

  • Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (Introduction on the foundation, patrons, sources, library, and the vklad/commemoration system of the Volokolamsk monastery.)
  • 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. (The founding of Volokolamsk; its wealth and place in Russian monastic history.)
  • Ostrowski, Donald. “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy.” Slavonic and East European Review 64, no. 3 (1986): 355–379. (Monastic landholding, donations, and the vklad in the Muscovite church.)
  • Lazarev, Viktor N. Russian Icon Painting from Its Origins to the Early Sixteenth Century. (On Dionysius, his workshop, and the Muscovite mural painting of c. 1500 to which the Volokolamsk decoration belongs; the attributions discussed are art-historical inferences.)
  • Steindorff, Ludwig. Memoria in Altrussland: Untersuchungen zu den Formen christlicher Totensorge. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994. (The Russian commemorative books — synodika, vkladnye and kormovye knigi — and the Volokolamsk material as a principal witness to the practice.)