The Enlightener (Prosvetitel’)

The Enlightener (Prosvetitel’), also transmitted as The Book Against the Novgorod Heretics (Kniga na novgorodskikh eretikov), is St. Joseph of Volotsk’s great anti-heretical compendium, a chain of sixteen “Words” (Slova) assembled to refute the so-called “Judaizer” heresy of late-fifteenth-century Novgorod and Moscow. This file describes the book’s polemical purpose, the broad content of its sixteen Words — from the Trinity and the divinity of Christ through icons, the church and its sacraments, and the chronological crisis of the year 7000 (AD 1492) to the duty owed the unrepentant heretic — and the genuinely contested question of its redaction history, on which the work of Lurie and Kazakova is decisive. The Enlightener is best understood not as a single composition but as a composite that grew.

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

A Book Built Against a Heresy

The Enlightener is an occasional book in the precise sense that it was written against something. Its occasion was the heresy that appeared in Novgorod in the 1470s and reached Moscow in the following decade, the movement Joseph and the sources call the zhidovstvuyushchie — the “Judaizers” — and which Joseph held to deny the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the veneration of icons, the resurrection, and the authority of the church (Joseph, The Enlightener, prologue and Slovo 1; Lurie 1960; Kazakova and Lurie 1955). The book’s alternative and probably older title, The Book Against the Novgorod Heretics (Kniga na novgorodskikh eretikov), states the purpose without disguise: it is a manual of refutation, compiled so that an Orthodox reader confronted with these errors would have, ready to hand, the scriptural proof-texts, the patristic authorities, and the canonical rulings with which to answer them (Kazakova and Lurie 1955; Fedotov 1966, on the genre of the work). What the heresy actually was — and how far Joseph’s portrait of it can be trusted — is a separate and deeply contested question treated elsewhere in this collection; the present file describes the book Joseph wrote, not the movement as it may have been.

The polemical aim governs the book’s form. Each Slovo takes up one error and answers it by accumulation — by piling up authorities until the weight of the tradition is felt to settle the matter. This is not the method of a summa that builds an argument from first principles; it is the method of the florilegium, the anthology of authoritative passages, applied to controversy. The reader is meant to be overwhelmed, and convinced, by the unanimous testimony of Scripture and the Fathers (Fedotov 1966; Goldfrank 2000, on Joseph’s compilatory technique). The character of that method, and the assessment it has received, are the subject of the companion file (joseph-as-theologian.md).

The Sixteen Words

In its developed form The Enlightener consists of sixteen “Words” (Slova, singular Slovo) preceded by a narrative prologue — the so-called Skazanie — that recounts the rise of the heresy from its alleged beginning with a Jew named Skhariia (Zacharias) at Novgorod (Joseph, The Enlightener, Skazanie / prologue; Kazakova and Lurie 1955; Lurie 1960). The Words proceed by topic, and they may be grouped, broadly, into four clusters.

The Trinity and the divinity of Christ. The opening Words answer what Joseph presents as the heretics’ central denial — that God is not Three Persons and that Jesus is not God. Here the book argues from the texts the whole tradition uses for these doctrines: the appearance of the three men to Abraham at the oak of Mamre, read as a manifestation of the Trinity (Genesis 18); the opening of the Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1); the baptismal command to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19); and the Old Testament theophanies and prophetic texts read christologically (Joseph, The Enlightener, Slova 1–4; Lurie 1960). The argument is cumulative and exegetical rather than philosophical: it does not so much define the doctrine of consubstantiality as demonstrate, text by text, that Scripture and the Fathers already confess it.

The veneration of icons. A central block of the book defends the making and honoring of holy images against an alleged iconoclasm of the heretics. Joseph reaches for the standard arsenal of the iconodule tradition — the divine command to fashion the cherubim of gold over the Ark (Exodus 25:18–22), taken to show that God himself ordained sacred images; the Incarnation as the ground on which the invisible God became depictable; and the relative honor that passes from the image to its prototype (Joseph, The Enlightener, Slova 5–7; on the inherited theology, see Icons and Iconoclasm). This is the part of the book in which Joseph stands most squarely and most successfully within the conciliar tradition of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) and the Apologies of St. John of Damascus, and it is treated at length in the companion file (joseph-as-theologian.md).

The church and its sacraments. Further Words defend the validity of the church, its hierarchy, and its sacraments — baptism, the Eucharist, monasticism, and the cult of the saints and their relics — against the heretics’ alleged contempt for these things (Joseph, The Enlightener, Slova 7–11; Kazakova and Lurie 1955). Here the polemic shades from dogma into ecclesiology and devotional practice: the book is defending not only what Orthodox Christians believe but the whole sacramental and liturgical life that the heresy is said to have despised.

Prophecy, the end of the world, and the Paschalion. One of the most historically revealing parts of the book answers a scepticism about prophecy that was bound up with a concrete chronological crisis. According to the Byzantine reckoning from the creation of the world, the year 7000 anno mundi fell in AD 1492, and a current of expectation — and, when the world did not end, of embarrassment — surrounded that date, because the Paschal tables (the Paschalion) had been computed only to the end of the seventh millennium (Joseph, The Enlightener, Slova 8–9; Lurie 1960; Meyendorff 1981). Joseph argues that the failure of the world to end at 7000 is no argument against the truth of prophecy or of Scripture, that the “day and hour” remain unknown (cf. Matthew 24:36), and that the church’s continuation past the date is providential rather than a refutation. The episode anchors the book firmly in its moment: the heresy and its rebuttal belong to the years on either side of 1492.

The unrepentant heretic and the duty of the prince. The closing Words turn from doctrine to discipline: what is to be done with heretics who will not repent. Here the book argues that the church may and must judge heretics, that the secular ruler is bound to assist in their suppression, and — in Slovo 13 in particular — that it is the God-given prince’s duty to defend the faith and to punish those who corrupt it (Joseph, The Enlightener, Slovo 13; Lurie 1960; Fedotov 1966). Slovo 13 is the textual root of the campaign for the prosecution and execution of the heretics with which Joseph’s name is most controversially linked, and of his developed theology of the God-given but accountable ruler; both are treated in their own sections of this collection. It should be noted that the most severe of these disciplinary Words are also the ones most clearly belonging to the book’s later expansion, so that the Prosvetitel’ as we have it grew more punitive over time as well as longer (Lurie 1960; Kazakova and Lurie 1955).

A Composite That Grew

It is essential to a fair reading of The Enlightener to recognize that it is not a book Joseph sat down and wrote once, from beginning to end, in its sixteen-Word form. It is a composite work that grew by accretion out of separate polemical pieces, epistles, and dossiers, and the sixteen-Word Prosvetitel’ is the end-product of that growth rather than its origin (Lurie 1960; Kazakova and Lurie 1955). The individual Words began as discrete refutations, several of them circulating first as letters or poslaniia before being gathered, revised, supplemented, and arranged into the connected book; the prologue-narrative (the Skazanie) was itself shaped to introduce the assembled collection (Kazakova and Lurie 1955; Lurie 1960). This is why the book reads as an anthology of self-standing discourses rather than as a continuous treatise: it is one.

The textual history is correspondingly intricate, and the redactions are genuinely contested. The foundational modern analysis is that of Kazakova and Lurie, who in their 1955 study of the anti-feudal heretical movements published and analyzed the documents of the heresy and traced the formation of the Prosvetitel’ through stages, and of Lurie in his 1960 study of the ideological struggle, who set out the relationship among the surviving redactions (Kazakova and Lurie 1955; Lurie 1960). Their work distinguishes between a shorter, earlier form of the anti-heretical material and the fuller, expanded Prosvetitel’ of sixteen Words, and it relates the polemical book to a body of separately transmitted “epistolary” pieces. The relationship between a “Brief” recension of Joseph’s anti-heretical writing and the expanded book is part of the same problem, and it has an exact parallel in the textual history of his Monastic Rule, which likewise survives in an “Extended” and a “Brief” redaction (on the Rule’s redactions, Goldfrank 2000). The number of Words and the order in which the book reached its final shape are therefore not simple data but the outcome of a redactional process.

[Disputed: the redaction history and original extent of the *Prosvetitel'* — Lurie, *Ideologicheskaia bor'ba* (1960), and Kazakova and Lurie, *Antifeodal'nye ereticheskie dvizheniia* (1955), reconstruct the book's growth from separate polemical and epistolary pieces into the expanded sixteen-Word collection, distinguishing earlier shorter material from the later fuller redaction; Goldfrank (2000) and Pliguzov (2002) refine the relative dating and authorship of individual Words and caution that the boundaries between Joseph's own composition, his sources, and later editorial assembly are not everywhere recoverable — so that "how many Words Joseph originally wrote" admits no single agreed answer.]

[Disputed: the authorship of parts of the book — most scholarship treats *The Enlightener* as substantially Joseph's, but because several Words derive from pre-existing dossiers and circulated independently, Lurie (1960) and Pliguzov (2002) note that portions reflect a Josephite circle and inherited anti-heretical material rather than Joseph's pen alone; the degree of his personal composition versus compilation is a matter of judgment, not a settled fact.]

How to Cite It and How to Read It

Because the book is an assembly of numbered Words, the stable way to refer to it — and the way used throughout this collection — is by Slovo number (e.g., Slovo 13 on the prince’s duty), not by the page of any one printing; the principal printed editions are the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Kazan printings (1857; 1882–1904), with the documentary basis for the redaction-critical study supplied by Kazakova and Lurie (1955) (METHODOLOGY §2.1–2.2; Kazakova and Lurie 1955). A reader should hold two things together. First, The Enlightener is a real and substantial witness to the dogmatic mind of the early Muscovite church: on the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and above all the veneration of icons, it transmits the conciliar tradition faithfully and at length. Second, it is a polemic, written to win an argument and increasingly to justify coercion, and it is our principal — and a deeply interested — source for the very heresy it attacks; the movement it describes cannot be reconstructed from it alone (Lurie 1960; Kazakova and Lurie 1955; Fedotov 1966). The theological measure of its author is taken in the file that follows.

References

Joseph of Volotsk. The Enlightener (Prosvetitel’, or The Book Against the Novgorod Heretics / Kniga na novgorodskikh eretikov). Cited by Slovo number; principal printed editions, Kazan, 1857 and 1882–1904. (The prologue/Skazanie on Skhariia and the rise of the heresy; Slova 1–4 on the Trinity and the divinity of Christ; Slova 5–7 on icons; Slova 7–11 on the church and the sacraments; Slova 8–9 on prophecy and the year 7000/1492; Slovo 13 on the duty of the prince toward heretics.)
Kazakova, N. A., and Ya. S. Lurie. Antifeodal’nye ereticheskie dvizheniia na Rusi XIV–nachala XVI veka [Anti-Feudal Heretical Movements in Rus’ from the Fourteenth to the Early Sixteenth Century]. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1955. (Edition and analysis of the documents of the heresy; the formation and redactions of the Prosvetitel’.)
Lurie, Ya. S. (Lur’e). Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka [The Ideological Struggle in Russian Publicistic Writing of the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries]. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960. (The relationship among the redactions; the dating and growth of the anti-heretical corpus.)
Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (Joseph’s compilatory technique; the parallel “Extended”/“Brief” redaction problem in the Rule.)
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 character and genre of The Enlightener; its standing as the chief and interested source for the heresy.)
Pliguzov, Andrei. Polemika v russkoi tserkvi pervoi treti XVI stoletiia [Polemics in the Russian Church of the First Third of the Sixteenth Century]. Moscow: Indrik, 2002. (Authorship and relative dating of individual Words; the Josephite circle.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (The eschatological expectation around 7000/1492 and the Paschalion question.)