05 — Possessions and Social Function

Joseph of Volotsk’s defense of monastic landholding as the material basis of the church’s social work — charity to the poor, hospitality to travelers, famine-relief, the ransoming of captives, and the education and support of a learned, dignified clergy from which the episcopate was recruited — together with the documented almsgiving of the Volokolamsk monastery and its conduct in the great famine. The governing distinction is Joseph’s own: the monk owns nothing at all, while the monastery may and must own much. This section sets out the argument that made Joseph and his party the “Possessors” (stiazhateli, iosiflyane), and the lived demonstration of that argument in the monastery’s recorded charity.

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

The question of whether monasteries should own villages, land, and serfs was the most consequential public controversy of Joseph’s later life, and it is the one for which his party is named: the stiazhateli (“acquirers,” “possessors”), the iosiflyane (Josephites). Joseph’s position was not a defense of wealth for its own sake but an argument from social function: the monastery is the one institution in Muscovy capable of sustained, organized charity, of training a literate clergy, and of supplying the church with capable bishops, and it can do none of these things if it is stripped of the endowed estates that pay for them. The argument turned on a sharp distinction he insisted upon in his own Monastic Rule — the monk as an individual owns nothing whatsoever, but the house as a corporation owns and administers much. These two files treat, first, the case Joseph made and the secularization pressure and Non-Possessor critique it answered; and second, the practical fruit he pointed to — the recorded almsgiving of Volokolamsk, above all in the famine of the early sixteenth century, pinned to the Lives and the Paterik that attest it. The recent scholarship’s caution that the very neatness of the “Possessor / Non-Possessor” debate is partly a retrospective construction is carried in both files.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Case for Monastic Estates Joseph’s positive defense of monastic landholding as the material basis of charity, hospitality, famine-relief, the ransoming of captives, and a learned clergy and capable episcopate; the distinction between the monk who owns nothing and the monastery that must own much; the answer to the crown’s pomestie land-hunger and the Non-Possessor critique that property corrupts monks; with Ostrowski’s and Pliguzov’s caution that the “Possessor” label and the tidy debate are partly later constructions.
Charity and the Famine The documented almsgiving of the Volokolamsk monastery as the lived demonstration of the case — the feeding of the hungry in the early-sixteenth-century famine, the children’s shelter, the spending-down of reserves and the appeal to the princely heirs for grain — pinned to Savva Chorny’s Life and the Volokolamsk Paterik; the vklad and synodikon system that tied donations to commemoration and obligated the house to charity.

See Also

  • The Strict Typikon — the rule of total community of goods that grounds the “monk owns nothing, monastery owns much” distinction
  • The Dormition Monastery — the estates, vklady, and synodikon commemoration whose justification this section supplies
  • Muscovy in the Age of Ivan III — the pomestie service-land system and the crown’s appetite for secularizable land
  • St. Nilus of Sora — the leader of the Trans-Volga “non-possessors” whose critique these files answer; both men are canonized saints
  • Russian Monasticism — the cenobitic and skete currents within which the estates debate unfolded
  • The Mongol and Muscovite Periods — the political and economic world of Ivan III in which the church’s wealth became a question of state
  • Church Governance — the church-state and canonical questions the estates debate raised

References

  • Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000.
  • Ostrowski, Donald. “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy.” Slavonic and East European Review 64, no. 3 (1986): 355–379.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Steindorff, Ludwig. Memoria in Altrussland: Untersuchungen zu den Formen christlicher Totensorge. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994.