Charity and the Famine

The documented almsgiving of the Volokolamsk monastery was the practical fruit Joseph of Volotsk pointed to when he defended monastic estates: a house that fed the hungry, sheltered travelers and children, and answered a severe regional famine by feeding many daily, spending down its reserves, and going into debt to buy grain. These stories are reported in the Lives — above all the Life by Savva Chorny — and the Volokolamsk Paterik, and are given here as what those sources attest, with their authors named, in keeping with the rule that hagiographic claims are pinned to their earliest written attestation rather than asserted as bare fact. This file also sets out the vklad (donation-commemoration) and synodikon system that tied gifts to the house to both the commemoration of donors and the obligation of charity.

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

The Lived Demonstration of the Case

In the companion file, Joseph’s defense of monastic landholding rests on a claim about function: the corporate wealth of the monastery exists for the poor and for the church’s social work, and a propertyless house cannot do what an endowed one can (see The Case for Monastic Estates). That claim is only as good as its demonstration, and the demonstration Joseph and his hagiographers pointed to is the recorded charity of the Volokolamsk monastery itself — its standing almsgiving in ordinary times and, above all, its conduct during a severe famine in the Volokolamsk region near the end of Joseph’s life. The monastery’s granaries, swollen by the very estates the Non-Possessors wished to strip away, became in the famine the means of feeding the countryside; the wealth was vindicated, on Joseph’s logic, by what it accomplished. The scriptural charter is the one that governs his whole treatment of charity — “I was hungry and you gave me food… as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:35–40).

Before retracing the famine narrative, the methodological caution must be stated plainly. The accounts of Joseph’s almsgiving come to us through hagiography — through the Lives and the Paterik, which are edifying texts written to honor the saint and the house. They are reported here as what those sources attest, with their authors and approximate dates named, not certified as bare historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). That a saint’s Life praises his charity does not make the round numbers it gives exact; what the sources establish securely is that the monastery’s institutional almsgiving, and its extraordinary effort in the famine, were remembered and recorded as central to Joseph’s holiness within a generation of his death.

The Sources: Savva Chorny’s Life and the Volokolamsk Paterik

The principal narrative source for Joseph’s charity is the Life (Zhitie) composed by Savva Chorny (Savva the Black), a Volokolamsk monk who became bishop of Krutitsy and who wrote his Life of Joseph in the 1540s, within a generation of the saint’s repose in 1515; it is the fullest and earliest of the connected vitae and the one that dwells on the monastery’s almsgiving and the famine (on the vitae and their dates, the standard treatments are in Lurie 1960 and the scholarship on the Volokolamsk hagiography; for the documentary apparatus of the house, Goldfrank 2000). Alongside Savva’s Life stands the Volokolamsk Paterik (Volokolamskii paterik), a collection of edifying tales and reminiscences from the monastery’s own milieu, compiled in the mid-sixteenth century, much of it traceable to Dosifei Toporkov, Joseph’s nephew and disciple; it preserves stories of the house’s life, discipline, and charity in the manner of the old Kievan Caves Paterik (the Volokolamsk Paterik and Dosifei Toporkov’s part in it are discussed in Lurie 1960 and in the scholarship on Russian patericon literature). There are also a shorter anonymous Life and a Life attributed to Lev Filolog (Lev the Philologist). For the charity narratives, Savva’s Life is the load-bearing witness, with the Paterik corroborating the picture of a house organized around mercy.

The Standing Almsgiving and the Guest-House

The Lives present charity as a fixed institution of Volokolamsk, not an occasional gesture. The monastery maintained hospitality to travelers, pilgrims, and the poor at its gates, and a regular distribution of alms and food, as a standing function of the house — the guest-house and the almsgiving being precisely the works for which, on Joseph’s argument, the estates existed (Savva Chorny, Life of Joseph; Volokolamsk Paterik; summarized in Fedotov 1966 and Goldfrank 2000). This ordinary, institutional mercy is the background against which the famine effort stands out as an intensification rather than an exception.

The Famine and the Feeding of the Hungry

The centerpiece of the charity narrative is a severe famine that struck the Volokolamsk region in the last years of Joseph’s life, in the early sixteenth century. The Life by Savva Chorny reports that in the famine the monastery threw open its resources to the starving countryside: Joseph ordered the hungry fed from the monastery’s stores, and great numbers came daily to be fed at the house; the monastery set up provision for abandoned and orphaned children, a shelter or almshouse to keep them; and when the monastery’s own reserves began to run out, Joseph would not turn the hungry away but continued the feeding — spending down the granaries, buying grain, and going into debt, and appealing to the lay patrons of the house, the heirs of the princes of Volotsk, for grain and support to sustain the relief (Savva Chorny, Life of Joseph, on the famine; corroborated in outline by the Volokolamsk Paterik; the episode is recounted in Fedotov 1966 and in the scholarship on the monastery’s social role). The picture the Life draws is of a monastery that, in the crisis, became the granary and refuge of an entire district, exhausting itself rather than let the people starve — the social function Joseph defended, performed under maximum strain.

Two features of the account warrant the structured caution the methodology requires: the date of the famine and the numbers fed are both reported variously and cannot be fixed with precision from the hagiographic sources.

[Disputed: the dating of the famine to which the Volokolamsk relief narrative is attached — the modern literature and editions place it variously in the early 1510s, with c. 1512 and c. 1515 (i.e., at or near the end of Joseph's life, who reposed in 1515) the figures most often given; the hagiographic sources (Savva Chorny's *Life*; the Volokolamsk Paterik) recount the relief as a single great dearth without an unambiguous year, so the exact date is an inference from the *Life* and the regional record rather than a securely fixed datum].

[Disputed: the number fed daily during the famine — the *Lives* convey an extraordinary scale (the monastery feeding the hungry of the whole district, with figures of several hundred and, in some retellings, many hundreds given for those fed each day, plus the children kept in the shelter), but these are round hagiographic magnitudes meant to convey the greatness of the charity; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 they are reported as what Savva Chorny's *Life* and the Paterik attest, not as an audited count].

What is not in serious doubt is the substance the sources agree on: that the monastery conducted famine-relief on a scale large enough to threaten its own solvency, that Joseph drove the effort to the point of debt, and that he appealed to the princely heirs of his patrons to sustain it. This is the demonstration Joseph’s defense of estates required — a documented instance in which the corporate wealth of the house was poured out for the hungry.

The Vklad and Synodikon System: Donation, Commemoration, and Obligation

The famine relief was possible because the monastery had accumulated reserves, and those reserves came in large part through the vklad system — the donation-commemoration economy that bound the wealthy laity to the house. A vklad was a gift to the monastery — land, money, goods, or movable wealth — given in return for the spiritual benefit of being commemorated by the monks: the donor’s name was entered in the monastery’s synodikon (sinodik) and kormovaia kniga (the “feeding book” or commemoration register), and the community undertook to pray for the donor and his kin in the liturgy in perpetuity, and to keep memorial meals on the appointed days (Steindorff, Memoria in Altrussland, 1994, on the forms of Russian commemoration; on Volokolamsk’s vklady and synodikon, see The Dormition Monastery). The transaction was a covenant of mutual obligation: the donor gave wealth and received commemoration; the monastery received wealth and incurred the duty of unending prayer.

The point for the present file is that this same system materially obligated the house to charity. The memorial meals (kormy) endowed by donors were occasions on which the poor were fed at the monastery’s expense in the donor’s name, so that the commemoration of the dead and the feeding of the living poor were joined in a single institution; the alms given for a soul’s repose were, in practice, alms given to the hungry (Steindorff 1994; Fedotov 1966; Goldfrank 2000). The vklad economy thus did exactly what Joseph said monastic wealth should do — it converted the gifts of the rich into prayer for the dead and bread for the poor — and it is the institutional channel through which the reserves that fed the famine had been gathered. Joseph’s defense of estates and the synodikon-charity of his house are two faces of one thing: corporate wealth held in trust, accountable both to God in commemoration and to the poor in mercy.

Reading the Charity Narratives

How should an Orthodox reader hold these accounts? Not as audited statistics, and not as embellishment to be discounted, but as the early and consistent testimony of the monastery’s own memory — Savva Chorny writing within a generation, the Paterik preserving the house’s own tales — that mercy on a heroic scale was central to who Joseph was and what his monastery was for (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The famine narrative is, in the sources’ own logic, the proof of the case for the estates: the wealth the Non-Possessors distrusted became, in the dearth, the bread of a starving district. That the exact year and the exact numbers are uncertain does not touch the thing the sources securely attest — that the house emptied its granaries and went into debt rather than let the people die, and that this was remembered as holiness. It is the lived demonstration of the argument made in the companion file, and the strongest answer Joseph’s tradition could give to the charge that monastic property was mere acquisitiveness.

References

Savva Chorny (Savva the Black). Life of Joseph of Volotsk (Zhitie Iosifa Volotskogo). Composed c. 1540s. (The earliest connected vita; the narrative of the monastery’s almsgiving, the children’s shelter, the famine relief, the spending-down of reserves, and the appeal to the princely heirs for grain. Reported per METHODOLOGY §3.5 as what the Life attests.)
Volokolamskii paterik (The Volokolamsk Paterik). Mid-sixteenth century; substantially associated with Dosifei Toporkov. (Edifying tales of the monastery’s life, discipline, and charity, corroborating the picture of a house organized around mercy.)
Steindorff, Ludwig. Memoria in Altrussland: Untersuchungen zu den Formen christlicher Totensorge. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994. (The vklad, synodikon, and kormovaia kniga commemoration system, and the joining of memorial provision with charity to the poor.)
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. (Joseph’s charity and the social role of the monastery; the famine relief.)
Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (The corporate-property-for-charity principle and the documentary world of the house.)
Lurie, Ya. S. (Lur’e). Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960. (The Volokolamsk vitae and Paterik, their authors and dates.)