06 — Joseph and Nilus

The encounter of St. Joseph of Volotsk with St. Nilus of Sora over the two questions that divided their circles around 1500 — whether monasteries should hold landed estates, and how the church should treat the “Judaizer” heretics. Both men are glorified saints of the Orthodox Church, neither is caricatured, and the section follows the recent scholarship (Pliguzov, Ostrowski, Goldfrank) in flagging that the sharp “Possessor versus Non-Possessor” antithesis, the dramatic staging of a debate at the 1503 council, and the personal “Joseph-versus-Nilus duel” over heretics are in substantial part a later construction read back onto the events.

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

The two saints of this section represent two ancient and legitimate forms of the monastic life: St. Nilus of Sora’s eremitic, hesychast skete ideal of inner work, deep poverty, and small hidden brotherhoods, and St. Joseph of Volotsk’s great cenobitic, socially engaged, richly endowed house ordered to charity and the service of the church. Around 1500 those two vocations collided in the practical order over monastic estates, and the circles of the two men also divided over the treatment of the condemned “Judaizer” heretics, some pleading for mercy where Joseph defended severity. It is essential to the discipline of this collection (METHODOLOGY §4) that both Joseph and Nilus are canonized, that neither is reduced to a hero or a foil, and that the neat two-party schema and the dramatic confrontations through which the story is usually told are presented as in significant part the work of later sixteenth-century polemic and modern historiography rather than as a transparent record of the events — a caution that the parallel collection on Nilus shares (see St. Nilus of Sora).

Files in This Section

File Description
The 1503 Council and the Two Ways The Moscow council of 1503 — convened mainly on widowed priests and simony, with the monastic-estates question arising at its end; the tradition of Nilus and the Trans-Volga elders urging renunciation of the villages against Joseph’s defense of corporate landholding; the two monastic spiritualities (skete poverty versus the endowed cenobium) as two legitimate ways; and the crucial source-critical caution that the Nilus-led 1503 estates debate and the “Possessor / Non-Possessor” party schema are substantially later constructions (Pliguzov, Ostrowski).
Severity and Mercy The disagreement over the “Judaizer” heretics — Joseph’s defense of imprisoning and even executing the obstinate heretic as a sanctified work (with the famous “sanctified hand” line flagged as a later epitome, not his verbatim words), against the Trans-Volga elders’ “Epistle on the Non-Condemnation of the Repentant” pleading that the church receive the repentant, leave judgment to God, and wield the word not the sword; with heavy caution that the personal Joseph-versus-Nilus duel and Nilus’s own authorship of an anti-execution position are partly later-built.

See Also

  • 05 — Possessions and Social Function — Joseph’s full case for monastic estates and the documented famine-relief that is its practical proof
  • 04 — The “Judaizer” Heresy — the contested content of the heresy and the campaign and burnings of 1504 that the mercy-and-severity dispute concerns
  • 03 — The Enlightener — The Enlightener and its closing Slova in which Joseph defends the punishment of heretics
  • 02 — Founding Volokolamsk — the strict cenobitic typikon of total community of goods that grounds “the monk owns nothing, the monastery owns much”
  • St. Nilus of Sora — the elder of the Sora skete, the other saint of this section; both are canonized
  • St. Sergius of Radonezh — the founder of the cenobitic revival in whose tradition both Volokolamsk and the northern sketes stand
  • Russian Monasticism — the cenobitic and skete vocations the section sets side by side
  • Russian Orthodox Tradition — the wider Russian monastic and ecclesial world
  • Methodology — §4 on sensitive topics and disputed claims, the governing discipline for this section

References

  • 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.
  • Ostrowski, Donald. “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy.” Slavonic and East European Review 64, no. 3 (1986): 355–379.
  • Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000.
  • Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo and Spencer: Cistercian Publications, 2008.
  • 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.
  • Lurie, Ya. S. (Lur’e). Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960.
  • Kazakova, N. A., and Ya. S. Lurie. Antifeodal’nye ereticheskie dvizheniia na Rusi XIV–nachala XVI veka. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1955.
  • Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.