08 — Sources and Reception
How we know what we know about St. Joseph of Volotsk, and how his name has been read across five centuries. This section sets out the biographical sources — the several Lives (by Savva Chorny, the anonymous Life, the Life attributed to Lev Filolog) and the Volokolamsk Paterik compiled by his nephew and disciple Dosifei Toporkov — and weighs their reliability as partisan, hagiographic texts written within his own monastery a generation after his death; and it traces the long swing of his reputation, from the hostile “reactionary theocrat” of liberal, Slavophile, and above all Soviet historiography to the careful source-work and revisionism of Lurie, Pliguzov, and Ostrowski and the post-Soviet Orthodox re-embrace of Joseph as a great organizer-saint.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (cenobitic founder; “Possessors”)
The historical Joseph is unusually well documented for a Muscovite figure — and unusually hard to see plainly, for two opposite reasons. On the one hand his own writings survive in quantity: The Enlightener, the Monastic Rule in two redactions, and a substantial body of epistles give us his mind, his program, and his voice at first hand, a self-witness most medieval Russian saints entirely lack. On the other hand the biographical sources — the Lives and the Paterik — were produced by his own community and party, within a generation of his repose, in the service of his canonization and of the Josephite cause; they are precious and they are interested, and they must be read as such (Goldfrank 2000; Lurie 1960). Beyond the medieval record stands a second problem of reception: more than a century of liberal, Slavophile, and Soviet writing made Joseph a byword for clerical reaction, while post-Soviet Russia has re-embraced him as a model churchman, and the careful scholarship of the late twentieth century has dismantled some of the neat schemata on which both the older condemnation and the older celebration rested. This section treats both the sources and the reception with the source-critical and both-sides discipline the whole collection observes (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4).
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Volokolamsk Paterik and the Vitae | The biographical sources and their reliability: the Life by Savva Chorny (Savva the Black, later bishop of Krutitsy), the anonymous Life, the Life attributed to Lev Filolog, and the Volokolamsk Paterik of Dosifei Toporkov — what they are good for and where they must be read critically; with Joseph’s own writings as the primary self-witness, and specific edifying and miracle stories pinned to their source and date. |
| From Soviet Villain to Rehabilitation | The long swing of Joseph’s reputation: the hostile reading in nineteenth-century liberal and Slavophile and church-historical writing and its hardening in Soviet historiography (Joseph as reactionary ideologist; the “Non-Possessors” recast as progressive); and the late- and post-Soviet reappraisal — Lurie’s source-work, Pliguzov and Ostrowski against the party schema, the Western monastic-legislator reading (Goldfrank), and the Orthodox re-embrace. Heavily [Disputed]. |
See Also
- The Enlightener (Prosvetitel) — Joseph’s own major work, the primary self-witness alongside the Rule and epistles
- The Strict Typikon — the monastic legislation the Lives and Paterik idealize and the Rule records
- Charity and the Famine — the famine-relief the Lives and Paterik celebrate, here pinned to its sources
- St. Dimitri of Rostov — the later master hagiographer of the Russian church, a comparison point for the Lives
- St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves — the Kiev Caves Paterik is the great precedent for the genre Dosifei Toporkov worked in
- Russian Monasticism — the monastic world the sources describe and serve
- Methodology — §3.5 on hagiography pinned to attestation; §4 on disputed and sensitive topics
References
- Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000.
- 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.
- Kazakova, N. A., and Ya. S. Lurie. Antifeodal’nye ereticheskie dvizheniia na Rusi XIV–nachala XVI veka [Antifeudal Heretical Movements in Rus’]. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1955.
- 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.
- 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.