The Volokolamsk Paterik and the Vitae

The biographical record of St. Joseph of Volotsk rests on a small cluster of texts produced within his own monastery and party in the decades after his repose in 1515: the Life by Savva Chorny (Savva the Black, later bishop of Krutitsy), written about the 1540s; an anonymous Life; a Life whose attribution to Lev Filolog (Lev the Philologist) is itself disputed; and the Volokolamsk Paterik, a collection of edifying tales of the Volokolamsk and Pafnuty-Borovsk elders compiled by Joseph’s nephew and disciple Dosifei Toporkov. This file sets out what these sources are, weighs their reliability as hagiographic and partisan documents shaped to support Joseph’s canonization and the Josephite cause, distinguishes what they are good for from where they must be read critically, pins specific edifying and miracle stories to their source and date (METHODOLOGY §3.5), and recalls that Joseph’s own writings — The Enlightener, the Rule, and the epistles — remain the primary self-witness.

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

The Self-Witness First: Joseph’s Own Writings

Before any of the Lives, the most reliable witness to Joseph of Volotsk is Joseph of Volotsk. Unlike the great majority of medieval Russian saints — for whom we possess only a later hagiographer’s vita and must reconstruct the man from his legend — Joseph left a substantial body of writing in his own hand and voice, and it is this corpus, not the Lives, that gives us his mind at first hand (Goldfrank 2000, introduction; Lurie 1960). Three bodies of material stand out. First, The Enlightener (Prosvetitel), the long dogmatic-polemical work in sixteen “Words” (Slova) against the Novgorod heretics, which shows his theology, his use of patristic and scriptural authority, and his temper as a controversialist (see The Enlightener). Second, the Monastic Rule (Ustav), surviving in an “Extended” and a “Brief” redaction, which records — in his own legislative voice — the discipline, the community of goods, and the order of the house he built; David Goldfrank’s critical edition and translation makes it the single most secure document of Joseph’s program (Goldfrank 2000). Third, the Epistles, his letters to grand princes, bishops, and patrons, edited by Zimin and Lurie, which catch him in the act of governing, pleading, and arguing (Zimin & Lurie 1959).

The methodological order matters. Where the Lives and the Paterik agree with what Joseph says of himself in the Rule and the letters — the strictness of the typikon, the community of goods, the centrality of charity — the convergence is strong, because the hagiographic claim is anchored to the saint’s own legislation (see The Strict Typikon). Where the Lives go beyond the writings — into miracles, idealization, and the framing of his enemies — they are reporting the monastery’s memory and devotion, and must be read as such (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Life by Savva Chorny

The principal Life of Joseph is that of Savva Chorny (Savva “the Black”), a monk of Volokolamsk who later became bishop of Krutitsy (Sarai and the Podonsk see). His Life of Joseph was composed about the 1540s — roughly a generation after the saint’s death and in the run-up to the great mid-century canonizations — and it is the fullest and most influential of the biographical texts (Goldfrank 2000; on the dating and the Volokolamsk hagiographic milieu, Lurie 1960). Savva had been a member of Joseph’s own community; he writes from within the house, with access to its memory and its documents, and his Life is the source on which most later accounts — and most of the standard biography — ultimately depend.

That insider position is precisely the source of both its value and its bias. As a member of the Volokolamsk brotherhood writing for the canonization of its founder, Savva had every reason to present Joseph in the most edifying possible light: the strict but fatherly abbot, the defender of orthodoxy, the great almsgiver, the worker of wonders. His Life is good evidence for how the monastery remembered and venerated its founder by the 1540s — for the institutional self-understanding of Volokolamsk and the shape of the Josephite ideal — and it is reasonably good evidence for the broad facts that his own writings independently confirm. It is weak evidence wherever it idealizes, wherever it casts Joseph’s controversies in the partisan terms of the Josephite party, and wherever it reports the miraculous. [Disputed: the dating and relative priority of the several *Lives* — Savva Chorny's *Life* (c. 1540s) is generally taken as the principal and earliest substantial *vita* and the source for the others (the standard view reflected in Goldfrank 2000 and Lurie 1960), but the precise sequence and interdependence of Savva's *Life*, the anonymous *Life*, and the Lev Filolog text are not settled, and different scholars have arranged them differently]

The Anonymous Life and the Life Attributed to Lev Filolog

Alongside Savva’s Life stand two further hagiographic texts. The first is an anonymous Life of Joseph, related to Savva’s but not identical with it; its exact relationship to Savva — whether it draws on him, is drawn on by him, or shares a common source — is part of the unsettled question of the texts’ sequence (Lurie 1960). The second is a Life attributed to Lev Filolog (Lev “the Philologist”), a rhetorically elaborate composition in the ornamented “word-weaving” (pletenie sloves) manner that the sixteenth-century Russian church favored for its grand canonizations.

The attribution to Lev Filolog is itself disputed, and is the kind of authorship question on which medieval Russian hagiography is notoriously slippery. [Disputed: whether the rhetorically elaborate *Life* of Joseph is in fact the work of Lev Filolog — the attribution is traditional and is carried in much of the literature, but it rests on slender grounds, and scholars have questioned both the identification of "Lev Filolog" and his authorship of this particular text; the matter cannot be regarded as settled (cf. the cautious handling in Lurie 1960 and the standard reference literature on the Volokolamsk hagiography)]. For the purposes of using these texts, the disputed authorship is a reminder of a general truth: the Lives are products of a hagiographic workshop and a devotional program, not detached biographies, and their authorial labels and interdependence are part of what the historian must hold loosely.

The Volokolamsk Paterik of Dosifei Toporkov

The most distinctive of the Volokolamsk sources is not a Life at all but a paterik — a collection of short edifying tales of holy elders, in the venerable genre whose great Russian precedent is the Kiev Caves Paterik (see St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves). The Volokolamsk Paterik was compiled by Dosifei Toporkov, Joseph’s nephew and disciple and a learned monk of the house, and it gathers the sayings, deeds, visions, and edifying stories of the elders of Volokolamsk and of the Pafnuty-Borovsk monastery where Joseph had been formed and had briefly served as abbot (on that formation see the foundations of the collection; on the Paterik and Dosifei, Goldfrank 2000; Lurie 1960). Dosifei was himself a significant figure in the Volokolamsk literary circle — associated with work on the Enlightener‘s redactions and with the chronographic and historical labors of the house — and his Paterik is the monastery’s own portrait of its spiritual genealogy.

As a source the Paterik has the characteristic strengths and limits of its genre. Its purpose is edification, not chronicle: it preserves the oral memory and the moral lessons of the community, the stories elders told about elders, the visions and visitations and exempla by which a monastic house transmits its ethos. It is therefore excellent evidence for the spirituality and self-understanding of Volokolamsk — for what the Josephite tradition prized, feared, and held up as a model — and for the human texture of the monastery in Joseph’s generation and the next. It is not, and does not try to be, a critical record of events; its miracle-tales and visions are reported as the community’s pious memory, pinned to their teller, not certified as bare fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Goldfrank 2000).

Pinning the Edifying and Miraculous Material

Per the methodology, the edifying and miraculous claims of these sources are reported as what those texts attest, with their source and date named, never as independently certified history (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The portrait of Joseph as the stern but provident father of a great community — keeping the strict community of goods, walking the monastery at night, governing the three degrees of asceticism — is the burden of Savva Chorny’s Life (c. 1540s) and is consonant with Joseph’s own Rule (Savva, Life of Joseph; Goldfrank 2000). Where the Life dramatizes this into edifying scenes of the abbot’s vigilance and severity, those scenes are hagiographic elaboration of a discipline the Rule independently attests.
The celebrated account of Joseph’s famine-relief — the monastery feeding hundreds and then thousands of the starving from its stores, Joseph compelling the brethren to bake and give until the granaries were emptied and replenished by the grand prince — is transmitted in the Volokolamsk hagiographic tradition and the Life as the supreme demonstration of why a monastery must possess in order to give. It is reported there as the monastery’s memory of a real charity grounded in the estates; the theological use to which the story is put (the case for monastic possessions) is Joseph’s own, argued in his writings (the famine-relief tradition; Fedotov 1966, II; and see Charity and the Famine).
The visions, prophetic warnings, and wonders of the Volokolamsk and Borovsk elders — including the exempla by which the Paterik enforces obedience, the dangers of self-will, and the keeping of the rule — are the proper material of Dosifei Toporkov’s Volokolamsk Paterik and are reported there as edifying memory in the paterik genre (Dosifei Toporkov, Volokolamsk Paterik; Goldfrank 2000; Lurie 1960). They are received here as the testimony of that text, with Dosifei named as compiler and his relation to Joseph (nephew and disciple) noted as part of the provenance.
The depiction of the heretics and of Joseph’s opponents in the hagiographic tradition is, of all the material, the most partisan: it is written from inside the Josephite party, after the executions of 1504, to vindicate the campaign and its hero, and it is precisely where the Lives must be read against the grain (see What the Heresy Was and The Campaign and the Executions; on the polemical literature, Pliguzov 2002).

What the Sources Are Good For — and Where They Must Be Read Critically

The honest summary is a division of labor. The Lives and the Paterik are good, even excellent, sources for: the internal life and discipline of Volokolamsk; the monastery’s veneration of its founder and the shape of the Josephite ideal by the mid-sixteenth century; the broad biographical facts that Joseph’s own writings independently confirm; and the human and spiritual texture of the community. They are sources to be read critically for: miracle accounts and visions, which are pious memory pinned to a teller, not chronicle; the idealization of Joseph’s person and severity; and above all the framing of his controversies — the heresy, the executions, the quarrel over possessions — which is rendered in the partisan terms of the party that produced the texts a generation after the events, in the service of canonization (Lurie 1960; Pliguzov 2002; Goldfrank 2000).

The comparison with a great later Russian hagiographer is instructive. When St. Dimitri of Rostov assembled his vast Menaion of saints’ lives, he was working at a scholarly remove, compiling and refining an inherited tradition (see St. Dimitri of Rostov). The Volokolamsk hagiographers, by contrast, were writing the founder of their own house, for his glorification, within living memory of his disciples — closer to their subject, and more interested in him. That closeness is the reason the sources are so rich and the reason they must be weighed so carefully; it is not a defect peculiar to Volokolamsk but the ordinary condition of monastic hagiography, and the discipline it calls for is the discipline this collection applies throughout (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

References

Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (Critical edition and translation of the Rule; introduction on the sources, the Lives, Dosifei Toporkov and the Volokolamsk Paterik, and Joseph’s self-witness.)
Lurie, Ya. S. 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 Volokolamsk hagiographic and literary milieu; the redaction history; the dating and interdependence of the Lives and the role of Dosifei Toporkov.)
Zimin, A. A., and Ya. S. Lurie, eds. Poslaniia Iosifa Volotskogo [The Epistles of Joseph of Volotsky]. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1959. (Critical edition of Joseph’s letters, the primary self-witness alongside the Enlightener and the Rule.)
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. (The documentary basis for the heresy and the polemic the hagiography frames.)
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. (The polemical literature in and around the Volokolamsk circle; the partisan shaping of the record.)
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 and the charity tradition within the spiritual history of the period.)
Savva Chorny. Life of Joseph of Volotsk (c. 1540s). (The principal vita; the portrait of the founder, his discipline, and his charity. Discussed and dated in Goldfrank 2000 and Lurie 1960.)
Dosifei Toporkov, comp. Volokolamsk Paterik. (The collection of edifying tales of the Volokolamsk and Pafnuty-Borovsk elders; reported as the monastery’s edifying memory. Discussed in Goldfrank 2000 and Lurie 1960.)