Muscovy and the Monastic Landscape

The Muscovy of Ivan III into which St. Nilus of Sora’s mature life fell was a state consolidating around Moscow and a Church whose monasteries had become, in a century and a half, among the greatest landowners in the realm. The cenobitic houses founded in the revival of St. Sergius of Radonezh now held villages, salt-works, and dependent peasants, and the question of whether the monastic vocation could survive such wealth was sharpening just as Nilus came to maturity. This file sets that landscape, the precondition of everything Nilus would teach and of the controversy later tradition placed at the center of his life.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (hesychast; “Non-Possessors”)

The Gathering of the Russian Land

By the time Nil Sorsky reached maturity in the second half of the fifteenth century, the political world of the Russian north had been transformed. The grand principality of Moscow under Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505) was absorbing its rivals: Novgorod was subjugated in 1478, Tver annexed in 1485, and the long Mongol overlordship was formally repudiated after the bloodless stand on the Ugra in 1480 (Fedotov 1966, vol. II, on the historical setting of the period). The “gathering of the Russian land” under Moscow created, for the first time since before the Mongol invasion, a strong centralizing power whose interest in the wealth of the Church — and especially in the vast lands held by monasteries — would become a defining theme of the reign of Ivan III and of his successors.

This is the political backdrop against which the monastic question must be read. A state consolidating its resources and a Church holding immense landed wealth were bound, sooner or later, to collide over those lands, and that collision is the historical frame within which later tradition would set the figure of Nilus (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The point to hold from the outset, and one to which this collection returns in Section 06, is that the question of monastic property was a live question of state and Church policy quite apart from Nilus, and that his own concern with poverty was a spiritual and ascetic concern before it was ever a matter of council politics.

The Sergian Revival and Its Wealth

The monasticism of fifteenth-century Russia was the rich inheritance of the great revival of the fourteenth century. St. Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1314–1392) and his disciples had planted a network of cenobitic — communal — monasteries across the forests of the north, and these houses had multiplied and grown into the spiritual and economic centers of Russian Christianity (see St. Sergius of Radonezh; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The “Northern Thebaid,” as later writers called the monastic colonization of the Russian north, was the most vigorous Christian movement of the age.

But the cenobitic ideal carried within it a tension that two centuries laid bare. A communal monastery, by definition, holds property in common rather than each monk holding his own; and a house that prospered, attracted donations, and received bequests of land for the commemoration of the dead inevitably became a corporate landlord. The great houses — Trinity-St. Sergius itself, the Kirillo-Belozersk monastery, and others — came to own villages, fishing and salt rights, and the labor of dependent peasants bound to monastery lands (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). Donations of land “for the soul” of the donor were a principal engine of this accumulation: a landowner would give a village to a monastery so that the monks would pray perpetually for his salvation, and the monastery thereby grew richer with each generation of the faithful dead.

By the late fifteenth century the result was a monasticism of great institutional power and wealth, supporting large communities, extensive charity, and impressive building — and exposed, precisely for that reason, to the charge that it had drifted from the poverty of its own founders. It is essential to state the matter without caricature: the wealthy cenobitic house was not a corruption pure and simple but a genuine and defensible form of the monastic vocation, sustaining hospitality, almsgiving, the relief of the poor in famine, and the education of the clergy. Its great later defender, St. Joseph of Volotsk, would argue exactly this (see Two Visions of Monasticism). The landscape was not one of villains and reformers but of two goods in tension.

The Question of Monastic Estates

What gave the question its edge in Nilus’s lifetime was the convergence of three pressures. First, the spiritual pressure: a current of monks and elders sensed that landholding and the management of peasants and revenues drew the monastery away from prayer and toward administration, litigation, and worldly business — a perception of decline that recurs in every century of monastic history. Second, the social pressure: monastery estates worked by dependent peasants raised, in an age of hardening serfdom, questions about the propriety of monks profiting from coerced labor. Third, and most consequentially, the political pressure: a centralizing state eyed the secularization of monastic and Church lands as a source of revenue and of land to grant to its servitors (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Fedotov 1966, vol. II).

These pressures came together, by tradition, at the Council of 1503, where the question of monastic landholding was raised — and where later sources place Nilus at the head of those who urged the monasteries to surrender their estates (treated, with the source-critical caveats that the picture requires, in The 1503 Council). For the purposes of this foundational sketch, the essential point is that the monastic landscape of late-fifteenth-century Muscovy was one in which the wealth of the great houses had become a question — a question of the spiritual life, of social justice, and of state policy at once — and that this triple charge is what gave Nilus’s quiet poverty its later resonance and made it, in retrospect, the banner of a “party.”

The Hesychast Alternative in Waiting

Into this world Nilus brought something that was not, in origin, a political program at all: the contemplative, inward, Athonite hesychasm he would gather on his pilgrimage to the East and plant on the Sora (see The Journey to Athos and Constantinople). The wealthy cenobium and the centralizing state form the foreground of his age; the silent prayer of the heart, learned from Gregory of Sinai and the Athonite fathers, is what he set against it — not by polemic in the first place, but by a way of life. His poverty was the expression of a contemplative ideal, and only secondarily, and largely through the construction of later writers, the platform of a faction. To understand Nilus, one must see the landscape first as he saw it — as a soul seeking stillness in an age of monastic prosperity — and only then as the historians’ battlefield it became (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction).

References

Fedotov, Georges 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. (The setting of fifteenth-century Muscovite monasticism; the Sergian revival and the growth of monastic landholding; the chapter on Nil Sorsky.)
Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Introduction on the historical and political context of the monastic-property question and the construction of the “Non-Possessor” picture.)
Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (On the cenobitic background and Nilus’s alternative.)