The Early Life of Nil

What is known of St. Nilus of Sora before his pilgrimage to the East is little, late, and partly traditional. The reports that his lay surname was “Maikov,” that he had been a copyist in Moscow, and even the year of his birth (conventionally c. 1433) rest on slender or inferential evidence; what is reasonably secure is his formative attachment to the great northern house of Kirillo-Belozersk, where the legacy of St. Cyril of White Lake and an austere monastic memory shaped him. This file inventories the biographical record honestly, marking what is documented, what is inferred, and what is legend.

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

The Thinness of the Record

It is a striking feature of Nil Sorsky that the man whose inner life is more fully accessible than almost any other medieval Russian saint — because he wrote it down — left almost no trace of his outer biography. He composed no autobiography beyond what his ascetic teaching incidentally reveals; he was the subject of no contemporary vita; and his deliberate self-effacement, expressed most sharply in the will that asks for his body to be left without honor (see Canonization and Feast), extended to his lifetime. The result is that the basic data of his early life — birth, parentage, name, early occupation — are known only late, by inference, or not at all (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Maloney 1973). This collection therefore treats his early biography under the discipline proper to a thin record: each datum is reported with its standing — documented, inferred, or traditional — rather than smoothed into a continuous life.

The conventional birth date of c. 1433 is itself an estimate, derived by working back from the relative chronology of his career rather than from any record of his birth, and it should be held loosely (Maloney 1973; Goldfrank 2008). What can be said with confidence is that he was a man of the fifteenth century, that he reached spiritual maturity in its second half, and that he died in 1508 — the one firm date in his biography, and even that secured chiefly by the tradition of his repose rather than by contemporary documentation (see Section 09).

The “Maikov” Question

The surname most often attached to Nilus in modern accounts — that as a layman he bore the name Nikolai Maikov, and that his brother was a state secretary (d’iak) in Moscow — illustrates exactly how legend hardens into fact in a thin record. [Disputed: the lay surname "Maikov" and the identification of Nilus's brother as the d'iak Andrei Maikov are widely repeated in popular and older accounts but are not securely documented; David Goldfrank (2008, introduction) treats much of the conventional early biography, including such details, as later or inferential rather than established, while the older tradition (reflected in nineteenth-century lives and repeated by Fedotov 1966) transmits them as received]. The careful position is that “Maikov” is a traditional identification, plausible but not proven, and that the reports of his pre-monastic life in Moscow — including the often-repeated claim that he had worked as a copyist of manuscripts (a skoropisets, a fast-writer) before becoming a monk — belong to the same category of received tradition rather than documented fact (Goldfrank 2008; Maloney 1973).

The copyist tradition has a certain internal plausibility, because Nilus’s surviving writings show him to have been a learned and meticulous handler of texts, an excerptor and compiler of the patristic tradition with a scribe’s care for accuracy (see The Skete Rule (Ustav)). But plausibility is not attestation, and the honest statement is that we know Nilus was deeply literate from his works, and that tradition makes him a copyist, without being able to document the early occupation directly.

Kirillo-Belozersk

The one element of Nilus’s early formation that stands on firmer ground is his attachment to the Kirillo-Belozersk monastery — the great house on the White Lake (Beloozero) in the far north, founded by St. Cyril of White Lake (Kirill Belozersky, d. 1427), a disciple of the Sergian tradition (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). It was at Kirillov that Nilus became a monk and received his monastic formation, and it was from Kirillov that he set out on his pilgrimage to the East and to which he returned before withdrawing to found his own skete nearby (Goldfrank 2008; Maloney 1973).

Kirillo-Belozersk is significant for understanding Nilus in two ways that point in opposite directions. On one hand, it was by the late fifteenth century one of the great landholding cenobitic houses of the north — a participant in exactly the monastic prosperity Nilus’s own poverty would implicitly criticize. On the other, it preserved a memory of austerity: St. Cyril its founder had been remembered for a stricter, more frugal ideal, and the house retained a current of “elders of the Beloozero,” among whom a tradition of contemplative seriousness survived (Fedotov 1966, vol. II). Nilus thus came out of a house that embodied both the wealth and the older austerity of Russian monasticism, and his life can be read as the radicalizing of the austere strand against the prosperous one — not as a revolt against his formation but as a return to its deepest memory.

What Drove Him East

The sources do not give us a conversion narrative or a precipitating crisis; they give us a movement. At some point after his profession at Kirillov, Nilus undertook the long pilgrimage to Mount Athos and Constantinople that would be the decisive event of his formation (treated in The Journey to Athos and Constantinople). Whether he was accompanied by his disciple Innokenty (Innocent) Okhlyabinin from the outset or joined later, and how long the journey lasted, are again matters of inference rather than record (Maloney 1973; Goldfrank 2008). What the record makes clear is the result: a Russian monk who had drunk directly at the Greek hesychast spring returned to the Russian north to plant what he had found.

The Shape of an Honest Biography

The honest biography of Nilus’s early life, then, is short and largely negative in its certainties. He was born, by estimate, around 1433; he became a monk at Kirillo-Belozersk; he was deeply literate and steeped in the patristic tradition; he traveled to the Christian East; and he returned to found a skete on the Sora and to write. The colorful details — the Maikov surname, the brother in the chancery, the Moscow scriptorium — are tradition, not documentation, and are best held as such (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The poverty of the biographical record is, fittingly, of a piece with the poverty Nilus chose: a man who asked that his very body be forgotten left little for the biographer, and much — in his writings — for the student of the soul.

References

Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Introduction on the limits of the biographical record, the standing of the “Maikov” identification and the early-life traditions, and the formation at Kirillo-Belozersk.)
Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (Biographical reconstruction and its sources; the Kirillov years and the pilgrimage.)
Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II: The Middle Ages, the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The Kirillo-Belozersk house, the Beloozero elders, and the received early biography of Nil.)