The Journey to Athos and Constantinople

Sometime after his profession at Kirillo-Belozersk, St. Nilus of Sora made the long pilgrimage to Mount Athos and Constantinople — the formative journey of his life. There he encountered the living Greek hesychast tradition not as a book but as a practiced discipline of inner stillness and the prayer of the heart, and he gathered the patristic manuscripts and the method he would carry back to plant in the Russian north. This file traces what can be said of the journey and what Nilus absorbed from the Christian East, the spring from which all his later teaching flows.

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

The Pilgrimage East

The journey to the Christian East was the turning point of Nilus’s life, and unlike much of his early biography it is well attested in its fact, if not in its detail: Nilus himself refers to his sojourn among the holy fathers of Athos, and his writings are saturated with what he learned there (Maloney 1973; Goldfrank 2008, introduction). He traveled, by the common reconstruction, in the company of his disciple Innokenty Okhlyabinin (Innocent), spent a substantial period — perhaps several years — on Mount Athos, and passed through Constantinople and the monasteries of its environs before returning to Russia (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The precise dating and duration of the journey are not securely fixed and rest on inference from his career, and should be held as such (Goldfrank 2008; Maloney 1973), but that the journey happened and that it formed him is beyond reasonable doubt, because the proof is in his writings.

The chronology matters in one large respect. Nilus reached Athos in the decades after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 — that is, when the Byzantine imperial Church had fallen but the monastic tradition of the Holy Mountain continued under Ottoman rule. He thus came to Athos at the moment when Russia was beginning to think of itself as the heir of fallen Byzantium, and he brought home not an imperial theology but the one thing of Byzantium that had not fallen: the hesychast prayer of the monks (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Meyendorff 1974). His pilgrimage was, in effect, the personal channel by which the living Athonite tradition reached the Russian north in the generation after the City’s fall.

What He Found on the Holy Mountain

What Nilus encountered on Athos was the matured fruit of the fourteenth-century hesychast renewal. A century before his arrival, the Holy Mountain had been the center of the great controversy in which St. Gregory Palamas defended the hesychast monks and their claim to a real, experiential participation in the uncreated light and energies of God (see St. Gregory Palamas; Meyendorff 1974). The Palamite synods of 1341–1351 had vindicated the hesychasts, and by Nilus’s day the practice of inner prayer — the watchful guarding of the heart, the rhythmic invocation of the name of Jesus, the disciplines of attention and stillness — was the settled spiritual culture of the Athonite monasteries (Meyendorff 1974; Maloney 1973).

Crucially, Nilus did not learn this tradition primarily as doctrine. He learned it as a practiced method — a concrete discipline of the body and the attention, transmitted from elder to disciple, by which the mind is gathered into the heart and held in the remembrance of God (Maloney 1973; Špidlík 1986). This is what makes his witness distinctive in Russian history: where his contemporaries possessed the hesychast texts in Slavonic translation, Nilus had stood inside the living school and watched it done. His own teaching has, in consequence, the character of an eyewitness’s manual rather than a copyist’s anthology — though he was also, scrupulously, a copyist (see The Philokalic Inheritance).

The Manuscripts and the Method

Nilus returned from the East with two things that would define his life’s work. The first was the method of inner prayer — the hesychast discipline of attention, breathing, posture, and the invocation of the name, which he would set out in his Ustav with a precision unmatched in earlier Russian writing (treated in The Prayer of the Heart; Maloney 1973). The second was a library: he came home steeped in the texts of the hesychast and ascetic fathers, and he made it his labor to copy them, collate variant readings, and excerpt them into usable form, with the care of a trained scribe who would not pass on a corrupt or uncertain text (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Maloney 1973).

This scribal seriousness is one of Nilus’s most attractive and most consequential traits. He warns explicitly against accepting writings uncritically: a monk must weigh the Scriptures and the writings of the holy fathers, hold to what accords with the divine commandments and the consensus of the fathers, and set aside what does not (Nil Sorsky, Ustav, preface and ch. 1; trans. Maloney 2003; Goldfrank 2008). He brought to the transmission of the tradition a critical conscience — testing, comparing, refusing to vouch for the uncertain — that anticipates, in its small way, the source-critical temper this very collection applies to him.

Constantinople and the Wider East

Less can be said of Nilus’s time in Constantinople and its monasteries than of his Athonite formation, but the visit to the imperial city — even fallen, even under the Ottomans — placed him in the geographical and spiritual center of the Greek tradition he was absorbing (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). Whatever the particulars, the effect of the whole journey was to make Nilus a Russian who had drunk directly at the Greek source rather than at the secondhand pool of Slavonic translation alone — and it is this directness that gives his writing its authority and its freshness.

The Return and Its Meaning

When Nilus came back to Kirillo-Belozersk he did not remain in the great cenobitic house but withdrew, after a time, to found his own skete on the Sora river some distance away (see The Skete on the Sora). The journey east is the hinge between the two halves of his life: the monk formed in a wealthy Russian cenobium went to the Holy Mountain, learned the contemplative way at its living source, and returned to create in Russia a setting where that way could be practiced — a poor, remote, small skete modeled on what he had seen in the East (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). The pilgrimage is thus not merely a biographical episode but the cause of everything that follows: the skete, the writings, the contemplative teaching, and even — at one remove — the controversy over poverty that later tradition placed at the center of his life. All of it begins with a Russian monk on the Holy Mountain, learning to pray.

References

Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (The pilgrimage to Athos and Constantinople, its reconstruction and sources, and the hesychast method Nilus absorbed.)
Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Introduction on the journey, Nilus’s scribal care, and the critical handling of the patristic sources; translation of the Ustav preface and ch. 1.)
Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (Nilus’s journey east in the generation after 1453 and its significance for Russian spirituality.)
Meyendorff, John. St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The fourteenth-century hesychast renewal and the Athonite tradition Nilus encountered.)
Špidlík, Tomáš. The Spirituality of the Christian East. Trans. Anthony P. Gythiel. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1986. (Hesychast prayer as a practiced method.)
Nil Sorsky. The Ustav (Skete Rule), preface and ch. 1, in Maloney, Nil Sorsky: The Complete Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 2003.