The Philokalic Inheritance

St. Nilus of Sora’s whole teaching is a transmission of the Greek ascetic and hesychast fathers — the same constellation of authors that would later fill the Philokalia. His Ustav is woven almost entirely from their texts: Gregory of Sinai above all, and behind him John Climacus, Symeon the New Theologian, Isaac the Syrian, the Macarian homilies, Hesychius, Philotheos of Sinai, Nilus of Ancyra, and the Palamite tradition. This file maps that inheritance, the patristic library Nilus copied, excerpted, and naturalized in the Russian north, and shows how he transmitted it not as an anthologist but as a master who had practiced what he passed on.

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

A Teaching Made of the Fathers

The most important fact about Nilus’s writing is that he claimed to originate nothing. He insists, in the preface to his Ustav, that he writes not on his own authority but as one transmitting the teaching of the Holy Scriptures and the holy fathers, and that the brethren should test everything he sets down against that tradition (Nil Sorsky, Ustav, preface; trans. Maloney 2003; Goldfrank 2008). His Ustav is, accordingly, a tissue of citation and paraphrase: long stretches are excerpts from or close reworkings of the Greek ascetic fathers, and Nilus’s own contribution is the selection, arrangement, and the quiet authority of a man writing from experience (Maloney 1973; Goldfrank 2008, introduction).

This self-effacing method is not weakness but the deliberate humility of the hesychast tradition, which prizes the handing-on of what has been received over personal invention. But it also means that to understand Nilus one must know his fathers, because his mind is built of them. The decisive ones are these.

Gregory of Sinai

The single most important source for Nilus’s specifically hesychast teaching is St. Gregory of Sinai (c. 1260s–1346), the fourteenth-century master who systematized the method of the Jesus Prayer and the guarding of the heart and propagated it from Sinai and Athos through the Balkans (Maloney 1973; Meyendorff 1974). From Gregory, Nilus took the concrete technique of inner prayer: the gathering of the mind, the posture and the regulation of the breath, the rhythmic invocation of the name of Jesus, and the watchful return of the wandering attention to the heart (Nil Sorsky, Ustav, chs. 2–5; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973). Where Gregory of Sinai is the codifier of the method on the Greek side, Nilus is its faithful transmitter on the Russian side; the practical core of the Ustav is, in large part, Gregory of Sinai rendered into Slavonic and into a Russian skete’s life (Maloney 1973; Goldfrank 2008).

John Climacus and the Ladder

Behind Gregory stands St. John Climacus (c. 579–649), whose Ladder of Divine Ascent is one of the foundational texts of the whole hesychast tradition and a constant presence in Nilus (see St. John Climacus). From the Ladder Nilus drew the analysis of the passions and the virtues, the doctrine of penthos (the gift of tears and compunction), the teaching on stillness (hesychia), and above all the discipline of nepsis — sober watchfulness over the thoughts (Maloney 1973; Špidlík 1986). Climacus’s account of the steps by which a temptation grows from a first suggestion into a ruling passion lies directly behind Nilus’s own famous schema of the stages of a thought (treated in Guarding the Thoughts).

Symeon the New Theologian

From St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) — the great Byzantine mystic of the experience of divine light and the necessity of conscious, felt grace (see St. Symeon the New Theologian) — Nilus inherited the conviction that the spiritual life aims at a real and perceptible communion with God, not merely an outward observance, and the emphasis on tears, compunction, and the interior verification of grace (Maloney 1973; Meyendorff 1974). The method of prayer associated with Symeon’s name in the later tradition (the attention turned inward toward the heart) belongs to the same stream that reached Nilus through Gregory of Sinai and the Athonite fathers.

Isaac the Syrian

Perhaps no father is closer to the spirit of Nilus than St. Isaac the Syrian (Isaac of Nineveh, seventh century), the supreme teacher of solitude, stillness, humility, and the boundless mercy of God (see St. Isaac the Syrian). Isaac’s Ascetical Homilies shaped Nilus’s whole tonality: the love of hesychia and the cell, the primacy of inner work over outward observance, the gentleness toward the struggling, and the contemplative’s tears (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). Where Gregory of Sinai gives Nilus his technique, Isaac the Syrian gives him much of his soul — the warmth, the mercy, and the love of stillness that pervade the Ustav and the letters.

The Wider Library

Beyond these four, Nilus’s Ustav draws on the broad ascetic tradition that the Philokalia would later gather: the Macarian homilies, with their theology of the heart as the place of God’s indwelling; Hesychius of Sinai and Philotheos of Sinai, masters of watchfulness and the guarding of the intellect; Nilus of Ancyra (the “other Nilus”); Barsanuphius and John, Dorotheos of Gaza, and the desert tradition; and the Palamite framework that vindicated the whole hesychast enterprise (Maloney 1973; Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Meyendorff 1974). Nilus also knew and used the lives and sayings of the desert fathers and the great cenobitic legislators. His was, in short, the full ascetic library of the Byzantine East, mastered and made his own (see St. Gregory Palamas for the Palamite vindication of this tradition).

Transmission, Not Anthology

It would misrepresent Nilus, however, to call him merely an anthologist. Two things lift his transmission above compilation. First, he had practiced what he passed on: he had stood inside the living school on Athos (see The Journey to Athos and Constantinople), and his selection and emphasis carry the authority of experience, not only of reading (Maloney 1973). Second, he transmitted critically: he tested the texts against the consensus of the fathers and the commandments of the Gospel, refused to vouch for the uncertain, and arranged what he kept into a coherent and humane discipline (Nil Sorsky, Ustav, preface and ch. 1; trans. Maloney 2003; Goldfrank 2008). The result is that the Philokalic inheritance reaches Russian readers through Nilus not as a heap of excerpts but as a living rule of life — the Greek hesychast tradition naturalized, two and a half centuries before the Philokalia itself was printed, in the forests of the Russian north (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973).

References

Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (The patristic sources of the Ustav; Gregory of Sinai, John Climacus, Symeon, Isaac, and the Sinaite fathers in Nilus.)
Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Critical edition and notes identifying Nilus’s patristic sources and excerpts; the Ustav preface and ch. 1 on testing the tradition.)
Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (Nilus’s spirituality and its debt to Isaac the Syrian and the contemplative fathers.)
Meyendorff, John. St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Gregory of Sinai, Symeon, and the hesychast tradition Nilus inherited.)
Špidlík, Tomáš. The Spirituality of the Christian East. Trans. Anthony P. Gythiel. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1986. (Nepsis, penthos, and the ascetic analysis of the thoughts in the Greek fathers.)
Nil Sorsky. The Ustav (Skete Rule), preface and chs. 1–5, in Maloney, Nil Sorsky: The Complete Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 2003.