The Skete on the Sora

Some distance from the great house of Kirillo-Belozersk, on the low, marshy banks of the small Sora river, St. Nilus of Sora founded the skete that gave him his name. He chose the site for its very poverty and remoteness — an inhospitable, unproductive place that could never become a rich estate — and built there a small, austere settlement where a few monks lived in separate cells, supported by the labor of their own hands and the barest alms. This file describes the founding, the deliberately poor economy, and the physical character of the skete that was the laboratory of Nilus’s contemplative ideal.

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

The Choice of a Poor Place

When Nilus returned from Mount Athos to Kirillo-Belozersk he did not settle permanently in the great cenobitic monastery. After a period there he withdrew, with a few like-minded brothers, to found a new and very different kind of settlement on the river Sora, in the forests and marshlands not far from the Kirillov house (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction). The choice of site was itself a statement. The place was remote, swampy, poor in soil, and unpromising — exactly the kind of location that could never support the villages, fields, and dependent peasants that had made the great monasteries wealthy (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). Nilus chose poverty geographically before he ever argued it theologically: a skete on the Sora could be poor because the land would let it be nothing else.

This deliberate selection of an inhospitable site is of a piece with the whole logic of Nilus’s foundation. He wanted a setting in which contemplative prayer, not estate management, would be the business of the monks, and in which the temptation to accumulate would be removed by the simple fact that there was nothing there to accumulate (see Possessions and the Monastic Vocation). The barrenness of the Sora was a feature, not a defect.

The Form of the Settlement

The skete Nilus built bore little resemblance to a Russian cenobitic monastery. There was no great walled compound, no large refectory, no array of dependent buildings. Instead the monks lived in separate cells, set apart from one another at a distance — far enough for solitude and silence, near enough that the brothers could gather for common worship and could reach one another in need (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). At the center stood a small church, where the brotherhood assembled for the services that punctuated their largely solitary lives. The whole was small: Nilus’s ideal was not a populous community but a handful of monks, and the skete was sized to that ideal (treated in The Skete as a Third Way).

The simplicity extended to the worship and the buildings alike. Nilus is reported to have insisted on the plainest possible furnishings, refusing costly ornament, gold and silver vessels, and rich decoration as inappropriate to monks who had renounced the world’s goods — a frugality that flowed from the same principle as the poverty of the site and would later become one of the marks associated with the “Non-Possessor” sensibility (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). The skete was to be beautiful, if at all, with the beauty of austerity.

Living by the Labor of the Hands

The economy of the skete was built on a single principle that Nilus took directly from the ancient monastic tradition and from the Apostle Paul: the monk should be supported by the labor of his own hands, supplemented only by alms accepted in genuine necessity, and should not live from the worked estates of others (Nil Sorsky, Predanie; Ustav; trans. Maloney 2003; Goldfrank 2008). Nilus grounded this in Scripture — the Apostle’s “if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) and his example of working with his own hands so as not to burden the churches (cf. 1 Thessalonians 2:9; Acts 20:34) — and in the practice of the early monks (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II).

In practice this meant that the monks of the Sora supported themselves by handwork — copying manuscripts, the crafts of the cell, and such cultivation as the poor land allowed — taking from the labor only what was needed for a frugal sufficiency. Alms might be accepted when work failed to provide, but begging as a way of life and the holding of villages worked by serfs were both excluded (Nil Sorsky, Predanie; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973). The skete thus modeled in miniature the economic principle that later tradition would magnify into the “Non-Possessor” program: a monasticism that owned almost nothing and lived from its own hands (see Possessions and the Monastic Vocation).

The Skete as Laboratory of Prayer

It is essential to see the Sora skete first as what Nilus intended it to be — not a political demonstration but a workshop of inner prayer. Everything about it served the contemplative end: the remote site that removed distraction, the separate cells that gave solitude, the silence, the frugal economy that freed the monks from administration, the small numbers that allowed real spiritual fellowship. The skete was the physical condition Nilus judged necessary for the hesychast prayer he had learned on Athos to be possible in Russia (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). His writings — the Ustav and the Predanie — are the rule of this place, composed for these brothers in this setting (see The Skete Rule (Ustav)).

The historical importance of the Sora skete therefore far exceeds its tiny scale. It was the first thoroughgoing transplantation of the Athonite skete ideal into Russian soil, the seedbed of the Trans-Volga hermitages, and the concrete embodiment of a contemplative and poor monasticism set quietly beside the wealthy cenobitic mainstream. From this small, marshy, deliberately poor place came both Nilus’s writings and the movement that later generations would call the Non-Possessors (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction; and Section 08).

See Also

References

  • Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (The founding of the Sora skete, its poverty, its layout in separate cells, and its economy of handwork.)
  • Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The deliberate poverty and remoteness of the Sora skete and its place in Russian monastic history.)
  • Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Introduction on the skete and its setting; translation of the Predanie and Ustav.)
  • Nil Sorsky. The Predanie (Tradition) and The Ustav (Skete Rule), in Maloney, Nil Sorsky: The Complete Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 2003. (The rule of self-support by the labor of the hands.)