The Skete Rule (Ustav)

The Ustav — Nilus’s “Skete Rule,” sometimes called the Predanie i ustav or the “Tradition of the Skete Life” — is his major work and one of the masterpieces of medieval Russian spiritual writing. In a sustained treatise of some eleven chapters, woven almost entirely from the Greek ascetic fathers but ordered by Nilus’s own experience, it sets out the whole inner discipline of the contemplative: the practice of mental prayer, the analysis of the eight evil thoughts, and the method of waging warfare against them. This file describes the structure and substance of the Ustav as the core of Nilus’s teaching.

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

The Work and Its Standing

The Ustav is the principal writing of Nil Sorsky and the fullest statement of his teaching. Its authenticity is secure: it survives in the manuscript tradition associated with Nilus’s circle, it is critically edited and translated, and it presents a coherent and unified vision that scholars accept as genuinely his (Goldfrank 2008, introduction and text; Maloney 1973). It is, with the Predanie, the foundation document of Russian hesychasm and the chief reason Nilus’s mind remains accessible where his biography is not.

The work is not a systematic theology but an ascetic manual — a guide to the practice of the inner life, written for the monks of a skete who have already renounced the world and now face the harder, interior renunciation of the passions. Its method, as Nilus repeatedly says, is transmission: he writes what he has received from the Scriptures and the holy fathers, and he asks the reader to test it against them (Nil Sorsky, Ustav, preface; trans. Maloney 2003; Goldfrank 2008). Much of the text is therefore citation and paraphrase of Gregory of Sinai, John Climacus, Isaac the Syrian, Symeon, and the Sinaite masters (see The Philokalic Inheritance); but the selection, the ordering, and the controlling voice are Nilus’s own, and they carry the authority of a man who had practiced what he transmits.

The Structure of the Inner Discipline

The Ustav is built around the progressive discipline of mental prayer and the warfare against the thoughts. After a preface on the testing of all teaching against the tradition, Nilus treats the foundations of the inner life — the gathering of the mind, the practice of stillness, the bodily and mental conditions of prayer — and then turns to the central drama of the spiritual life as the hesychast fathers understood it: the rising of evil thoughts in the heart and the monk’s struggle to meet and master them before they become sin (Nil Sorsky, Ustav, chs. 1–5; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973).

The heart of the practical teaching is the prayer of the heart: the rhythmic, attentive invocation of the name of Jesus, by which the mind is gathered, held in the remembrance of God, and given a single occupation that crowds out the wandering thoughts (treated in The Prayer of the Heart). Around this central practice the Ustav arranges the supporting disciplines — watchfulness (nepsis), the guarding of the senses, the cultivation of compunction and tears, the remembrance of death and judgment, and the whole economy of the contemplative day (Nil Sorsky, Ustav; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973; Špidlík 1986).

The Eight Thoughts

The analytical core of the Ustav is its treatment of the eight evil thoughts (Greek logismoi) — the schema of the principal passions inherited from Evagrius of Pontus and John Cassian and standard in the ascetic tradition. Nilus enumerates them in the received order: gluttony, fornication (lust), avarice (love of money), anger, dejection (sadness), acedia (listlessness or despondency), vainglory, and pride (Nil Sorsky, Ustav, on the eight thoughts; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973; Špidlík 1986). These eight are the roots from which all sins grow, the standing temptations against which the monk wages his lifelong warfare.

For each of the eight, Nilus does two things in the manner of the fathers. He describes the character of the passion — how it arises, what it feeds on, what disguises it wears — and he prescribes the remedies: the practical disciplines, counter-thoughts, scriptural weapons, and above all the recourse to prayer by which it is resisted (Nil Sorsky, Ustav; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973). His treatment is notable for its psychological realism and its mercy: he understands the passions from within, as a man who has fought them, and he counsels not crushing severity but patient, discerning, persevering resistance (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973).

The Method of Mental Warfare

What gives the Ustav its enduring interest is the precision with which it describes the mechanism of temptation — the stages by which a thought passes from a first faint suggestion to a ruling passion — and the corresponding method of resistance at each stage. This is Nilus’s psychology of the thought, drawn from Climacus, Hesychius, Philotheos, and Gregory of Sinai but rendered with a clarity that is his own, and it is treated in detail in its own file (see Guarding the Thoughts). In brief: a thought is most easily defeated at its first appearance, before the will has consented to it, and the whole art of nepsis — watchful attention — is to catch the thought early, refuse it entry, and turn at once to the prayer of the name of Jesus, which both expels the intruder and unites the mind to God (Nil Sorsky, Ustav; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973; Špidlík 1986).

The warfare is “mental” (umnoe delanie, the “work of the mind” or “intelligent activity”) because it is fought in the nous, the mind or spiritual intellect, the inner battleground where thoughts arise and where they must be met. Nilus’s teaching is that outward observance — fasting, vigil, bodily labor — is necessary but not sufficient; the real combat is interior, in the guarding of the heart, and the monk who attends only to the outward and neglects the inner has not yet begun the true ascetic work (Nil Sorsky, Ustav; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). This primacy of the inner over the outer is the signature of Nilus’s whole spirituality and the deepest meaning of his “mental warfare.”

The Tone of the Ustav

For all its rigor, the Ustav is pervaded by a gentleness that distinguishes Nilus from harsher ascetic writers. He warns against excessive, indiscreet austerity that breaks the body and the spirit; he counsels measure and discernment (diakrisis) above raw severity; he is full of compassion for the struggling and for human weakness; and his ideal is not the spiritual athlete’s conquest but the humble, tearful, persevering love of God (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). This humane and merciful temper — learned above all from Isaac the Syrian (see The Philokalic Inheritance) — is why the Ustav reads less as a code of discipline than as the counsel of a wise and gentle elder, and why it has nourished readers far beyond the skete on the Sora.

See Also

References

  • Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Critical edition and translation of the Ustav; its authenticity, structure, and patristic sources; the preface on testing the tradition.)
  • Maloney, George A., S.J., trans. Nil Sorsky: The Complete Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 2003. (English translation of the Ustav; the eight thoughts and the method of mental warfare.)
  • Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (Analysis of the Ustav, the eight passions, and the discipline of mental prayer.)
  • Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The humane temper of the Ustav and the primacy of inner work.)
  • Špidlík, Tomáš. The Spirituality of the Christian East. Trans. Anthony P. Gythiel. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1986. (The eight thoughts and the ascetic psychology in the Eastern fathers.)