The Tradition (Predanie) and Letters

Beside the great Ustav, St. Nilus of Sora left a shorter monastic rule — the Predanie (Tradition), governing the practical life of his brotherhood — together with four surviving letters of spiritual direction and a brief, severe last will. The Predanie sets out how the skete is to live: by the labor of the monks’ own hands, in poverty, simplicity, and obedience to a shared discipline and an elder. The letters apply the same teaching on inner work to individual souls. This file presents these writings and the consistent doctrine of the inner life that runs through them.

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

The Predanie

The Predanie (“Tradition,” or “what has been handed down”) is Nilus’s shorter rule, the practical complement to the Ustav. Where the Ustav is a treatise on the interior discipline of mental prayer and the war on the thoughts, the Predanie governs the outward conditions of the skete life: how the brothers are to be received and tested, how they are to support themselves, how poverty and simplicity are to be observed, and how the common worship and the relations of the brotherhood are to be ordered (Nil Sorsky, Predanie; trans. Maloney 2003; Goldfrank 2008). The two writings are so closely joined that the whole is sometimes transmitted under the title Predanie i ustav (“Tradition and Rule”), and they are best read together as a single project: the Predanie establishing the frame, the Ustav filling it with the inner work.

The central principle of the Predanie is self-support by honest labor. Nilus lays down that the monks are to live from the work of their own hands, taking from it only a frugal sufficiency, accepting alms only in genuine necessity, and refusing both idle begging and the holding of villages and estates worked by others (Nil Sorsky, Predanie; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973). He grounds this in the apostolic injunction “if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) and in the example of St. Paul, who labored with his own hands (cf. Acts 20:34; 1 Thessalonians 2:9), and in the practice of the ancient monks (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The economic principle of the Predanie is thus the seed of what later tradition would call the “Non-Possessor” position (see Possessions and the Monastic Vocation), but in the Predanie itself it appears not as a polemic against other monasteries but as the simple rule of one poor skete.

The Predanie is also marked by Nilus’s characteristic moderation. He prescribes discernment in fasting and labor, adapting the discipline to the strength of each monk, and he refuses the harsh uniformity that breaks the weak; the rule is firm in its poverty and its order but humane in its application (Nil Sorsky, Predanie; trans. Maloney 2003; Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). Here, as in the Ustav, the inner spirit governs the outer observance.

The Letters

Four letters of Nilus survive, addressed to disciples and others who sought his spiritual counsel, and they are precious as the application of his teaching to particular souls and situations (Maloney 1973; Goldfrank 2008). In them Nilus appears as a spiritual director: gentle, learned, drawing constantly on the Scriptures and the fathers, attentive to the individual’s state, and unfailingly directing the correspondent back to the inner work — the guarding of the heart, the prayer of the name, the discernment of the thoughts, and the cultivation of humility and compunction (Nil Sorsky, Letters; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973).

The letters confirm in miniature what the Ustav teaches at length: that the heart of the spiritual life is interior; that outward asceticism serves the inner purification and is worthless without it; that the passions must be met with discernment and patience rather than crushed by violence; and that the goal is the humble, loving, prayerful union of the mind with God (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). They also show his pastoral mercy — his care for the discouraged, his counsel against despair, his insistence that God’s mercy exceeds every sin — the same warmth that pervades the larger works (Fedotov 1966, vol. II). Among the matters touched in the correspondence is Nilus’s discernment in the handling of those who had fallen into error, a theme that bears on the later tradition of the Trans-Volga elders’ mildness toward heretics (see The Treatment of Heretics).

The Last Will

The shortest and in some ways the most eloquent of Nilus’s writings is his last will (testament), in which he gives directions for the disposal of his body after death. He asks that his corpse be cast out into the wilderness to be devoured by beasts and birds, or buried without honor, because it had sinned grievously against God and was unworthy of burial; he forbids any costly funeral or memorial and any veneration of his remains (Nil Sorsky, Testament / Last Will; trans. Maloney 2003; Goldfrank 2008; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The will is the perfect epitome of his whole teaching: the radical humility, the refusal of honor, the contempt for the body’s glorification, the same self-effacement that made his biography so thin. It is treated more fully in connection with his veneration, where the irony of a man who forbade his own cult becoming a venerated saint is examined (see Canonization and Feast).

The Unity of the Teaching

What is striking across all of Nilus’s writings — the long Ustav, the practical Predanie, the directive letters, the austere will — is their perfect consistency. Every one returns to the same center: the primacy of the inner life, the prayer of the heart, the discernment of the thoughts, humility, compunction, mercy, and the refusal of all that is outward, showy, or accumulating (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The poverty of the Predanie is the social face of the humility of the will; the warfare of the Ustav is the inner face of the counsel in the letters. This unity is itself an argument for the authenticity and integrity of the corpus, and it is the reason that, alone among most medieval Russian saints, Nilus can be known not through what others said of him but through the steady voice of his own writings (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Maloney 1973).

See Also

• The Skete Rule (Ustav) — the major treatise the Predanie frames and the letters apply
• Possessions and the Monastic Vocation — the principle of self-support set out in the Predanie
• The Prayer of the Heart — the inner work the letters direct souls toward
• The Treatment of Heretics — Nilus’s discernment toward those in error
• Canonization and Feast — the last will and the irony of his veneration
• The Ascetic Fathers — the tradition of spiritual direction Nilus practiced

References

• Maloney, George A., S.J., trans. Nil Sorsky: The Complete Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 2003. (English translation of the Predanie, the letters, and the last will.)
• Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Critical edition and translation of the Predanie, the letters, and the testament; the authenticity and unity of the corpus.)
• Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (The Predanie and its rule of self-support; the letters as spiritual direction.)
• Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The Predanie, the letters, the last will, and the humane and humble temper of Nilus’s teaching.)
• Nil Sorsky. The Predanie (Tradition), Letters, and Last Will (Testament), in Maloney, Nil Sorsky: The Complete Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 2003.