Possessions and the Monastic Vocation

Beneath the contested drama of the 1503 council lies a principle that is genuinely and demonstrably St. Nilus of Sora’s, set out in his own Predanie and Ustav: that monks, having renounced the world, should live by the labor of their own hands and by alms accepted in true need, and should not hold villages and estates worked by dependent peasants. This file sets out that principle and its grounds in Scripture and the monastic tradition, distinguishing the authentic teaching of Nilus from the “Non-Possessor party platform” that later tradition built upon it.

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

The Principle in Nilus’s Own Words

Whatever the uncertainties about Nilus’s public role at the 1503 council (see The 1503 Council), there is no uncertainty about the principle of poverty itself: it stands plainly in his own writings. In the Predanie, the rule for his brotherhood, Nilus lays down that the monks of the skete are to support themselves by the work of their own hands, taking only a frugal sufficiency, accepting alms only in genuine necessity, and refusing to hold the kind of landed property that would make them dependent on the labor of others (Nil Sorsky, Predanie; trans. Maloney 2003; Goldfrank 2008; Maloney 1973). This is not a later attribution but Nilus’s own legislation for his own community, and it is the secure foundation of everything the tradition later built into the “Non-Possessor” position.

The principle flows directly from Nilus’s whole spirituality. The monk has renounced the world and its goods in order to be free for God; to reacquire wealth and the cares of estate management corporately, even under the form of a monastery’s common property, is to take back with one hand what was given up with the other, and to load the contemplative with exactly the worldly business and anxiety that inner prayer requires him to be free of (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). Poverty, for Nilus, is not first a social program but a condition of stillness: the poor monk is the free monk, undistracted, able to attend to the one thing needful (see The Prayer of the Heart).

The Scriptural Grounds

Nilus grounds the rule of self-support in Scripture and the apostolic example. He invokes the Apostle Paul’s command that “if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10), and Paul’s own example of laboring with his hands so as not to be a burden — “these hands have ministered to my necessities” (Acts 20:34; cf. 1 Thessalonians 2:9) (Nil Sorsky, Predanie and Ustav; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973). Behind these stands the Lord’s own teaching on poverty and detachment — the call to lay up treasure in heaven rather than on earth (Matthew 6:19–21), the warning that one cannot serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:24), and the counsel to the rich young man to sell what he had (Matthew 19:21) — which the monastic tradition had always read as the charter of its renunciation (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II).

He grounds it equally in the monastic tradition he had absorbed in the East. The ancient monks of Egypt and the great legislators had prized poverty and the labor of the hands; the hesychast fathers Nilus revered lived in poor sketes, not on worked estates (see The Philokalic Inheritance). Nilus’s rule is thus presented by him not as innovation but as a return to the authentic poverty of the fathers, from which, in his judgment, the great prosperous monasteries of his own day had drifted (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II).

What the Principle Did and Did Not Mean

It is important to state the principle precisely, because later partisanship inflated it. Nilus’s teaching concerns the monastic vocation: it is a rule about how monks, who have vowed poverty, should live. It is directed against monasteries holding villages and the bound labor of dependent peasants, which Nilus judged incompatible with the monk’s renunciation and a source of worldly entanglement and even of injustice (Nil Sorsky, Predanie and Ustav; trans. Maloney 2003; Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). It is not, in Nilus’s own writings, a comprehensive program of state secularization of Church lands, nor a polemical campaign against other monasteries by name, nor a “party platform.” Those extensions belong to the later movement that took Nilus as its patron, not to Nilus himself (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; see The Trans-Volga Elders).

Nor did Nilus’s poverty entail contempt for charity. The objection that monastic estates were needed to feed the poor and relieve the hungry — the heart of Joseph of Volotsk’s defense (see Two Visions of Monasticism) — Nilus did not meet by denying the duty of mercy but by locating the monk’s first calling elsewhere: in repentance, prayer, and the purification of the heart, supported by his own labor, with alms given from what he had rather than from the proceeds of others’ bound toil (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The two saints differed not over whether to love the poor but over how the monastic life should be ordered so as to serve God and neighbor rightly.

A Spiritual Principle Before a Social One

The deepest point about Nilus’s teaching on possessions is that it is a spiritual principle before it is a social or economic one. He cared about poverty because he cared about prayer; he wanted the monk free of estates because he wanted the monk free for God (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The social implications — the critique of serf-worked monastic estates, the suspicion of monastic wealth — are real and follow genuinely from his teaching, and they would be drawn out forcefully by his heirs. But in Nilus himself they are the overflow of a contemplative ideal, not its foundation. To read his poverty primarily as a social-reform program is to reverse his own order of concern and to remake the hesychast as a reformer (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Maloney 1973). The authentic Nilus is a man who, loving stillness and the prayer of the heart, found that they required poverty — and who legislated that poverty for the handful of monks who shared his cell-life on the Sora, leaving to others the task of turning his quiet rule into a banner.

See Also

References

  • Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Translation of the Predanie and Ustav on self-support and poverty; the distinction between Nilus’s authentic principle and the later “Non-Possessor” program.)
  • Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (Nilus’s teaching on poverty, the labor of the hands, and its scriptural and monastic grounds.)
  • Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The principle of monastic poverty in Nilus and its place in the controversy; poverty as a spiritual ideal.)
  • 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 and the refusal of estates.)