Two Visions of Monasticism

St. Nilus of Sora and St. Joseph of Volotsk are remembered as the heads of two contrasting visions of the monastic life: Nilus’s small, poor, contemplative skete, living by the labor of the hands, set against Joseph’s large, well-endowed, disciplined cenobium, holding property in order to feed the poor, train clergy, and serve the Church and society. This file presents both visions fairly — for both men are canonized saints — refusing to make either a hero or a villain, showing each as an authentic good answering a real need, and naming the degree to which their famous opposition was sharpened by the partisans who came after them.

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

Two Saints, Not a Hero and a Villain

Before anything else is said, the governing fact must be stated: both Nilus of Sora and Joseph of Volotsk are canonized saints of the Orthodox Church, venerated, commemorated, and held up for imitation. Whatever the differences between them — and the differences are real — the Church has judged that both served God and were sanctified in their service. The temptation of the modern reader, fed by older partisan historiography, is to cast the contemplative Nilus as the enlightened hero and the propertied, heretic-prosecuting Joseph as the reactionary villain (or, in a churchly mirror-image, to cast Joseph as the defender of the Church’s order against a dangerous laxity). Both caricatures are false, and this file refuses them. What follows is a contrast of two authentic visions, not a verdict between a saint and a sinner (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction; see St. Joseph of Volotsk).

Nilus’s Vision: Contemplative Poverty

Nilus’s vision has been set out across this collection: the small skete of two or three monks, poor by deliberate choice, remote, supported by the labor of the monks’ own hands, ordered wholly toward inner prayer and the purification of the heart (see The Skete on the Sora; The Prayer of the Heart). For Nilus the monk’s first and almost only business is the contemplative work — repentance, the prayer of the name, the warfare against the thoughts, the love of God in stillness — and everything else, including property and even much organized activity, is a distraction to be stripped away (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). His monasticism is inward, hidden, individual in its core (though guarded by the skete’s fellowship), and radically poor. Its strength is its purity of focus and its fidelity to the contemplative heart of the monastic tradition; its limit, as Joseph would urge, is that it left the monastery little capacity to serve the wider Church and the suffering world.

Joseph’s Vision: Service and Stewardship

Joseph of Volotsk (1439/40–1515), founder and abbot of the Volokolamsk monastery, embodied the opposite and equally ancient vision. His monastery was a large, strictly disciplined cenobium, well-endowed with lands and revenues — and Joseph defended that endowment not as worldliness but as the material basis of the monastery’s service to God and neighbor (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; see St. Joseph of Volotsk). The monastery’s wealth, in Joseph’s vision, existed to be poured out: to feed the poor in time of famine (the Volokolamsk house was famous for sustaining thousands during the great famine), to give alms and hospitality, to train and supply clergy, to maintain the splendor of the Church’s worship, and to undergird the moral and social order of the realm (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction). Joseph’s monk was disciplined, obedient, liturgically rich, and active in the Church’s mission to society. Its strength is its fruitfulness in charity and service and its capacity to sustain the Church’s public life; its limit, as Nilus’s heirs would urge, is the worldly entanglement and the dependence on bound labor that great wealth brings.

The Real Difference and Its Limits

The genuine difference between the two visions can be stated without exaggeration. It is a difference of emphasis and ordering within the monastic vocation: whether the monastery should be a poor and hidden workshop of contemplation (Nilus) or a wealthy and active center of service and stewardship (Joseph); whether the monk’s first calling is the inner purification of his own heart (Nilus) or that purification expressed in and through the disciplined service of the Church and the poor (Joseph) (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). Both drew on the monastic tradition; both could cite the fathers; both aimed, in their different ways, at the love of God and neighbor. The Church’s canonization of both is its judgment that both emphases are legitimate and that the tension between them is a fruitful one within a single tradition, not a contradiction to be resolved by anathematizing one side.

The Later Sharpening of the Antithesis

It is essential to recognize how much the sharpness of the Nilus-Joseph opposition is the work of later generations rather than of the two men. [Disputed: the portrayal of Nilus and Joseph as the conscious heads of two organized, opposed "parties" — the *nestyazhateli* (Non-Possessors) and the *iosifliane* (Josephites) — locked in a defining struggle is substantially a later construction. David Goldfrank (*Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings*, 2008, introduction) emphasizes that the sharp party antithesis and Nilus's role as its head derive largely from sixteenth-century polemic and later historiography rather than from a documented, programmatic confrontation between the two men in their own lifetimes; Georges Fedotov (*The Russian Religious Mind*, vol. II, 1966) presents the two visions and their opposition as broadly historical and theologically real, while still treating Nilus's primary concern as contemplative rather than factional]. Nilus and Joseph were, in their own lives, two holy abbots with different ideals of monastic life who differed on the question of property; the dramatic clash of “movements” with Nilus and Joseph as their banners belongs largely to the writers and historians who came after — to the Non-Possessors who needed a sainted patron, to the Josephites who triumphed and wrote the official history, and to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who organized the whole into a tidy opposition (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Fedotov 1966, vol. II; see The Modern Rediscovery).

Holding Both

For an Orthodox reader the right posture is to hold both saints and both visions together, as the Church does. The contemplative purity of Nilus and the serving stewardship of Joseph are not rivals to be chosen between but complementary goods that the Church needs and has always needed: the hidden monk of prayer and the active monastery of charity, the witness of poverty and the witness of generous service. That the two were set against each other by their heirs, and that Joseph’s model prevailed in Russian practice while Nilus’s was for a time eclipsed (see The Eclipse of the Movement), is a fact of history; but it is not a verdict of the Church, which keeps the feasts of both and commends both to the faithful. To honor Nilus rightly is, paradoxically, to refuse to dishonor Joseph — for the contemplative who taught humility, mercy, and the refusal of all contention would be the last to wish his name made a weapon against a brother saint (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction).

References

Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The two visions of monasticism; Joseph’s monastery as a center of charity and service; the opposition of the ideals and its theological reality.)
Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Introduction: the later construction of the Possessor/Non-Possessor party antithesis and the caution against reading it back into Nilus’s and Joseph’s own lifetimes.)
Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (Nilus’s contemplative ideal in contrast with the cenobitic and active model.)