The Eclipse of the Movement

Within a generation of St. Nilus of Sora’s death the Non-Possessor cause was overwhelmed. The Josephite party rose to dominate the Russian hierarchy; Vassian Patrikeyev and Maximus the Greek were tried, condemned, and imprisoned; the principle of monastic landholding was confirmed; and the contemplative, poor, merciful current Nilus embodied was driven to the margins and at last silenced for centuries. This file traces that eclipse — the Josephite ascendancy, the ruin of the movement’s leaders, the long suppression — and the quiet survival of Nilus’s spiritual legacy beneath the institutional defeat.

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

The Josephite Ascendancy

The decisive fact of the sixteenth century, for the fate of Nilus’s tradition, was the rise of the Josephites (iosifliane) — the disciples and heirs of Joseph of Volotsk — to dominance in the Russian Church. Joseph’s vision of a wealthy, disciplined, socially active monasticism, closely allied with and serviceable to a strong centralizing state, proved congenial to the Muscovite autocracy, and after Joseph’s death in 1515 his party supplied a succession of bishops and metropolitans and set the dominant tone of Russian Church life (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction). The alliance of the Josephite hierarchy with the growing power of Moscow — the ideology that made the monasteries and the Church the partners and sanctifiers of the autocratic state — gave the Josephites an institutional and political weight the contemplative Non-Possessors could not match (Fedotov 1966, vol. II). The wealthy, serving, state-aligned model of monasticism won the field, and the question of monastic estates was settled in its favor: the monasteries kept their lands.

The Ruin of Vassian and Maximus

The personal fate of the Non-Possessor leaders sealed the movement’s defeat. Vassian Patrikeyev, the forceful advocate of monastic poverty and mercy, fell at last under the hostility of the Josephite hierarchy and the displeasure of the Grand Prince. He was tried for error before a Church council (in the 1530s), condemned, and confined — fittingly and cruelly — in the Josephite stronghold, the Volokolamsk monastery of Joseph himself, where he is believed to have died (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008). Maximus the Greek, the learned Athonite who had lent the Non-Possessor circle his prestige and learning, suffered an even longer ordeal: tried in 1525 and again in 1531 on charges that mixed accusations of doctrinal and translation error with the political offense of his Non-Possessor and reforming associations, he was condemned and held in monastic imprisonment for some two decades, much of it in harsh conditions, before being released to a gentler confinement in his old age; he died in 1556 and was much later canonized (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008). The two ablest champions of Nilus’s cause were thus broken by the victorious party — a defeat both political and personal.

The Long Suppression

With its leaders ruined and the Josephite hierarchy dominant, the Non-Possessor current was driven from the public life of the Church and, in its political and polemical form, effectively silenced. The triumphant party had every reason to let the memory of a “Non-Possessor movement” fade, and the official history of the Russian Church for generations was written from the Josephite side (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction). The contemplative, poor monasticism of the Trans-Volga sketes survived as a marginal and dwindling reality, no longer a force in the councils of the Church; and the wider trajectory of Russian Church life — its close binding to the autocratic state, its institutional wealth — followed the Josephite path rather than the Nilan one (Fedotov 1966, vol. II). For an Orthodox reader it is important to register this defeat soberly: the holier vision, on the questions of poverty and mercy, did not prevail in the institutions of its own time. History is not always a vindication of the saints within history.

The Survival of the Spiritual Legacy

Yet the eclipse was not extinction. Two things survived the political defeat. First, the contemplative tradition itself — the skete life, the inner prayer, the Nilan ideal — persisted, however diminished, in the northern sketes and hermitages, kept alive by monks who revered Nilus and lived in his spirit even when his “party” was dead (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II). Second, and decisively, Nilus’s writings survived: the Ustav, the Predanie, the letters were copied and preserved in the manuscript tradition, carrying his teaching intact through the centuries of his marginalization (Goldfrank 2008, introduction; Maloney 1973). The defeat of the Non-Possessor cause as a political movement did not destroy the spiritual substance that had animated it; that substance went underground, waiting.

The Seed Beneath the Snow

The history of Nilus’s tradition after his death is therefore best read not as a simple disappearance but as a long dormancy. The contemplative hesychast spirituality he had transplanted from Athos was driven from the foreground of Russian Church life by the Josephite ascendancy — but it was not lost, and it would surge back into life in the great Russian spiritual revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: in the work of Paisius Velichkovsky, who again brought the Philokalia and the Athonite skete tradition into Russia, and in the startsy of Optina and the wider recovery of inner prayer (treated in The Modern Rediscovery). The eclipse of the movement is the dark middle of the story; the rediscovery is its dawn. Nilus’s contemplative seed, buried by the Josephite winter, did not die in the ground — and the long suppression, terrible as it was for the men who suffered it, did not have the last word over the prayer of the heart he had planted in Russian soil (Maloney 1973; Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008).

See Also

• The Trans-Volga Elders — Vassian, Maximus, and the movement before its defeat
• Two Visions of Monasticism — the Josephite vision that prevailed, presented without caricature
• The Modern Rediscovery — the later revival of the tradition that survived the eclipse
• The Skete Rule (Ustav) — the writings that survived to carry the legacy forward
• Russian Monasticism — the wider tradition shaped by the Josephite outcome

References

• Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The Josephite ascendancy; the trials and imprisonment of Vassian Patrikeyev and Maximus the Greek; the suppression of the Non-Possessor current and the survival of the contemplative tradition.)
• Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Introduction: the defeat of the Non-Possessor cause, the Josephite triumph, and the survival of Nilus’s writings.)
• Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (The marginalization of the Nilan tradition and its survival in the northern sketes and in his writings.)