The Trans-Volga Elders

The contemplative, poor tradition St. Nilus of Sora planted was carried forward after his death by the “Trans-Volga elders” (zavolzhskie startsy) — the hermits and skete-dwellers of the forests beyond the Volga who lived the Nilan skete life and championed the Non-Possessor cause. Their most prominent and articulate figure was Vassian Patrikeyev, a princely monk turned forceful advocate of monastic poverty and of mercy toward heretics. This file traces the Trans-Volga elders and Vassian as the bearers of Nilus’s legacy into the next generation, and the conflict with the Josephite party that their advocacy provoked.

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

The Trans-Volga Elders

The region beyond the Volga, in the forests and lakelands of the Russian north where Nilus had founded his skete, became the heartland of the contemplative and poor monasticism he embodied. The “Trans-Volga elders” — the monks of the sketes and hermitages of this region — carried on the Nilan way: the small skete or hermitage, the poverty, the labor of the hands, the inner prayer, and the gentle, merciful temper (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). They were not a formal organization but a milieu, a spiritual current, united by a shared ideal of monastic life rather than by institutional structure. It was this milieu, looking back to Nilus as its exemplar, that became identified with the “Non-Possessor” cause in the controversies of the early sixteenth century (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction).

The Trans-Volga elders are, in an important sense, the reason Nilus came to be seen as the head of a “party.” In themselves, his writings legislated poverty for one small skete; it was the elders who lived in his spirit and took up his cause in the public disputes who turned the quiet rule of the Sora into the banner of a movement (see Possessions and the Monastic Vocation; The 1503 Council). The historical Nilus is the contemplative; the “leader of the Non-Possessors” is in large part the creation of the Trans-Volga tradition that revered him (Goldfrank 2008, introduction).

Vassian Patrikeyev

The outstanding figure of this current was Vassian Patrikeyev (in the world Prince Vasily Ivanovich Patrikeyev, c. 1470–after 1531). A high-born member of a great princely family, he had been forcibly tonsured a monk around 1499 after falling under the disgrace of Grand Prince Ivan III, and he came under the influence of Nilus and the contemplative tradition (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008). Vassian became the most forceful and articulate advocate of the Non-Possessor position in the generation after Nilus: he argued vigorously and publicly against monastic landholding, attacking the great monasteries’ wealth and their possession of villages and dependent peasants, and he urged mercy toward the heretics against the severity of Joseph of Volotsk and his party (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction).

Vassian was a man of a very different temper from his teacher — polemical, learned, combative, engaged in the controversies of court and Church in a way the retiring Nilus never was. In him the Nilan ideal became a program and a cause, pressed in the public arena with an energy that drew the full hostility of the dominant Josephite party (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008). It is largely through Vassian’s advocacy that the documented case for the Non-Possessor position — against monastic estates, for mercy to heretics — enters the record; what is carried more by spirit and tradition in Nilus himself becomes explicit polemic in Vassian (see The Treatment of Heretics).

Maximus the Greek and the Learned Circle

The Non-Possessor current of these years drew strength from the presence in Russia of Maximus the Greek (Maximos the Hagiorite, c. 1470–1556), a learned Athonite monk of Greek and Italian humanist formation who had come to Moscow around 1518 at the invitation of the Grand Prince to translate and correct liturgical and patristic books (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008). Maximus, with his Athonite formation and his criticism of the abuses he found in the Russian Church — including monastic wealth — became associated with Vassian and the Non-Possessor circle, lending it his immense learning and his prestige as a representative of the living Greek tradition (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973). For a time the contemplative, poor, learned, and merciful current Nilus had founded seemed to have powerful and articulate champions at the very center of Russian Church life.

The Gathering Conflict

But the very forcefulness of Vassian’s advocacy, and the criticism leveled by him and Maximus at the wealth and practices of the dominant monasteries, ensured a fierce reaction. The Josephite party — the heirs of Joseph of Volotsk, who after his death rose to dominate the Russian hierarchy (see The Eclipse of the Movement) — possessed the institutional power, the favor that came with their model of a Church closely allied to and serviceable to the state, and the polemical resources to crush their critics (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Goldfrank 2008, introduction). The conflict between the Trans-Volga current and the Josephites was not merely a debate over ideas but a struggle for the soul and the structure of the Russian Church — and it was a struggle the Non-Possessors, for all their saintliness and learning, were positioned to lose. The story of that defeat, and of the personal ruin of Vassian and Maximus, belongs to the companion file (see The Eclipse of the Movement).

The Elders as Bearers of the Legacy

For the legacy of Nilus, the Trans-Volga elders matter in two opposite ways. On one hand, by taking up his cause in the public disputes they exposed the contemplative tradition to political defeat and to the suppression that followed — they made Nilus’s quiet poverty into a faction that the victorious party had reason to silence. On the other hand, by living the skete life and revering his memory and copying his writings, they preserved the contemplative tradition itself through the lean centuries, keeping alive in the northern sketes the inner prayer and the Nilan ideal that would one day be recovered (Fedotov 1966, vol. II; Maloney 1973; see The Modern Rediscovery). The elders are thus both the cause of the movement’s political defeat and the guardians of its spiritual survival — a fitting ambiguity for the heirs of a saint whose true greatness lay not in any party but in the prayer of the heart.

See Also

References

  • Fedotov, Georges P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The Trans-Volga elders; Vassian Patrikeyev’s life and advocacy; Maximus the Greek and the Non-Possessor circle.)
  • Goldfrank, David M., trans. and ed. Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings. Cistercian Studies 221. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. (Introduction: the Trans-Volga tradition, Vassian’s role in constructing the Non-Possessor cause around Nilus, and the conflict with the Josephites.)
  • Maloney, George A., S.J. Russian Hesychasm: The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. (The afterlife of Nilus’s tradition among the Trans-Volga hermits.)