Nil Sorskii, the Non-Possessor

Nil Sorskii, or Nilus of Sora, was a monk active in Russia’s Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 16^th century, and the most prominent representative of the group later identified as the Non-Possessors.  Known sometimes as the Trans-Volga Elders, these churchmen thought the church had no business owning land and operating as landlords.  However, their opposition to the church as landowner had less to do with land, and more to do with the spiritual welfare of the Church.  They argued that owning land led the clergy’s attention away from God, and tied the Church down to mundane maneuverings that distracted the priests and destroyed their integrity and the purity of the Church itself. 

I first became interested in Nil Sorskii because of his stance against the church’s status as the dominant Russian landlord in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries, and it was with high expectations that I began this investigation.  What possessed the Non-Possessors to stand up to the clerical hierarchy, and indeed to the state of Russia, I wondered, and to declare that the economic structure of their society was wrong, was dangerous, and was a practice that needed amend.  Or is that what they truly represented?  What I found out is far different than what I expected.  Nevertheless, it entails an interesting story that tells us much about Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the early 16^th century in the northern Europe steppes and river valleys of the meandering Volga.

Difficulties of Discovery

I was not able to find out much about the early life of Nilus from Sora. I found one reference to the fact that his birth name was Nikolai Maikov or Maykov, and that his brother was state secretary Andrei Maykov (active in the 1450s - 1490s) , but I found little else.  Many references agree that he was born in 1433 and died in 1508.  The facts of his adult life seem a little more certain.  Part of the trouble in research is the inconsistency in the translations of names.   Nil or Nilus Sorskii or Sorsky hailed from Sora or Sorka, and information may be found under each of these names, in addition to that of Saint Nil.  Although I looked at much material, I will only focus on a few sources, and use them as the basis of my paper.

The most interesting source of information was undoubtedly the website put up by a San Franciscan who wrote about his namesake and patron saint.    Miles (Nilus) Stryker writes well of his namesake, includes a good bibliography, and a few beautiful pictures. 

Another reference found online was the Answers.com article on Nil Sorsky, which said:

“Brother of the state secretary Andrei Maykov (active 1450s - 1490s), Nil entered the Kirillov-Belozersk monastery in the 1440s or 1450s, went to Mt. Athos at some time for special training, and in 1470 was a leading Kirillov elder. Dissatisfied with materialism and secular interests there, he founded the Sorsky Hermitage on a Kirillov property, where he enforced a strict, self-supporting regimen and taught the Athonite, hesychastic mode of prayer. By favoring monastic dispensation of only spiritual alms, he avoided the amassing of goods and dependent labor required for material charity. In 1489, Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod sought out Nil, who helped produce Joseph of Volok's anti-heretical, theological polemics…Locally venerated, Nil has been seen as Russia's great elder and as relatively liberal for his day. He was added as a saint to official church calendars only in modern times.”

 

The Orthodox Wiki has an article on Nilus of Sora that sheds more light:

Nil Sorsky was involved in the Novgorod heresy affair (see Strigolniki [1] and Sect of Skhariya the Jew [2] for details), which had stirred a lot of minds in Russia at that time. It appears that Sorsky and his closest associate Paisiy Yaroslavov were much more tolerant towards the heretics than most of the Russian clergy, led by Archbishop Gennady and Joseph of Volokolamsk.

In 1489, Gennady (Archbishop of Novgorod) embarked on the path of fighting the heretics and asked Archbishop of Rostov to consult with the elders Nil Sorsky and Paisiy Yaroslavov (who had been living in his eparchy) and seek their assistance in this matter. Historical accounts of that period do not shed any light on the outcome of these "negotiations", but from that time on there seems to have been no interaction between Sorsky and Yaroslavov on one side and Gennady and Joseph of Volokolamsk on the other.

The two elders, however, did not treat heresy with indifference. They were both present at the Synod of 1490, which dealt with heresy, and exerted their influence upon its final decision. Initially, the clergy unanimously spoke in support of burning all the heretics at the stake. At the conclusion of the synod, however, only a few priests were condemned and then defrocked without being executed.

An interesting article on Possessors and Non-Possessors explores this further. 

"Possessors" more or less dominated the Russian Church during 1502-1511, 1522-1539, and 1542-1566. The Josephites - Iosifov monastery elders and alumni prelates - were a formidable and often disliked "Possessor" faction, and not only by Kirillov-Belozersk Monastery elders, who patronized the northern Trans-Volgan hermitages.”

The whole argument was neither small, nor simple.  The dispute presaged the Great Schism in the 17^th century, and was itself predated by two other movements within Orthodoxy.  The outcome undoubtedly determined the fate of the Russian peasantry for the next 400 years. 

 

The Strigolniks

The predecessors of this dispute included the Strigolniks, or “the barbers” (named after Pskov deacon Karp who gave the clergymen their haircuts).  The Strigolniks believed that it was sinful to charge a fee for the ordination of clergy and the offering of the sacraments (sounds a lot like Martin Luther…).  The complaint was taken to the Patriarch of Constantinople, but the Greeks followed the same practice as the Russian Orthodox Church, and claimed it was reimbursement for the expenses of office.        The Strigolniks left the Church to establish separate communities, thinking it blasphemous to receive sacrament from the tainted clergy.  Karp and another Strigolnik, Nicetas, were executed in 1375, but the sect survived.  Eventually the Pskov government imprisoned all practitioners, and any survivors went underground.  Or at least that’s how Bolshakoff tells the story in Chapter II of “Russian Nonconformity”.

The Judaizers

The next prominent group that next surfaced in opposition to the Orthodox Church was the Judaizers, so named because they followed a Lithuanian Jew named Zechariah, who had come to Novgorod in 1470.  He converted two Orthodox priests to Judaism, Dionysius and Alexis, and advised them to practice their new faith secretly. 

When Grand Duke Ivan III went to Novgorod to incorporate it into his Moscovy domain, he was “so impressed by their learning and apparent piety that he invited them to Moscow.”   It took the bishops of Moscow 17 years to notice how far the heresy had spread, and in 1490 a national Church council was called to consider the matter. 

National Church Council Convenes – 1490

The Primate of Russia at the time was Gennadius, a man who “was a stern prelate and admirer of the Spanish Inquisition, the methods of which he had learned from Nicholas Poppel, the Western emperor’s ambassador; and he urged the council to destroy the heretical society and to execute those who relapsed into heresy.”   Gennadius had wished for action against the heretics earlier, but had to wait for the death of his predecessor, Gerontius, before he could take action.  Even so, he faced stiff opposition: Ivan III was opposed to capital punishment, and “the celebrated Russian starets of the day, Paisius Yaroslavov and Saint Nilus of Sora, opposed it in principle.”  

Nilus of Sora Surfaces

The heretical movement continued to grow, for men such as Nilus made effective argument against persecution of the heretics.  In fact, even the Court of Ivan III was affected, as Princess Helen, the daughter-in-law of Ivan III, became Jewish.  “It seemed that Moscovy would gradually give up Christianity and become Jewish,” Bolshakoff claims, but continues that “the heretics themselves were largely responsible for the fact that it did not happen.”    Zosima, the primate of Moscow, was “a drunkard and a debauchee,” and he was replaced in 1494 by Simon, “a sworn enemy of the Judaizers.”  However, he could not act against them until Theodore Kuritsyn, the chancellor, died, which happened in 1504.  Another council was called, and by now, the tide had turned.

Another National Council Convenes – 1504

In 1504 the debate turned on the issue of whether the heretics should be burned alive, or simply imprisoned for life.  The verdict was to ruthlessly punish the perpetrators, and the effect was to destroy the movement of reform and religious “protestantism” that had sprung up in the native Russian soil of the Orthodox Church.   And now we come to the crux of the matter, as far as Nil Sorskii was concerned.  “The Moscow council of 1504 was further noteworthy,” Bolshakoff asserts, “because of the appearance there of the two first Russian theological schools, the Josephites and the Nonpossessors.”

Military Might vs. Orthodox Oligopoly

Up until this point, Ivan III had been sympathetic to the Judaizers, and the men who became known as the Nonpossessors, because he had his own reasons to want the Church to divest itself of their monopoly of land and wealth within the Moscovy state.  “Ivan III’s wish to deprive the monasteries of a large part of their lands, in order to distribute these to his soldiers, had a great deal to do with his tolerance of the Judaizers, whose teachings had become useful to him in this respect.”   The costs of government had gone up, and the sources of revenue had gone down, and Ivan saw a simple solution at hand – support the church challengers who argued against its practices of landlordism, and allow the heretics their freedoms.  Alas, the prevailing winds of politics tipped the scales the other way, for Ivan III was literally wed to the Church.  His wife, Princess Sophia Palaeologos, whom he married in 1472, was the daughter of the brother of the last two Byzantine emperors. Ivan had used this subterfuge to claim the coat of arms and the court ceremonies of Byzantium for himself, and the role of the Third Rome for Moscow.

The Protagonists

Joseph of Volokolamsk and Nilus of Sora epitomized the ecclesiastical dilemma, and personified the political dramatis personae.  Saint Joseph (both men were later canonized by the Orthodox Church) preferred the strict and austere life of the Kirilo-Belozersky monastery to the abbot of Borovsk, where he was professed in 1460 (at 20 years of age).  Later, he created his own monastery at Volokolamsk, and reveled in its “long vigils, severe fasts, hard work, and serious study.”   He was called by Gennadius for help in quelling the heresy of Judaizers, and relished the job.

“He demanded the severest laws against the heretics, specifying that they should be excommunicated and delivered to the civil authorities to be burned alive.  He justified the severest kind of punishment for the Judaizers on the basis that they were not, strictly speaking, Christian heretics but rather apostates from Christianity.  Fully realizing the strength of the secret organization of the Judaizers and their outward conformity to the Church, Saint Joseph demanded a diligent search for the heretics and a long probation period for those who repented.”

A Different Sort of Saint

Nilus of Sora was a different sort of man altogether.  He was professed at the Kirilov monastery (is this the same as the Kirilo-Belozersky monastery?  If so, how ironic…) by Paisius Yaroslavov, “one of the most attractive figures in Russian monastic history”, who was the one who “first headed the Nonpossessors.”  After this, “Nilus went to Constantinople, the Holy Land, and Mt. Athos to study the monastic life.”   All accounts testify that the time spent at Mt. Athos had a significant impact on his life, for here he learned of the mystical and ascetical ideas of Gregory Sinaites’s hesychasm, which asks believers “to concentrate on their inner world and personal emotional experiences of faith as means for achieving unity with God.”   It was undoubtedly this training and preference that helped Saint Nilus survive the animosity and bellicosity that the National Church Councils unleashed, for after the churchmen chose death for the heretics, Nilus chose solitude for his soul.  He returned to his skete with the “Elders of the Upper Volga” and put into practice his beliefs in the virtue of solitude and mystical prayer over the pursuit of worldly power and possessions.

A Century Ahead

Saint Nilus seems to have been roughly a century ahead of his churchly compatriots, and he undoubtedly led many onto the path of purity and protestantism which later led to the Great Schism.  Why did he oppose the Church’s possession of property? 

“Saint Nilus asserted that it was most unbecoming for monks to possess landed property.  He held that since monks deny the world and its entanglements, they ought to avoid great estates which would involve them in the affairs of this world and corrupt them.  He insisted that monks should live in poverty and evangelic simplicity, maintaining themselves by their own exertions. On these grounds Saint Nilus objected to the founding of large monasteries in populous district or in cities.  Monks, he said, should live retired lives in remote places and be supported not by endowments but by their own labor.  Saint Nilus recommended to the monks the skeptic form of the religious life which flourished at Mt. Athos.  In sketes the monks lived together in small groups, not exceeding twelve persons.  Their superior was also their spiritual director, or starets.  Saint Nilus advised his monks to use their free time for a diligent and critical study of the Bible and of the Fathers.  He prescribed mental prayer as a regular exercise and recommended certain works to undertake, particularly the spiritual direction of the faithful.”

Saint Nilus did agree with the Josephites (the Possessors) that the Church was obliged to excommunicate the apostates and heretics, and that some punishment was in order, but “he advocated clemency as more becoming to Christians.  In any case he resolutely opposed capital punishment.  Saint Nilus taught quite uncompromisingly that the human conscience must be free and that none should be persecuted for his religious views.  In that he was well in advance of his age, and the intolerant Josephites were simply unable to understand him.  They suspected his very Orthodoxy.”  

A Summary

 

The best summary of information about Nilus Sorskii, and the issue of the Church owning property, comes from a 1948 book my father loaned me called Readings in Russian History.

 

 

In the early sixteenth century an acute struggle was going on within the

ranks of the Orthodox Church in Muscovy. The immediate issue was the

question of church land possession. Like the Western church during the

Middle Ages, the Russian Church had accumulated, in the course of the

previous centuries of its existence, enormous wealth in land which for the

most part belonged to the monasteries. It was against this state of affairs

that a small but determined group of church reformers raised the voice of

protest. .Known as the "Trans-Volga Elders," the protestants were grouped

around the hermitage of Sorsk, a center of ascetic monasticism, highly re-

spected for the purity of life and the devotional zeal of its members. They

had for leader a remarkable man - Nilus of Sorsk, himself an ascetic and

a mystic, a man of deep convictions and of a great strength of character.

The Trans-Volga Elders, who also were referred to as the "noncovetous"

monks, loudly called upon the church to give up its worldly possessions in

order to achieve the Christian ideal of poverty and humility. In their eyes,

a truly monastic life and management of big land estates were fundamentally

incompatible.

On the other side stood the so-called "Josephites," by far the larger of

the two groups, and one that enjoyed the support of the church hierarchy.

To them the material wealth of the church was one of the indispensable

conditions for the proper performance of its functions. The head of this

faction, Joseph of Volokolamsk (hence the name of the ]osephites) was

the abbot of one of the richest and most influential monasteries in Muscovy.

Throughout the sixteenth century this monastery played the part of a

"nursery of bishops," and many of the most prominent hierarchs of the

period had received their training there. Profoundly different from Nilus

of Sorsk in character and outlook, Joseph too was a remarkable man, in

his own way. An outstanding church administrator, he defended the re-

tention by the monasteries of their land possessions on purely utilitarian

grounds. One of his typical arguments was that the poor monasteries could

not attract the better class of people, and these were needed for the building

up of an educated and influential hierarchy.

Behind this controversy over the problem of church lands lay a more

fundamental difference between two distinct religious types. The Josephites

stood for a strict adherence to tradition, emphasized the importance of the

ritual and were inclined towards a literal interpretation of religious texts.

The followers of Nilus represented the spiritual trend in Russian Christianity,

assigning first place to personal piety and assuming a much more liberal

attitude towards the dogma and tradition.

Of particular importance was the difference between the two groups

with regard to the problem of Church and State relationship. The Josephites

wanted the Russian Church to be in an intimate and indissoluble alliance

with the State. Preaching a doctrine of absolute loyalty to the secular

power, they expected in return a full measure of state support and protection

for the Church. In particular, they did not hesitate to invoke the assistance

of the secular arm in the suppression of heresies. The Trans-Volga Elders

differed sharply from the Josephites on this point. With a degree of toler-

ance surprising for their time, they rejected compulsion in matters of faith.

Those who strayed away from the path of true Christianity should be brought

back by persuasion, not by force. The realm of the Church, unlike that of

the State, was one of spirit, and in the solution of its problems only spiritual

methods could be used. Therefore, it would be better for the State not to

interfere with the Church, just as the clergy should refrain from interfering

in politics.

 

The Russian government of the period was bound to be vitally interested

in this controversy within the Church. It was particularly concerned with

the problem of church lands. Precisely at that time the Moscow rulers were

engaged in reorganizing the system of national defense in their dominions.

The new system was based on the principle of military service in return for

land grants, and the government needed a sufficiently large land fund at its

disposal. This is why it viewed the growth of church landownership with

some alarm, and why at times it even contemplated secularization of church

estates. With regard to this issue the government found itself in agreement

with the followers of Nilus of Sorsk who, as is known, demanded the vol-

untary relinquishment by the church of its worldly possessions. And yet it

could not enter into an alliance with the Trans-Volga Elders because of the

other tenets held by that group. The spirit of individual freedom in which

they approached the religious problems, their liberal attitude towards those

deviating from Orthodoxy, and, above all, their endeavor to protect the

Church from state interference and control, were hardly compatible with

the centralizing and absolutist tendencies of the rising Russian autocracy.

On the contrary, the government was in full sympathy with the traditional-

ism of the Josephites, their strict adherence to Orthodoxy, and, in particu-

lar, their advocacy of a close alliance between Church and State.

And so, a sort of unwritten concordat was concluded between the Moscow

government and the leading faction of the Russian Church. For the time

being, the government gave up its plan of secularizing the church estates,

limiting itself to enacting legislation that tended to prevent their further

growth, and in return it received the unqualified allegiance of the church

hierarchy. With governmental support, the opposition movement within

the Church was effectively silenced, and the Josephites achieved a complete

victory over their antagonists. Under their leadership, the Orthodox Church

finally became, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the official national

Church of Russia, thus winning a position that it was destined to hold until

the Revolution of 1917.

 

A Saint, None the Less

I come away from this study of Nil Sorskii with a little bit of disappointment, but a whole lot of respect.  I would have liked to find he had stood up against the church’s monopoly of land because it deprived the peasants of a decent living.  I would have wanted to find out that he opposed the emerging autocracy in Russia, and that he stood up against the collaboration between church and state that survived for centuries.  However, I find again that heroes have their own mind, and mentors must fit into their own times.  Nevertheless, Nilus of Sora stands out because he preached compassion when others called for persecution, and argued against corruption when others sought but a tighter bond between the moneyed men and the faith-challenged fathers.  Nil Sorskii’s side did not win then, but the arguments were advanced, and the principles upheld, that paved the way for others in the centuries ahead.  The inherent contradictions between money and morality, between landlordism and love, and between church and state, remain today.  But we can be relieved knowing that others have raised their voices and aired their grievances against abuses of both church and state, and can rest assured knowing that, when silenced, they have still survived, and had their say.  History is often made by ones such as these, and life is loved for the ideals and the integrity of their efforts.  Nilus of Sora, I salute you.  

Bibliography - Web

 

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5. Orthodoxy and Peace, by Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jim_forest/behrsige.htm, accessed 1/19/07.
6. Relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and Judaism: Past and Present, by Yuri Tabak, http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?id=787, accessed 1/19/07.
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Bibliography – Books

1.  “The Strigolniks and the Judaizers”, in Russian Non-Conformity, by Serge Bolshakoff, The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1950, pp. 29-36.

2.  "The Josephites and the Nonpossessors", in Russian Non-Conformity, by Serge Bolshakoff, The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1950 , pp. 36-45.                 

3.  "The Church as Servant of the State", Chapter 9 in “Russia under the Old Regime”, by Richard Pipes, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, NY, 1974, pp. 221-248.                 

4.  "Appanage Russia: Religion and Culture", in A History of Russia, 7th edition by Nicholas Riasanovsky and Mark Steinberg, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2005, pp111-122.          

5.  "The Peasant and Religion", by Donald W. Treadgold, in The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia, by Wayne Vucinich, , editor          , Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 1968, pp. 72-107.   

6.  "Church and State in Early Russian History", by Mikhail Karpovich, in The Russian Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 10-20 (Spring, 1944.), pp. 10-14, from Readings…in Russian History, by Warren Walsh, editor, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 1948, pp.99-103.
7.  "The Moscow Tsardom and the Russian Church", Chapter 6 in Russians & Their Church, by Nicholas Zernov, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1945,  pp. 44-55.