Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings (review)

Saint Nil Sorsky (1433/4–1508), Russian Orthodox ascetic, hagiographic editor and compiler, and proponent of hesychastic prayer and skete monasticism, emerges as perhaps the most significant figure in the systematic advance of the teaching and practice of contemplative stillness in the medieval Russian spiritual tradition. Born to a middle class family in Moscow and likely well educated, Nil entered a period of cloistered monastic discipleship at the Kirillov-Belozerskii monastery sometime during the 1450s or 60s. In keeping with his developing interest in hesychastic prayer, Nil undertook a pilgrimage to Mt. Athos between the early 1470s and late 1480s, and eventually returned to a location not twelve miles from the monastery at Kirillov to found his own small hermitage along the Sora River. Nil Sorsky ultimately remains shadowy, a mysterious personage who functions substantially as “a hagiographic cipher” (3), apart from these scattered biographical particulars and the (relatively few) authentic extant writings. In such case, then, it is doubly pressing to translate the genuine Sorskiian corpus as vigilantly as possible. In Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings, historian David M. Goldfrank meticulously presents his critical translation of Nil’s textually legitimated oeuvre, and in so doing has performed an invaluable service for students and scholars of the Russian spiritual tradition alike.

Goldfrank includes the following (textually interrelated) works as authentically attributable to Nil: the Predanie (“Tradition”), the Ustav (“On Mental Activity”), epistolary material including letters to coevals Vassian Patrikeev, Gurii Tushin, and German Podol’nyi (collectively referred to as the Three Epistles) as well as the pithy Little Epistle, the foreword and postscript to the Sobornik, and, finally, the Testament, a limited canon constituting a more conservative list of genuine texts than certain previous scholarship has allowed as admissible. Taken as a whole, this compilation of Nil’s authentic writings reveals their author to be a gifted but humble spiritual teacher deeply committed to propagating the wisdom of the Church Fathers, contributing to the spiritual edification of others through the collection and dissemination of saints’ Lives, strengthening his number for battle against demonic forces and the passions, and promoting the practice of continuous mystical contemplative prayer among his brothers. The Predanie (literally “tradition” or “instruction”) which was composed “for myself and my genuine lord brothers, who are of my ethos” (113), served as something of a monastic rule, specifically for Nil’s own scete at Sora. Following an introductory credo, the Predanie catalogues a set of regulative principles for monks, including exhortations to self-support (mainly through handicrafts), manual labor, and poverty; and prohibitions against such things as associations with women, female animals, or young adolescents, ill-gotten gains, haggling over prices, excess of provisions, extraneous adornment in cells and churches, unnecessary conversations, and intoxicants.

The much longer Ustav—Nil’s magnum opus and the centerpiece of this volume—is a more broadly applicable treatise on mental prayer. It follows a tri-partite scheme. Part one (Slova 1–4), attends primarily to the twin struggle in monasticism against the passions and for the achievement of hesychastic stillness, interspersed with classic advice for the beleaguered monk to recite all or some portion of the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Part two (Slova 5–6) is Nil’s excursus on the classically Orthodox catalogue of the eight logismoi (translated by Goldfrank throughout as ‘urges’) antecedent and analogous to the ‘seven deadly sins’ in the West: gluttony, fornication, avarice, wrath, sadness, despondency, vainglory, and pride. Part three (Slova 7–11) details Nil’s recommended strategies that function to remediate such urges, including a remembrance of death, expectation of the judgment of the second coming, consciousness of personal sin, the acquisition of the gift of tears, and the conscious cultivation of a posture of detachment.

The Three Epistles, independent letters written respectively to rakish boyar Vassian Patrikeev, esteemed publisher Gurii Tushin, and aristocratic bibliographer German Podol’nyi, contain variously personal advice for the cultivation of spiritual virtues, elucidating in quite concrete...