ABSTRACT

One of the most admired monks from the Russian Middle Ages, Nil Sorskii (1433/34–1508) left few biographical traces in the historical record. Instead, as one who believed that his home was in heaven (2 Cor. 5:1–5), he bequeathed a road map in the form of spiritual writings that secured for him a place among the great Orthodox spiritual masters. Though it is relatively certain that he belonged to the Maikov or Maiko family of Moscow, his baptismal name is unknown. Nil is the name he received when tonsured a monk, and Sorskii refers to his association with the skete he established on the Sora River. His family had the means to provide him and his brother Andrei Fedorovich with a sound education, for his brother became a scribe and later a diplomat. It is possible that Nil too was destined for scribal work in Moscow, but instead he chose the monastic life. He entered the Dormition monastery on White Lake, better known as the Kirillo-Belozerskii or Kirillov Monastery, as his initial monastic home. The monastery was founded in 1397 by the monk Kirill (Koz’ma Veliaminov) on the basis of a vision which came to him while meditating on a passage from the Akathist Hymn. Initially a rather loosely organized hermitage where the monks practiced a form of Hesychasm and what has been called a desert spiritual pedagogy, 1 by the time Nil arrived the foundation had grown into a thoroughly coenobitic organization whose monks were engaged in book culture and production. Not all traces of the original founder’s love of stillness disappeared, however, so that the Hesychast quest for a personal experience of God in the quiet of prayer was married with scholarly dedication to the preparation, editing and copying of texts, ranging from traditional Byzantine hagiographical, devotional and doctrinal fare to purely secular novellas, histories and chronicles.