To do these things properly a monk must be detached from the world, and only those who are vowed to complete poverty can achieve true detachment. Monks who are landowners cannot avoid being tangled up in secular anxieties, and because they become absorbed in worldly concerns, they act and think in a worldly way.
In the words of the monk Vassian Prince Patrikiev , a disciple of Nilus:. Where in the traditions of the Gospels, Apostles, and Fathers are monks ordered to acquire populous villages and enslave peasants to the brotherhood? We torture them with scourges like wild beasts Quoted in B. Pares, A History of Russia, third edition, p. Joseph upheld the view all but universal in Christendom at this time: if heretics are recalcitrant, the Church must call in the civil arm and resort to prison, torture, and if necessary fire.
But Nilus condemned all forms of coercion and violence against heretics. One has only to recall how Protestants and Roman Catholics treated one another in western Europe during the Reformation, to realize how exceptional Nilus was in his tolerance and respect for human freedom. The question of heretics in turn involved the wider problem of relations between Church and State. In general Nilus drew a clearer line than Joseph between the things of Caesar and the things of God.
The Possessors were great supporters of the ideal of Moscow the Third Rome; believing in a close alliance between Church and State, they took an active part in politics, as Sergius had done, but perhaps they were less careful than Sergius to guard the Church from becoming the servant of the State. The Non-Possessors for their part had a sharper awareness of the prophetic and other-worldly witness of monasticism. The Josephites were in danger of identifying the Kingdom of God with a kingdom of this world; Nilus saw that the Church on earth must always be a Church in pilgrimage.
While Joseph and his party were great patriots and nationalists, the Non-Possessors thought more of the universality and Catholicity of the Church. Nor did the divergences between the two sides end here: they also had different ideas of Christian piety and prayer. Joseph emphasized the place of rules and discipline, Nilus the inner and personal relation between God and the soul. Joseph stressed the place of beauty in worship, Nilus feared that beauty might become an idol: the monk so Nilus maintained is dedicated not only to an outward poverty, but to an absolute self-stripping, and he must be careful lest a devotion to beautiful icons or Church music comes between him and God.
In this suspicion of beauty, Nilus displays a Puritanism — almost an Iconoclasm — most unusual in Russian spirituality. Joseph realized the importance of corporate worship and of liturgical prayer:.
A man can pray in his own room, but he will never pray there as he prays in Church Heaven and earth keep festival together, one in thanksgiving, one in happiness, one in joy Quoted by J.
Nilus on the other hand was chiefly interested not in liturgical but in mystical prayer: before he settled at Sora he had lived as a monk on Mount Athos, and he knew the Byzantine Hesychast tradition at first hand.
The Russian Church rightly saw good things in the teaching of both Joseph and Nilus, and has canonized them both. Each inherited a part of the tradition of Saint Sergius, but no more than a part: Russia needed both the Josephite and the Transvolgian forms of monasticism, for each supplemented the other.
It was sad indeed that the two sides entered into conflict, and that the tradition of Nilus was largely suppressed: without the Non-Possessors, the spiritual life of the Russian Church became one-sided and unbalanced. The close integration which the Josephites upheld between Church and State, their Russian nationalism, their devotion to the outward forms of worship — these things were to lead to trouble in the next century. One of the most interesting participants in the dispute of Possessors and Non-Possessors was Saint Maximus the Greek ?
The First Rome, according to Philotheus, is the real Rome — the capital of the Roman Empire — which brought together dozens of societies under its rule. In the 4 th century AD Christianity gradually became the dominant religion in the previously pagan empire and Rome became the Christian capital of the world.
According to Orthodox Christians, the Catholic Rome fell, descending into heresy, and Constantinople became the Second Rome, the capital of the truly Christian world.
But several centuries later the Second Rome also fell. In , the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, weakened by political crises, and renamed it Istanbul. Moscow, which in the 15 th to 16 th centuries gathered around itself the fragmented Russian lands, became the main Orthodox Christian capital.
Allegedly at its foundation lies the expansionist notions of creating an empire similar to the Roman one. Poe himself believes it is the wrong approach: "It [the idea of a Third Rome] says nothing about long-term trends in Russian foreign policy or Russian national psychology. Is it possible to break into the Moscow Kremlin?
The historian goes on to explain that the meaning of the concept is exaggerated. In fact, after Philotheus the monk expressed the idea of a Third Rome at the end of the 16 th century, it was safely forgotten for the next three centuries. The Russian state expanded but not because of its rulers' dreams of an Orthodox empire but for more practical reasons, such as the struggle for resources and access to the seas, to name but a few.
Philotheus's idea was remembered for the first time only in the second half of the 19 th century, under Emperor Alexander II, when Philotheus's epistles were published in large print runs. From OrthodoxWiki. Jump to: navigation , search. Medieval Russia: A Source Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Fort Worth, Texas. External links Moscow The Third Rome? Category : Church History.
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