Other church writings focused on monastic and by extension lay morality,
although most likely the authors had in mind an elite audience, namely monks,
their elite patrons, and the court elite to whom bishops sermonized. Here, two
trends developed over thefifteenth century from within monasticism. One was a
trend to promote a morality focused on public behavior—drunkenness, sexual
license, disorder. Church leaders such as Metropolitan Daniil (d. 1547) fulminated
on these topics in sermons that were widely reproduced, while monastic leaders
such as Joseph Sanin (d. 1508), founder of the Trinity Monastery in Volokolamsk,
embedded such concerns in advice to monks. Joseph of Volokolamsk (sainted
regionally in 1579 and for the whole Russian Church in 1591) composed aRulefor
proper monastic life in communal (cenobitic) monasteries, which he believed
offered the discipline and pastoral oversight needed to keep monks focused on
God. HisRulebecame common for Russian monasteries for the next two centuries;
it prescribed a life of labor, prayer, abstinence, humility, and self-discipline
for monks while their monasteries accumulated property, wealth, and lands, in
Joseph’s view, all to better serve God.
Another trend in spirituality paralleled Joseph Volotskii’s emphasis on cenobitic
life; it was related to the influence of hesychasm in Russian monasticism in the
fifteenth century. As noted above, hesychasm was a fourteenth-century Byzantine
revival of contemplative spirituality; Paul Bushkovitch has shown that when Russia
received hesychasm in thefifteenth century, it developed its own“regional variant”
that excluded some key elements of hesychast theology (Gregory of Palamas’s
theory of uncreated light) and practice (mystical visions), although they knew
about them. Rather, hesychasm had a more generalized impact of sparking a revival
of contemplative life in monasteries, modeled on age-old Christian prescriptions for
silence, prayer, and ascetic disciplines. Great spiritual leaders were memorialized by
great writers: Epifanii Premudryi wrote theLifeof St. Sergii of Radonezh (d. 1392),
while Pakhomii Logofet authored theLifeof St. Cyril of Beloozero, both depicting
their subjects as ascetic ideals living lives of discipline, hard labor, humility, and
prayer, denying worldly passions in a generally solitary setting to pursue a connec-
tion with God. Nil Sorskii, founder of a small hermitage at Sora in the latefifteenth
century, integrated hesychastic theology more faithfully in his writings: while
writers of the school of Joseph of Volokolamsk took the hesychast concept of
“absence of passion”to mean control of sexual desire, for example, Sorskii under-
stood the original Greek meaning of subduing inner turmoil such as greed, pride,
and anger. Thus, Sorskii represents a more inward morality than that preached by
Joseph and Metropolitan Daniil; his works were revered in monastic circles through
the Muscovite period. The goal of hesychasm as ethereal union with God was
hauntingly depicted in some of the greatest works of Russian religious art in the
fifteenth century—the other-worldly spirituality of icons and frescos by Theo-
phanes the Greek in Moscow, Novgorod and the Ferapontov Monastery near
Beloozero, and of Andrei Rublev in Vladimir, Zvenigorod, and Moscow.
It was not obligatory that a monk seeking to pursue a life of contemplation live in
an eremitic, solitary hermitage, but Nil Sorskii makes clear the challenges posed
by the alternative—large monasteries that balanced worldly wealth with inner
250 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801