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Nil Sorsky's Rule for Hermits

Meg: I am using with permission an article from the "Hermitary." My comments are at the end of each section.

Click Here to view the original article.

Nil or Nikolai Sorsky or Sorskiĭ (1433-1508) was the most significant figure in the promotion of hesychasm and eremitism in early modern Russia.

Though he only composed two works, modest guidelines for monks and hermits, their influence and the influence of his hermitage were instrumental in a widespread eremitic movement in Russia that persisted for centuries.

Although Nil Sorsky is associated with the Non-possessor controversy, this article addresses only his Tradition (Predanie) and Rule (Ustav).

Nil Maikov was born of the upper class, well educated, and with a great capacity for advanced learning. He spent time as a young monk at the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery, where the abbot promoted hesychasm, that is, a form of mediation and continuous prayer.

Nil was encouraged to study and traveled to Constantinople, Palestine, and Greece. In Greece he spent fruitful time at the monastery of Mt. Athos. The experience of Mt. Athos deepened his understanding of hesychasm and additionally offered him examples of administrative models for monasticism and eremitism heretofore unknown in Russian Orthodoxy.

Nil returned to the Kirillo monastery, but the spiritual environment had changed. He decided to leave and pursue his plan. By the Sora River, in an

(A great deal of hagiographic material accompanies this period and will not detain us here.) His model was the skete, based on the desert hermits and the practice of Mt. Athos.

The skete is a hermitage of no more than two or three hermits, an elder and younger disciple(s). They pursued a schedule and routine of practice of their own devising, usually engaging in continuous prayer, reading, writing, and the editing and copying of manuscripts and crafting of icons and religious articles to be exchanged for provisions.

Their time and energies, therefore, were entirely individual. What they had in common was the store of food from donations, and the availability of the elder for counsel.

The hermits were not to engage in money-making labor, and though they gardened or foraged for themselves, the manuscripts or icons they produced elicited alms, which were kept when sufficient or given to the poor when more than enough.

Meg: Nil Sorsky provides quality content and teachings we can appropriate today. He trained his monks to obtain stillness in the presence. This stillness was not only body and mind, but emotions and feelings.