Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/112

 88 of which in the northern deserts I have already referred, another wind began to blow. Nil Sorski, born in 1433, of an ancient boiar family, the Maikov, having first spent several years at the monastery of Mount Athos, then lived near Biélooziéro and the monastery of St. Cyril, and finally founded a hermitage, the name of which he took for himself, on the banks of the little Sorka River, suddenly came forward as the representative of a new religious world. His travels and his reading, fuller and better chosen than that of his fellows, had, to a certain point, turned the knijnik in him into a theologian. He had learnt to admit and assert that 'all written things were not holy things.' He ventured to reject the authority of the document, in the sense in which it was accepted by most of his contemporaries—that is to say, apart from the origin and value of the testimony it bore. Finally, he had looked for something more than texts in the sacred writings: he had sought inspiration. On these lines, and independently of his views concerning the religious life, novel, in Russia, and occasionally very deep, he was destined to conceive a new ideal of monastic existence, to consist, not in the exact observance of external discipline, but in an internal transformation of the soul. Hence his choice of the isolated life, already adopted by a certain number of monks in that country, but destined, under his influence, to attain a much greater development.

Nil Sorski had soon gathered several hundreds of followers round him, and to these the generic title of 'monks from beyond the Volga' (Zavolojskiié startsy) was given. Their example and teaching were to play an important part in the religious life of the sixteenth century. They had no rule, so to speak; they enjoyed an almost complete independence; they were free to choose their own material conditions and means of existence; one principle only ruled these—poverty. Here was where the split came with Joseph Volotski and his school, and the clamour of the quarrel thus begun filled the first years of the reign of the Terrible, and lasted.on after he himself was dead.

The problem of monastic proprietorship divided the two camps. Nil Sorski's solution of it will be easily guessed, and it brought the niéstiajatiéli and the lioubostiajatiéli, the adversaries and partisans of the property in question (stiajatiel, an acquirer; lioubit, to love), face to face. Nil, though condemned by the conciliable of 1503, was allowed to go back to his desert. But the question continued to fill the literature of the day, and the hermit’s ideas were adopted and brilliantly set forth by another monk, the least qualified of all his comrades, seemingly, for such a task. Even under his klobouk, Vassiane Kossoï, otherwise Prince Vassili Ivanovitch