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David M. Goldfrank, a specialist in Russian studies, is professor of history at Georgetown University.

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The Military and Society in Russia: 1450-1917 (2002) — Bidragyder — 11 eksemplarer

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I first became aware of Nil Sorsky through a collection of spiritual writings which had been circulated in the former Soviet Union in the pages of an underground magazine called 'Nadezhda' - texts of Patristic and contemporary witness to the life of the spirit even in the depths of the desert: a collection of these writings, many from the time of the Terror during the 1930s, had been published in English in 1989 in a book called 'The Cry of the Spirit' by Tatiana Goricheva - and it is one of the most valuable books which I possess. One of those texts was an account of a visit to the far north of Russia, to the remains of the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery - which had by then been turned into a mental asylum - and which had been the base from which, in the c14th, Nil Sorsky himself had set out to pursue the hermit life on the banks of the nearby River Sora. A single phrase from that account stuck with me and has continued to inspire me, in particular as we face the decline of our churches in the west in the face of the very different kind of desert of materialism: 'The great starets Nil was pleased "with God's grace to have found somewhere which fulfils the following purpose: worldly folk will rarely visit here"'. These words - this idea of authenticity in the spirit having nothing to do with our ability to change the circumstances around us, but instead sometimes having to step away from the world in order to find our real bearings - have remained extremely important to me: it turns out - in this fantastic gathering together of all of Nil's writings, with a commentary and historical background essay published to honour the half-millennium of the hermit's death in 1508 - that this motto is one of the central ideas in Nil's understanding of the religious life, turning up both in the 'Ustav', which are eleven chapters on 'mental activity' - the moral and spiritual life - and in a letter to one of his disciples, German; move far enough away that the only people who will bother to seek you out are those who really mean to do so; and seek the Spirit. This is a characteristically Russian approach to the spiritual life - and this edition of Nil's fairly compact written corpus [alongside the Ustav is the 'Predanie' - effectively a monastic Rule; three Letters; a short hagiographical text; and a 'Testament' - about 140 pages in all] shows one of the key moments in the emergence of that tradition in the far north, based on the heritage both of the monks of Mount Athos (whom Nil had visited), and of the Desert Fathers and the tradition which was gathered later into what became the 'Philokalia'. Nil is part of that radiant moment when Russian Orthodoxy truly became itself, and he represents the other half of what is embodied in the icons of Dionysius, his exact contemporary, following in the slightly earlier tradition of Theophan the Greek and Andrei Rublev.
These writings, and the life to which they point, are of immeasurable value: they were the source to which Russian Christians returned with St Seraphim of Sarov and the startsy of Optina, and again, of course, in the Gulag. Very smartly produced, and eloquently presented to us here by David Goldfrank from Georgetown University, these short texts are part of the well of life for any of us who seek the Face of God in the darkness.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
readawayjay | Aug 17, 2011 |

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