The life of St Joseph of Volotsk
His attempt to bring stricter discipline to that community met resistance strong enough, including from Grand Prince Ivan III, that he left Borovsk in 1479 and founded a monastery of his own at Volokolamsk, built on the conviction that a well endowed monastery, properly governed, served the poor and the Church better than one stripped of property altogether. That conviction put him at the head of one side of a dispute that would divide Russian monasticism for a generation: at the Church council of 1503, Joseph and his followers, who came to be called Josephites, argued successfully against the Non Possessors led by Nil Sorsky, who held that monasteries should own no land at all. Joseph went further still, defending the state's use of force against those judged heretics, a position that has left his legacy more contested than that of the elder, gentler opponent he defeated. At his own monastery he wrote The Enlightener, a work directed chiefly against the Judaizing heresy then troubling Muscovite Russia, and built a community that became one of the country's centers of learning and Orthodox defense. He reposed in 1515 and, unlike Nil Sorsky, was numbered among the saints within a generation of his death; the Russian Church today venerates both men, opponents in their lifetimes, as saints of the same Church.
