Iosiflyane ( Osiflyane ) - followers of Joseph Volotsky , representatives of the church and political movement in the Russian state at the end of the XV - the middle of the XVI centuries , defended the right of monasteries to land ownership and property ownership in order to carry out wide educational and charitable activities by the monasteries. They sharply polemicized with other groups and movements.
Joseph Volotsky - the exposer of the heresy of the Judaizers , the author of the "soulful writings" called the Enlightener and a series of letters in which, arguing with another ascetic, Neil Sorsky , he argued the usefulness of monastic land tenure, defended the need to decorate temples with beautiful murals, rich iconostases and .
The main opponent of the Josephites in the church was the movement of non-possessors led by Neil Sorsky , demanding a return to collectivism and asceticism of early Christianity and a corresponding renunciation of church property in general and feudal land tenure of monasteries in particular. At the cathedral in 1503, the Josephites sharply condemned non-possessors and Prince Ivan III Vasilyevich , who temporarily supported them, defending monastic land ownership. As a result, Ivan III supported Joseph Volotsky and convened the Cathedral in 1504 , at which the "Judaizers" were condemned as heretics and anathematized .
The Josephites also dominated the Stoglav Cathedral in 1551 , at which they again rejected the program for restricting church and monastery land ownership, put forward by Archpriest Sylvester close to Ivan IV the Terrible . Later, the Josephites initiated the condemnation of Matvey Bashkin and Theodosius Kosy and the persecution of their followers, and also supported the establishment of the oprichnina .
The Josephites acted as official ideologists of the Orthodox Church and the monarchist government. The Josephine doctrine was based on the theological justification of the emergence of the state and the divine origin of royal power, as well as on the assertion of the continuity of the Russian state, which remained the only stronghold of Orthodoxy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 . On this basis, the Josephites demanded that the Moscow Metropolitanate be granted the status of a patriarchate (this happened only in 1589).
The Josephites advocated the openness of monasteries. The main task of the monasteries was missionary activity and providing the population with food during a crop failure.
The Joseph Pskov monk Philotheus , a popularizer of the concept of the metropolitan of Moscow Zosima “ Moscow - the Third Rome ”, on which the official ideology of the Russian tsars was built (it is noteworthy that Metropolitan Zosima himself was not a supporter of the Josephs and was attacked and accused of “indulging heretics” on their behalf) )
Name Origin
The naming of “Josephites” was not accepted either during the lifetime of the Monk Joseph Volotsky, or after his death. This term was not used at the end of the 15th century - the first half of the 16th century, neither its followers, nor their opponents among the elders of Belozersky and Vologda monasteries or other groups in the church and secular environment. The medieval man of Ancient Russia did not think in terms of “parties”, especially in relation to spiritual life. Conscious of himself as a member of the Old Russian community and community, he considered church life as part of community life, and therefore any dissent outside the dogmas established at the seven Ecumenical Councils seemed to him to be a spiritual “foreignness”; in the same way, in ethnic terms, he belonged to representatives of the German nation who had come to Russia for a long time.
Most likely, in the second half of the 16th century, in the collective sense, they began to speak about the monks - immigrants of the Joseph-Volotsky Monastery in a collective sense as a special spiritual school. For the first time this name appeared in the writings of the fugitive Prince Andrei Kurbsky [1] , who thought in terms of a different spiritual and political environment [2] . Among the "Osiphlians" named Vassian Toporkov . In the spirit of sharp controversy and revealing pathos about his former compatriots, Kurbsky remembers the "Osiphany mnikhs", calling them all without exception "omnipotent" and "contemptible."
Notes
- ↑ Third Message of Kurbsky to Ivan the Terrible
- ↑ The Tales of Prince Kurbsko. 2nd ed. N. Ustryalova. St. Petersburg, 1842.S. 5, 40, 122.