Joseph of Volotsk

Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk, in the world Ivan Sanin, was a Russian abbot and theologian, born in 1439 or 1440 and fallen asleep on 9 September 1515, a defender of monastic landholding. He is also honoured as patron of businessmen. The Russian Church commemorates him on 9 September and 18 October.

He came of a family of nobles who owned the village of Yazvishche in the principality of Volokolamsk. He learned to read from the elder Arsenius at the Exaltation of the Cross monastery at Volok and around 1459 was tonsured at the monastery in Borovsk, where he lived eighteen years under Saint Paphnutius of Borovsk. His father came to the monastery too, lived in the same cell with him, and Joseph cared for him fifteen years. After Paphnutius's death in 1477 he was named abbot, tried to introduce a strict rule, but the monks resisted and he had to leave. After staying in a few monasteries, disappointed by their lax morals, he founded in 1479 his own monastery near Volokolamsk, called Joseph-⁠Volokolamsk. His rule prescribed that the monk's chief virtue be absolute obedience to the abbot. He welcomed the hungry into the monastery, ordering that all provisions be spent on their help and money borrowed for bread, regardless of the brethren's murmuring. He founded a library, a school for abandoned children and a shelter for the sick and homeless. The stone Dormition Cathedral was painted by Dionisy. Joseph was godfather and confessor of Prince Ivan of Ruza, son of Duke Boris of Volok.

At first he was tied to the appanage princes of Volokolamsk, then joined Grand Prince Vasili III, to whom he entrusted the monastery in 1507. At the council of 1503 Joseph and his followers, the Josephites, rejected the project to abolish monastic landholding, proposed by the non-⁠possessors, led by Nilus of Sora and Vassian Patrikeyev, whom he opposed in epistles. In the end the monasteries kept their lands. He strengthened the position of the grand princes, holding the tsar to be "a man in nature, but with power like God's", yet legitimate only while he keeps the rules of the Church. He was also an opponent of the heresy of the "Judaizers", demanding at the council of 1504 that heretics be executed by the state, and wrote The Enlightener in sixteen chapters. In this struggle he was in turn opposed by Saint Nilus of Sora. He was canonized locally in 1579 and nationally in 1591.

His relics and chains are in the Dormition Cathedral of the monastery. In 2009 a bronze monument was unveiled near the monastery, and Patriarch Kirill proclaimed him patron of Orthodox business.