St. Nil Sorsky

A monk who went to the Holy Mountain in the fifteenth century, learned the prayer of the heart there, and came home to found a skete in the forests on the Sora river, where a few monks lived in separate cells, worked with their hands and owned nothing. He wrote a rule for skete life drawn from the Fathers of the Philokalia. At the council of 1503 he spoke for those who held that monasteries should not own villages and serfs, against St Joseph of Volokolamsk, and lost; the two are both saints, and the argument between the non-possessors and the possessors ran through Russian monasticism for centuries. He died in 1508. Feast: May 7.