“I Want to Leave a Little Monk”

The single most consequential act of St. Arsenios’ life: in 1924, in the last weeks before the Farasiots left Cappadocia, he baptized the infant Arsenios Eznepidis — the future St. Paisios the Athonite — and insisted, against the parents’ wish to name the child after his grandfather, on giving the boy his own name, “to leave a monk behind him.” Drawn from St. Paisios’ own account and his authorized biography.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Cappadocian)

The Child of Farasa

On 25 July 1924, in the last weeks of the Farasiot community’s life in Cappadocia, a boy was born to Prodromos and Eulogia Eznepidis of Farasa (Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, Chalkidiki, 2012, on the birth of Arsenios Eznepidis at Farasa on 25 July 1924; see St. Paisios of Mount Athos). The community was on the eve of departure — the compulsory exchange had been decreed, and the Christians of Anatolia were being uprooted (see The Uprooting of 1924). The infant was one of a number of children whom the old priest hurried to baptize before the journey, so that none would leave Cappadocia unbaptized (Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, 2012, on Arsenios baptizing the community’s children before the departure).

That the future St. Paisios was born a Farasiot, and baptized by St. Arsenios in the very shadow of the exodus, ties the two saints together at the root. The child would be carried as an infant to Greece, grow up among the Farasiot refugees in Konitsa in Epiros, and become in time the most beloved of modern Athonite elders (Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, 2012, on the family’s settlement in Konitsa; see St. Paisios of Mount Athos). But the bond was sealed at the font, in Cappadocia, by the hands of the old priest.

The Naming

The heart of the story is the naming. By the account St. Paisios himself transmitted and his biographer records, the parents intended, as custom dictated, to name the child after his paternal grandfather. The old priest refused. He insisted on giving the infant his own name, Arsenios, and he gave his reason: he wished to leave a monk behind him — in the often-quoted form, that he wanted “to leave a little monk” in his place, or words to that effect (Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, 2012, on Arsenios’ insistence on his own name and the “to leave a monk behind me” saying). The godfather’s will prevailed, and the child was baptized Arsenios (see The Two Arsenioi).

[Disputed: the exact wording of St. Arsenios’ saying at the baptism. The tradition, resting on St. Paisios’ own transmission of the family memory, gives the sense uniformly — that he named the child after himself in order to leave behind him a monk to continue his work — but the precise phrasing varies across retellings (e.g. “I want to leave a monk behind me,” “to leave a little monk in my place”). The collection reports the substance as securely attested by St. Paisios’ account and his biography, while flagging that the verbatim form is a devotional transmission, not a recorded quotation (Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, 2012; and St. Paisios’ own testimony as transmitted therein and in the Souroti tradition).]

Prophecy and Its Fulfilment

The reason the story is told and retold is that the naming reads, in retrospect, as a prophecy fulfilled. The child Arsenios did become a monk — and not merely a monk but one of the great spiritual figures of twentieth-century Orthodoxy, tonsured on Mount Athos, sought by countless thousands, and himself canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2015 (on St. Paisios’ monastic life and canonization see St. Paisios of Mount Athos, and specifically his Legacy and Canonization). The old priest of Farasa, wishing to leave a monk behind him, left the Church St. Paisios; and the tradition sees in this the vindication of Arsenios’ discernment (see Clairvoyance and the Gift of Prayer).

The collection reports this with the discipline it applies throughout (§3.5). That the child was named Arsenios by the priest who baptized him, and that he became the monk-saint Paisios, are both secure. Whether the naming is to be read as a prophecy — a foreknowledge of the child’s destiny — or as a devout old man’s hope that happened to be gloriously realized, is exactly the kind of judgement the methodology declines to force: the tradition receives it as prophecy, and the collection reports that reception while pinning the underlying facts to their source (Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, 2012). It is worth adding that St. Paisios himself, in writing his godfather’s Life, treated the naming with reverence but without self-aggrandizement, presenting it as the old priest’s act rather than as a prophecy about his own greatness (see St. Paisios as Biographer).

A Bond That Shaped a Life

The consequences of the baptism reached across St. Paisios’ whole life. He bore Arsenios’ name from the font to his monastic tonsure — when he received, in the Athonite way, a new name (Paisios) and so passed the name Arsenios on, in a sense, back to its origin (see The Two Arsenioi). He grew up hearing of his godfather from the very people the old priest had served, and he came to venerate him deeply. And when he was a mature monk he undertook to gather that living memory into a book and to bring the old priest’s relics into his own keeping — becoming, as no one else could, the guardian of St. Arsenios’ memory and the instrument of his glorification (Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, 2012, on St. Paisios’ lifelong veneration of his godfather; see The Translation of the Relics and St. Paisios as Biographer). The baptism of 1924, in other words, did not only leave a monk behind St. Arsenios; it left behind the very person who would make St. Arsenios known to the world. The reciprocity of that bond is the subject of the next file.

See Also

• The Two Arsenioi — the spiritual bond across the generations and the passing-on of the name
• St. Paisios of Mount Athos — the child baptized here, the great Athonite elder and biographer
• St. Paisios: Legacy and Canonization — the fulfilment of “a monk behind me” in St. Paisios’ own glorification
• The Uprooting of 1924 — the exodus in whose shadow the baptism took place
• Clairvoyance and the Gift of Prayer — the discernment the naming is read as expressing

References

• Hieromonk Isaac. Elder Paisios of Mount Athos. Greek original 2004; English trans., Holy Monastery of Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Chalkidiki, 2012. (The birth of Arsenios Eznepidis at Farasa on 25 July 1924; St. Arsenios baptizing the community’s children before the departure; his insistence on his own name and the “to leave a monk behind me” saying; St. Paisios’ lifelong veneration of his godfather.)
• Elder Paisios the Athonite (Hieromonk Paisios). Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Holy Hesychasterion “Evangelist John the Theologian,” Greek 1st ed. 1975; English translation, Souroti. (St. Paisios’ own account of his godfather, including the baptism and naming, transmitted with reverence and without self-reference.)