07 — Sources

The source-critical heart of the collection: St. Arsenios is known almost entirely through one devotional book — St. Paisios’ Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian (Souroti, 1975), compiled from the living memory of the Farasiot refugees. This section examines that single source and states, in detail, what is firmly attested versus what rests on pious memory.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Cappadocian)

This section makes explicit the governing fact of the whole collection: to read St. Arsenios is to read St. Paisios reading the Farasiot memory of St. Arsenios. It examines the Life as a frankly devotional work of gathered oral testimony written by the saint’s godson, and then applies the repository’s §3.5 attestation discipline — distinguishing the firmly attested core (the existence and shape of a life and a cult) from what rests on pious memory (the exact dates, the birth name, the individual miracles, the verbatim sayings), and reporting the wonders from both sides without adjudicating (§4).

Contents

  • saint-paisios-as-biographer.md — the single principal source; its origin in gathered Farasiot testimony; its devotional character and purpose; St. Paisios’ conspicuous reticence about himself; why a single devotional source is a condition to work with, not a scandal to conceal.
  • attestation-and-tradition.md — the detailed reckoning: the evidentiary situation, what is firmly attested, what rests on pious memory, both sides on the miracle accounts, and the theology of ecclesial reception.

See Also