Glorification 1962

Paisiy was canonized by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 1962 — the two-hundredth anniversary of the Slavo-Bulgarian History — with his feast fixed on 19 June. The bicentenary timing deliberately bound the saint to his book, and the act itself came in a delicate moment: a national Orthodox Church, under a communist state that was itself celebrating Paisiy as a secular patriotic hero, receiving the monk-historian into the calendar of the saints.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Act of 1962

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church glorified Paisiy Hilendarski — numbered him among the saints and appointed his liturgical veneration — in 1962, and fixed his feast day on 19 June (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Paisiy of Hilendar”). The year was not chosen at random: 1762 to 1962 is exactly two centuries, and the canonization was timed to the bicentenary of the completion of the History (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 6, on the 1962 jubilee). The choice of anniversary is telling. The Church glorified Paisiy not on the (unknown) anniversary of his birth or death but on the anniversary of his book — declaring, in the very timing, that it is as the author of the History, the awakener of his people’s Orthodox self-consciousness, that he is received as a saint. The saint and the deed are bound together in the act of canonization itself.

The Grounds of the Glorification

As the source-critical section discusses (see What Is Known of His Life), the Church in glorifying Paisiy did not certify a biography — much of which is unrecoverable — but received and ratified a holiness and a labor whose fruit the Church had come to recognize. The grounds are the character of the man as the tradition holds him: a monk of the Holy Mountain who, in humility and love for his people, spent himself to recall them from forgetfulness and shame to the memory of their faith, their saints, and their nation (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface and author’s note; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). His History culminates, characteristically, in the Bulgarian saints and is offered for the spiritual benefit of an Orthodox people; the Church’s judgment is that his work belongs to the order of Christian witness and not merely of national feeling (see Content and the Famous Appeal). In the categories of this repository’s methodology, the warrant for the glorification is the Church’s reception of a holy life and a holy labor, not the completeness of the documentary record — the same principle that governs the glorification of other lightly documented saints (see St. Xenia of Petersburg — Methodology).

The Delicate Context

The 1962 glorification came in a context that the honest account must name, because it bears on how the saint and the symbol relate (a theme developed in National Saint and Symbol). Bulgaria in 1962 was a communist state, officially atheist, in which the Orthodox Church was constrained and closely watched. Yet that same state honored Paisiy intensely — as a national hero, a proto-democrat, a forerunner of the people’s liberation, a figure who could be woven into the socialist narrative of Bulgarian history (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6, on the communist-era cult of Paisiy). The bicentenary of 1962 was marked with large public commemorations by the state and its cultural institutions, in which the religious dimension of Paisiy was minimized or reinterpreted (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6).

The Church’s canonization in the same year can be read as its own claim on Paisiy — a quiet insistence, in the teeth of the secular cult, that the monk of Hilandar belonged first to the communion of saints and to the Orthodox faith he served, and not only to the nation or the state that had appropriated him (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). It is one of the ironies of Paisiy’s afterlife that the atheist state and the constrained Church both honored him in 1962, each for its own reasons and in its own key. The collection does not resolve that irony; it notes it, and it keeps the ecclesial act distinct from the state’s celebration.

What the Canonization Established

The effect of 1962 was to give Paisiy a fixed and permanent place in the calendar and worship of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church: a feast day (19 June), a liturgical commemoration, iconographic representation, and the title of saint — Sveti Paisiy Hilendarski (see Feast and Cult) (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). From that point Paisiy is not only a national founder honored in the schools and squares but a saint venerated at the altar — a distinction the concluding sections of this collection are careful to preserve. The glorification did not settle the disputed points of his biography, nor did it adjudicate the historiographical or nationalism questions treated elsewhere in this collection; it did what canonization does — it received a holy man into the fellowship of the saints, on the anniversary of the book by which he had served his people and their faith.

See Also

References

  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Entry “Paisiy of Hilendar”: the canonization by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 1962; the feast on 19 June.)
  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The 1962 bicentenary; the communist-era state cult of Paisiy and the minimizing of his religious dimension; the Church’s counter-claim in canonizing him.)
  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The preface and author’s note; the culmination in the Bulgarian saints — the character on which the glorification rests.)