Assessment

A sober final assessment of Paisiy of Hilendar, drawing together the threads of the collection. Three things must be held at once and not confused: a man of thin and disputed biography; a book of enormous effect and unreliable history; and a saint received by the Church. This file weighs them honestly, per the collection’s methodology, honoring the saint the Church venerates without endorsing every claim of his History or dissolving the monk into the national symbol.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

Three Things to Hold Apart

The difficulty of assessing Paisiy is that he comes to us as three things that the national tradition tends to fuse into one, and that honest study must keep distinct.

There is the man — a hieromonk of the Holy Mountain, born around 1722 most probably at Bansko, a monk of Hilandar and Zograph, a traveler as taxidiot, dead around 1773 in a place and manner not securely known. Of this man the record is thin: nearly all we know comes from the autobiographical notes of his own book, and his birthplace and death are genuinely disputed (see What Is Known of His Life) (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1).

There is the book — the Slavo-Bulgarian History of 1762, a short, fervent, polemical work whose effect on Bulgarian history is enormous and whose reliability as history is poor: derivative of the uncritical Orbini and of Baronius (read in Russian translation), legendary and erroneous in places, written to persuade rather than to establish fact (see The History as Source and as Polemic) (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1 and 6).

And there is the saint — Paisiy Hilendarski, glorified by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 1962, commemorated on 19 June, venerated as a holy monk who served his people’s faith (see Glorification 1962) (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). Around this saint has grown a further figure — the secular national icon, Vazov’s lone monk, the founder on the monuments — which is built from the same man but faces toward the nation rather than the altar (see National Saint and Symbol).

To assess Paisiy well is to give each of these its due without letting any one swallow the others.

What Should Be Said of the Man

Of the man, the honest word is that we know little, and should not pretend otherwise. The thinness of the biography is not a defect to be papered over with legend but a fact to be reported (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The birthplace is probably Bansko but not certain; the death is around 1773 but not fixed; the details of his life are largely inference from his book. What can be said with confidence is small but real: that a monk of this name, of this age, of these monasteries, wrote this book in 1762, and left in it the marks of a man of monastic humility, historical purpose, and passionate love for his people (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface and author’s note; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The man is known chiefly through the deed, and the deed is fully documented; that is the honest measure of him.

What Should Be Said of the Book

Of the book, the honest word is the both-sides word: it is at once one of the most valuable and one of the least reliable books in Bulgarian history, and both for the same reason. Its value was never its accuracy but its effect — it gave a forgotten people back a usable past and named the program of their awakening — and by that measure it is among the most consequential works in the nation’s history (see The History as Source and as Polemic) (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1 and 6). As history, however, it cannot be trusted: no serious scholar uses it as a factual authority on the medieval Bulgaria it narrates, and Bulgarian critical historiography superseded it in the nineteenth century (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). To honor the book is to honor a great and formative act of the spirit dressed as a history it does not sustain — and to endorse none of its particular claims about the Bulgarian past on its authority alone. This collection accordingly reports the History‘s contents as Paisiy’s account, not as established fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What Should Be Said of the Saint

Of the saint, the honest word is that the Church’s glorification is not a certification of the biography or an endorsement of the book’s historiography, and need not be. When the Bulgarian Orthodox Church received Paisiy as a saint in 1962, it ratified a holiness — a life spent, in humility and love, recalling an Orthodox people to their faith — not a set of historical claims and not a program of nationalism (see Glorification 1962). One may hold, without contradiction, that Paisiy’s History is unreliable history and that Paisiy is a saint; the two judgments answer different questions, and neither touches the other (see What Is Known of His Life). The veneration of the saint is secure precisely because it does not rest on the accuracy of the book or the fullness of the record.

Against the Two Reductions

Two reductions must be resisted, and naming them is the heart of a sober assessment.

The first is the national reduction: to make Paisiy simply the father of the nation, the secular hero, the demigod of the Revival — and to abstract him from the monasticism and the Orthodoxy that were the whole frame of his own book (see National Saint and Symbol). This betrays both the man, who was a monk, and the ecclesiological cautions the tradition itself raises against nationalism in the Church (see The Question of Nationalism) (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6).

The second is the deflationary reduction: to let the thinness of the biography and the unreliability of the book shrink Paisiy to a minor compiler of no great account, as though naming his limits were the same as taking his measure. This betrays the plain historical fact that his small book stood at the head of a nation’s awakening, and the ecclesial fact that the Church venerates him as holy (Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 3; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015).

The Balanced Word

The balanced assessment, then, is this. Paisiy of Hilendar was an obscure eighteenth-century Athonite monk of whom little is documented, who wrote a short and historically unreliable book out of love and indignation for his forgotten people — and that book began the awakening of the Bulgarian nation, and its author is venerated by the Church as a saint. The three facts do not cancel; they compose. The honest reader honors the saint the Church has glorified, values the book for the mighty thing it did rather than the shaky history it tells, reports the man’s life for the little that is truly known, and keeps the monk distinct from the monument. That is the truth of Paisiy, held whole: a hidden life, a flawed and glorious book, and a holy man — the awakener who was himself gathered, at the last, among the saints he sought to recall his people to remember.

See Also

References

  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The marks of monastic humility, historical purpose, and love of people in the preface and author’s note; the religious frame of the book.)
  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The thin biography; the doubleness of the History; the critical historiography’s supersession of it; the appropriations and the national reduction.)
  • Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The History at the head of the Revival; its historical consequence.)
  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (The 1962 glorification and the feast; Paisiy’s national and ecclesial significance.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 and §4, this repository. (Attestation-pinning; reporting the History’s claims as attributed; both-sides on saint and symbol.)