01 — Foundations
The historical and spiritual ground on which the witness of St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794) stands: the post-Petrine, state-ordered, Latinizing Russian Church into which he was born, the eighteenth-century constriction of monastic and contemplative life that culminated in Catherine the Great’s secularization of 1764, and his own birth at Poltava, formation in the Fathers, and decisive abandonment of the scholastic Kiev Mohyla Academy. These two files establish the famine — of living elders and of corrected ascetic texts — to which the whole of his life-work is the answer.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Russian-Moldavian (hesychast; Philokalic revival)
To understand Paisius one must first understand what he reacted against. He was born a year after Peter the Great abolished the Patriarchate and placed the Russian Church under a state-supervised Synod, and he came of age as the contemplative monastic tradition was being squeezed by official suspicion and then gutted by the seizure of monastic lands. At the same time, the higher learning open to a clerical son was the Latin, Aristotelian, Jesuit-modeled scholasticism of the Kiev Academy, which he found spiritually empty. This section sets out both faces of that single situation — the institutional decline of monasticism and the Latinized schooling — and shows how Paisius’s flight from the Academy and his later recovery of the hesychast tradition abroad were the response of one soul to a tradition that had nearly lapsed at home.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Eighteenth-Century Decline of Monasticism | The post-Petrine secularization of church life (the abolition of the Patriarchate 1721, the Spiritual Regulation, the Holy Synod, the Ober-Procurator); the constriction and then the wholesale reduction of monasteries under Catherine the Great’s 1764 secularization of monastic lands; and the resulting “spiritual famine” — the scarcity of living hesychast elders and of corrected ascetic texts — that Paisius’s revival answered. |
| Poltava and the Kiev Academy | His birth at Poltava in 1722 as Pyotr Velichkovsky into an archpriest’s family; his early piety and reading of the Fathers; his entry into the Kiev Mohyla Academy; and why he left it — the scholastic, Latinizing, Jesuit-modeled curriculum he found spiritually barren, against his hunger for the patristic and ascetic tradition. |
See Also
- Seeking a Living Tradition — what Paisius did after leaving the Academy: the search outside Russia for the eldership the famine had made scarce
- Translating the Dobrotolyubie — his constructive answer to the famine of corrected ascetic texts
- The Philokalic Revival — how the recovered tradition was carried back into the Russia described here
- St. Nilus of Sora — the earlier Russian hesychast tradition marginalized before the eighteenth-century decline
- Russian Monasticism — the longer arc of Russian monastic history within which 1721 and 1764 fall
References
- Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.
- Smolitsch, Igor. Russisches Mönchtum: Entstehung, Entwicklung und Wesen, 988–1917. Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1953.
- Zernov, Nicolas. The Russians and Their Church. London: SPCK, 1945.
- Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979.
- Chetverikov, Sergei. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. English translation.
- Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. Ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
- Paisius Velichkovsky. The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj [Autobiography]. Trans. J. M. E. Featherstone. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.