Poltava and the Kiev Academy

Paisius Velichkovsky was born Pyotr (Peter) Velichkovsky at Poltava in 1722, into a clerical family — his father an archpriest of the town’s cathedral — and was formed from childhood by the reading of the Fathers and the lives of the saints. Sent to study at the Kiev Mohyla Academy, he found there a scholastic, Latinizing curriculum modeled on Jesuit schooling — Latin grammar, Aristotelian philosophy, and Western theology — which he experienced as spiritually barren, and he left it to seek the patristic and ascetic tradition his soul hungered for. This file tells the story of his birth, formation, and decisive abandonment of the Academy, drawing on his own Autobiography.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Russian-Moldavian (hesychast; Philokalic revival)

Birth and Family at Poltava

Paisius was born on 21 December 1722 at Poltava, in the Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire, and was given in baptism the name Pyotr (Peter) — the name Paisius being his later monastic name (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.; Featherstone, introduction to the Autobiography, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature). He came of a family long bound to the Church. His father, John (Ivan) Velichkovsky, was an archpriest (protoierei) — the senior priest, by the account of the sources, of the cathedral church of the Dormition at Poltava — and the priestly office had been held in the family for several generations before him, so that Pyotr was the descendant of a line of clergy (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Featherstone, intro to the Autobiography). He was the youngest of the children, and his father died while he was still a small child, leaving him to be raised by his mother (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone).

This clerical inheritance matters for the shape of his vocation. A boy of such a family was destined by custom and expectation for the clerical estate, and his early education was directed toward it. The path that lay open before him — schooling at Kiev, then ordination and a place in the Church’s service, very possibly succeeding to his father’s cure — was the ordinary trajectory of a sacristan’s or archpriest’s son in the Hetmanate of the early eighteenth century (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). It is against this settled expectation that his later flight to the monastic desert must be read.

Early Piety and the Reading of the Fathers

From the Autobiography and the disciple-Lives a consistent portrait emerges of a child marked early by an unusual gravity and drawn above all to reading. As a boy Pyotr applied himself to the sacred books — the Scriptures, the lives of the saints, and the writings of the Fathers — and these, rather than the games of his fellows, became the food of his imagination (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). The sources describe him absorbing the lives of the great monastic saints and the ascetic teachers, and conceiving from this reading a longing for the monastic life and for solitude that never afterward left him (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Featherstone, intro to the Autobiography). The reading of the Fathers, in other words, preceded and shaped his vocation: the books gave him a picture of a kind of life — the desert, prayer, obedience to an elder — and he came to the schools already in possession of a measure by which he would find their learning wanting.

This is a point of some importance for understanding the rupture that followed. Paisius did not reject learning out of incapacity or laziness; by the testimony of the sources he was an able and diligent student (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). What he carried into the Academy was a prior and competing ideal of formation — the patristic and ascetic ideal of the knowledge of God gained through prayer and purification of the heart — against which the scholastic learning of the schools would be judged and found, in his eyes, empty (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, vol. 1, Faber).

Entry into the Kiev Mohyla Academy

In due course Pyotr was sent to Kiev to study at the Kiev Mohyla Academy (the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), the foremost Orthodox school of higher learning in the Slavic world, founded in the previous century by Metropolitan Peter Mohyla (Mohila) (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1, trans. Nichols, ch. on Kiev learning). He entered as a boy and pursued the lower classes of the Academy’s curriculum, which proceeded by the standard grades of the Latin school — grammar, infima, syntax, poetics (piitika), and rhetoric, leading up to philosophy and theology (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1).

The character of the institution is the crux of the story, and it was thoroughly Western in form. The Kiev Academy as Mohyla had organized it, and as it stood in the early eighteenth century, was modeled closely on the Jesuit colleges of Catholic Poland: its language of instruction was Latin, its philosophical curriculum was scholastic and Aristotelian, and its theology was cast in the categories of post-Tridentine Latin scholasticism (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1, ch. on the Kiev school; Zernov, The Russians and Their Church, 1945; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). Georges Florovsky took the Mohyla Academy as the very emblem of the “Latin captivity” of Orthodox theology — an Orthodox content forced into a wholly Western, scholastic vessel, taught in a dead Western language by methods borrowed from the schools of the Counter-Reformation (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1, ch. 2–3). Whatever one makes of Florovsky’s larger polemic, the curricular facts are not in dispute: a student at Kiev in the 1730s spent his years construing Latin, disputing Aristotelian theses, and learning theology as a system of Latin distinctions (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.).

The Scholastic-versus-Patristic Tension

Here the two ideals collided, and the collision is the heart of this file. Pyotr had come to Kiev formed by the Fathers and the desert saints, hungry for the knowledge of God that the ascetic writers described — and he found instead a curriculum of Latin grammar and pagan poetry, of Aristotelian logic and scholastic disputation, in which (as he experienced it) the living patristic and ascetic tradition that he sought was scarcely to be found (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1). In his own retrospective account he records his growing dissatisfaction: the studies seemed to him to feed the mind with the wisdom of the world while leaving the soul unfed, and he came to feel that what was taught at the Academy did not lead toward the salvation and the inner life he longed for (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.).

The Autobiography frames the decision to leave in precisely these terms — as a choice between the learning of the schools and the wisdom of the saints. Paisius describes how he reflected that the Fathers whose lives he had read had not been formed by the disputations of the schools but by prayer, obedience, and the ascetic struggle, and how he resolved that he too must seek that formation rather than the Latin learning set before him (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). The sources stress that his quarrel was not with learning as such — he would remain all his life a man of books, a collator of manuscripts and a translator of the Fathers — but with a learning detached from the spiritual life and conducted in a foreign tongue and a foreign method (Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). His later life-work of correcting and translating the Greek ascetic texts into Slavonic was, in a sense, the constructive answer of the man to the very deficiency he had felt as a boy at Kiev: he would supply in corrected patristic books what the scholastic schools had failed to give (Translating the Dobrotolyubie; The Ascetic Fathers).

The exact length of his stay at the Academy and the precise sequence of his departure are reported with some variation in the sources, and it is best to be candid about the uncertainty: [Disputed: the *Autobiography* (trans. Featherstone) gives Paisius's own first-person account of his years at the Kiev Academy and his decision to leave but is not precise on the calendar of those years; modern reconstructions differ on how long he remained and at what grade he broke off — Chetverikov (*Starets Paisii Velichkovskii*, Eng. trans.) sets his departure in his later teens after several years in the lower and middle classes, around 1739–1741, while other summaries place his leaving slightly earlier or later. The substance — that he left the Academy before completing its course, out of the scholastic-versus-patristic dissatisfaction described above — is firmly attested in his own account; the exact dating is not].

Leaving the Academy

What is not in doubt is the act itself and its motive. Pyotr abandoned the Kiev Mohyla Academy without finishing its course of study and set out to seek the monastic life and a living spiritual father — first among the monasteries and sketes of Ukraine and the Romanian lands, and at length on Mount Athos (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1). The departure was a deliberate renunciation of the path that his birth and his schooling had laid out: the archpriest’s son who might have risen through the clerical schools to a place in the Synodal Church chose instead the uncertain road of the wandering seeker after a living tradition (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.).

This choice is the hinge of his whole biography, and it carries the same significance at the level of one soul that the broader decline of monasticism carries at the level of the Church. Paisius’s flight from the Kiev Academy and the eighteenth-century constriction of monastic life are two faces of a single situation — the post-Petrine Church in its Latinized, state-ordered form — and his life is the story of a man who left both the schools and the homeland to recover, abroad, the patristic and hesychast tradition that neither could any longer give him (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1; Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1; see The Eighteenth-Century Decline of Monasticism). The wandering years that followed are taken up in the next section (Seeking a Living Tradition).

References

Paisius Velichkovsky. The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj [Autobiography]. Trans. J. M. E. Featherstone. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (Paisius’s own first-person account of his childhood reading, his years at the Kiev Academy, and his decision to leave it in search of the monastic and patristic life.)
Chetverikov, Sergei. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. English translation. (The standard modern biography; birth at Poltava, the archpriest father and clerical family, the Kiev Academy years, and the dating and motive of his departure.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979. (The Kiev Mohyla Academy as a Latin, scholastic, Jesuit-modeled school, and the “Western captivity” of post-Mohyla Orthodox theology.)
Zernov, Nicolas. The Russians and Their Church. London: SPCK, 1945. (The Kiev Academy and the Latinization of Orthodox learning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.)
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’s dissatisfaction with the scholastic education of the post-Petrine Church and his recovery of the patristic ascetic tradition.)