The Eighteenth-Century Decline of Monasticism

The world into which Paisius Velichkovsky was born in 1722 was one in which Russian monastic and contemplative life was being deliberately constrained by the state. Peter the Great had abolished the Patriarchate and subordinated the Church to a government bureau; Catherine the Great’s secularization of monastic lands in 1764 closed or reduced the great majority of Russian monasteries and pensioned the survivors. This file sets out the post-Petrine secularization of church life and the resulting “spiritual famine” — the scarcity of living elders and of trustworthy ascetic texts — that Paisius’s labors answered.

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

The Petrine Reordering of the Church

Paisius was born in the year after the act that, more than any other, defined the situation of the Russian Church for the rest of the eighteenth century. In 1721 Peter the Great promulgated the Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovnyi Reglament), drawn up for him by Archbishop Feofan (Prokopovich), and with it abolished the office of Patriarch of Moscow, which had stood vacant since the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700 (Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great, 1971, ch. 5; Zernov, The Russians and Their Church, 1945, ch. 9). In place of a single primate the Regulation established a collegial body — first called the Spiritual College, almost immediately renamed the Most Holy Governing Synod — to administer the Church (Cracraft 1971, ch. 5–6). The Synod was, in form and in fact, a department of the imperial state: its members were appointed by the emperor and swore an oath acknowledging him as “the supreme judge of this Spiritual College,” and from 1722 its proceedings were supervised by a lay official, the Ober-Procurator, who acted as “the eye of the sovereign” over ecclesiastical affairs (Cracraft 1971, ch. 6; Zernov 1945, ch. 9).

The significance of this reform for the spiritual life of the country is hard to overstate, and Orthodox historians have not been shy about its character. The replacement of the Patriarchate by a state-supervised committee severed the conciliar self-governance of the Russian Church and placed it under the same bureaucratic rationality Peter was applying to the army and the civil service (Zernov 1945, ch. 9; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1, trans. Nichols, ch. 2). Georges Florovsky famously described the whole Petrine settlement as the beginning of a long “Western captivity” or “pseudomorphosis” of Russian theology, in which the living forms of Orthodox thought were poured into borrowed Western — chiefly Protestant and scholastic — moulds (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1, ch. 2–3). Whatever the merits of that broad thesis, the institutional fact is plain: the Church Paisius was born into was governed by the state, and its monasteries were treated by that state as resources to be managed and, increasingly, reduced.

The State and the Monasteries Before 1764

Peter’s hostility to monasticism as he found it was open and programmatic. He regarded the monasteries as harbouring idle men withdrawn from productive service to the state, and he set out to subordinate them to social usefulness. The Spiritual Regulation and the supplementary Addendum on the Rules of Monks (1722) restricted entry into monastic life, fixed minimum ages for tonsure, forbade monks to keep books or write in their cells without permission, and directed that monasteries be turned to the service of the sick, the aged, and disabled soldiers (Cracraft 1971, ch. 7; Smolitsch, Russisches Mönchtum, 1953, on the Petrine measures). Already in 1701 Peter had restored the Monastery Office (Monastyrskii Prikaz), a state organ to administer monastic estates and divert their revenues to the treasury and to charitable-military ends (Smolitsch 1953; Zernov 1945, ch. 9). These measures did not yet seize the monasteries’ lands outright, but they established the principle that monastic property and monastic numbers were matters for the state to regulate downward.

The pressure was thus already constricting contemplative life when Paisius was a boy and a young monk. A young man drawn to the desert in the 1730s and 1740s found a monastic estate hedged by suspicion of the contemplative vocation as such, by limits on tonsure, and by an official ideology that valued the monk for his social utility rather than for prayer (Smolitsch 1953; Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans., on the conditions of his youth). This is the immediate background to Paisius’s flight from his homeland in search of a living tradition, recounted in his own Autobiography (trans. Featherstone, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature) and treated in the next section (Seeking a Living Tradition).

Catherine’s Secularization of 1764

The decisive blow fell in 1764, when Paisius was already on Mount Athos. The seizure of church lands had been prepared under the Empress Elizabeth and decreed by Peter III in 1762; after a brief suspension it was carried through by Catherine II by the manifesto of 26 February 1764, which transferred the populated estates of the monasteries, episcopal sees, and the Synod to a state body, the College of Economy (Kollegiia Ekonomii), and converted the Church’s landed wealth into a fixed cash budget administered by the state (Smolitsch 1953, on the secularization of 1764; Zernov 1945, ch. 9; Chetverikov, Eng. trans., on the 1764 reform). The roughly one million peasants (“souls”) who had belonged to ecclesiastical estates became state peasants, and the income that had supported the monasteries flowed instead to the treasury (Smolitsch 1953).

In place of the lands the monasteries received a state-set establishment. The reform divided the surviving houses into three classes (shtaty) with fixed numbers of monks and fixed salaries, designated a limited number of “staffed” (shtatnye) monasteries to be supported from the budget, left a smaller category “beyond the staff” (zashtatnye) to subsist without state salary, and closed or reduced the great majority of the rest (Smolitsch 1953; Zernov 1945, ch. 9). The scale of the suppression was drastic. Scholars give the proportions as a reduction from several hundred houses to a remnant of a few hundred, with a large majority abolished: [Disputed: the precise figures vary by how houses and dependent sketes are counted — Smolitsch (*Russisches Mönchtum*, 1953) and the figures repeated after him give a reduction of Great-Russian monasteries from roughly 950–1,070 before 1764 to about 350–400 retained on the establishment, with well over half closed or left without support; other summaries (e.g. Zernov, *The Russians and Their Church*, 1945, ch. 9) speak more generally of "more than half" of the monasteries being suppressed. The order of magnitude — the closure or reduction of the majority — is not in dispute; the exact counts are]. The houses that remained were capped at small fixed numbers of monks, so that even the surviving communities were prevented from growing (Smolitsch 1953; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). The contemplative estate of Russian monasticism was, at a stroke, both decapitated of its wealth and legally prevented from expanding.

The Loss of a Living Hesychast Tradition

The material reduction had a spiritual consequence that matters most for understanding Paisius. The monastic milieu in which the hesychast tradition of inner prayer — the disciplined practice of the Jesus Prayer under the guidance of an experienced elder — could be handed on from master to disciple had been thinning for generations and was now further impoverished. The line of the “non-possessor” hesychasts associated with St. Nilus of Sora (d. 1508), who had taught the prayer of the heart and the disclosure of thoughts to a spiritual father, had never been the dominant institutional party in Muscovite monasticism and had been marginalized after the victory of the “possessor” tendency in the sixteenth century (St. Nilus of Sora; Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, ch. on the later tradition). By the eighteenth century the continuous transmission of hesychast practice within Russia had grown faint to the point that a young monk seeking a living guide in the prayer of the heart could not reliably find one at home (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, vol. 1, Faber, with Palmer and Sherrard).

This is the condition Paisius himself describes. In his Autobiography he records that as a young monk in Ukraine and the Romanian lands he searched for a true spiritual father and a sound rule of ascetic life and could not find what he sought, a frustration that drove him first to the Romanian sketes and then to the Holy Mountain (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). His difficulty was not personal but structural: the institutional supports for contemplative eldership had been so eroded that the tradition had to be sought outside the borders of the Russian state, on Athos and in Moldavia, where Ottoman conditions had left older monastic forms more intact (Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.).

The Famine of Texts

Bound up with the scarcity of living elders was a scarcity of trustworthy books. The ascetic and hesychast literature of the Greek Fathers — Evagrius, Mark the Ascetic, Hesychius, Diadochus, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, and the rest of the corpus later gathered in the Philokalia — existed in Slavonic only in a scattered, partial, and often badly corrupted state. The manuscripts that survived in Slavonic translation had passed through centuries of copying without critical correction; many were textually unreliable, some unintelligible, and the difficult vocabulary of the inner life had been rendered inconsistently or wrongly (Chetverikov, Eng. trans., on the state of the Slavonic texts; Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1). Paisius would later describe his own labor of comparing manuscripts and correcting the Slavonic against the Greek precisely as a remedy for this corruption — a problem treated in detail in the sections on Athos and the Dobrotolyubie (Discovering the Greek Manuscripts; Translating the Dobrotolyubie).

The result was a double famine. A monk who wished to learn the prayer of the heart in mid-eighteenth-century Russia lacked both a living teacher who had received the practice from his own elder and a reliable written guide by which to test and steady the practice. It is this twofold scarcity — of persons and of corrected texts — that scholars mean by the “spiritual famine” of the period (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1). The point is not that Russian Christianity had failed: parish life, liturgy, and popular piety continued, and the eighteenth century produced great hierarchs such as St. Tikhon of Zadonsk and St. Dimitri of Rostov. The point is narrower and exact: the specific tradition of contemplative hesychast prayer transmitted through eldership had nearly lapsed within the Russian lands, and the means of recovering it — living masters and sound books — were both wanting (Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality).

The Famine the Revival Answered

Seen against this background, the shape of Paisius’s life-work becomes legible as a direct response to the famine. He could not find a living tradition at home, so he reconstituted it abroad — first by gathering on Athos and in Moldavia a brotherhood living under obedience and the disclosure of thoughts, and then by hunting down, collating, and correcting the Greek and Slavonic ascetic texts so that the written tradition could once more steady the practical one (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.; Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1). The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie printed at Moscow in 1793 and the starchestvo his disciples carried back into Russia in the early nineteenth century were the answer to exactly the two scarcities described above: corrected texts and living elders (The 1793 Slavonic Philokalia; The Philokalic Revival).

That the recovery had to come from outside the Russian state — from the freer monastic world of Athos and Ottoman Moldavia — and be carried back in is itself the strongest commentary on what the eighteenth-century reforms had done to monastic life within the empire (Ware, Philokalia intro, vol. 1; Chetverikov, Eng. trans.). The decline described here is therefore not mere scene-setting but the problem to which the whole of Paisius’s labor is the response, and against which his achievement is to be measured (Russian Monasticism; Monasticism).

References

Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971. (The abolition of the Patriarchate, the Spiritual Regulation of 1721, the Holy Synod, the Ober-Procurator, and the Petrine monastic legislation.)
Smolitsch, Igor. Russisches Mönchtum: Entstehung, Entwicklung und Wesen, 988–1917. Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1953. (Standard history of Russian monasticism; the Petrine Monastyrskii Prikaz, the shtaty, and the 1764 secularization with its figures.)
Zernov, Nicolas. The Russians and Their Church. London: SPCK, 1945. (Chapter 9 on the Petrine reform, the Synodal period, and the suppression of monasteries.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979. (The “Western captivity” / pseudomorphosis thesis on the post-Petrine Church; vols. 5–6 of the Collected Works.)
Chetverikov, Sergei. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. English translation. (The standard modern biography; the conditions of Russian monastic and textual life in Paisius’s youth, the 1764 reform, and the state of the Slavonic ascetic manuscripts.)
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. (The Philokalic tradition, the “spiritual famine,” and Paisius’s place in the recovery.)
Meyendorff, John. St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The hesychast tradition and its later transmission.)
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 search for a spiritual father and a sound rule, and his flight from his homeland.)