Seeking a Living Tradition

After abandoning the Latinizing scholasticism of the Kiev Mohyla Academy in the later 1730s, the young Pyotr Velichkovsky spent his wandering years searching Ukraine, the Kiev Caves Lavra, and above all the sketes of Wallachia and Moldavia for what he could not find at home: a living elder who actually practiced and could teach the inner prayer of the heart. This file follows that search as he himself narrates it in his unfinished Autobiography, through the Pechersk Lavra and across the frontier into the Danubian principalities, to the hesychast sketes — Trăisteni, Dălhăuți, Cârnul — and the elders of the tradition associated with Basil of Poiana Mărului, where he first met the spiritual fatherhood he was seeking.

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

What drove Paisius out of the Kiev Mohyla Academy was not failure but disappointment. The curriculum he had entered — Latin grammar, rhetoric, poetics, and a scholastic theology mediated through Western textbooks — struck him as estranged from the patristic and ascetic sources he had begun to love in the Fathers’ own words; the tension between the schoolroom and the desert is the subject of the previous section (see Poltava and the Kiev Academy). He left in his teens, and the years that followed — the later 1730s into the 1740s — were not a settled novitiate but a deliberate, restless quest. In his own retrospective account he frames the whole period as a search for two inseparable things: true monastic poverty and obedience, and a living teacher of prayer (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature).

The structure of that quest is essential to understanding everything that followed in his life. Paisius was not looking for a monastery in the abstract; the Russian and Ukrainian lands had monasteries enough. He was looking for the transmission of an experiential discipline — the guarding of the mind, the watchfulness (nepsis) and inner attention of the hesychast Fathers, and the practice of the Jesus Prayer under an experienced guide — and his repeated complaint, voiced again and again in the Autobiography, is that this living transmission had grown so scarce in the secularized Church of the post-Petrine empire that it could scarcely be found at all (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; on the institutional decline, see The 18th-Century Decline of Monasticism). The hesychast and Philokalic renewal that he would later set in motion was therefore not a project he conceived in advance; it was the answer he was forced to construct because the thing he sought ready-made no longer existed in his homeland (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber).

The Kiev Caves Lavra and Its Disappointment

The most famous station of these early wanderings was the Kiev Caves Lavra — the Pecherska Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves — the ancient cradle of Rus’ monasticism founded in the eleventh century by Saints Anthony and Theodosius (on the foundation, see St. Anthony of the Kiev Caves and St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves). For a young man steeped in the Paterik of the Caves and the lives of its early ascetics, the Lavra was the natural place to look for the desert tradition still alive. He went there, and for a time he was attached to it (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone).

What he found, by his own testimony, did not satisfy the hunger that had brought him. The Lavra of the eighteenth century was a great and venerable institution — a center of learning, printing, and pilgrimage, with its caves and incorrupt relics — but it had become, in important respects, exactly the kind of establishment the wandering Pyotr was fleeing: large, ordered, and bound up with the administrative and educational machinery of the Church, rather than a school of solitary inner prayer under a personal elder (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.; Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, on the eclipse of the hesychast tradition in this era). The Autobiography presents his time there as one more place where the form of monastic life was present but the living core he sought — an elder who himself prayed the prayer of the heart and could hand it on through obedience — was not to be found in the manner he needed (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone).

It would be a distortion to read this as a young man’s contempt for a holy place; the sources do not support that, and Paisius’s veneration for the ancient Caves Fathers never wavered. The point is rather narrower and more poignant: the institution that had once been the fountainhead of Russian asceticism could no longer, in the spiritual climate of the 1730s and 1740s, supply a living master of hesychast prayer to a seeker who knew precisely what he was looking for (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.). His departure from the Lavra is therefore of a piece with his departure from the Academy: in both, the visible Church of his homeland offered him structures without the particular living transmission he sought, and in both he chose the road over the settled place.

Across the Frontier: Why Wallachia and Moldavia

The decisive turn of these years was geographical as much as spiritual: Paisius moved south and west, across the imperial frontier, into the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The choice was not arbitrary, and its logic illuminates the whole condition of Orthodox monasticism in the mid-eighteenth century.

Wallachia and Moldavia in this period were autonomous Christian principalities under Ottoman suzerainty, ruled in Paisius’s youth largely by the Greek Phanariot princes appointed from Constantinople. Precisely because they lay outside the Russian Empire and its program of state regulation of the Church, Slavonic-rite and Greek monastic life — including the small, informal, prayer-centered communities of the skete type — survived there with a freedom that had become difficult under the centralizing, secularizing reforms set in motion by Peter the Great and pressed forward by his successors (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber; on the Russian background, Russian Monasticism). The paradox is real and important: the living hesychast tradition that the Orthodox empire could no longer easily sustain at home had taken refuge in the forests and hills of lands under Muslim political overlordship, where the principalities’ Christian princes endowed monasteries and the sketes were left to their prayer (Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality).

For a Slavonic-speaking seeker, Moldavia and Wallachia had the further advantage of being a meeting-ground of traditions: Romanian, Slavonic, and Greek monks lived and prayed in proximity, and the older Slavonic ascetic and liturgical inheritance remained in use alongside Romanian and Greek (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.). This bilingual and trilingual milieu is the seedbed of everything Paisius would later become — the corrector of Slavonic texts against the Greek, the abbot of a brotherhood in which Slavs and Romanians prayed together. His crossing of the frontier was thus, in retrospect, the most consequential decision of his wandering years (Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber).

The Sketes of Wallachia and the Elders He Found

In the sketes of Wallachia and Moldavia, Paisius at last found what the Academy and the Lavra had not given him: small communities organized expressly around the disclosure of thoughts to an elder, manual labor, poverty, and the practice of inner prayer. The Autobiography names the places and the men, and it is from this part of his own narrative that we know the specific sketes that formed him (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone).

Among the sketes associated with his early years in the principalities are Trăisteni, Dălhăuți, and Cârnul — hermitages set in the wooded hills, of the kind in which a handful of monks lived under an elder in semi-eremitic poverty (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.). Here he encountered for the first time the lived practice of obedience and the opening of the conscience to a spiritual father that he had read of in the Fathers but had not seen embodied — the very starchestvo he would later make the heart of his own communities (on which see Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood; and more broadly Spiritual Direction). Among the elders he names and reverenced in these years are figures such as the elder Vasily (Basil) and others of the skete brotherhoods, under whose direction and example he learned the rudiments of the discipline he had been seeking (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone).

The most important single influence of this milieu was the tradition associated with Basil of Poiana Mărului — Vasile de la Poiana Mărului (c. 1692–1767), the Slavonic-rite elder who had gathered and led skete communities in the Wallachian-Moldavian hills and who had written introductions (precuvântări) to the hesychast Fathers, defending and explaining the practice of the Jesus Prayer for monks living the active life and not only for perfected solitaries (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber; on Basil’s writings, see the notes in Stăniloae’s Romanian Filocalia). The relationship between Paisius and Basil is attested in the tradition and is treated in the scholarship as formative; the precise extent and chronology of their personal contact, however, is handled with care in the sources, and not every later claim of close discipleship can be pinned to the Autobiography itself: [Disputed: the tradition and Chetverikov (*Starets Paisii Velichkovskii*, Eng. trans.) present Basil of Poiana Mărului as a direct and formative spiritual father to Paisius in the Wallachian sketes, and report that Basil later tonsured him; Ware (introduction to *The Philokalia*, Faber) and the broader scholarship treat Basil's influence as decisive for the milieu and its teaching on the Jesus Prayer while noting that the depth of the personal relationship rests more on the disciple-tradition than on Paisius's own first-person testimony]. What is not in dispute is that the kind of monasticism Basil represented — skete life ordered to inner prayer, with the Jesus Prayer commended to ordinary cenobitic and semi-eremitic monks under obedience — is the matrix from which Paisius’s own program grew (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.; Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality).

The Want of Living Teachers

Even in the Wallachian sketes, however, the Autobiography preserves a note of incompleteness that explains the next stage of his life. Paisius found communities of genuine prayer and real elders of poverty and obedience; what he did not yet find, in the measure he longed for, was a master who could lead him into the higher reaches of the contemplative prayer of the heart as the great hesychast Fathers described it — and, crucially, he found that the patristic texts that taught this prayer were themselves scarce, scattered, and often corrupt in their available Slavonic copies (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.). The two lacks were connected: the absence of living teachers and the absence of reliable books were, for Paisius, a single wound in the tradition, and healing both would become the double labor of his life — the recovery of starchestvo and the recovery of the texts.

This is the thread that carries him onward. Convinced that the fullness of the hesychast inheritance survived, if anywhere, on the Holy Mountain where it had been born, Paisius resolved to go to Athos — a decision that opens the next chapter of his search (see To the Holy Mountain). The wandering years thus end not in arrival but in a further departure, and the seeker who had failed to find a finished tradition at home set out to find its source. That he would have, in the end, to reconstitute the tradition himself — gathering the books, correcting the translations, and re-establishing the eldership — is the irony and the greatness of his life (Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber; on the monastic ideal he was pursuing, Monasticism).

See Also

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 / Ukrainian Research Institute, 1989. (His own first-person account of his flight from the Kiev Academy, his time at the Kiev Caves Lavra, his crossing into Wallachia/Moldavia, and the sketes — Trăisteni, Dălhăuți, Cârnul — and elders of his wandering years.)
  • Chetverikov, Sergei. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. Trans. from the Russian. Belmont, MA: Nordland / St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (The standard critical biography; the Wallachian sketes, the figure of Basil of Poiana Mărului, and the scarcity of living elders and of reliable ascetic texts.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. Introduction(s) to The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–. (The Philokalic tradition, the survival of hesychast life in the Danubian principalities under Ottoman suzerainty, and Basil of Poiana Mărului’s place in the milieu.)
  • Meyendorff, John. St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Trans. Adele Fiske. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The hesychast tradition, its eighteenth-century eclipse, and the conditions of its survival and revival.)
  • Stăniloae, Dumitru. Filocalia (Romanian translation and notes). (Notes on Basil of Poiana Mărului and his introductions to the hesychast Fathers, where used for the Romanian skete tradition.)