03 — Athos

The roughly seventeen years (c. 1746–1763) that St. Paisius spent on the Holy Mountain, the formative middle of his life: his arrival as a young rasophore monk, his years as a solitary hermit, his tonsure into the great schema, the gradual gathering of a brotherhood around him, his unwilling ordination to the priesthood, the founding of the skete of the Prophet Elias, and — running beneath all of this — his discovery that the Slavonic ascetic books he had inherited were corrupt, and his consequent hunt for sound Greek manuscripts. The two strands of his later greatness, the eldership and the Dobrotolyubie, are both seeded here.

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

Paisius came to Athos c. 1746 still seeking what he had not found in Ukraine or Wallachia: a living tradition of the prayer of the heart and of obedience to a spiritual father (see To the Holy Mountain). What he found instead, at first, was solitude — and then, slowly and against his own inclination, a community. The Athonite decades are the period in which the wandering disciple became, almost despite himself, an elder, and in which the bookish problem that would consume the rest of his life first declared itself: that the ascetic and patristic texts on which the whole edifice of hesychast prayer rested had reached his generation in a state so corrupt as to be, in places, unintelligible.

This section treats those decades in two files. The first follows the human and institutional story — the hermit, the tonsure and the name, the brotherhood, the priesthood, and the skete of the Prophet Elias. The second follows the textual story — the realization of corruption, the search of the great Athonite libraries, the learning of Greek, and the recovery of good manuscripts that became the seed of the Slavonic Philokalia. Throughout, the primary witness is Paisius’s own unfinished Autobiography, supplemented by the Life compiled by his disciples and by the critical work of Chetverikov and Ware; where the Autobiography breaks off or the sources diverge — notably on the precise sequence of his monastic names and the date of his ordination — the divergence is flagged rather than smoothed.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Hermit and the Brotherhood The Athonite decades c. 1746–1763: Paisius’s solitary years; his meeting with Elder Basil of Poiana Mărului, who counseled him and (on the disciples’ account) tonsured him into the mantle; the name-sequence from Platon to Paisius; the gathering of disciples into a bilingual Slavonic-Romanian brotherhood; his ordination to the priesthood (c. 1758); and the founding and settlement of the skete of the Prophet Elias near Pantokrator.
Discovering the Greek Manuscripts Paisius’s discovery that the available Slavonic ascetic texts were riddled with scribal corruption; his search of the Athonite monastery libraries (Vatopedi and others) for Greek originals; the scarcity of even good Greek copies; the providential find of manuscripts at a skete; his learning of Greek to translate and correct; and how this labor of textual recovery became the seed of the Dobrotolyubie project.

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, 1989.
  • Chetverikov, Sergius (Sergei). Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. Trans. Vasily Lickwar and Alexander I. Lisenko. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1980.
  • Ware, Kallistos. “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia.” In The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Trans. and ed. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. Vol. 1, introduction. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.