Discovering the Greek Manuscripts

The intellectual crisis that set Paisius on the work of his life began on Athos with a discovery: the Slavonic ascetic books he had carried from Ukraine and copied with such labor were corrupt — full of scribal error, omission, and passages so garbled as to be unintelligible. This file follows the consequence of that discovery: his search of the great Athonite libraries for sound Greek originals, his dismay at finding even good Greek copies scarce, the providential find of manuscripts at a skete, his learning of Greek in order to translate and correct, and the way this labor of textual recovery became the seed of the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie.

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

The Books That Did Not Make Sense

The crisis was practical before it was scholarly. Paisius and his brotherhood lived by the patristic ascetic writings — the works of the hesychast and Philokalic fathers on watchfulness, the guarding of the mind, and the prayer of the heart — and they lived by them in Church Slavonic, the only language most of the brotherhood could read (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). But as Paisius copied and studied these Slavonic texts, he found to his distress that he frequently could not understand them. The fault, he came to see, was not in his own understanding but in the books: the Slavonic manuscripts had been copied and recopied over generations by scribes who often did not understand what they were transcribing, and the texts had accumulated errors, lacunae, and corruptions until whole passages had become, in his own word, unintelligible (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989).

This is the burden of Paisius’s own testimony in his prefaces to the translated texts, where he describes the corruption of the Slavonic ascetic books as the very problem his life’s labor was meant to remedy (Chetverikov 1980, quoting and summarizing the prefaces; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). He found, he says, that the Slavonic copies were so disfigured by the ignorance and carelessness of copyists that in many places no sense could be drawn from them at all, and that to attempt to live the inner life by such guides was to walk by a lamp whose light had failed. The realization had a sharp edge for a man who had staked everything on the patristic path: the very texts on which the recovery of the tradition depended were themselves in need of recovery.

The Search of the Athonite Libraries

Paisius’s first remedy was the obvious one: if the Slavonic copies were corrupt, the corruption could be checked and corrected against the Greek originals from which they had ultimately descended. And the Holy Mountain was, of all places in the Orthodox world, the one richest in such originals — its ruling monasteries held libraries of Greek manuscripts going back centuries, among them the great collections of Vatopedi, the Great Lavra, and Iviron (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). Paisius accordingly set himself to search these libraries for the Greek texts of the fathers he needed, traveling among the monasteries and inquiring after manuscripts of the ascetic and hesychast writers (Chetverikov 1980).

The search was, at first, a disappointment that deepened the crisis rather than resolving it. Paisius discovered that even on Athos sound Greek manuscripts of the ascetic fathers were scarce: many of the texts he sought he could not find at all, and where he did find them the copies were sometimes themselves defective or incomplete (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). The very fathers whose recovery he had set as his task had, it seemed, fallen out of common circulation even in the Greek-speaking monastic world — a sign of the same eighteenth-century decline of the inner tradition that had driven him from Ukraine to the Mountain in the first place (see The 18th-Century Decline of Monasticism). For a time the search seemed to fail: he had identified the disease but could not find the medicine.

The Find at the Skete

The turn came, on Paisius’s own account, providentially. After his disappointment in the libraries of the great monasteries, he found the manuscripts he had sought not in those celebrated collections but at a skete — the disciple-tradition and Paisius’s own testimony record that he came upon a store of the Greek patristic and ascetic texts he needed at one of the sketes of the Mountain, where they had been preserved (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). [Disputed: Paisius's prefaces and the disciple-*Life* attribute the decisive discovery of the manuscripts to a skete and present it as providential, but the sources as transmitted in the secondary literature do not consistently name a single skete or fix a precise year for the find; Chetverikov (1980) and Ware (in Bingaman and Nassif 2012) recount the discovery as Paisius himself frames it — a long and disappointing search followed by an unexpected finding — without resolving these particulars, so the location should be read as "a skete on Athos" rather than a securely identified house.] The point on which the sources agree, and which matters for the history, is the shape of the experience: a protracted and failing search, and then an unlooked-for finding that Paisius received as a gift of Providence and as the warrant for the whole translation enterprise that followed.

Learning Greek

Finding the Greek manuscripts solved only half the problem, for Paisius could not at first read them well enough to use them as correctives. His formation at the Kiev Mohyla Academy had been in Latin and Slavonic, in the Latinizing scholastic curriculum of the post-Petrine Church that he had in fact fled (see Poltava and the Kiev Academy); his command of Greek was inadequate to the delicate work of collating manuscripts and rendering technical ascetic vocabulary (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). He therefore set himself, on Athos and afterward in Moldavia, to learn Greek properly — both the language and the scribal and editorial skills needed to compare copies, weigh variant readings, and translate accurately (Chetverikov 1980). This was not a brief preliminary but a labor of years that continued into his Moldavian period, where the work of translation and correction became the organized industry of his communities (Chetverikov 1980; see Translating the Dobrotolyubie).

Paisius’s approach to the work, once he could do it, was that of a scrupulous corrector rather than a free paraphraser. He aimed to establish a sound text by comparison of copies and to render it into Slavonic with a fidelity that sometimes made his translations difficult — he preferred to follow the Greek closely, even at the cost of fluency, rather than to smooth the sense and risk losing the precise meaning of the fathers on so exacting a subject as the discernment of thoughts and the practice of the prayer (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). His own prefaces are explicit about the difficulty and the method, and they constitute a small but genuine treatise on the textual transmission of the ascetic corpus and the responsibilities of the translator (Chetverikov 1980).

The Seed of the Dobrotolyubie

The significance of this Athonite labor is that it is the seed of the Slavonic Philokalia. The whole enterprise that would culminate in the Moscow Dobrotolyubie of 1793 — the corrected Slavonic translation of the patristic ascetic corpus — grew directly out of the problem Paisius first confronted on the Holy Mountain: corrupt Slavonic texts, a search for sound Greek originals, a providential find, and the learning of Greek to make the correction possible (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012; Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware 1979, introduction). What began as a monk’s practical need to understand the books his brotherhood prayed by became, by its own logic, a vast work of textual recovery, and that recovery — carried from Athos to Dragomirna, Secul, and Neamț — issued in the printed Slavonic collection that re-seeded the hesychast tradition across the Slavic Orthodox world.

It is worth marking the relation, and the question, between Paisius’s labor and the Greek Philokalia printed at Venice in 1782 by Macarius of Corinth and Nicodemus the Hagiorite (see St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite). The two enterprises were broadly contemporary and drew on the same Athonite manuscript world and the same hesychast revival, and Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie overlaps substantially with the Greek printed collection in its contents. But Paisius’s translation work began on Athos in the 1750s, before the Greek Philokalia appeared in print, and proceeded largely from his own manuscript searches rather than from the Venetian edition; precisely how much of his Slavonic collection depends on the printed Greek Philokalia and how much is independent of it is a matter on which scholars differ and which is treated as a structured question in its own place (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012; see The 1793 Slavonic Philokalia). What belongs here is only the origin: the textual problem that Paisius discovered among the corrupt Slavonic books of his Athonite brotherhood, and the search of the Greek manuscripts by which he set out to solve it, were the true beginning of the modern Philokalic revival.

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. (His Latin-and-Slavonic formation; the first-person account of his early life underlying the textual crisis.)
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. (The standard biography: the corruption of the Slavonic texts as described in Paisius’s prefaces; the search of the Athonite libraries; the scarcity of good Greek copies; the find at a skete; the learning of Greek; his close, faithful method of translation; and the genesis of the Dobrotolyubie.)
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. (Paisius’s textual labors and their relation to the Greek Philokalia of 1782; the question of dependence and independence.)
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. (The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie and its place in the Philokalic tradition.)