The Hermit and the Brotherhood

When the young monk Platon — soon to be Paisius — landed on the Holy Mountain about 1746, he came to be a hermit, and for some years he was one. This file traces the slow reversal of that intention across his roughly seventeen Athonite years: his solitary asceticism, his decisive meeting with the Moldavian elder Basil of Poiana Mărului, his tonsure and the sequence of his monastic names, the disciples who gathered around him until he could no longer remain alone, his reluctant ordination to the priesthood, and the settlement of his growing community at the skete of the Prophet Elias near Pantokrator — a brotherhood Slavonic and Romanian from the first.

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

Arrival and the Will to Solitude

Paisius reached Mount Athos by sea, by way of Wallachia and the sketes of the Carpathians, around 1746, a rasophore monk in his early twenties (Featherstone 1989; Chetverikov 1980). He had left the Kiev Mohyla Academy and wandered through Ukraine and Wallachia precisely because he could not find at home the thing he sought — a living elder under whom to practice obedience and the prayer of the heart (see Seeking a Living Tradition). The Holy Mountain was, in the geography of his hopes, the reservoir of that tradition; and his first response to it was to seek the desert within the desert. He did not at once attach himself to a coenobium but sought out solitude, living in poverty in a cell and giving himself to fasting, vigil, and the Jesus Prayer (Featherstone 1989; Chetverikov 1980).

His own Autobiography dwells on the hardship and the inward struggle of these first years rather than on external events, and it is in fact unfinished, breaking off before the fuller institutional history of the brotherhood; for the later Athonite years the narrative must be supplemented from the Life compiled by his disciples (chiefly the hieromonk Mitrofan, reworked by Platon), with the source-critical caution that the disciple-Life is a devotional composition whose hagiographic shaping is named rather than read as transparent record (Featherstone 1989, translator’s introduction; Chetverikov 1980; see The Autobiography and The Life by His Disciples). What both sources agree on is the shape of the arc: a man who came to be alone, and who was drawn out of solitude by the gravitational pull of others’ need for what he had.

The Name: From Pyotr to Platon to Paisius

The matter of Paisius’s monastic names must be set out carefully, because it is easy to garble and the sources are not uniformly explicit on the sequence. He was born Pyotr (Peter) Velichkovsky at Poltava in 1722 (see Poltava and the Kiev Academy). In the course of his wanderings, before Athos, he received the rasophore — the first, preliminary degree of the monastic state, in which a novice is clothed in the cassock and given a new name but does not yet take the full vows — and as a rasophore he bore the name Platon (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989). He came to Athos, therefore, as the monk Platon.

The name Paisius is the schema-name — the name received at the monastic tonsure into the mantle (the lesser schema, the full monastic profession) that he received on the Holy Mountain. The conventional and best-attested account is that this tonsure, with the giving of the name Paisius, was performed in connection with his meeting with Elder Basil of Poiana Mărului (see below), so that the sequence is: Pyotr (baptismal) → Platon (rasophore) → Paisius (mantle / schema-name) (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989). [Disputed: the sources agree that "Platon" was his rasophore name and "Paisius" his name at the mantle-tonsure, but they are not fully explicit and uniform on precisely when and by whom the mantle-tonsure was conferred — Chetverikov (1980) and the disciple-*Life* connect the tonsure into the mantle with Elder Basil's visit to Athos and date the change of name to that occasion, while the *Autobiography* (trans. Featherstone 1989), being unfinished, does not narrate the tonsure in detail, so the exact circumstance is reconstructed rather than documented in his own hand.] The reader should hold the name-sequence as secure in outline (Platon → Paisius) and the precise ritual occasion of the change as a reconstruction from the disciple-tradition.

Elder Basil of Poiana Mărului

The pivotal human encounter of Paisius’s Athonite solitude was with Basil of Poiana Mărului (Vasile of Poiana Mărului), the elder of a Romanian skete in the Buzău mountains of Wallachia and himself a teacher of the Jesus Prayer and a writer of prefaces (introductions) to the hesychast fathers (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). Basil came to the Holy Mountain — the disciple-tradition places the visit in the years after Paisius’s arrival — and the two men met. Basil counseled the young hermit, and, on the account of the Life, it was Basil who tonsured him into the mantle and so gave him the name Paisius (Chetverikov 1980). Basil’s counsel ran in a specific direction that would mark Paisius for life: he warned the young man against premature and total solitude, urging that the path of the beginner is safer in the company of a few like-minded brethren — the “middle way” between the full coenobium and the hermitage — than in the unguarded isolation of the anchorite (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). Basil’s own prefaces, defending the practice of the Jesus Prayer for those still in the active life and not only for the perfected, anticipate the apologetic Paisius would later have to make on the same point (Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012; see The Prayer of the Heart).

The encounter with Basil is thus the hinge on which Paisius’s vocation turned from solitary to communal. He had come to be a hermit; Basil told him, in effect, that he was not ready to be one alone, and that the prayer he sought was better learned and guarded in brotherhood.

The Gathering of Disciples

Whether by Basil’s counsel or by the simple force of his reputation, Paisius did not remain alone for long. The Life records that his manner of life — his poverty, his constancy in the Jesus Prayer, his evident seriousness about the patristic path — drew others to him, first one and then several, who asked to live with him and to receive his guidance (Chetverikov 1980). His first companion, by the disciple-tradition, was a Moldavian monk, Bessarion, and others followed, so that the cell that had been a hermitage became a small community (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989). Paisius at first resisted: he had come for solitude, and he regarded himself as a learner, not a teacher, and as unworthy and unprepared to direct souls (Chetverikov 1980). But the brethren persisted, and the number grew until the eremitic life was no longer possible — the community had become too large for one man to live as a hermit in its midst, and the responsibilities of an elder were thrust upon him (Chetverikov 1980).

From its beginning this brotherhood was bilingual. Paisius was a Ukrainian by birth and formation, formed in Church Slavonic; many of his earliest disciples were Moldavians and Wallachians, formed in Romanian; and the community accordingly conducted its life and, increasingly, its translation labors in both Slavonic and Romanian (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). This double character — a single hesychast brotherhood living in two liturgical and literary languages — was not a later development of the Moldavian period but a mark of the community from its Athonite infancy, and it would shape the whole of Paisius’s translation enterprise, which proceeded in Slavonic and Romanian alike (see Discovering the Greek Manuscripts and Translating the Dobrotolyubie).

Ordination to the Priesthood

As the brotherhood grew, it required its own priest to celebrate the Liturgy and hear confessions, and the office fell — over his protest — to Paisius. He was ordained to the priesthood, the disciple-tradition records, with great reluctance, regarding himself as unworthy of the sacerdotal dignity and accepting it only under the pressure of the community’s need (Chetverikov 1980). [Disputed: the date of Paisius's ordination is usually given as c. 1758, when he was about thirty-six (Chetverikov 1980, and the dating followed in Ware's account in Bingaman and Nassif 2012); some accounts place it slightly later, toward 1758–1759, and the *Autobiography* (trans. Featherstone 1989), being unfinished, does not supply a precise date, so "c. 1758" should be read as the conventional reconstruction rather than a documented year.] The ordination is significant beyond the practical: it marks the formal recognition that the hermit had become an elder with a flock, a hieromonk responsible for the sacramental as well as the spiritual life of a brotherhood. The man who had fled Kiev rather than be made a teacher of rhetoric now found himself a priest and a father of monks, and his subsequent insistence that the office of eldership be exercised within obedience and the disclosure of thoughts — the starchestvo he would systematize in Moldavia — has its root in this Athonite reluctance to claim authority he had not sought (Chetverikov 1980; see Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood).

The Skete of the Prophet Elias

The growth of the brotherhood eventually outstripped its quarters, and Paisius’s community moved to a new and more substantial home: the skete of the Prophet Elias (Profitou Iliou, “Prophet Elias Skete”), situated on the territory of the ruling monastery of Pantokrator in the northeastern part of the peninsula (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). A skete in Athonite usage is a dependent settlement of cells gathered around a central church, subordinate to one of the twenty ruling monasteries — a form intermediate between the great coenobium and the isolated hermitage, and thus exactly the “middle way” Basil had commended. Paisius’s community founded or settled the Prophet Elias Skete as its base, building it up into an organized brotherhood under his direction (Chetverikov 1980). [Disputed: the founding/settlement of the Prophet Elias Skete by Paisius's brotherhood is conventionally dated to the late 1750s, c. 1757–1759, in the same period as his ordination (Chetverikov 1980); the precise year is given variously in the literature and is not fixed by the *Autobiography*, so the date is offered as an approximate, source-conventional figure.] It is worth noting, against a common confusion, that this is the Prophet Elias Skete near Pantokrator — later famous as a largely Russian (Little Russian) establishment — and not a cell at or of Constantinople; Paisius’s foundation belongs to Athos itself.

At the Prophet Elias Skete the brotherhood took on the settled, organized character that it would carry intact across the sea when, about 1763, the pressures of life on Athos — material hardship, the burden of Turkish taxation on the monasteries, and the limits the Mountain placed on so large and growing a community — moved Paisius to transplant the whole brotherhood to Moldavia (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in Bingaman and Nassif 2012). The community that arrived at Dragomirna was, in its essential form, the community that had taken shape on Athos: bilingual, hesychast, ordered around the Jesus Prayer and the disclosure of thoughts, and committed to the labor of correcting the ascetic texts. The Athonite years were the workshop in which that community was forged (see Dragomirna, Secul, Neamț).

What the Athonite Decades Established

By the time he left the Holy Mountain, Paisius had become, in fact if not yet in full institutional form, what he would be for the rest of his life: an elder of a coenobitic-hesychast brotherhood, a hieromonk, and a corrector of texts. The reluctance that runs through every step of this story — his preference for solitude over community, his protest at ordination, his sense of unworthiness to teach — is not a hagiographic ornament but the substance of his understanding of eldership, which he held to be a burden received in obedience rather than an authority seized. The brotherhood that gathered around him on Athos, Slavonic and Romanian together, praying the Jesus Prayer and beginning to wrestle with the corrupt state of its own ascetic books, is the seed from which both his Moldavian communities and his Slavonic Philokalia would grow.

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. (The first-person, unfinished account of his early life and arrival on Athos; the rasophore name Platon; the will to solitude.)
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 meeting with Basil of Poiana Mărului, the tonsure and name-change, the gathering of disciples beginning with Bessarion, the ordination c. 1758, and the Prophet Elias Skete near Pantokrator.)
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. (Basil of Poiana Mărului and the defense of the Jesus Prayer; the Athonite brotherhood and its move to Moldavia; Paisius’s place in the Philokalic tradition.)
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. (Orientation to Paisius and the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie within the Philokalic tradition.)