04 — Moldavia
When overcrowding, Ottoman pressure, and the impossibility of holding a large brotherhood together on the Holy Mountain made the Athonite situation untenable, St. Paisius (Velichkovsky) returned to Moldavia in 1763 with his community and reconstituted it across three great monasteries in succession — Dragomirna (1763–1775), Secul (1775–1779), and Neamț (from 1779) — moving twice under the duress of war and the cession of Bukovina to Catholic Austria. There he achieved his most distinctive work: a large, strictly coenobitic community ordered to the hesychast inner life of the Jesus Prayer, served in two languages, Church Slavonic and Romanian, and governed by the daily disclosure of thoughts to the elder. This section narrates the Moldavian decades and analyzes the cenobitic-hesychast synthesis that became their lasting model.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Russian-Moldavian (hesychast; Philokalic revival)
The Moldavian period (1763–1794) is the maturity of Paisius’s life and the setting of his two great labors — the corrected Slavonic translation of the ascetic Fathers (treated in Section 05) and the restoration of eldership and the disclosure of thoughts (treated in Section 06). It is also the period from which the modern Philokalic revival was carried into Russia by his disciples (Section 08). The two files below divide the material between narrative and analysis: the first follows the brotherhood across the three monasteries and the war that displaced it; the second examines the rule of life — the fusion of coenobium and hesychasm in a bilingual community — that Paisius built within those walls.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Dragomirna, Secul, and Neamț | Why Paisius left Athos (overcrowding, Ottoman taxation and pressure, the opening in the Romanian principalities) and returned to Moldavia in 1763 with c. 64 monks; the flourishing at Dragomirna (1763–1775) and the intensification of the translation work; the displacement caused by the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 and the 1775 cession of Bukovina to Habsburg Austria; the move to Secul (1775–1779); and finally to Neamț (from 1779), which Paisius led, eventually over both houses, until his death there in 1794. |
| The Organized Community | Paisius’s cenobitic-hesychast synthesis: the fusion of strict communal organization with the inner work of the Jesus Prayer, usually held apart; the bilingual Slavonic-Romanian brotherhood with its two choirs and services in both tongues; the rule of life — daily disclosure of thoughts, common labor, liturgical fullness, communal reading of the Fathers, the centrality of the Prayer; the scale of Neamț; and his standing as a model coenobium. |
See Also
- The Hermit and the Brotherhood — the Athonite community that became the Moldavian brotherhood
- Translating the Dobrotolyubie — the translation labor that reached its height at Dragomirna and Neamț
- Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood — the disclosure of thoughts and starchestvo at the heart of the Moldavian rule
- Disciples Carry the Revival to Russia — how the Neamț brotherhood seeded the Russian renewal
- Russian Monasticism — the monastic tradition into which Paisius’s model flowed
References
- Chetverikov, Sergei. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. Trans. Vasily Lickwar and Alexander I. Lisenko. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1980.
- Velichkovsky, Paisius. The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj. Trans. J. M. E. Featherstone. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
- 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.