The Organized Community

St. Paisius’s most distinctive achievement at Dragomirna and Neamț was to hold together two things the monastic tradition had usually kept apart: the strict, fully communal organization of the coenobium and the hesychast inner work of the Jesus Prayer, the prayer of the heart that had been cultivated chiefly in the solitary and eremitic life. Within that fused frame he built a bilingual Slavonic-Romanian brotherhood — two choirs, services sung in both Church Slavonic and Romanian — governed by a rule of common labor, liturgical fullness, communal reading of the Fathers, and, at its center, the daily disclosure of thoughts to the elder and the unceasing practice of the Prayer. This file analyzes that synthesis, the bilingual community, the rule of life, and the scale to which the community at Neamț grew.

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

The Synthesis: Coenobium and Hesychasm Joined

The originality of Paisius’s Moldavian foundations is best stated as a joining of two things the tradition had tended to separate. On one side stood the coenobium — the fully communal monastery in which monks hold all things in common, keep a single rule and timetable, eat in a common refectory, and obey a single superior. On the other stood hesychasm in its strict sense — the inner discipline of stillness (hesychia) and the continual invocation of the name of Jesus, the “prayer of the heart,” a work that the tradition had cultivated above all in the solitary cell, the hermitage, and the small idiorrhythmic skete, where the silence and freedom of the eremitic life made room for it. The two ideals were not enemies, but they were usually pursued apart: the great coenobia were houses of obedience and liturgy more than of contemplative stillness, and the prayer of the heart was sought by those who withdrew from the crowd (Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, trans. Fiske, 1974, on the hesychast tradition; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in The Philokalia, ed. Bingaman and Nassif, 2012).

Paisius fused them. He gathered a large community under a strict common rule — the full apparatus of the coenobium, common property, common table, common obedience — and made the inner work of the Jesus Prayer the goal and animating center of that communal life, so that the whole organized body existed to make the prayer of the heart possible for ordinary monks living in community (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, trans. Lickwar and Lisenko, 1980; Ware 2012). The instruments by which the prayer was protected and guided — above all obedience and the daily disclosure of thoughts to the elder — were drawn from the cenobitic and patristic discipline and turned to the service of the inner work. This is the synthesis for which the Moldavian communities are remembered: a coenobium ordered to hesychasm, the prayer of the heart made the common possession of a community rather than the privilege of the solitary (Chetverikov 1980; on the prayer itself, see The Prayer of the Heart).

That Paisius could attempt this rested on his recovery of the patristic ascetic corpus. He held that the prayer of the heart could be practiced safely only under guidance and within the obedience of the common life, and against him stood a contemporary suspicion of the Jesus Prayer as the province of the few or as spiritually dangerous; his defense was that the Fathers themselves commend it and that the coenobium under a true elder furnishes exactly the guidance the prayer requires (Chetverikov 1980; on the controversy, The Prayer of the Heart). The community and the books were thus two sides of one work: the translations gave the brotherhood the teaching, and the coenobium gave it the discipline within which that teaching could be lived.

The Bilingual Brotherhood

The community Paisius led in Moldavia was, from its Athonite beginnings, composed of both Slavonic-speaking monks — Ukrainians, Russians, and other Slavs — and Romanian- (Moldavian-) speaking monks, and it remained so as it grew in Moldavia (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone, introduction to The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj, 1989). This bilingual composition is historically important, and Paisius did not suppress it but built it into the structure of the common life.

The community accordingly maintained services and a choral order in both languages. The sources describe the divine services being celebrated in both Church Slavonic and Romanian, with the brotherhood organized so that each linguistic body could pray in its own tongue — commonly described as two choirs, the Slavonic and the Romanian, dividing or alternating the offices (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989). The arrangement made the great coenobium genuinely pan-Orthodox in its membership and worship rather than the house of a single nation, and it is one reason the Paisian renewal flowed afterward into both the Romanian and the Russian monastic worlds. [Disputed: the sources agree that the services at Dragomirna and Neamț were conducted in both Church Slavonic and Romanian for a brotherhood of both tongues (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989); the precise liturgical mechanism — two distinct choirs singing in parallel, alternation of the languages within a single office, or alternation by day or by service — is described in general terms in the sources and not fixed in detail]. The bilingualism extended to the work of the community as well: the translation enterprise produced and corrected texts in Slavonic for the Slavonic brotherhood and for Russia, while the Romanian monks carried the same Philokalic tradition into Romanian-language monasticism (Ware 2012; see Translating the Dobrotolyubie).

The Rule of Life

The common life Paisius ordered had a recognizable shape, drawn from the cenobitic Fathers and from the hesychast tradition he had recovered, and held together by the figure of the elder. Its principal features, as the sources present them, are these (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989):

• The disclosure of thoughts to the elder. At the center of the rule stood the daily opening of the heart — the confession of thoughts (logismoi) to the spiritual father — by which the monk’s inner life was kept under guidance and the practice of the Jesus Prayer was protected from delusion. This restoration of the disclosure of thoughts and of spiritual fatherhood (starchestvo) is the heart of Paisius’s discipline and is treated fully in its own section; it is the cardinal link between the organized community and the inner prayer it served (see Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood; more broadly, Spiritual Direction).

• Common labor. The monks shared the work of the house — the gardens, workshops, copying room, and offices of the community — as part of the cenobitic discipline of obedience and mutual service, the labor of the hands accompanying the prayer of the heart rather than competing with it (Chetverikov 1980).

• Liturgical fullness. The community kept the full round of the divine services, the daily cycle sung in the two languages, as the public and corporate frame within which the private practice of the Prayer was set (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989).

• Communal reading of the Fathers. The patristic ascetic texts that Paisius and his collaborators were translating were read aloud to the brotherhood — characteristically in the refectory at the common meal and in the assemblies of the community — so that the teaching of the Fathers on prayer, obedience, and the inner life formed the common mind of the house (Chetverikov 1980; Ware 2012). The communal reading made the translation enterprise not merely scholarly but formative: the books were produced to be heard and lived by the whole community.

• The centrality of the Prayer. Above and through all of these stood the continual invocation of the name of Jesus, the prayer of the heart, which the entire ordered life — obedience, labor, liturgy, reading, and the disclosure of thoughts — existed to make possible and to guard (Chetverikov 1980; on the prayer, The Prayer of the Heart).

This rule of life is what made the Moldavian houses a coenobium ordered to hesychasm rather than either a contemplative hermitage or a merely well-run communal monastery. Each element served the prayer; the prayer in turn gave the communal apparatus its purpose.

The Scale of the Community

The community grew large. At Dragomirna it expanded well beyond the body that had come from Athos, and at Neamț — the greatest and best-endowed of the three houses — it reached its full size, becoming the largest and most influential Orthodox monastic community of its generation (Chetverikov 1980; Featherstone 1989). The numbers given for Neamț are substantial but vary in the sources, and the figure must be flagged rather than asserted. [Disputed: the size of the brotherhood at Neamț under Paisius is given variously: figures of several hundred monks are commonly reported, and some accounts state that the community grew to as many as about a thousand (Chetverikov, *Starets Paisii Velichkovskii*, 1980, and accounts dependent on the disciple-*Life*). These totals derive from the devotional reckonings of the disciple-tradition rather than from a register, and they may reflect different moments or count the dependent houses together with Neamț; the order of magnitude — a community of several hundred, possibly approaching a thousand at its height — is secure, the exact figure is not]. Whatever the precise count, the community was on a scale unmatched among the Orthodox monasteries of the day, and that scale is part of the historical significance of the synthesis: Paisius had shown that the prayer of the heart could be the discipline of a very large coenobium, not only of the solitary.

A Model Coenobium

The result was a model that outlived its founder. The Moldavian community became the recognized pattern of a large coenobium ordered to the inner life and governed by eldership — a living demonstration that strict communal organization and hesychast prayer could be fused, that a great brotherhood could be both fully cenobitic and contemplative, and that the prayer of the heart could be transmitted within obedience to many rather than reserved to a few (Chetverikov 1980; Ware 2012). It was from this model community at Neamț, and from the disciples formed in it, that the renewal passed into the monasteries of Russia, where the figure of the elder and the disclosure of thoughts took root above all at Optina (see Disciples Carry the Revival to Russia; on the wider tradition, Monasticism and Russian Monasticism). The organized community was thus not only the setting of Paisius’s life but, with the translations, one of his two principal bequests to the Orthodox world.

See Also

• Dragomirna, Secul, and Neamț — the three houses in which this community took shape and grew
• Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood — the disclosure of thoughts and starchestvo at the heart of the rule
• Translating the Dobrotolyubie — the patristic corpus read communally and produced within this community
• Spiritual Direction — the practice of disclosure of thoughts in the broader Orthodox tradition
• Monasticism — the coenobitic and eremitic ideals Paisius fused

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. (The fullest account of the Moldavian communities: the fusion of coenobium and hesychasm; the bilingual Slavonic-Romanian brotherhood and its services in both tongues; the rule of life — disclosure of thoughts, common labor, liturgical fullness, communal reading of the Fathers, the centrality of the Prayer; the growth of the community and the figures reported for Neamț; the community as a model coenobium.)
• 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. (Featherstone’s introduction on the bilingual composition of the brotherhood and the Moldavian settlements; the primary first-person witness for the earlier life.)
• Meyendorff, John. St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Trans. Adele Fiske. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer and hesychia, against which the originality of joining it to a strict coenobium is measured.)
• 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 Philokalic context; the communal use of the translated Fathers; Paisius’s place in the hesychast revival.)