05 — The Philokalia
The literary heart of St. Paisius’s legacy: the lifelong labor by which he translated and corrected the Greek hesychast and ascetic Fathers into Church Slavonic, the contested relationship of that labor to the Greek Philokalia printed at Venice in 1782, and the Moscow Dobrotolyubie of 1793 whose appearance re-seeded the inner-prayer tradition across the entire Slavic Orthodox world. These two files separate the making of the translation from the publication and impact of the printed book, and treat the textual-historical questions — above all the precise relation of the Slavonic collection to the Greek printed edition — as the source-critical problems they genuinely are.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Russian-Moldavian (hesychast; Philokalic revival)
If Paisius’s restoration of starchestvo (Section 06) is the spiritual heart of his work, this section is its literary heart — and the two are inseparable, for the books existed to serve the prayer. The whole of Paisius’s textual labor grew out of a single discovery made on Athos: that the Slavonic ascetic books his generation had inherited were so corrupted by centuries of careless copying as to be, in places, unintelligible, and that the living practice of the Jesus Prayer could not safely rest on so rotten a textual foundation (see Discovering the Greek Manuscripts). From that discovery flowed decades of collating, correcting, and translating — first on Athos, then in the Moldavian communities of Dragomirna, Secul, and Neamț (see Dragomirna, Secul, Neamț) — and finally the printed Slavonic Dobrotolyubie of 1793.
That Slavonic collection appeared eleven years after, and overlaps heavily in content with, the Greek Philokalia of the Neptic Fathers compiled by St. Makarios of Corinth and St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and printed at Venice in 1782 (see St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite). The relationship between the two is one of the genuinely contested questions of modern Orthodox scholarship, and it is the discipline of this section to present it as such — with named positions in structured notes — rather than to flatten it into a simple story of dependence or independence. The first file treats the translation and its method; the second treats the printed book and its seismic afterlife in nineteenth-century Russia, down to The Way of a Pilgrim and the later expanded Russian Dobrotolyubie of St. Theophan the Recluse.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Translating the Dobrotolyubie | Paisius’s lifelong labor of translating and correcting the Greek hesychast and ascetic Fathers (Macarius, Isaac the Syrian, Hesychius, Philotheus of Sinai, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas, and others) into Church Slavonic; his philological method — collating manuscripts, correcting the corrupt Slavonic against the Greek, his scrupulous literalism; and the contested relation of this work to the Greek Philokalia (Venice, 1782), presented as a structured [Disputed] note. |
| The 1793 Slavonic Philokalia | The Moscow Dobrotolyubie of 1793: its publication under the patronage of Metropolitan Gabriel (Petrov) of St. Petersburg and Novgorod; its contents and arrangement against the Greek; how, printed in the liturgical Slavonic understood across the Slavic world, it carried Paisius’s recovered corpus into Russia; its impact on Optina, the Jesus-Prayer revival, and The Way of a Pilgrim; and the later, expanded Russian Dobrotolyubie of St. Theophan the Recluse (1877–1889). |
See Also
- Discovering the Greek Manuscripts — the Athonite seed of the whole translation project: the discovery of corruption and the hunt for sound Greek copies
- The Prayer of the Heart — the practice these books exist to serve, and which their corruption endangered
- The Line to the Optina Elders — the channel through which the printed Dobrotolyubie and the Paisian editions reached nineteenth-century Russia
- St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite — co-editor of the Greek Philokalia (Venice, 1782) that parallels the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie
- St. Theophan the Recluse — translator of the later, expanded Russian Dobrotolyubie (1877–1889)
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.