The 1793 Slavonic Philokalia

The Moscow Dobrotolyubie of 1793 was the printed monument of St. Paisius’s translation labor — a Church Slavonic anthology of the neptic and ascetic Fathers, published under the patronage of Metropolitan Gabriel (Petrov) of St. Petersburg and Novgorod, that carried the recovered hesychast corpus into the heart of the Russian Orthodox world. This file treats the book itself: its publication and sponsorship, its contents and arrangement against the Greek Philokalia of 1782, the decisive fact that it was printed in the liturgical Slavonic understood across the Slavic lands, its seismic impact on nineteenth-century Russian spirituality — Optina, the Jesus-Prayer revival, and The Way of a Pilgrim — and its relation to the later, expanded Russian (not Slavonic) Dobrotolyubie of St. Theophan the Recluse.

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

The Book and Its Name

The volume printed at Moscow in 1793 bears the Slavonic title Dobrotolyubie (Dobrotolūbïe), a calque of the Greek Philokalia — philo- “love of” and -kalia from kalon “the beautiful / the good,” rendered into Slavonic as “love of the good (or the beautiful)” (Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, intro., 1979). The choice of title is itself a statement: it announces the Slavonic collection as the counterpart, in the Slavic Church, of the Greek anthology of St. Makarios of Corinth and St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite printed at Venice eleven years earlier (see St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite). The relation between the two — the degree to which the Slavonic depends on the printed Greek, given that Paisius’s translating long preceded 1782 — is the contested question treated in the companion file (see Translating the Dobrotolyubie); the present file concerns the printed book and what it did once it existed.

The Dobrotolyubie of 1793 was the fruit of the decades-long translation work carried on at Athos and in the Moldavian communities (see Dragomirna, Secul, Neamț), now brought to the press. That it was printed at all, and at Moscow rather than in Moldavia, owed much to the support of a particular hierarch.

The Role of Metropolitan Gabriel

The 1793 printing was sponsored and supported by Metropolitan Gabriel (Gavriil Petrov) of Novgorod and St. Petersburg, one of the leading hierarchs of the Russian Church under Catherine II, who lent his authority and patronage to the publication of the Slavonic text in Moscow (Chetverikov 1980, on Metropolitan Gabriel’s role in the 1793 printing; Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, intro., 1979). Gabriel’s involvement matters for more than logistics: it signals that the recovery of hesychast prayer, which Paisius had carried on at the edge of the Russian world and in the face of contemporary suspicion of “mental prayer,” received the backing of a senior figure within the Russian hierarchy itself, which helped secure the book’s diffusion and its standing.

The precise extent and character of Gabriel’s contribution, however, are not perfectly fixed in the sources, and are better given as a structured note than as a single confident sentence.

[Disputed: the role of Metropolitan Gabriel (Petrov) in the 1793 Dobrotolyubie. Sergei Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii(1980), and Kallistos Ware, in the introduction toThe Philokalia(Faber, vol. 1, 1979), agree that Metropolitan Gabriel of Novgorod and St. Petersburg supported and authorized the Moscow printing of the SlavonicDobrotolyubie and was instrumental in bringing it to the press. The accounts attribute to him patronage, encouragement, and the lending of hierarchical authority; some retellings additionally credit him with entrusting the text to learned monks for review or with promoting its publication actively. The general fact of his sponsorship is firmly attested; the finer detail of exactly what editorial or supervisory steps he took is reported with less uniformity across the sources and should not be stated more precisely than they warrant.]

Contents and Arrangement Against the Greek

The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie draws on the same family of neptic and ascetic Fathers as the Greek Philokalia — Macarius, Hesychius of Sinai, Philotheus of Sinai, Isaac the Syrian, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas, Mark the Ascetic, Diadochus of Photike, Maximus the Confessor, the Xanthopouloi, and others (Chetverikov 1980; Ware 2012; on the corpus, The Ascetic Fathers). But it is not a mechanical mirror of the Greek collection. The two differ in what they include and in how the material is ordered: the Slavonic does not reproduce the Greek table of contents item for item, and the selection and arrangement reflect Paisius’s own decades of translation and the needs of his Slavonic-reading monastic audience rather than a simple transcription of Nicodemus’s plan (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; Chetverikov 1980). These divergences of contents are themselves part of the evidence that the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie is not merely a translation of the 1782 Greek edition (see Translating the Dobrotolyubie).

Why Church Slavonic Mattered

The single most consequential fact about the 1793 book is the language in which it was printed. Church Slavonic was the liturgical language of the entire Slavic Orthodox world — read and heard in the services from Russia and Ukraine through Moldavia and the Balkans — and a literate Orthodox monk or layman across that whole world could read it (Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, intro., 1979). Printed in Slavonic, the Dobrotolyubie was therefore immediately accessible in a way the Greek Philokalia could never be in the Slavic lands. The Greek edition had recovered the neptic Fathers for the Greek-speaking East; the Slavonic edition, by carrying the same recovery into the common liturgical tongue of the Slavs, opened it to a vastly larger Orthodox population at the very moment of a monastic revival (Ware 2012; Chetverikov 1980; on the monastic world it reached, Russian Monasticism). A printed book in Slavonic could be copied, distributed, read aloud in refectories, and carried by traveling monks and pilgrims; the language was the vehicle of the diffusion.

The Seismic Impact on Russian Spirituality

The Dobrotolyubie arrived in Russia as the nineteenth-century revival of monastic and contemplative life was gathering, and it became one of that revival’s foundational books. Its impact ran along several channels.

Through Paisius’s own disciples, who carried his tradition of the prayer of the heart and the disclosure of thoughts into Russian monasteries, the book and the practice it served reached above all Optina Pustyn, which became the great nineteenth-century center of starchestvo and of Philokalic publishing — the Optina elders sponsoring printed editions of the very patristic texts Paisius had recovered (Chetverikov 1980, on the transmission to Optina; see The Line to the Optina Elders). The Dobrotolyubie thus stood at the headwaters of the Optina renewal and, more broadly, of the recovery of inner prayer in the milieu of nineteenth-century Russian monasticism, including the world around Sarov (Ware 2012; Chetverikov 1980; on the renewal generally, Russian Monasticism).

The book also fed directly into the revival of the Jesus Prayer among monks and, increasingly, lay people — the unceasing invocation of the Name that the neptic Fathers teach and that Paisius had defended and transmitted (see The Prayer of the Heart; and The Jesus Prayer). The most famous popular witness to this diffusion is the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim (Otkrovennye rasskazy strannika), whose wandering narrator carries a copy of the Dobrotolyubie as his constant companion and learns the Jesus Prayer from it — a vivid testimony, whatever the work’s own date and authorship, to how thoroughly the printed Slavonic Philokalia had become the book of the inner prayer in Russian devotion (Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, intro., 1979, noting the role of the Dobrotolyubie in The Way of a Pilgrim).

Theophan’s Later Russian Dobrotolyubie

A precise distinction must close this account, because the two are often conflated. Paisius’s Dobrotolyubie of 1793 was in Church Slavonic. Nearly a century later, St. Theophan the Recluse produced a different collection: a translation and considerable expansion of the Philokalic corpus into Russian — the modern vernacular, not the liturgical Slavonic — published in five volumes between 1877 and 1889 (Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, intro., 1979; see St. Theophan the Recluse). Theophan’s Dobrotolyubie is larger than both Paisius’s Slavonic collection and the original Greek Philokalia: he added texts not present in either, omitted or abridged some material, and rendered the whole into a Russian accessible to the educated lay reader of his day (Ware 2012). The two Russian-world Philokalias thus stand in sequence: Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie (1793) recovered the corpus and put it into the common liturgical tongue; Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolyubie (1877–1889) carried it further into the vernacular and expanded it for a new readership. To call Theophan’s the “Russian Philokalia” and Paisius’s the “Slavonic Philokalia” is the way to keep them straight — the language is the marker, and Paisius’s came first.

References

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; Metropolitan Gabriel’s sponsorship of the 1793 Moscow printing, the contents of the collection, and the transmission of the Paisian tradition to Optina and Russian monasticism.)
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 relation of the Slavonic and Greek Philokalias; the differences of contents; Theophan’s later Russian expansion.)
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. (Kallistos Ware’s introduction on the title Dobrotolyubie, the Slavonic edition of 1793, its diffusion, The Way of a Pilgrim, and Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolyubie of 1877–1889.)
Meyendorff, John. St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The hesychast tradition and the Jesus Prayer revived through the Philokalic literature.)
The Way of a Pilgrim (Otkrovennye rasskazy strannika dukhovnomu svoemu ottsu). Anonymous nineteenth-century Russian work. (The pilgrim’s use of the Dobrotolyubie as the book from which he learns the Jesus Prayer; cited as a witness to the book’s diffusion, with its own date and authorship contested.)