Translating the Dobrotolyubie

St. Paisius’s defining literary labor was the translation and correction of the Greek hesychast and ascetic Fathers into Church Slavonic — a work that began on Athos out of his discovery that the inherited Slavonic books were corrupt, continued through his Moldavian decades, and issued in the printed Dobrotolyubie of 1793. This file treats the translation itself: the texts he rendered, the philological method by which he collated manuscripts and corrected the Slavonic against the Greek, his scrupulous literalism, and the genuinely contested question of how his decades-long, manuscript-based labor relates to the Greek Philokalia printed at Venice in 1782 — a relationship presented here as a structured [Disputed] note rather than resolved by assertion.

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

The Problem That Began the Work

Paisius’s translation labor did not begin as a publishing project; it began as a crisis of texts. The crisis is the more striking because it grew not from a lack of books but from the discovery that the books he had were untrustworthy. In his own account and in the Life compiled by his disciples, the young monk found that the Slavonic ascetic writings on which the practice of the prayer of the heart depended had reached his generation in a state of deep corruption — copied and recopied for centuries by scribes who often no longer understood what they transcribed, until whole passages had become, in his word, unintelligible (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone 1989; Chetverikov 1980, on the Athonite discovery of textual corruption). The seed of this realization on Athos is treated in its own place (see Discovering the Greek Manuscripts); here the concern is the labor that followed from it.

For Paisius the problem was not merely scholarly but spiritual, and the order of those adjectives matters. The neptic Fathers describe an inner path — the guarding of the mind, the descent of the intellect into the heart, the unceasing invocation of the Name — on which a single misread instruction could mislead a soul (on the prayer itself, see The Prayer of the Heart; and The Jesus Prayer). A corrupt text on watchfulness was therefore not a harmless blemish but a danger to be removed. This conviction — that the recovery of the books and the safeguarding of the prayer were one task — governs the whole of Paisius’s translation enterprise and explains its almost obsessive care (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, in The Philokalia, vol. 1, intro., 1979).

The Fathers He Translated

The corpus Paisius rendered into Slavonic is the same family of neptic and ascetic authors that constitutes the hesychast tradition — the writers on watchfulness (nēpsis), inner attention, and the prayer of the heart whom the Orthodox East had read and copied for a millennium. Among the Fathers represented in his translations and in the collection that issued from them are St. Macarius of Egypt (the Macarian Homilies), St. Isaac the Syrian (see St. Isaac the Syrian), St. Hesychius of Sinai (On Watchfulness and Holiness), St. Philotheus of Sinai, St. Symeon the New Theologian (see St. Symeon the New Theologian), St. Gregory of Sinai — the great fourteenth-century teacher of the Jesus Prayer — and St. Gregory Palamas, the theologian of the hesychast controversy (see St. Gregory Palamas); together with such monastic masters as Sts. Barsanuphius and John, St. Mark the Ascetic, St. Diadochus of Photike, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. John Climacus, St. Theodore the Studite, and Sts. Callistus and Ignatius Xanthopoulos (Chetverikov 1980, on the contents of the translations and the Neamț scriptorium; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; on the broader corpus, The Ascetic Fathers).

This is not an arbitrary list. It is, in substance, the canon of hesychast spirituality — the same authors who, gathered and printed in Greek at Venice in 1782, constitute the Philokalia of the Neptic Fathers of St. Makarios of Corinth and St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite (see St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite). The heavy overlap between Paisius’s Slavonic corpus and the Greek printed Philokalia is the central fact from which the textual-historical question arises, and it is taken up below.

The Philological Method

What distinguishes Paisius’s translation from a merely devotional rendering is its method, which was that of a corrector and collator rather than a free interpreter. The Life and Chetverikov’s reconstruction describe a labor of the desk carried on for decades and, in the Moldavian years, organized as a kind of scriptorium at Neamț, where Paisius gathered, compared, and emended manuscripts with the help of a trained circle of disciples (Chetverikov 1980, on the Neamț translation workshop). Several features of his method are consistently attested.

First, collation against the Greek. Paisius did not simply re-copy or lightly touch up the inherited Slavonic; he set the corrupt Slavonic beside the Greek originals he had hunted down on Athos and afterward, and corrected the one against the other, treating the Greek as the standard by which the Slavonic was to be judged and mended (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, intro., 1979). To do this he had first to learn Greek himself — a labor undertaken in middle life and against considerable difficulty — and then to assemble Greek copies good enough to serve as exemplars, which on Athos were far scarcer than one might expect (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone 1989; on the manuscript hunt, Discovering the Greek Manuscripts).

Second, scrupulous, even severe, literalism. Paisius held that in texts describing the inner life the translator’s first duty was fidelity to the precise wording of the Father, not elegance or readability in the receiving language. He preferred to follow the Greek word for word, and word order where he could, rather than risk distorting a subtle ascetic instruction by paraphrase — a literalism that his admirers praised as reverent exactness and his critics found stiff and at times obscure (Chetverikov 1980, on Paisius’s deliberately literal method; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). He was acutely conscious that he was handling holy and dangerous material, and his prefaces and letters return repeatedly to the theme of the translator’s trembling responsibility — better an awkward Slavonic that preserves the Father’s sense than a fluent one that loses it (Paisius, prefaces, as transmitted in the Life and discussed in Chetverikov 1980).

Third, a confessed sense of insufficiency. Paisius did not present his translations as definitive. In his prefatory remarks he describes his own labor as provisional, repeatedly corrected, never finished to his satisfaction, and he urges that the work be continued and improved by those who come after — an honesty about the limits of his achievement that is itself part of his method (Paisius, prefaces, in Chetverikov 1980). This humility is the reason the printed Dobrotolyubie of 1793 represents a stage in a continuing labor rather than a closed edition (see The 1793 Slavonic Philokalia).

The Relation to the Greek Philokalia of 1782

Here lies the genuinely contested question, and it must be stated precisely. The Greek Philokalia tōn hierōn nēptikōn — compiled by St. Makarios of Corinth and St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite — was printed at Venice in 1782 (see St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite). Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie was printed at Moscow in 1793, eleven years later, and overlaps very heavily with the Greek collection in its roster of authors and treatises. The natural inference — that the Slavonic is simply a translation of the Greek printed book — is, however, complicated by a decisive chronological fact: Paisius had been translating these same Fathers from manuscripts for decades before 1782, beginning on Athos in the 1750s and continuing through his Moldavian years. His translation labor was thus in large part independent of, and prior to, the Greek printed edition, even though the two enterprises converged on nearly the same corpus because they drew on the same hesychast tradition and, in part, on the same Athonite manuscript sources (Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, intro., 1979; Chetverikov 1980).

What remains debated is the more exact question of whether, and how far, Paisius made use of the printed 1782 Greek Philokalia when preparing his Slavonic collection for the press in the years before 1793 — that is, whether the printed Moscow book reflects his independent manuscript translations, a revision of them against the new Greek edition, or some combination. The positions are best set out as a structured note.

[Disputed: the relation of Paisius's Slavonic translations to the Greek printed Philokalia(Venice, 1782). (1)Largely independent and prior:Kallistos Ware, in the introduction toThe Philokalia(Faber, vol. 1, 1979) and in "St Nikodimos and the Philokalia" (2012), stresses that Paisius worked from manuscripts for decades before the Greek edition appeared, that his project and Nicodemus's arose separately out of the same Athonite milieu and overlapping manuscript sources, and that the two collections are therefore parallel and partly independent achievements rather than original-and-translation; Ware notes that the precise extent of Paisius's use of the 1782 print for the 1793 Moscow edition is not fully settled. (2)Independent labor, later harmonized:Sergei Chetverikov,Starets Paisii Velichkovskii(1980), reconstructs Paisius's translation as a decades-long manuscript-based enterprise centered on Neamț and grants that the printed GreekPhilokaliacould have been known to and consulted by his circle in the final preparation for the Moscow printing, while emphasizing the priority and independence of the underlying translation work. The disagreement is one of degree — how much the 1793 Slavonic text was checked or supplemented against the 1782 Greek print — not of the basic fact that Paisius's translating long preceded 1782. No source consulted here claims the 1793Dobrotolyubie is simply a translation of the 1782 Greek edition.]

Two further points sharpen the picture without resolving the dispute. First, the very different settings of the two collections caution against treating one as a copy of the other: the Greek was a printed anthology produced for a Greek-reading public in the Venetian-Ottoman world, while the Slavonic grew out of a working monastic translation-scriptorium serving a Slavonic- and Romanian-speaking brotherhood (Chetverikov 1980; Ware 2012). Second, there are real differences of contents and arrangement between the Greek Philokalia and the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie — the two are not identical in what they include or in how they order it — which is itself evidence that the Slavonic is not a mechanical rendering of the Greek (the contents-comparison is taken up in The 1793 Slavonic Philokalia). The honest conclusion is that the Slavonic and Greek Philokalias are twin fruits of a single eighteenth-century recovery of the neptic Fathers, related by shared sources and a shared milieu more than by direct dependence — with the fine question of Paisius’s use of the printed Greek for his 1793 edition left, as the sources leave it, open.

What the Labor Achieved

Whatever its exact relation to the Greek edition, Paisius’s translation accomplished something the Greek Philokalia by itself could not: it put the recovered neptic corpus into Church Slavonic, the liturgical language understood across the entire Slavic Orthodox world, and thereby made it available to the monasteries and faithful of Russia, Ukraine, Moldavia, and the Balkans (Ware 2012; Chetverikov 1980; on the diffusion that followed, see The 1793 Slavonic Philokalia). The corrected texts also became the working books of his own brotherhood, read aloud and studied as the textual underpinning of the prayer of the heart and the disclosure of thoughts that he had restored (see The Prayer of the Heart). The translation, in short, was the bridge by which a nearly lapsed tradition crossed from the Greek manuscript world into the living devotion of the Slavic Church — a crossing whose printed monument is the Moscow Dobrotolyubie of 1793.

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. (Paisius’s first-person account of the discovery of textual corruption, his learning of Greek, and the manuscript hunt; his prefatory reflections as transmitted in the tradition.)
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 fullest reconstruction of the contents of the translations, the Neamț scriptorium, the literal method, and the independence and priority of the translation work.)
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 standard English account of the relation of the Greek and Slavonic Philokalias.)
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 genesis of the Greek Philokalia and Paisius’s parallel, partly independent Slavonic labor.)
Meyendorff, John. St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The hesychast tradition of inner prayer and Palamite theology that the translated corpus transmits.)