06 — The Jesus Prayer and Eldership
The spiritual heart of St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s labor: his teaching and explicit defense of the Jesus Prayer — the inner, noetic prayer of the heart — against the suspicion it met in his own century, and his restoration of starchestvo (eldership), built on obedience and the daily disclosure of thoughts to a spiritual father. These two themes are one thing seen from two sides: Paisius held that the prayer of the heart cannot be undertaken safely except under the guidance of an experienced elder to whom one opens one’s whole inner life, and that the institution of the elder exists precisely to guard the prayer from delusion.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Russian-Moldavian (hesychast; Philokalic revival)
Where the previous section traced Paisius’s literary legacy — the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie and the correction of the patristic ascetic corpus (see 05 — The Philokalia) — this section treats the living practice those texts were meant to serve. Paisius did not gather and translate the neptic Fathers as an antiquarian; he did so because the prayer of the heart was being practiced in his communities at Dragomirna, Secul, and Neamț, and because that practice was under attack. In his own day the Jesus Prayer was accused by some of being a novelty, a delusion (prelest), or even a heresy, and monks were challenged on it. Paisius answered with a treatise — the Scroll, also known as the Field Flowers (Slavonic Krïny sel’nïe, “Lilies of the Field”) — and with a whole pattern of communal life in which obedience and the open confession of thoughts (logismoi) were made the foundation and the safeguard of inner prayer.
The two files below take the two halves of this single teaching. The first treats the prayer itself and Paisius’s defense of it; the second treats the institution — eldership, obedience, and the disclosure of thoughts — that he restored to protect it, and that his disciples carried into nineteenth-century Russia, above all to Optina.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Prayer of the Heart | The Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”) and the hesychast tradition of noetic prayer; Paisius’s treatise the Scroll / Field Flowers defending the practice against contemporary charges of novelty, prelest, and heresy; his patristic grounding (Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas, the Philokalic Fathers); his insistence that the prayer is the ancient tradition, not an innovation, that it must be practiced under an experienced elder, and that it is for all the faithful. |
| Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood | Paisius’s restoration of starchestvo — the institution of the spiritual elder (starets) and the daily disclosure of thoughts (logismoi) to the spiritual father; obedience (poslushanie) as the foundation of the spiritual life and the safeguard of the Jesus Prayer; the patristic grounding in Climacus’s Ladder, Barsanuphius and John, and the Gerontikon; and how this restored eldership became his most consequential institutional legacy, carried by his disciples to Optina. |
See Also
- Translating the Dobrotolyubie — the textual labor that supplied the neptic Fathers this section’s practice depends on
- The Organized Community — the cenobitic structure of Neamț within which the prayer and the disclosure of thoughts were institutionalized
- The Line to the Optina Elders — how the restored starchestvo passed to nineteenth-century Russia
- The Jesus Prayer — the pan-Orthodox treatment of the Prayer of the Heart Paisius taught and defended
- Spiritual Direction — the wider Orthodox theology of the spiritual father and obedience
References
- Metrophanes, Schemamonk. Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky: The Life and Ascetic Labors of Our Father, Elder Paisius. Translated by Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1976. (Contains the Life by his disciples and translated excerpts of his ascetic writings and letters, including the Scroll on the Jesus Prayer.)
- Chetverikov, Sergei. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. Translated by Vasily Lickwar and Alexander I. Lisenko. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1980. (The standard modern biography; original Russian, Pechory/Paris, 1933.)
- Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.
- The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Compiled by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Macarius of Corinth. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. 5 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–2023.
- Climacus, St. John. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Translated by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982.