Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood

St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s most consequential institutional legacy was not a book but a relationship: the restoration of starchestvo, the eldership in which a monk opens his whole inner life — daily, and without reserve — to a spiritual father, and lives under obedience to him. By the eighteenth century this disclosure of thoughts (logismoi) had largely lapsed in the Slavonic monastic world; Paisius made it the organizing principle of his communities and the indispensable safeguard of the Jesus Prayer against self-deception. Grounded by him in Climacus’s Ladder, in Barsanuphius and John, and in the Gerontikon, this restored eldership was carried by his disciples into Russia and became the spring of the Optina tradition.

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

The Lapse of the Living Tradition

Paisius’s restoration of eldership begins, biographically, in a felt absence. The young Pyotr Velichkovsky left the Kiev Mohyla Academy and wandered through Ukraine and Wallachia precisely because he could not find at home what he was looking for: a living elder under whom the inner life could be learned by obedience rather than from books (Chetverikov 1980, chs. on the wandering years; Featherstone, trans., The Autobiography). The institution he later rebuilt was one he had first to go searching for, because in the post-Petrine Slavonic Church it had grown rare. The state suppression of monasticism, the Latinizing and scholastic cast of the new ecclesiastical education, and the simple thinning of the chain of experienced elders had together left the practice of the open disclosure of thoughts to a spiritual father — once the daily substance of cenobitic and skete life — largely in abeyance (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979). What Paisius accomplished in Moldavia was therefore a restoration: the deliberate re-establishment of a practice that the tradition had always taught but that his own world had nearly lost.

The Disclosure of Thoughts

At the center of the eldership Paisius restored stands the practice the ascetic Fathers call the disclosure or revelation of thoughts (logismoi): the open, regular, and unsparing manifestation of one’s inner life — not only one’s sins but one’s thoughts, impulses, temptations, and movements of the heart — to the spiritual father. This is broader than sacramental confession of sins; it is the laying bare of the whole interior so that the elder can discern what is of God, what is of nature, and what is of the enemy, and prescribe accordingly (on the distinction between confession and the wider discernment of thoughts, see Spiritual Direction). In Paisius’s communities this disclosure was made a fixed and frequent practice — the daily opening of thoughts to the elder or to those he appointed — rather than an occasional or extraordinary recourse (Metrophanes / Rose 1976; Chetverikov 1980).

The rationale is the ancient one. The intrusive thought, named and brought into the light before a discerning father, loses its power; concealed and entertained in the dark of one’s own judgment, it grows and deceives. The Fathers of the desert had taught that the monk should reveal every thought to his elder and do nothing on his own judgment, and the Gaza fathers had made this the heart of their direction (Barsanuphius and John, Letters; see below). Paisius’s contribution was not to invent this but to re-institutionalize it in a large, mixed Slavonic-Romanian brotherhood, weaving it into the daily fabric of community life at Dragomirna, Secul, and Neamț (see The Organized Community).

Obedience as the Foundation and the Safeguard

For Paisius, the disclosure of thoughts is inseparable from obedience (poslushanie). Obedience is not, in his teaching, mere submission to authority but the therapy of the deepest wound of the fall — self-will (authadeia) — and the precondition of all genuine spiritual progress. He stands here squarely within the patristic ascetic consensus, and the texts he relies on are the texts he had labored to translate and correct. St. John Climacus devotes the entire fourth step of The Ladder of Divine Ascent to obedience, defining it as “the tomb of the will and the resurrection of lowliness” (Climacus, Ladder, Step 4; trans. Luibheid–Russell), and Paisius takes Climacus’s account of the obedient life under a spiritual father as normative. Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, whose Discourses were among the most beloved texts of this tradition, grounds the same teaching in the cutting off of self-will (Dorotheos, Discourses 1, 5); and behind both stand the Letters of Saints Barsanuphius and John of Gaza, the great sixth-century witnesses to direction by the disclosure of thoughts, and the sayings of the desert elders gathered in the Gerontikon (the Apophthegmata Patrum), where the constant counsel is to reveal one’s thoughts and to do nothing without asking (Metrophanes / Rose 1976; Chetverikov 1980; on the desert and Gaza foundations, see Spiritual Direction).

Obedience, in Paisius’s teaching, is also the specific safeguard of the Jesus Prayer. The prayer of the heart and the eldership are two aspects of one thing: the prayer is what the monk does in his cell, and the disclosure of thoughts under obedience is what keeps that prayer from curdling into delusion (see The Prayer of the Heart). Because the noetic prayer reaches into the depths where the imagination, the passions, and demonic suggestion all operate, it is precisely there that the practitioner is least able to judge his own case. The remedy is to refuse to be his own judge — to bring everything, including the experiences and consolations of prayer, before the elder. This is why Paisius’s defense of the prayer against the charge of prelest and his restoration of eldership are a single argument: the prayer is not dangerous in itself, but it is dangerous to the self-guided, and the elder is the God-given guard.

No One Should Attempt the Prayer Without a Guide

From this follows one of Paisius’s firmest teachings: no one should attempt the prayer of the heart without a guide and without the disclosure of thoughts. The higher reaches of the hesychast method — the descent of the mind into the heart, the psychophysical aids — are not to be undertaken alone or from books, however accurate the books. The one who attempts them in self-will, seeking experiences and trusting his own discernment, is the very figure the Fathers’ warnings about prelest describe (Metrophanes / Rose 1976; Chetverikov 1980). This is not a counsel of timidity but of realism about the unhealed heart, “deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9); the safeguard is not to abandon the prayer but to practice it under obedience and in the open.

Paisius’s insistence on obedience was nevertheless not the doctrine of blind or unlimited submission. He taught with the tradition that nothing may be accepted from any spiritual father that is contrary to Holy Scripture and the dogmatic teaching of the universal Church — a limit he urged repeatedly in his letters (paraphrase of his repeated insistence; see Metrophanes / Rose 1976; and the treatment in Spiritual Direction). The elder is to be tested by the Scriptures and the Fathers, and obedience is owed within the bounds of the faith, not beyond them. Within those bounds, however, Paisius held that the surrender of self-will to a true elder, through the daily revelation of thoughts, is the safest and shortest road, and the only safe road for the prayer of the heart.

The Most Consequential Legacy

Of all Paisius’s labors — the manuscript-hunting on Athos, the correction and translation of the ascetic corpus, the building of the great Moldavian communities — it is this restored eldership that proved the most consequential for the later history of Orthodox spirituality. The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie might have remained a venerable book on a shelf; what made the Philokalic revival a living revival was that Paisius’s disciples carried out of Moldavia not only the texts but the practice — the starchestvo, the obedience, the open disclosure of thoughts — and re-seeded it in the monasteries of Russia (Chetverikov 1980; Ware 1979). The line runs, through named disciples and the schemamonk Theodore, to the first of the great Optina elders, St. Leonid (Lev Nagolkin), and through Optina to the whole nineteenth-century flowering of the Russian startsy (on this genealogy and the cautions proper to stating it, see The Line to the Optina Elders; and the Optina elders in Spiritual Direction). The institution Paisius found nearly extinct and rebuilt in Moldavia became, in the century after his death, one of the great treasures of Russian Orthodox life — and that, more than any single text, is his enduring bequest.

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. (The disciple-Life with translated letters and ascetic writings on obedience, the disclosure of thoughts, and the necessity of a guide for the prayer of the heart.)
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. (Original Russian, 1933. The standard account of Paisius’s restoration of eldership and its transmission to Russia.)
Velichkovsky, Paisius. The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj [Autobiography]. Translated by J. M. E. Featherstone. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (His first-person account of the search for a living eldership.)
Climacus, St. John. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Translated by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982. (Step 4, “On Obedience.”)
Dorotheos of Gaza, Abba. Discourses and Sayings. Translated by Eric P. Wheeler. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977. (Discourses 1 and 5, on self-will and obedience.)
Barsanuphius and John. Letters. Translated by John Chryssavgis. Fathers of the Church 113–114. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006–2007. (The Gaza fathers’ direction by the disclosure of thoughts.)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (the Gerontikon / Apophthegmata Patrum). Translated by Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1975.
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.