The Paisian Root of the Eldership

The Optina eldership did not arise in isolation: it was the Russian flowering of a revival gathered in the eighteenth century by St. Paisius Velichkovsky at Neamț in Moldavia — the recovery of the Jesus Prayer, of the elder–disciple relation, and of the patristic texts on prayer that Paisius translated into Slavonic as the Dobrotolyubie. Through Paisius’s disciples and the Roslavl forest hermits, that revival reached Optina and made it the great channel of the Paisian inheritance in Russia.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Optina synaxis glorified 1996 local / 2000 general)

The Eighteenth-Century Decline and the Paisian Revival

To understand why the eldership at Optina was felt as a revival — a recovery of something nearly lost — one must recall the state of Russian monasticism in the eighteenth century. The Petrine and Catherinian reforms had subordinated the Church to the state and, in the secularization of monastic lands under Catherine II in 1764, stripped the monasteries of their endowments and sharply reduced their numbers; the contemplative and eldership traditions of medieval Russia, associated with St. Nilus of Sora and the “non-possessors,” had grown faint (Paert, Spiritual Elders, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010, ch. 1–2, on the decline and the Paisian recovery; see St. Nilus of Sora). The renewal came, characteristically, from the margins — from a Ukrainian-born monk who left Russia to find the living tradition of prayer on Mount Athos and in the Romanian lands.

St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794) was born Peter Velichkovsky in Poltava, studied briefly at the Kiev Academy, and, dissatisfied with its scholasticism, went in search of authentic monastic prayer — first in the sketes of Moldavia and Wallachia, then on Mount Athos, where he gathered a small brotherhood, and finally back in Moldavia, where as abbot of Dragomirna, Sekul, and at last the great monastery of Neamț he presided over a community of hundreds (Featherstone, trans., The Life of Paisij Velyckovskyj, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, 1989, the autobiography and Life; Chetverikov, Elder Paisius Velichkovsky, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, the classic biography; see St. Paisius Velichkovsky). Paisius’s genius was threefold: he restored the continual practice of the Jesus Prayer as the center of the monastic life; he re-established the relation of elder and disciple, the disclosure of thoughts and obedience, as the ordinary way of monastic formation; and he devoted immense labor to translating the patristic texts on prayer from Greek into Church Slavonic (Chetverikov, Elder Paisius Velichkovsky, St. Herman Brotherhood; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 2, on the three strands of the Paisian program).

The Dobrotolyubie

The literary monument of the revival is the Dobrotolyubie — the Slavonic Philokalia. The Greek Philokalia, the great anthology of hesychast and ascetic texts compiled by St. Macarius of Corinth and St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, was first printed in Venice in 1782; St. Paisius, working from Greek manuscripts he had gathered on Athos, produced a Slavonic version of much of this material, published in Moscow in 1793 as the Dobrotolyubie (the standard accounts date the Moscow Dobrotolyubie to 1793; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970, on the Slavonic Philokalia; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 2). This book — the fathers on watchfulness, the guarding of the heart, and the Jesus Prayer — became the handbook of the renewed Russian eldership, and its diffusion is one thread that runs directly into Optina, where the elders read it, lived by it, and later re-translated and re-published its sources (see The Published Inheritance; the seeking of a “guide” to read the Philokalia safely is the theme of the anonymous Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim, itself a fruit of this milieu).

From Neamț to the Roslavl Forests to Optina

Paisius never returned to Russia; the revival crossed the border through his disciples. When his great community at Neamț dispersed after his death in 1794, and as conditions in the Romanian lands grew difficult, a stream of his monks and their spiritual children carried the Paisian way north into Russia, settling in forest hermitages and remote monasteries where the eldership could be practiced quietly (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 2–3, on the diffusion of the Paisian disciples into Russia; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the Paisian lineage reaching Optina). Two channels in particular reached Optina.

The first ran through St. Leonid (Lev), the first Optina elder. Leonid had been formed spiritually by the Hieroschemamonk Theodore of Svir (Feodor), a direct disciple of St. Paisius at Neamț; through Theodore, Leonid received the Paisian eldership at first hand and carried it, after years of wandering and of eremitic life, to Optina in 1829 (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on Theodore of Svir and Leonid; Elder Leonid of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood; see St. Leonid the First Elder). The Paisian line at Optina is thus not metaphorical but genealogical: elder to disciple, Paisius → Theodore → Leonid → Macarius → Ambrose and the rest.

The second channel ran through the Roslavl forest hermits — the eremitic community in the Smolensk forests, formed under fathers of the Paisian tradition, from which the Putilov brothers (the future Abbot Moses and St. Anthony) came to build the Optina skete in the 1820s (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the Roslavl hermits; Elder Anthony of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood; see The Monastery and the Skete). The two channels converged at Optina: the Roslavl men built the skete, and Abbot Moses invited into it the elder Leonid, in whom the Paisian eldership was already living. The transplant took root.

The Continuity of the Line

What Optina received from Paisius, and what it handed on, can be stated simply. First, the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” — as the sustaining center of the inner life, practiced with the watchfulness the Philokalia teaches (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). Second, the eldership itself: the conviction that the inner life is not safely undertaken alone but under a spiritual father, through the humble disclosure of one’s thoughts and the cutting off of self-will in obedience (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010; see Startchestvo and Spiritual Direction). Third, a living relation to the fathers — not merely reading them but translating, editing, and printing them, so that the whole Church might have access to the sources of prayer; this the Optina elders, above all St. Macarius with the Kireevsky circle, would carry out on a scale Paisius could only have dreamed of (see St. Macarius and the Publishing Work).

Optina was not the only heir of the Paisian revival — the tradition also flowed through Glinsk, Sarov, and other houses, and stands behind the parallel patristic labors of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and St. Theophan the Recluse (see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and St. Theophan the Recluse) — but Optina became its most concentrated and enduring expression, the place where the Paisian eldership was maintained without a break for a century and where it met, and spoke to, the whole of educated Russia (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, on Optina as the exemplary case; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970).

See Also

References

  • Featherstone, J. M. E., trans. The Life of Paisij Velyckovskyj. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, 1989. (Paisius’s autobiography and Life.)
  • Chetverikov, Sergius. Elder Paisius Velichkovsky (Elder Paisius: The Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky). Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (The classic biography; the Athonite years, Neamț, the translations.)
  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (Theodore of Svir and Leonid; the Roslavl hermits; the Dobrotolyubie; the Paisian line at Optina.)
  • Paert, Irina. Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. (Ch. 1–3: the eighteenth-century decline, the Paisian program, the diffusion of the disciples, Optina.)
  • On the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie (Moscow, 1793) and the Greek Philokalia (Venice, 1782): the standard accounts as summarized in Kontzevitch and Paert.