05 — The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie

The Philokalia’s first great migration. Barely a decade after the Greek edition, St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s Church Slavonic Dobrotolyubie (Moscow, 1793) carried a large part of the anthology into the Slavic world — and through the Optina Elders and the wider staretsdom it helped kindle the Russian spiritual revival of the nineteenth century.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Slavic)

This section follows the Philokalia out of the Greek world and into the Slavic. The first file treats St. Paisius Velichkovsky and the 1793 Slavonic Dobrotolyubie and the Moldavian–Athonite school of translation behind it; the second traces how that book fed the Optina eldership and the Russian revival. Both defer St. Paisius to his own collection.

Files in This Section

File	Description
paisius-velichkovsky-and-the-slavonic-philokalia.md	St. Paisius Velichkovsky and the 1793 Slavonic Dobrotolyubie; the Athonite and Moldavian (Neamţ) transmission and the “ascetico-philological” school of translation.
the-philokalia-comes-to-russia.md	How the Slavonic Philokalia fed the Optina eldership and the 19th-c. Russian spiritual revival; the rebirth of staretsdom.

See Also

• The Compilers and the Kollyvades — the Greek original this translates
• The Russian Philokalia — the next stage of transmission
• St. Paisius Velichkovsky — the translator’s own collection
• The Optina Elders — the Russian heirs of the Slavonic Philokalia
• Master README — the whole guide