Paisius Velichkovsky and the Slavonic Philokalia

Within eleven years of the Greek Philokalia, St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794) had rendered a large part of it into Church Slavonic; his Dobrotolyubie was printed at Moscow in 1793. The work grew out of the translating community he had built on Mount Athos and at the monastery of Neamţ in Moldavia — an “ascetico-philological” school that recovered the Greek ascetic fathers and, through this book, set the Slavic Orthodox world afire.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Slavic)

The Title: Dobrotolyubie

The Slavonic name of the Philokalia is Dobrotolyubie (Добротолюбие), a calque that would name every later Slavonic and Russian edition. It was coined to render the Greek Philokalia element by element: dobroto- from dobrota, which in Church Slavonic carries the double sense of “goodness” and “beauty,” and -lyubie, “love” — so “the love of the good/beautiful,” exactly answering the Greek “love of the beautiful” (on the Slavonic title as a calque of the Greek, see the discussion in the English Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, Faber, 1979, Introduction; and Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012). The word would become one of the most resonant in Russian spirituality; St. Paisius’s life is treated fully in his own collection, and only his work on the Dobrotolyubie is followed here (see St. Paisius Velichkovsky).

An Independent Recovery of the Fathers

A crucial point about St. Paisius is that his translating labor did not begin with the printed Greek Philokalia — it converged with it. Paisius, a Ukrainian-born monk who had gone to Mount Athos and then settled in the Romanian principalities, had for decades been gathering, copying, correcting, and translating the Greek ascetic fathers, driven by his search for authentic texts to guide the spiritual life of his growing community. He had struggled with the poor state of the available Slavonic manuscripts and had learned Greek in order to go back to the sources — the same impulse of return to the neptic fathers that animated the Kollyvades in the Greek world, arrived at largely independently (on Paisius’s independent recovery of the ascetic fathers and his textual labors, see Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; and the account in the standard lives, e.g. The Life and Mission of St. Paisius Velichkovsky, trans. from Schema-monk Metrophanes, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood). When the Greek Philokalia appeared at Venice in 1782, Paisius was thus already deep in the same enterprise, and he moved quickly to prepare a Slavonic version of a large portion of it.

The Neamţ Community and the “Ascetico-Philological” School

The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie was the fruit of a whole community, not of one man working alone. At the monasteries of Dragomirna, Secu, and finally Neamţ in Moldavia, St. Paisius had built a large, multi-ethnic monastic brotherhood — Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks — organized in part around the labor of translation. Modern scholars describe this as an “ascetico-philological” school: monks trained both in the ascetic life and in the languages and textual skills needed to translate the patristic corpus accurately from Greek into Slavonic (on the Neamţ community as an “ascetico-philological” school, see the scholarship on Paisius, e.g. as summarized in the standard accounts and in Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). Paisius insisted on fidelity to the Greek and on the correction of texts against multiple manuscripts — a discipline he had learned by hard experience with corrupt copies. The result was a body of Slavonic translations of the neptic fathers of a quality the Slavic Church had not before possessed.

The 1793 Moscow Edition

St. Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie was printed at Moscow in 1793. Its passage into print owed much to the support of Metropolitan Gabriel (Petrov) of St. Petersburg and Novgorod, who backed the publication and entrusted the revision of the text to learned monks and clergy before it went to the press (on the 1793 Moscow printing and Metropolitan Gabriel’s role, see the standard accounts; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). The Slavonic edition did not reproduce the whole of the Greek: Paisius rendered a large part — by common report a substantial majority of the Greek texts, though not all — and his selection and the state of his manuscripts gave the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie a somewhat different profile from the Greek original [Disputed: the exact extent of Paisius's translation is given variously in the literature — most accounts describe it as a large portion (commonly reckoned around two-thirds) of the Greek Philokalia rather than the whole; the precise count depends on how one reckons the texts and on the manuscripts Paisius used (see the discussion in Ware, "St Nikodimos and the Philokalia," 2012, and the standard lives of Paisius). The compendium reports it as a large but partial selection and does not fix a single number.].

That the book was printed in Church Slavonic — the liturgical and sacred language of the Slavic Orthodox, not the Russian vernacular — is significant for its early reception. It made the Dobrotolyubie at once venerable and, to many nineteenth-century readers, difficult: a sacred but archaic text, more readily used by monks and educated clergy than by ordinary laypeople (a point that would motivate St. Theophan the Recluse’s later Russian version; see Theophan the Recluse and the Russian Dobrotolyubie).

The Book That Set the Slavic World Afire

The historical importance of St. Paisius’s Dobrotolyubie is hard to overstate. Where the Greek Philokalia had a relatively quiet early reception in the Greek-speaking world, the Slavonic version fell upon the Russian Church at a moment of spiritual hunger and became the seed of a vast revival. It renewed, above all, the institution of staretsdom — the ministry of the spiritual elder (starets) — which Paisius himself had embodied and taught at Neamţ, and which his disciples now carried into Russia (on the Dobrotolyubie and the revival of eldership, Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; and the treatment in The Philokalia Comes to Russia). Through Paisius’s disciples and the book they carried, the Philokalic tradition of watchful prayer and the Jesus Prayer spread from Neamţ across Russia in the nineteenth century, reaching its most famous flowering at the Optina Monastery. That story is the subject of the companion file.

See Also

References

  • Ware, Kallistos. “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia.” In The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif, 9–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. (Paisius’s independent recovery of the fathers; the Neamţ community; the 1793 Moscow Dobrotolyubie; the extent of the translation; the revival of eldership.)
  • Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (Introduction on the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie and the meaning of the title.)
  • The Life and Mission of St. Paisius Velichkovsky (from the account of Schema-monk Metrophanes), trans. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (The standard hagiographic life; the Neamţ community and the translating labor; Metropolitan Gabriel and the 1793 printing.)