The Philokalia Comes to Russia

St. Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie did not stay on library shelves. Carried by his disciples out of Moldavia into Russia, it fed the great nineteenth-century revival of eldership — most famously at the Optina Monastery — and helped make the Philokalic tradition of the Jesus Prayer and the starets a living force in Russian Orthodoxy, with consequences reaching from the monasteries into Russian literature and thought.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

From Neamţ into Russia

St. Paisius Velichkovsky himself never returned to Russia; he died at Neamţ in Moldavia in 1794. But his brotherhood was large and multinational, and after his death — and already during his lifetime — his Russian and Ukrainian disciples carried his teaching, his manuscripts, and above all his living practice of the Jesus Prayer and of spiritual eldership back across the border into the Russian Empire (Kallistos Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012; Sergius Bolshakoff, Russian Mystics, Cistercian Publications, on the Paisian dispersion). The 1793 Moscow Dobrotolyubie had put the book in print in the Empire; the disciples brought the interpretive key — the oral, personal tradition of how to use it under a starets (see Paisius Velichkovsky and the Slavonic Philokalia).

This combination — a printed book and a living teacher — is essential to what followed. The Philokalia had always insisted that its higher teaching be received under guidance, not from the page alone (see The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart). Paisius’s disciples supplied the guidance, and the Dobrotolyubie supplied the text; together they seeded the revival.

The Rebirth of Staretsdom

The heart of the Russian revival was the rebirth of staretsdom — the ministry of the spiritual elder. The institution had ancient roots in the desert and Byzantium, but by the eighteenth century it had grown faint in Russian monastic life; the Paisian movement renewed it (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the revival of eldership; on the starets tradition generally, see Spiritual Direction). The starets was a monk — not necessarily a priest, not necessarily an abbot — recognized for spiritual discernment, to whom others opened their thoughts and from whom they received guidance in the inner warfare and the practice of the Jesus Prayer. This was precisely the relationship the Philokalia presupposed, and the Paisian disciples reestablished it as a living reality in Russian monasteries.

Optina and the Monastic Centers

The most celebrated center of the revival was the Optina Hermitage (Optina Pustyn), whose line of elders — Leonid, Macarius, Ambrose, and their successors — made it in the nineteenth century the spiritual heart of Orthodox Russia, drawing peasants, monks, and the leading writers and thinkers of the age (on Optina and the Philokalic revival, Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; and the treatment in The Optina Elders). The Optina elders stood in the Paisian lineage, and Optina became a center not only of eldership but of Philokalic publishing: under the elder Macarius (Ivan Ivanov), with the encouragement and help of the Slavophile writer Ivan Kireevsky and his wife, Optina undertook in the mid-nineteenth century a major program of editing and printing the patristic and ascetic texts of the Paisian tradition, including works of the very fathers gathered in the Philokalia (on the Optina publishing program under Elder Macarius and the Kireevskys, see the standard histories; deferred to The Optina Elders). The Philokalic tradition thus entered Russia not as a single book but as a whole movement of prayer, eldership, and publishing.

Optina was not alone. The Paisian influence spread to many houses — the Roslavl forests, Sofroniev, Ploshchansk, Glinsk, Sarov, and others — and shaped a whole generation of Russian monastic spirituality (Bolshakoff, Russian Mystics; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). It was in this milieu that St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and St. Theophan the Recluse would carry the Philokalic tradition forward in the Russian language (see The Russian Philokalia), and in this milieu, too, that the anonymous classic The Way of a Pilgrim would take shape and popularize the Jesus Prayer far beyond the monasteries (see The Way of a Pilgrim).

Into Russian Culture

The reach of the Philokalic revival extended beyond the monastery walls. The Optina elders were sought out by some of the greatest figures of Russian letters — Gogol, the Slavophiles, and famously Dostoevsky, whose visit to Optina and to the Elder Ambrose fed the portrait of the starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov (on Optina and Russian literature, the standard cultural histories; deferred to The Optina Elders). Through such channels the Philokalic tradition of inner prayer became part of the deep background of nineteenth-century Russian religious thought, a hidden root beneath the more visible flowering of Russian literature and the later religious philosophy (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the wider cultural reach; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, on the Philokalia at the head of the modern Orthodox revival).

A Book That Made a Revival

The migration of the Philokalia into Russia is the clearest demonstration of the book’s peculiar power. A folio of ancient Greek ascetic texts, printed at Venice in 1782, became within a generation — through a Slavonic translation and a chain of living elders — the seed of one of the great spiritual awakenings of modern Orthodoxy. It renewed the practice of the Jesus Prayer, restored the ministry of the starets, generated a program of patristic publishing, and reached into the heart of Russian culture (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). The next stage — the rendering of the Dobrotolyubie out of archaic Slavonic into living Russian by St. Theophan the Recluse, and the parallel labors of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov — carried the revival to its nineteenth-century height, and is the subject of the following section.

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. (The Paisian disciples in Russia; the revival of eldership; Optina; the wider cultural reach.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Philokalia at the head of the modern Orthodox revival.)
  • Bolshakoff, Sergius. Russian Mystics. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977. (The Paisian dispersion into Russia and the monastic centers of the revival.)