28 November 2020

Our venerable father Paisii Velichkovskii, Abbot of Neamț

Saint Paisii of Neamț

On the Old Calendar today, as well, the Holy Orthodox Church commemorates Saint Paisii (Velichkovskii), one of the sweetest and most luminous of the monastic fathers of our modern time. He would be worth commemorating alone for his translation and propagation of the spiritual texts of the Philokalia into the Russian language, but more than that, Saint Paisii is, with some justice, considered to be the ‘founding father’ of the tradition of startsy – spiritual elders – in Russia. He is commemorated with deep fondness in the churches of Russia and Romania, and especially the local church in Moldova, having been for part of his life the abbot of the Neamț Monastery.

Father Paisii [Ru. Паисий, Ro. Paisie, L. Paisius] was born Pyotr (after the Holy Apostle) on the twenty-first of December, 1722, into a quiet, modest clerical family, which was descended from the officer ranks of the Cossacks. He was the eleventh of twelve children. His father, Ivan Velichkovskii, was a protopriest who served as the dean of the Cathedral of the Dormition in Poltava. As might be expected growing up in such a household, Pyotr was a quiet, meek, fastidious and studious little boy who loved to read. He pursued specifically the spiritual readings that were present in his father’s house and in the Church library, and it was not long before he had read them all. He had a particular love for the homilies of Saint John Chrysostom and the hymns of Saint Ephraim the Syrian. It was in this way that he grew to love Jesus. He came to the Liturgy, prayed and worshipped and partook of the Elements, and yearned to follow in his father’s footsteps in service to the Church.

After his father died when he was age four, he was raised by his mother Irina, as well as by his older brothers. At the age of thirteen, in the year 1735, he entered the Collegium founded by the great Orthodox pædagogue Saint Petru Movilă in Kiev, and bent himself entirely upon his studies toward the priesthood. He was particularly keen on learning other languages. Latin, of course, was part of Movilă’s required curriculum. He also learned Greek, Polish and Church Slavonic. Pyotr’s interest in his studies began to wane after a couple of years, however, as God began calling him to become a monk. In 1739 he left the Collegium and began looking for a monastic community to serve. He went to several monasteries in the Ukraine but he found himself ill-suited to the life in each of them. At last he met two Moldavian monastic refugees of the Turkish War there, and when he attended Liturgy with the two of them he was struck by the beauty of their devotion. He came at last to the monastery of Saint Nikolai Medvedovskii on the Khasmin River, where evidently the life suited him much better and he became a robe-bearer. Here he took on the monastic name of Platon.

The new monk Platon’s life was not at all easy, however. Even back then, the Uniates were more than happy to use dirty tricks, political manipulation, force and fraud to get their way. At their behest the political authorities forced the Medvedovskii monastery to close, and they drove and scattered the monks who lived there. Elder Paisii himself, however, later said that he was somewhat dissatisfied with the life in Medvedovskii, because there was no elder and experienced monk to guide his spiritual strivings. Platon sought refuge at the Kiev Caves Monastery, and found a vocation there working at the printing-press (another of Petru Movilă’s innovations).

In 1741 he found his sister-in-law and his mother still living in Poltava. Irina was deeply opposed to her son’s going off to become a monk, and she wept and pleaded with him to stay, and threatened to starve herself if he did not obey her wishes. However, that night she was visited by an angel who upbraided her for loving the creation (her son) more than the Creator. The angel told her that she should be happy that her son was devoting himself entirely to God, and that she would do well to follow his example. When she awoke the following morning she found her soul was at peace, and she made up the mind to enter the monastic life herself. She was tonsured a nun with the name of Yulyana, and she faithfully followed the monastic discipline of her cloister for ten years, to the end of her earthly days.

Again, however, the monk Platon had an encounter with monastics from Moldavia. He met with the Abbot Mihai of the Saint Nicholas Skete in Trăisteni in Buzău, who welcomed him to join them. What Platon found there convinced him that here the love of Christ could be found. Mihai led a monastic community made up of brothers in Christ from many different national backgrounds: Romanians, Bulgarians, Russians, Serbs. Many of them were refugees from the Turkish incursions or from the oppression of the Catholic great powers to the west. Abbot Mihai and a monastic Elder named Vasile were particularly strong influences on Saint Paisii at this point in his life, and he writes about them both with deep fondness. It was Vasile who began to teach Platon the way of hesychasm and the prayer of the heart, the Jesus Prayer.

Young Platon’s spirituality has several episodes we might attribute to a certain excess of youthful zeal. In one particular instance, he overslept the bell for Matins, and when he arrived at the Church he found that the Gospel for the day had already been read and that they were starting the Canon. He returned to his cell in tears and did not come out. When the meal was served, Abbot Mihai and Prior Dimitru noticed that Platon was missing from the table. Mihai sent a hieromonk, Afanasii, to find out what had happened to Platon. When Fr Afanasii found Platon, he discovered him weeping. With some difficulty Afanasii was able to get out of the young monk what guilt was eating at him, and urged him to come to the refectory anyway, for his brother-monks missed him. When Platon went into the refectory and found that none of the monks had started eating but that they were all waiting for him, he fell down on his hands and knees with fresh tears, begging his brothers’ forgiveness. Abbot Mihai, Elder Vasile and Prior Dimitru all did their best to console the young monk not to grieve overmuch over something that had happened in a moment of weakness. However, from that time on, Platon would never sleep lying down, but instead only ever slept sitting up on a bench.

The cluster of monasteries overseen by Elder Vasile and Abbot Mihai were Athonite in their structure and in their daily observance; when Platon was age 24, he began to long himself to see the Holy Mountain, and he asked the blessing of his abbot to go, which he was granted – along with the company of a hieromonk named Trifon. (In his autobiography, Elder Paisii notes that part of his motivation was his eagerness to avoid being made a priest, which was something his Moldavian elders were urging him to do.)

Platon made his way to the Holy Mountain and was accepted into the Slavonic community of the Pantokrator Monastery on Athos. He was sent into a small skete to observe their rule of life. However, in that skete and in the several around it, Platon could find no monks suited to teach him further in the way of hesychasm, and so he went off by himself and lived a life of solitude for the following four years.

It happened after that that his former elder Vasile went to visit the Holy Mountain, and found his former pupil living the life of a hermit on Athos. Vasile had a long conversation with the young monk, telling him that at his stage of life it wasn’t good to live alone, and that he should have at least a few brothers around him to aid him in the struggle against the passions. Vasile tonsured Platon with the lesser schema, and it was at this time that he took on the name of Paisii. Paisii took on his first disciple, a Romanian named Bessarion, and founded a small monastic community. Several more Romanians joined him, and then later a few Slavs. As a result, Paisii’s monastery alternated the Liturgy between Romanian and Church Slavonic.

In 1758 Saint Paisii was at last ordained a priestmonk by Bishop Grigore Rasca, and the community he led was growing large enough that it had to move into the Skete of St Elias on Athos. Paisii’s community became renowned for the beauty of its Liturgies and the zeal and spiritual power of its monks: a mark of Paisii’s own intense inner life. Even the retired Patriarch Seraphim, who was then a monk at Pantokrator Monastery, came to Paisii’s Skete to receive the Eucharist. While living on Athos, Saint Paisii came to the disquieting realisation that contemporary Orthodox monastic life was dreadfully lacking in terms of living spiritual guidance, for monastics to be able to go and seek wisdom from someone trustworthy with experience in ascetic struggles and inward prayer life. He made it an object of his life’s study to approach the Church Fathers in their writings as though they themselves were living guides, and made a slow and often thankless and (in those early days on Athos) fruitless research into the writings of the older Church Fathers on the life of hesychastic prayer.

Here Saint Paisii’s aptitude for languages came in great handy. Together with two of his disciples, he embarked on a close study of mediæval Greek for the express purposes of translating such saintly authors such as Hesychios of Jerusalem, Theodoros of Edessa, Peter of Damascus, Anthony the Great, Grēgorios of Sinai, Philotheos of Constantinople, Thalassios of Libya, Diadochos of Phōtikē, Symeōn the New Theologian and Nikēphoros of Chios into Russian.

Saint Paisii’s growing popularity, and his clear preference for hesychastic prayer, earned him some critics even upon the Holy Mountain. The Skete of the Prophet Elias was soon too small to house all of Saint Paisii’s followers, and they soon had to spend much effort building out their physical premisses. This caused Paisii to recommend that the monks begin substituting repetitions of the Jesus Prayer for some of the daily singings from the Typikon if they were too busy and did not have time to attend. This provided Abbot Athanasios of Kavsokalyvia Monastery with a pretext to begin delivering pointed barbs against Paisii for his ‘innovations’, for his reliance on the teachings of Grēgorios of Sinai, and for his supposed cutting of corners.

Even though Athanasios made himself out to be a defender of Orthodox rigor and the discipline of the monastic Typikon, at stake there were two very different visions and understandings of monastic Orthodoxy. Abbot Athanasios represented a style of Orthodoxy which was, in the spirit of the times, dependent upon the Westward-looking scholasticism and structural formalism which were the hallmarks of the Counter-Reformation. Saint Paisii, who had grown up and had been educated in precisely this intellectual formation – the same formation which Saint Petru Movilă had worked so hard to inculcate in Kiev – was attempting to resuscitate a more inward-looking, more contemplative and more spiritually-free tradition of the life of prayer.

In answer to the accusations of Abbot Athanasios, Saint Paisii wrote a Letter of Apology in which he defended his researches into the hesychastic tradition and his prerogative as abbot to prescribe œconomia for his spiritual children within certain bounds if the need arose – for example, if the monks were at work on physical tasks like construction. He continued both his spiritual and his physical labours upon the Holy Mountain for six years more, before he was invited to Moldavia.

In 1763, at the express invitation of Grigore III Ghica of Moldavia to found monasteries and teach in his country, Elder Paisii tearfully took his leave of the Holy Mountain and left with sixty-four of his Athonite disciples for that country. He and his disciples had been given, by Metropolitan Gabriel of Iași, the use of the building of the Dragomirna Monastery in Bukovina. The monastic rule at Dragomirna was based on the rules of Saint Basil the Great, Saint Theodoros the Studite, and Saint Nil of Sora. Saint Paisii emphasised the importance for his monks of non-possession, of simplicity of spirit, of obedience to the elder and of the inward prayer of the heart. The services were sung in two languages: Slavonic in the right kliros, and Romanian in the left.

Saint Paisii was able to give practical talks and advice to his monks on the meaning of the inward prayer and the correct method for attaining it. He also continued his painstaking work on compiling and translating from Greek into Slavonic the writings of the mediæval Patristics, particularly those which had bearing upon the Jesus Prayer and upon the pursuit of inward stillness. He also took on the Great Schema from the hieromonk Aleksii, although he did not change his name further from Paisii.

Events further continued to try the life of Saint Paisii. The Dragomirna community grew to house over 350 monks. However, there was an incident in which a certain Ukrainian monk living nearby, who was opposed to hesychasm, gathered together a number of hesychast texts and instructed local believers to throw them into the river. This event prompted Saint Paisii to write his Six Chapters on the Prayer of the Heart. In addition, the incessant wars of the Turks against all of their neighbours, including Russia, forced many poor people to flee their homes as refugees. Saint Paisii made sure that Dragomirna was one site of safe passage and refuge for these people, of which there were often too many to adequately house and feed.

As a result of this Russo-Turkish war, Bukovina was conquered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1775. The Austrians expelled the Orthodox monks from Dragomirna. The monks were offered refuge at the Secu Monastery of Saint John the Forerunner. They set up their own quarters and continued to follow the rule they had established at Dragomirna. However, the conditions for the monks soon grew unsanitary and overcrowded, with as many as five monks sharing a single cell. They built out as many cells as they could but these accommodations were still not enough. Saint Paisii appealed to the new Greek Prince of Moldavia, Kōnstantinos Mourouzēs, for the right to establish new quarters in a separate monastery for the former monks of Dragomirna, but Mourouzēs actually granted him instead the entire monastery of Neamț in 1779. Paisii was reluctant to accept such a large and extravagant gift, which went against his principle of non-possession, but Mourouzēs enjoined him to be obedient, and to think of it as an opportunity to serve as an example to other monasteries. On these terms, Saint Paisii had little other choice than to accept.

Saint Paisii spent the remainder of his earthly days presiding over Neamṭ Monastery. Under his rule as many as 700 monks came to live at the monastery, and he made a number of renovations and improvements to the monastic complex while he was abbot there, including a hospital, a hostel for travellers, and housing for pilgrims, refugees and the poor. Hospitality was as important at Neamṭ as it had been at Dragomirna. He continued to research, compile and translate Patristic texts on the discipline of hesychasm. Toward the end of his life he was elevated to the rank of Archimandrite by the Archbishop of Moldavia.

Saint Paisii fell asleep in the Lord on the fifteenth of November, 1794. He was nearly seventy-two years old. He had been ill for several days prior to his passing, but he felt well enough to serve the Liturgy on the Sunday prior to it, and he asked all the monks to come forward to receive his blessing. He then retired to his cell and would not see anyone. He came out to receive the Gifts one final time and then reposed in peace. His death was mourned by great multitudes of monks, clergy and lay folk from all the countries around Moldavia, including Russia and Romania. Several times over the course of the nineteenth century – 1846, 1853, 1861 and 1872 – his relics were uncovered and were discovered to be incorrupt.

Saint Paisii is a pivotal figure in Orthodox monasticism particularly, but he had an outsized influence over the direction of Orthodox spirituality in general from the 1700s on. His writings, his translations and his methods of prayer were brought to Optina, where they were adopted with great care and attention by the Elders of that monastery, from whose wisdom and kindness the entire Russian nation has benefitted in incalculable ways throughout these past two centuries. Venerable father Paisii, good and wise teacher attentive to the heart which is deep beyond knowing, pray unto Christ our God for the salvation of our souls!
Apolytikion for Saint Paisii of Neamț, Tone 2:

Having become a stranger on earth,
You reached the heavenly homeland, venerable Father Paisii.
You taught the faithful to lift up their minds to God,
Crying out to Him with all their hearts:
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner!”

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