The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1746-1815 · Athos, Moldavia, Russia
The Hesychast Revival - Paisius & the Philokalia
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About This Movement
In 1746 a young Ukrainian monk named Paisius Velichkovsky arrived on Mount Athos and began working through its monastery libraries for the old Greek texts on inner prayer that almost nobody was reading any more. He gathered a community, moved with it to Moldavia, and at Neamț built a translation workshop where monks turned those fathers into Slavonic; meanwhile on Athos, Macarius of Corinth and Nicodemus the Hagiorite assembled the same material into an anthology printed at Venice in 1782 under the title Philokalia, 'the love of the beautiful'. Paisius's Slavonic version, the Dobrotolubiye, was printed in Moscow in 1793, and the effect was enormous and largely unplanned: a body of monastic teaching on the Jesus Prayer and the watching of one's own heart, gathered for specialists, went into general circulation and reached ordinary lay readers.
Sources
- Philokalia (Venice, 1782; comp. Macarius of Corinth and Nicodemus the Hagiorite; Eng. trans. Palmer, Sherrard & Ware, Faber, 1979-) (primary) — The anthology itself is formation evidence in its own right — an editorial act aimed at monastics and laity alike.
- Paisius Velichkovsky: his unfinished autobiography and Mitrofan's Life (Featherstone trans., Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1990), the Slavonic Dobrotolubiye (1793), letters and rule for Neamt (primary)
- Nicodemus the Hagiorite: A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel (CWS, 1989), Concerning Frequent Communion (with Macarius), Unseen Warfare (reworking of Scupoli); the Kollyvades controversy documents (primary) — The revival as a contested movement — both sides of the Kollyvades dispute are represented here; that it borrows from the Catholic writer Scupoli is itself worth noting.
- The living chain of teachers and students: Neamt's translation school and multinational community records; the starets-disciple correspondence into Russia (primary) — The Optina elders' tradition flowered a generation later.
- Bingaman & Nassif (eds.), The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality (OUP, 2012), with Kallistos Ware's essays and Chetverikov's Starets Paisii Velichkovskii (Eng. trans. 1980) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5, ch. 8 'Orthodoxy and the West: Reformation to Enlightenment' (Kitromilides), with ch. 6 'Mount Athos and the Ottomans' (Zachariadou) (reference) — A direct fit for this period.