The Catalog of Good Deeds

In the lists of the Twelve disciples who are recorded in the New Testament, the name Matthew is mentioned. He calls himself this in the list of disciples he quotes in his Gospel (Matth. 10, 3), and also in the narrative of his call to the role of apostle. In the narrative of his call, he talks about a man who was sitting at his tax booth, which is why he calls himself “Matthew the Tax-Collector [Publican]”. In Mark’s Gospel (2, 4), this tax-collector is called “Levi, the son of Alpheus” and in Luke’s (5, 27) he is called simply “Levi”. We should mention that in the list of disciples, the apostle James is also called “the son of Alpheus”, but he was not Matthew’s brother. Had he been, this would have been mentioned in the Gospels, as is the case with other apostles who were brothers, such as Peter and Andrew, and James and John.

Matthew the tax-collector and Levi are the same person [in this instance]. The name Matthew, which he received after the call from Jesus, means “Gift of God”. It is a contraction of the Hebrew Mattityahu. At Matth. 10, 3, Tatian adds “also the Lebbaeus”. We do not know when or why the Lord gave him the name by which he is now best known in the Church. Out of respect for their fellow apostle, neither Luke nor Mark mentions Matthew’s profession, because tax-collectors were hated. Matthew himself, however, reports that the Lord “saw a man called Matthew, sitting at the tax-booth”, that is a man already known as Matthew. As Saint John Chrysostom notes: “The apostle is deserving of admiration for not concealing his former life, and also giving his name, which the others concealed with another appellation”. The apostle does not deny his former life, but acknowledges his alteration after being called. This demonstrates his humility.

Matthew lived in Capernaum, a city that belonged to the jurisdiction of Herod. As a clerk, he would have been in the service of some larger employer who had paid the tax revenues of the city, or even the region, to the Romans and then had the right to keep whatever monies he had raised. Matthew would certainly have known the Aramaic spoken by the Jews in the area, and Greek as well.

When the Lord said: “Follow me”, he left immediately, abandoning everything without hesitation This indicates that he already knew and respected the Lord. He, too, belonged to the tax-collectors who approached the Lord and concerning whom the Pharisees condemned Him for being “a friend of tax-collectors” (Luke 7, 35; 15, 1). Matthew must have been a rich man. This is apparent from the fact that he had his own house. It was there that, to celebrate his call and the abandonment of his profession, he gave a farewell meal, to which he invited a good many people. It is not clear from the Gospels whether he, too, was a disciple of Saint John the Baptist, as other disciples of Christ seem to have been.

After his call, he was not prominent among the circle of disciples. Not when the Lord was alive, nor after the resurrection. His name is not mentioned anywhere in the New Testament [except as we have indicated above]. This was almost certainly because of his humility. Clement the Alexandrian provides us with details of his strictly ascetic life: “ For the Apostle Matthew ate cereals, nuts and vegetables, without meat”.

Clement, Efsevios [Eusebius] and Irinaios [Irenaeus] report that, after the Lord’s resurrection, Matthew preached Christ for about eight years to the Jews.

It was here that, between 60-66 A.D., he wrote the Gospel, originally in Aramaic, and then either translated it himself or had it translated into Greek [There is also a school of thought that the Gospel was written first in Greek. While it is certainly true that some of the expressions are Hellenized versions of Aramaic equivalents, it is not possible to know whether this is because of the translator or because they had passed into the ordinary Greek of the region and were therefore included in an original text. Rather like using, say, “a blank slate” [tabula rasa] in English. WJL]. It contains narratives of the events in the life of the Lord and also teachings which He used in His catechesis. Irinaios is the first to mention that “the Gospel according to Saint Matthew was written to the Jews”, meaning that the recipients were Jews who had become Christians or, as Origen says: “those who believed from Judaism”.

The purpose behind the writing of the Gospel of Saint Matthew was to make manifest that Christ came “from the seed of Abraham”, which is why the narrative begins with His nativity. As Saint John Chrysostom says: “He wanted nothing more than to show that He was of the seed of Abraham and David… for nothing would soothe a Jew so much as to know that Christ was the descendant of Abraham and David”. This is why he selects important events in the life of Christ, compiles His sayings and presents them in such a way that they demonstrate that Jesus Christ is, indeed, the Messiah Who was foretold for the Jews. By quoting the prophecies of the Old Testament, he makes it clear that they were fulfilled in the person of Christ.

As for his later activities, we cannot regard what has been handed down to us as either accurate or historical. Rufinus, Gregory the Great and the Church historian Socrates, all declare that he went to Ethiopia. Paulinus of Nola mentions that he converted the pagan Parthians to Christ, while Saint Nikodimos the Athonite declares that: “later he was put to death by fire by the infidels”, in Ierapolis, in Syria. It may be that this is confirmed by a verse in his Life: “‘Jesus You also save tax-collectors; grace belongs to You’. This is what Matthew cried, when he was in the midst of the fire”.

By the prayers of Your apostle, God, have mercy upon us. Amen.

Source:http://pemptousia.com/2014/11/a-tax-collector-apostle-and-evangelist-saint-matthew-16-november/

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Who wrote the Synoptic Gospels? Their titles bear the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but did those men actually draft them? Modern scholarship has called this previous assumption into question, with some going so far as to say that the men whose names adorn the books were long since dead.

Ground Rules

When writing on a controversial subject such as this, some ground rules are in order for this discussion to show my approach towards an objective conclusion.

First, while false attribution was not unheard of in the early Christian community (the Gospel of Thomas, not part of the canon, is an example of this), it is unfair for biblical critics to simply make the assumption that the canonical Gospels were misattributed and shift the burden of proof to those who hold to traditional authorship.

Second, anti-supernaturalism as a bias must be set aside. An example of this is the assumption that Matthew (or at least the 23rd chapter) had to be written after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, because Jesus simply could not have prophesied the destruction of the Temple. According to an anti-supernaturalist, the author of Matthew had to put that in later.

An even more glaring example of this is the belief among literary scholars that mythic traditions take one or two generations to evolve, thus an assumption is made that the Gospels, which proclaim Jesus’ deity, must have been the byproduct of this evolution. Ergo, the Gospels were written and compiled at least a generation or two after Jesus’ life. Such an assumption is philosophical and prejudicial.

With these concerns in mind, let us then proceed with an objective mind.

The Gospel Sources

The early Christian tradition, articulated by many but most notably by the famed theologian Augustine, is that the Synoptic Gospels were written in the order in which they now appear in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Post-Enlightenment scholarship challenged this assumption, and today mainline and liberal scholars embrace the view that Mark was the first Gospel written.

In addition, mainstream biblical scholars hold that Mark based his Gospel on a source document known as “Q.” There is absolutely no evidence for any Q document, but literary analysis of the Synoptic similarities along with Jewish rabbinical tradition (namely the practice of keeping records of rabbinical teachings) support the hypothesis. New Testament scholars have since added two additional sources: “L” and “M” – for which, once again, there is no hard evidence. These are assumed to be strains of mainly oral tradition.

The authors of Mark (first) and then Matthew and Luke are assumed to have utilized these various sources in putting together their Gospel accounts.

Matthew

Who wrote the Gospel that first appears in the New Testament canon, the Gospel of Matthew? Doubts about Matthew’s authorship stem largely from the fact that New Testament scholars now widely believe that Mark was written first. Would Matthew, an actual eyewitness of Jesus’ life, rely on the writing of Mark, who was not an eyewitness?

This skepticism, of course, assumes that Matthew primarily utilized Mark, yet this theory of Synoptic Gospel inter-connectivity has never been conclusively established, certainly not to a degree that would have the author of Matthew actually dependent on Mark’s Gospel. Thomas Jefferson utilized George Mason’s Virginia Constitution when writing the Declaration of Independence, but utilization does not equate to absolute reliance. No historian would argue that Jefferson was helpless in his task of authoring America’s independence document absent Mason’s handiwork. Accordingly, even if Matthew had Mark’s Gospel at his disposal, it hardly discredits the notion that the apostle himself wrote the Gospel of Matthew.

The strongest evidence attesting to Matthew’s authorship is the fact that four ancient sources, not counting the title itself, specifically attribute the Gospel to Matthew, the disciple of Jesus. Those sources are Papias of Asia Minor, Irenaeus of Gaul, Pantaenus, and Origen of Alexandria and Caesarea, all significant leaders or writers in the early Christian community. Moreover, the Gospel of Matthew was in wide circulation in the early church, and was circulated as an account written by Matthew, with no apparent question or contestation.

Confronted with this very strong evidence from ancient history, Matthew, the disciple of Jesus Christ, is the author of the first Gospel in the New Testament canon.

Was The Gospel Of Matthew The First Gospel Written, Composed Before 70 A.D., And Originally Written In Hebrew?

Traditionally, the universities of the western world have taught that the Gospel of Matthew was not the first Gospel written, that it was written in Greek, and that it was authored after 70 A.D.

However, as more and more discoveries have been made, those assumptions have been shown to be stone cold wrong.

As researchers are looking into the writings of the early church leaders, they are finding that not only was the Gospel of Matthew most definitely the first Gospel written (almost certainly before 50 A.D.), but that it was originally written in Hebrew!

Just check out what some of the early church writers from the first few centuries of the church have to say on this matter:

Origen (Eusebius, H.E. 6.25.4) "As having learnt by tradition concerning the four Gospels, which alone are unquestionable in the Church of God under heaven, that first was written according to Matthew, who was once a tax collector but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, who published it for those who from Judaism came to believe, composed as it was in the Hebrew language."

Papias (Eusebius, H.E. 3.39.16) "Matthew collected the oracles (ta logia) in the Hebrew language, and each translated (or interpreted) them as best he could."

Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. 3.1.1) "Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and laying the foundations of the church."

Eusebius (H.E. 3.24.6) "Matthew had first preached to Hebrews, and when he was on the point of going to others he transmitted in writing in his native language the Gospel according to himself, and thus supplied by writing the lack of his own presence to those from whom he was sent."

Epiphanius (ca. 315-403), bishop of Salamis, refers to a Gospel used by the Ebionites (Panarion 30. 13.1-30.22.4). He says it is Matthew, called "According to the Hebrews" by them, but says it is corrupt and mutilated. He says Matthew issued his Gospel in Hebrew letters. He quotes from this Ebionite Gospel seven times. These quotations appear to come not from Matthew but from some harmonized account of the canonical Gospels.

There is also early testimony that Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles, carried a Hebrew copy of the Gospel of Matthew to India. Two of the earliest Church historians, Eusebius and Origen, wrote about this. "It is reported," wrote Eusebius, "that among persons there who knew Christ, (Pantaenus) found the Gospel according to St. Matthew (which had arrived ahead of Pantaenus by more than a century). For Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had preached to them, and left them (in India) the writing of Matthew in the Hebrew language which they had preserved." In his ground-breaking book, A History of Christianity in Asia, Princeton scholar and author Samuel Moffett reveals that Pantaenus, a church historian and missionary who traveled to India in 180 A.D., discovered the copy of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew that Bartholomew had taken with him.

There is a similar tradition that the Apostle Barnabas, the follower of the Apostle Paul, also carried with him and was buried with an early version of the Gospel of Matthew. According to tradition, it was through Barnabas that Matthew's Gospel was transmitted and maybe even translated into Greek. Barnabas primarily taught the Jews in Cyprus and it is said in his Acts that he used the Gospel he received personally from Matthew not only to teach, but to work miracles as well. The Acts of Barnabas even mention a probability that Matthew wrote his Gospel in at least two documents, a narrative of miracles and one of doctrines. If this is true it may have been Barnabas that compiled the documents of his fellow apostle. At his death the supposed writer of the Acts of Barnabas, John Mark, saved Matthew's Gospel and hid it away in the tomb of Barnabas. In 478, during the reign of the Emperor Zeno, archbishop Anthemios of Cyprus announced that the hidden burial place of Barnabas had been revealed to him in a dream. The saint's body was claimed to have been discovered in a cave with a copy of the canonical Gospel of Matthew on its breast; according to the contemporary account of Theodoros Lector, who reports that both bones and Gospel book were presented by Anthemios to the emperor. Severus of Antioch examined this Gospel around the year 500, seeking to find whether it supported the piercing of the crucifed Jesus by a spear in Matthew 27:49 which some taught (it did not). According to the eleventh century Roman historian Georgios Kedrenos an uncial manuscript of Matthew's Gospel, believed to be that found by Anthemios, was then still preserved in the Chapel of St Stephen in the Imperial Palace. If this uncial version is Barnabas' copy, then we can assume he translated it into Greek. If not, Barnabas may have been buried with the original Hebrew version. Of course, there is a possibility that he had a Greek version written by Matthew.

This information further confirms that Matthew, an eyewitness to the miracles and events of Jesus' ministry, was indeed the author of the first Gospel and verifies both the Jewishness and early date of the first Gospel.

Article written By John Sanidopoulos

Source: http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2009/11/who-wrote-gospel-of-matthew.html

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The Life and Early Formation of St. Paisius

Saint Paisius Velichkovsky lived from 1722–1794. He was a Ukrainian by birth and for most of his life he liked to sign himself on documents as native of Poltava which was his hometown. But the locus of his major life’s work, and his spiritual reputation, have established him as one of the greatest honorary Romanian Orthodox saints, so much so that he is often called St. Paisie of Neamţ. The saint himself wrote in his last years a sketch of an autobiography, especially focused on being a record of all the monastic communities he had founded. It was never completed. It is called in short “The Autobiography” and recounts his own life from his birth up until his residence at the Carnul Skete in Wallachia. Its complete title was “Narrative of the holy community of my beloved fathers, brothers, and spiritual sons, who in the name of Christ have come to me, the unworthy one, for the salvation of their souls.” One of his disciples, the Romanian monk Vitalis, who had been with St. Paisius at Dragomirna, Secu, and Neamţ, wrote the first biography of his teacher in the four blank end pages of a Menaion for the month of February, which was never widely disseminated. The higumen of Neamţ, Archimandrite Mardarius, complained twenty years after Paisius’s death that still no biography was extant.

Accordingly, the community asked Schemamonk Metrophanes to write a life, since he was one of the senior surviving disciples of the saint. He wrote a life in Slavonic and a large number of copies of it were made. Metrophanes himself notes that the monk Isaac Didaskalos (the Teacher) undertook to publish a life in Romanian that was a digest of his own work. Shortly afterwards the monk Gregory, who later became Metropolitan of Wallachia, added a short life of St. Paisius as an introduction to his book entitled Collection of Sayings on Obedience. This Vita was entitled A Brief Narrative of the Life of Our Most Holy Father Paisius. It was printed at Neamţ in 1817. This was the first written life that departed from the heavy style of Byzantine tropes that had characterized the earlier hagiographical narratives, and it attempted to give a holistic sense of the importance of Paisius’ life in terms of contemporary contexts and judgments. Gregory of Wallachia placed emphasis on the remarkable leadership character of Paisius and on his superlative organizational skills and offered an overview of his lasting importance in terms of the Philokalic revival within the Orthodox Church.

Even so, by the mid-nineteenth century the extant biographies were not felt to be substantive enough, and so higumen Sylvester from Transylvania commissioned a full Vita from the monk Platon, with instructions that it should explicitly reflect the Slavonic and Romanian heritages of St. Paisius. Platon, accordingly, compiled a full-scale biography in Slavonic which was soon after translated into Romanian by the monk Cyriacus and printed in Romanian at Neamţ in 1836. The Slavonic edition of this work was published later, at Optina in Russia, in 1847, and went through several other editions there, establishing Paisius’ reputation in Russian circles around the Optina hermitage, as well as in Romania.

The family of St. Paisius was related to the Ukrainian nobility, and had many Cossack officers among them. His father Ivan was a protopriest and dean of the Orthodox cathedral in Poltava. Paisius was the eleventh of 12 children in the family. His father died when he was only four years of age, and he was brought up under the care of his elder brother John, also a priest at the cathedral. It was customary to begin children’s literacy studies in that time with the recitation of the Psalms and the Horologion prayers. In the Autobiography, Paisius tells the reader that he was seized with an unquenchable love for reading and prayer. His studies soon grew to include the reading of the entire Bible, the lives of the saints in the Menaion, and from that he progressed to the works of St. John Chrysostom and the Discourses of Ephraim the Syrian. This predominant reliance on Church literature was a common way that young Orthodox intellectuals in the 18th century accessed a foundation for literary and cultural studies in the broader sense.

For his secondary education, at the age of 13, Paisius attended the Kievan Theological Academy, founded in 1633 by the important hierarch Peter Mogila, but it was a time when the program of studies was dominated by the neo-classical Greek curriculum. St. Paisy later regarded it as a wasted period, finding the scholasticism of that kind of approach excessively desiccating. He stayed here from 1735 to 1739. It was a time when he specialized in acquiring languages (Latin, Greek, Polish, and Slavonic were the main foci of the school) but it was also a time when his desire for monastic life was growing stronger. He made visits to the hermitages in Kiev, especially the world-famous Kiev Pechersky Lavra. It is recorded at this time that he had a group of young friends who were devoted to the spiritual life, and together they made a mutual promise never to join a rich monastery, but to strive to live in strict observance and follow the difficult path. At the end of his time in Kiev he met and was influenced by two refugees from Moldavia, who had come to the city in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish war: Hieromonk Pachomius and Metropolitan Anthony of Moldavia. Paisius mentions in his Autobiography that he heard Metropolitan Anthony celebrate the Divine Liturgy in Romanian, and his heart was deeply moved by the beauty of the service. He says: “[In my soul] was born a great love for the Moldavian language and its God-protected people; still more, from this moment, my soul was set on fire with the desire to become a monk in a foreign land.”

In 1740, aged 18, he left the academy after completing the first grade of studies, and followed his vocation to monastic life. He submitted to the direction of hieromonk Pachomius and entered the monastery of Lubetch on the banks of the river Dnieper. He did not settle here, however, and soon moved on to the monastery of St. Nicholas Medvedovsky on the river Chasmin, where he became a rasophore monk on the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1741, receiving the name Platon. The monastery was shortly afterwards closed down because of the political stresses of the time, and he returned to the Pechersky Lavra at Kiev. He tells us in his Autobiography that he was dissatisfied with the life in the monastery there, and was seeking a spiritual father when he encountered the monk Ignatius who explained to him about the many patristic texts on asceticism he had with him, and who spoke to him in glowing terms about the monastic life in Romania where, he told Paisius, he had set his heart on returning. St. Paisius tells his readers that it was this spiritual encounter more than all the others which showed to him his future path; how he had to make his way into Romania to discover there a flourishing of monastic spirituality.

Developing the Mysteries of Monastic Life

In Lent of 1743 a meeting with the Romanian Hieromonk Michael proved decisive. He was higumen of the St. Nicholas Skete at Tra(isteni, and he encouraged Paisius to become a monk at this small household. It was located in the region of Buza(u where, at that period, there were a cluster of no less than forty monastic communities, comprised of monks of Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian origins, many of whom were refugees from the wars of that era. Paisius first entered the Da(lha(uţi Skete and then went on to the Tra(isteni Skete. Both of the communities were under the spiritual eldership of Starets Basil of Poiana Ma(rului, who became an important and formative influence on Paisius’ spiritual life, especially when telling him about the Prayer of the Heart.

In the Skete, which at the time had twenty monks living in it, not counting the hesychasts who lived in separate hermitages nearby, Paisius was introduced to a strict Athonite observance of the daily services. He was recommended for ordination at this period, though it was deferred because he was not yet of the canonical age. After two years’ formation in the community, Paisius moved to the Carnul Skete, in Wallachia, to live with the hesychast Starets Onuphrius. Here the Typikon, or daily observance, was also modeled on that of the Lavras of Athos. The brethren lived in solitude, and gathered together only on Sundays and feast days for the services. After the Divine Liturgy there was a festive meal in common, and they engaged in conversations about the spiritual life until Vespers. After Vespers each one returned to their separate cells. In this time Paisius perfected his command of the Romanian language.

In 1746, aged 24, with the blessing of the fathers of the Carnul Skete and in the company of the hieromonk Tryphon, St. Paisius moved to Mount Athos on the Halkidiki peninsula. In his Autobiography he tells us that he was anxious to move in order to avoid the ordination to the priesthood that the Moldavian fathers wanted to impose on him. As Metropolitan Serafim also notes in his study, the saint’s spiritual formation also required this next decisive step for its maturation. They arrived and lodged at the Great Lavra of St. Athanasius on July 4th of that year, and after a few days, St. Paisius found out where the Slavonic monks were lodged and so made his way to the Pantocrator monastery. He was assigned to live in one of its small Sketes by the name of Kiparis. Although he looked all over the mountain for a spiritual guide, he says that he could not find a single one that was advanced in the Prayer of the Heart. So he settled down once more to the solitary life, and so he passed the next four years in quiet.

In 1750 his former Starets, Basil of Poiana Ma(rului, came to visit the Holy Mountain, and made his way to seek out Paisius. He advised him not to spend so much time in solitude, but to take in some brothers to live beside him, so that a small community could follow the common observance together. Starets Basil also tonsured him to the Lesser Schema at this time. So it was that St. Paisius accepted his first disciple, a Romanian monk named Bessarion. Over the following four years, and always by Bessarion’s arrangement and outreach, they admitted a total of eight Romanian monks to the Skete. When the first Slavonic-speaking monks arrived, the services, which had up till then been all in Romanian, were alternated with Slavonic.

Priest and Translator: Finding Guidance in Ancient Texts

In 1758, Paisius was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Gregory Rasca, and the rate of growth for the community required them to move to the larger Skete of St. Elias. Paisius’ community became known all over the Holy Mountain for the beauty of its services and the fervor of its monks. The former Patriarch Seraphim, who then lived in the Pantocrator monastery, took Paisius as his spiritual guide.

While he was living on Athos, Paisius came to the conclusion that a critical problem affecting Orthodox life was the paucity of living elders who could provide guidance in the life of prayer that was directly founded on deep personal experience. He decided then that he should turn to the fathers as if they themselves were living spiritual elders. Their writings would give him the answers to his present need to find masters and teachers. At first, not knowing patristic Greek, he set out to organize and list all the Slavonic manuscripts he could find on Mount Athos. He found copies of the works of Hesychius of Jerusalem, Philotheus of Sinai, and Theodore of Edessa, and began a hand-written collation of them. But he wrote later to Archimandrite Theodosius of the Sophroniev hermitage in Russia, that his first steps in collating the fathers were “all in vain.” So he set himself to learn the difficult patristic Greek; and to this end studied with two of his Romanian disciples Macarius and Hilarion, who had mastered those language skills at the St. Sabas academy in Bucharest. Later at Dragomirna his study of Ancient Greek would be intensified.

On Athos, he presumed, it would be easy enough to get hold of numerous Greek manuscripts of the ascetic fathers. But he was soon proven wrong. He narrates that it was only in the Skete of St. Basil that he found ready access to the Greek patristic writings on prayer. He first gathered and rendered into Slavonic the works of St. Peter Damascene, St. Anthony the Great, Sts. Gregory of Sinai, Philotheus of Sinai, Hesychius, Diadochus of Photiki, Thalassius, Symeon the New Theologian, and Nicephorus the monk. This work begun at Athos, Paisius would continue at Dragomirna with Macarius and Hilarion leading the team of translators. It was a labor that would soon grow to become constitutive of his life’s vocation.

Stirring up the Opposition

Living in the Athonite Skete of St. Elias, Paisius acutely felt the restrictions of the few available rooms, and knew that his growing band of disciples would soon require larger premises. He therefore started his monks on a program of building, so as to enlarge the number of cells. To assist the monks during this time of extra physical labor he decided to substitute the Jesus Prayer for part of the sung offices. This provided the neighboring archimandrite of the Kavsokalyvia Skete, Abbot Athanasius, with a chance to attack St. Paisius for untraditional innovation. Athanasius took the occasion to criticize him for a whole range of his spiritual teachings: namely his allegedly excessive reliance on the old Greek manuscripts (prioritization of patristic ascetical teachings at a time when much Greek Orthodox thought had become scholasticized), also for an excessive use of the works of St. Gregory of Sinai (thus faulting him for his emphasis on the Hesychastic school of spirituality, again at a time when this was not common), and lastly for unauthorized liturgical innovations (namely the use of the Jesus Prayer as part of his monastic Typikon).

Each of the accusations hid behind the mask of traditional Orthodoxy but in fact was advocating the sleepy status quo from a low period in the history of Athonite life; whereas Paisius was calling for a return to the true sources of Orthodox tradition: a tradition which, as he knew, was always characterized by its vitality and its freedom in the face of spiritual weariness, formalism, and hide-bound traditionalism. St. Paisius was not willing to accept this criticism silently, and issued in return a fourteen chapter Letter of Apologia in which he used the testimony of the fathers of the Church to demonstrate that his spiritual path was authentically and deeply Orthodox, and that it was within the right of a monastic leader to introduce adaptations to the Typikon of a house under his spiritual guidance.

This early encounter with monks and priests who resisted his doctrine was a good preparation for all the greater levels of resistance that he would stir up when he returned to Romania. Every powerful spiritual work, so it seems, not only stirs up the opposition of the powers of evil which are ever hostile to the good, or that of the world which constantly seeks a state of spiritual apathy and cynicism with which to disguise its avoidance of Christ; but also, in a paradoxical way, often seems to stir the stubborn resistance of many otherwise fervent Christians who often hinder and block the dynamic works of Christ’s elect leaders. In the works of the good it is often this opposition from Christ’s own servants which most discourages those whom God has appointed to extraordinary tasks of leadership. This is a peculiar problem related to the mystery of spiritual discernment: when those of lesser vision cannot comprehend the mind of the saints (not surprisingly so, since this eludes their own more limited capacities), and when critics do not have the depth of discernment necessary to tell them the basic truth that if they cannot contribute to Christ’s energetic expanse of the Kingdom, then at least they should try not to hinder a work that demonstrates the grace of the Spirit.

A Coming Home – to Romania

In 1764 when Paisius was 42, Prince Gregory III of Moldavia asked him to leave Athos and come to preside over the revival of monastic life in his country. Paisius recognized here the hand of Divine Providence; a fulfillment of the strange tie of destiny he felt with Romania. So it was that he and 64 of his monks set sail for Moldavia and came to the Dragomirna monastery of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, in Bucovina. This house was offered to them by Metropolitan Gabriel of Iași. Here Paisius reordered the Typikon of observances on Athonite models. His rule was a blend of the great monastic rules of Sts. Basil, Theodore the Studite, and Nil Sorsky. Great emphasis was placed in his own synthesis on attentiveness during the Psalm recitations in church, and also on simplicity, poverty, obedience to the elder, and the fervent prayer of the heart. One of the new characters of his Typikon here was to introduce a Catechetical Lecture, in the Byzantine fashion, where the Higumen of the monastery addressed all the monks on spiritual matters in the Refectory each evening. Paisius’ talks were taken from the patristic writings on prayer. He was beginning to show that particular genius he had for synthesizing the patristic tradition and making it live again in the contemporary spiritual lives of the monks. This was to be taken to a new pitch in his publishing work when he later collated the Slavonic Philokalia, a major collection of patristic texts on prayer that would be forever afterwards associated with his name and his mission.

His work of transcribing patristic sources on prayer which began on Athos was continued at Dragomirna, with monks Macarius and Hilarion leading the team of translators. While the community was resident at Dragomirna the monk Raphael copied and compiled a selection of works from the ascetic fathers into Romanian. This was the first ever Romanian version of the Philokalia: the first time the spiritual fathers had been rendered into a vernacular tongue. The Romanian version of this proto-Philokalia included writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian (including the treatise on the “Method of Prayer”), Evagrius of Pontus, Dorotheus of Gaza, Gregory of Sinai, Nicephorus the Solitary, Nilus of Sinai, Starets Basil of Poiana Ma(rului, and the complete works of St. Nil Sorsky. The Romanian editor speaks of how his desire to elucidate and advocate the tradition of the Jesus Prayer was the whole motive behind his work of translation.

The Philokalia Project

Paisius established two groups of translators, editors, and copyists, to work on the writings of the fathers and prepare them for editions in Romanian and Slavonic respectively. The collections were made with a specific view to being a contemporary guide to hesychastic prayer. It was here that the concept of the Philokalia was really born. It was a momentous epoch in the early modern history of Orthodoxy. Several ancient collections of monastic lore and spiritual wisdom had already preceded it, such as the 5th century writings of the Desert Fathers, or the medieval Byzantine Evergetinoi collections (the so-called books of the Paterika, or the Niptic fathers) but this collection by Paisius was a focused work of editorial policy that gave precedence to the concept of the prayer of the heart as the chief guide and goal of the monastic life: indeed the apex of a Christian life, whether lived in the world or in the monastery. As Chetverikov puts it: “Thus the Lavra of Neamţ became the center and torch of Orthodox monasticism, and the school of the hesychastic life and spiritual culture for all the Orthodox East.”

St. Paisius had been anticipated in the actual publication of a Philokalia by the Greek Athonite saints Macarius of Corinth, and Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Paisius’ reputation as a spiritual elder had already attracted the attention of St. Macarius, who had even made an attempt to join his community in Moldavia; but stormy weather forced the abandonment of that sea journey, and the intention was never realized. When Macarius and Nicodemus’ great collection of the spiritual fathers was drawn to Paisius’ attention, it seemed to him the perfect synopsis of his own vocational vision. Accordingly, when the Greek edition of the Philokalia appeared at Venice in 1782, he lost no time in making a Slavonic version of a very large portion of it: 24 of the original 36 texts. The original Greek Philokalia actually had very little impact in its first edition. It appeared before its time in the Greek Orthodox world, as it were. It was destined to be Paisius’ Slavonic version (the Dobrotolyubié) that set fire to the Russian Orthodox world and brought about a veritable Philokalic revolution: changing the face of modern Orthodox spirituality and setting a new fire of spiritual excitement in the Orthodox monastic life.

Soon after he settled in Neamţ St. Paisius sent two leading disciples, the Romanian monk Gerontius, and the Russian Dorotheus, to study at the Greek Academy in Bucharest, so that they too could strengthen the translation team. He himself had undertaken translating work as a major part of his daily ascesis. He would spend the mornings giving counsel to the monks and organizing monastic affairs, and then pass much of the afternoon and evening in the work of patristic translation. Of the thousand manuscripts possessed by Neamţ monastery, representing all its history, and in all the languages, no less than 276 were produced by the school of Paisius in this time. The majority of the translators were Romanian, only a few working in Slavonic. But Paisius himself predominantly rendered the texts into Slavonic, and his work was brought to a culmination with the production of the Slavonic Philokalia in St. Petersburg in 1793. A new and posthumous development of the Starets’ mission came about when Neamţ monastery established its own printing press and distribution center in 1807. The original machinery is still visible there.

Paisius’ Enduring Influence

Paisius died on November 15, 1794, aged seventy-two years. He was buried in the monastery church at Neamţ where his grave is still greatly venerated. The Romanian Church and Mount Athos were the first to venerate him formally as a saint, and subsequently the Russian Church added his name to the Calendar of saints.

St. Paisius’ life’s work was taken up by a veritable school that came after him. Many of his own disciples, several of whom had become spiritual masters in their own right, took his teaching and mission back with them to Russia and the Ukraine after their Elder’s death. But his readers in the next generations, and especially in the 19th century, assumed his vision and mission at one remove: including great saints such as St. Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina Startsi, and (later) Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov and St. Theophan the Recluse. The Optina monastery to the southwest of Moscow, and its living tradition of elders, propagated Paisius’ understanding of the role of the spiritual father in the development of a deep inner life based around the prayer of the heart, in a way that greatly affected the subsequent spiritual development of Russia. This great movement of hesychastic elders that came after St. Paisius passed on the tradition of the Jesus Prayer by also passing it out of the limits of the monastic life; handing it as a precious heritage to a vast range of Orthodox lay devotees.

It is a hesychastic tradition that has shown itself capable of dynamic adaptation: from the cell of the hesychastic hermit, to the busy life of the layperson in the world: the invocation of the Holy Name being a healing, and a stilling, and an enlightenment in a world where the traditional supports of Orthodox life (the village church, the nearby monastery) are today few and far between, especially in the Diaspora. To that extent St. Paisius’ mission and his vision remain valid and important into the present era, as a way of witnessing and establishing a spirit of Eldership for use of serious God-seekers in a modern world often devoid of accessible Elders, by the judicious study of the authorities of the past, allied with deep traditions of hesychastic devotion adapted to lay lifestyles.

Source: http://stpaisiusmonastery.org/about-the-monastery/life-of-st-paisius/the-life-and-mission-of-st-paisius-velichkovsky-1722-1794/

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