Païssy Velitchkovsky
1722-1794 18th century
Handing on what you did not invent, cleaning it patiently as you go.
Who was Païssy Velitchkovsky?
The son of a priest of Poltava, he left the Kyiv academy at seventeen to look for teachers, wandered through Ukraine and Wallachia, spent seventeen years on Athos copying Greek manuscripts, then settled in Moldavia where he led close to a thousand monks at Neamț. His translating work produced, in 1793, the Dobrotolubiye, the Philokalia in Slavonic, the book that revived the Jesus Prayer across the Slavic world, down to the elders of Optina.
In their own words
And first of all I began, with God's help, to acquire the books of the Fathers (those that teach obedience and sobriety, attention and prayer) with no small labour and expense, now copying them with my own hand, now buying them with the coins we earned by the work of our hands for our needs, choosing many a time to endure scarcity in food and clothing. And we accounted them a heavenly treasure, freely given us by God.
Knowing for certain, from the teaching and the commandments of our God-bearing Fathers, that one who has brethren under his care must not instruct them according to his own mind and his own judgement.
Be it known that this divine work of the holy prayer of the mind was the unceasing occupation of our ancient God-bearing Fathers, and that in many desert places and in cenobitic monasteries it shone among the monks like the sun: on Mount Sinai, in the Egyptian Scetis, on the Nitrian mountain, in Jerusalem and the monasteries round about it, and, to put it simply, throughout all the East.
But the prince of malice and adversary of every good work, the devil, seeing that it is above all through this work of the prayer of the mind that the monastic order, choosing the better part, sits at the feet of Jesus with a love that cannot be torn away, began to waste with envy and to employ all his wiles to decry and revile this soul-saving work.