Sf. Paisie Velicikovski și înnoirea rugăciunii isihaste în ctitoriile mușatine
Saint Paisius Velichikovsky and the Renewal of the Hesychastic Prayer in the Musatine Foundations

Summary/Abstract: The present paper proposes, in the context of the Romanian Orthodox Church's celebration of the Year of Prayer and the Hesychast Fathers, a pilgrimage through the life and activity of Saint Paisie Velicikovski, (1722-1794), the abbot of the Dragomirna, Secu and Neamţ monasteries, translator of the Philokalia and other Christian writings, on the 300th centenary of his birth. Saint Paisius Velicikovski, the great spiritual teacher and renewer of the hesychastic prayer in the Musatian foundations, and not only, left a vast scholarly legacy and a favorable ground for the activity of monasticism.The Paisian current that he initiated, ՙan unprecedented cultural-spiritual movement՚, according to researcher Valentina Pelin, Paisianism, updated the doctrine and practice of Hesychasm, a mystical current that appeared in the 14th century, on Mount Athos, whose followers they preached communion with God, through contemplation and prayer of the heart. Appreciated as an orthodox reply to the European Enlightenment, to which it opposes ՙthe aspiration for suprarational knowledge and the ideal of Deification՚, Paisianism reached its heights in the scholarly environment of the Moldavian monasteries, where Saint Paisius elaborated his famous Philokalia (Добротолюбие), thereby exercising a great influence on monastic and spiritual life in the vast area of post-Byzantine culture, including the Eastern Slavic one, through which he laid the beginnings of the revival of Russian monasticism and the structure of the abbotship (starchestvo) in the 19th century, after the disastrous century on which the Russian Church knew him from Peter I to Catherine II.

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