St. Paisius Velichkovsky

He was born in Poltava in 1722 and named Peter at baptism. After early studies at the Kyiv academy, which he found barren of living prayer, he left to seek out the monks of the forests and the Carpathians, taking the name Plato when he was tonsured.

His search for living elders carried him at last to Mount Athos, where he settled as a hermit and gathered around himself a brotherhood drawn by his teaching on the Jesus Prayer. Ordained and given the name Paisius, he led his community first on the Holy Mountain and then, when their numbers outgrew it, to the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.

As abbot of the great monastery of Neamț he formed a community of hundreds of monks of many tongues, ordering its life around obedience, the reading of the Fathers, and the unceasing prayer of the heart. He set his most learned monks to the labor of collating Greek manuscripts and correcting the Slavonic texts of the ascetic Fathers.

From that labor came his Slavonic Philokalia (Dobrotolubiye), printed in 1793, which carried the hesychast teaching into Russia and the Slavic lands, where it shaped the elders of Optina and the spiritual revival of the nineteenth century. He reposed at Neamț on November 15, 1794.