Paisios the Athonite

Pharasa and the exile from Cappadocia

Arsenios Eznepidis was born on 25 July 1924 at Pharasa (Farasa) in Cappadocia, the son of Prodromos and Eulampia, in one of the last Greek-speaking Christian villages of the Anatolian interior. The village priest and its protector was Arsenios of Cappadocia (†1924), who baptised the child a week or so before the community's departure, refused the name the family had chosen, and gave the infant his own name, saying that he wished to leave a monk behind him to follow in his steps. Within days the whole village was uprooted in the population exchange of 1923–24. The old priest died on the voyage, at Kerkyra; the family passed through Igoumenitsa and settled in 1925 at Konitsa in Epirus.

The boy grew up in a poor refugee household on the Albanian frontier, reading the lives of the saints, going alone into the woods above the town to pray, and — when the time came to choose a trade — learning carpentry, which he chose deliberately because it had been the trade of Christ. He was still a village joiner, making doors, window-frames and coffins, when the war reached Epirus.

The army

From 1945 to 1949, through the Greek civil war, Arsenios served as a radio operator in the army. The stories told of him from those years are consistent: he volunteered repeatedly for the exposed duties in place of married men with children, went unarmed where he could, and prayed continuously under fire. He himself drew from it a lesson he repeated for the rest of his life — that a man who prays is not made reckless but made secure, because his security has stopped being his own. He was discharged in 1949 and returned to Konitsa, waiting only until his sisters were settled before leaving the world.

Esphigmenou, Philotheou and Stomio

He first went to the Holy Mountain in 1950, was sent back, and returned to stay in 1953, entering the coenobium of Esphigmenou as a novice. In 1954 he was clothed as a rassophore with the name Averkios. Seeking a stricter and quieter obedience, he transferred to the brotherhood of Philotheou, where in 1956 he was tonsured into the Small Schema and given the name Paisios, after Paisios II, Metropolitan of Caesarea, who had also been a Pharasiot.

In 1958 he was sent — at the request of the people of his own region — back to Epirus, where for four years he rebuilt the ruined monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Stomio above Konitsa. The years at Stomio were not contemplative: the district was then being worked hard by foreign missionary societies, and Paisios spent himself in strengthening the poor and the wavering, restoring the church, and quietly countering the proselytism with almsgiving and presence rather than argument.

Sinai

In 1962 he left for Mount Sinai, and lived for two years in the kelli of Saints Galaktion and Episteme in the wilderness above the monastery of St Catherine. He carved small wooden crosses, sold them through the monastery, and gave what they earned to the Bedouin of the desert, buying flour and clothing for their children; the tribes remembered him long after. The dry air of Sinai also repaired lungs that the damp of Stomio had ruined. He wished to stay, but obedience and his own health brought him back to Athos in 1964, to the Skete of the Honourable Forerunner at Iviron.

Katounakia, Stavronikita and the Great Schema

A grave pulmonary illness in 1966 cost him the greater part of his lungs in an operation at Thessalonica. The nurses and lay people who cared for him through that sickness formed the nucleus of the sisterhood he was to guide for the rest of his life: the convent of St John the Theologian at Souroti, founded in 1967 near Thessalonica.

In 1967 he withdrew to Katounakia, the harshest of the Athonite deserts, and in 1968 moved to the kelli of the Holy Cross at Stavronikita, partly to help the monastery's restoration, but chiefly to serve the aged Russian hermit Elder Tikhon, at whose hands he received the Great Schema shortly before Tikhon's death that same year. He remained at the Holy Cross for eleven years, keeping vigil, working the garden, and writing the little book that first made his name known: a life of Arsenios of Cappadocia, gathered from the surviving refugees of Pharasa, which was instrumental in that saint's own glorification in 1986.

The Panagouda

In 1979 he settled at the kelli of the Panagouda, under Koutloumousiou, in the woods a short walk below Karyes. There he spent the last fifteen years of his life, and there he became what Greece remembers. Pilgrims came in their hundreds — on some days the queue in the rough yard lasted from dawn to dark. He would come out, sit on a low wooden bench or a stump among the tins and the beehives, and receive them one by one: monks, soldiers, students, the possessed, the bereaved, the desperate, bishops, and a great many simple people with nothing but a domestic sorrow. He gave water and loukoumi, said very little, and let them go consoled. The nights he kept for prayer, which by his own account was the only thing he had to give.

His counsel had a recognisable shape. He preached the "good thought" (καλὸς λογισμός) — the deliberate habit of construing every event and every person in the best possible sense — as the practical form of humility and the ground of peace. He insisted on thanksgiving in affliction, on obedience, on not judging, and on doing one's own work without inspecting one's neighbour's. He distrusted spiritual excitement: he was famously severe with the appetite for prophecies, signs and end-times calculation, and sober to the point of dryness about visions, including his own. He carried the anxieties brought to him as real burdens, praying for named people by the hour, and he understood his own pain in the same currency, as something that could be offered for others.

Illness and repose

Colitis, a hernia, and finally cancer wore him down from the early 1990s. He haemorrhaged in 1993 and underwent surgery in February 1994. He refused analgesics almost to the end, on the ground that the pain was paying a debt he was glad to pay. Too weak to return to the Holy Mountain, he was taken to the convent at Souroti, received the Holy Mysteries for the last time on 11 July 1994, and reposed the next morning, 12 July 1994, at about eleven o'clock. He was buried in the convent grounds behind the church of St Arsenios of Cappadocia — the saint who had baptised him seventy years before — where his grave has since drawn an unbroken stream of pilgrims. His relics have not been exhumed or divided.

Glorification and cultus

The Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate entered him into the calendar of the saints on 13 January 2015, appointing his commemoration on 12 July. The Moscow Patriarchate followed in 2016, placing him on the Julian 29 June, whose civil equivalent is that same July 12. He is now among the most widely venerated of modern Orthodox saints — in Greece, Cyprus, Georgia, Romania, the Slavic Churches and the diaspora — and his Athonite kelli and his grave at Souroti are both places of pilgrimage.

Writings

Paisios wrote little himself. From his own hand come the Life of the Hieromonk Arsenios the Cappadocian (1975), Athonite Fathers and Athonite Matters, a short account of Hadji-Georgis the Athonite, and a body of letters, chiefly to the sisterhood at Souroti, which are the primary written witness to his mind. The six volumes of Spiritual Counsels (Λόγοι) that circulate under his name were compiled after his death by the Souroti convent from notes and recordings of his conversations, and are edited testimony rather than authored text — a distinction the convent itself has always maintained, not least because a considerable apocryphal literature of "prophecies of Elder Paisios" has grown up around him which it has repeatedly disowned.