Romanian lands
About this date: This is a regional grouping, not one see founded around 1300. Medieval principalities, later national church organization, and the eighteenth-century renewal associated with Paisius belong to different historical layers.
Wallachia and Moldavia developed enduring Orthodox church and monastic traditions. Northern Moldavia's painted churches preserve cycles of biblical and sacred subjects in Byzantine-inspired art. In the eighteenth century, Paisius Velichkovsky and his communities at Dragomirna, Secu, and Neamț renewed the study and translation of the Fathers and the practice of the Jesus Prayer under spiritual guidance.
Historical context
The modern national label is a convenient doorway into several older political and ecclesiastical settings. It should not imply that medieval Wallachia and Moldavia were already organized as the modern Romanian state or patriarchate.
Key points
- The painted churches of northern Moldavia preserve organized cycles of biblical and sacred subjects, not simply decorative religious pictures.
- UNESCO dates the nominated exterior-painting tradition to the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
- Paisius's communities and translations show movement of spiritual texts across Greek, Slavonic, and Romanian settings. His eighteenth-century work is not evidence for a fourteenth-century foundation date.
Primary sources
In chapter 3 of The Scroll, Paisius explains:
Writing at Dragomirna in Moldavia, Paisius describes mental prayer as a spiritual art requiring an experienced instructor.
it is impossible to learn this mental doing of prayer without a skilled instructor.
Passage context and translation
Writing at Dragomirna in Moldavia, Paisius explains why the Fathers call mental prayer an art: it requires instruction. He immediately qualifies this general rule by acknowledging rare cases in which the practice is received directly from God without human instruction. He then distinguishes communal church prayer from this specialized monastic practice.
Before the excerpt
so also
After the excerpt
But this matter