A very small essay on the Sign of the Cross: Origin and storage location of the manuscript

See also: A very small essay on the sign of the honorable and life-giving Cross, by which it befits Orthodox Christians to be marked... Rev. Paisius (Velichkovsky) “Message to the inhabitants of the villages of Vasilievsky and Palekha” and “A small essay on the Sign of the Cross” by St. Elder Paisius has never been published before. And the reason for this was, undoubtedly, their anti-Old Believer orientation, sustained, moreover, in a tone that was completely inconsistent with the norms of polemics with the schism that established itself in the Russian Church in the middle of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. As is known, even in the last decades of the 18th century. Metropolitan of Moscow Platon (Levshin) chooses a new way of returning Old Believers to the Church: the so-called “uniform faith.” Adherents of the latter, while preserving the old, pre-Nikon books and rituals, were subordinate to the Holy Synod and were obliged to maintain complete canonical and dogmatic unity with the Russian Orthodox Church. Of course, in the minds of the creators of the “uniform faith,” it was intended to prepare the Old Believers who converted to it for the full acceptance of the new rite, i.e., in other words, the presence of the old rite in the Russian Church was declared tolerable, and nothing more. In addition, despite the practice of “co-religion” and repeated statements that seemed to indicate the recognition by the Russian Hierarchy of the “equality of honor” of the old and new rites in general and the two- and three-fingered sign of the cross in particular, it should be noted that no lifting of the anathemas on the old rite and two-fingered faith occurred - and this put the “co-religionists” in a rather delicate position. At the same time, it is obvious that neither Met. Plato (Levshin), nor Met. Filaret (Drozdov) were not inclined to see heresy in the old rite and its inherent formation (unlike the polemicists of the turn of the 17th/18th centuries): the main delusion of the “verbal Old Believers” for these hierarchs was their disobedience to the Church, expressed both in separation from it and in blasphemy against the new rites adopted by it, repeatedly expressed in the religious ritual polemics against the “mainstream Church”. Anti-Old Believer polemical works of St. Paisiy Velichkovsky, although they were written in 1794, belong to a completely different era. Despite the colossal patristic erudition demonstrated by St. Paisiy in these texts and, of course, far superior to the corresponding knowledge of the Old Believer polemicists of that era, the Elder remains faithful to the approach formulated in the very initial period of the anti-Old Believer polemics, in the 60s–90s. XVII century This approach is a mirror image of the Old Believer concept, according to which two fingers and the old rite are the heritage of apostolic times and any change in this heritage entails a falling away from Orthodoxy. The anathematization of double-fingering as dogmatically erroneous, the incrimination of dogmatic errors among adherents of the old rite, the roots of which, moreover, supposedly go back centuries, essentially reflected exactly the same vision of church history. Elder Paisios, who relied largely on the works of the first Russian fighters against the schism, also shared similar views. It is important to note that the main thing for St. Paisius (both in the works under consideration and in his other works) invariably showed obedience to the Church and fidelity to its institutions. The “valid” rite for him was the rite of the Church, and rejection of it, even with declarative submission to the Church hierarchy, meant disobedience to the Church, disloyalty to her “in small things,” which could well be suspected of disloyalty “in many ways.” St. Paisiy was sincerely perplexed how it is possible, while recognizing the Orthodox Church as true, to doubt the truth of its rite, reject it, etc. All this is expressed with extraordinary clarity in the works published in this collection 1. It is obvious that historically the Old Believers were right in many respects, and the argumentation of St. Paisia, designed to convince opponents of the originality of, for example, the three-fingered sign of the cross in Rus' or its apostolic origin in our time, seems completely unsatisfactory. However, recognizing this fact, it is necessary to see something else: such a fake as the “Acts of the Council of 1157 against the heretic Martin the Armenian,” the inconsistency of which was exposed in the “Pomeranian Answers,” or the polemical works “Sling” and “Search for the schismatic Bryn faith,” were in the eyes of the Venerable. Paisius with texts testified by the Russian Church, recognized by it, and he relied on them, in fact, as a general church opinion. In addition, his distance from Russia for many years, during which he hardly followed the development of the fight against the schism in the Russian Empire, led to the fact that the monk appeals to polemical works that have long been unused or not used nearly as widely as before in the Russian Church itself. And yet, the works of Elder Paisius under consideration are striking both in their depth and thoroughness, and in their utmost honesty. It is no secret that during the Synodal period of Russian church history, “inconvenient texts” were often suppressed or their authority was questioned. So, for example, in a polemic with Andrei Denisov, the synodal missionaries refused to consider St. Nikita Stifat and expressed great doubts about the authenticity of the famous fragment about the sign of the cross from the works of St. Peter of Damascus. Of course, Rev. Paisius does not do this: he recognizes, in particular, the authenticity of the words of St. Peter, but tries to give them a different interpretation (as if St. Peter of Damascus is talking not about the sign of the cross, but about a blessing). Let us note that in the authentic translation of the works of Peter Damascene, performed by St. Paisiy, this fragment is present, but it is no longer found either in the edition of the Philokalia in the Slavic language, or in the Russian translation of the same works. Was there an alternative to this approach to the problem, as demonstrated by the published works of St. Paisia? It’s no secret that the “relativistic” approach of Met. For many, Plato or Philaret seems to be a direct consequence of the ideas of the Enlightenment, which at that time captured even the minds of the highest clergy. It seems that the approach, at the same time akin to the views of Metropolitan. Plato, and at the same time different from them, can be found in St. Nicodemus the Holy Mountain: in the book “Pidalion”, speaking about the form of the sign of the cross, St. Nicodemus, in full accordance with the historical information available to him, writes that at first the Orthodox Church maintained a different form of the sign of the cross, single-fingered, then two-fingered appeared, and later - three-fingered (Nicodemus attributed the introduction of the latter, as it seems, to the 9th-10th centuries, because he believed that Peter of Damascus lived in the 8th century; in reality this happened, in all likelihood, in the 12th-13th centuries). For Rev. Nicodemus, there is no doubt that the Church has the right to make changes to its ritual. And for him, as for St. Paisius, it was obedience to the Church that played the decisive role. St. Paisiy Velichkovsky: Polemical works, teachings, letters / Comp. P. B. Zhgun, M. A. Zhgun; General ed. O. A. Rodionova. M., 2006. – 256 p.