Niptic Books (Paterika)

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

This extensive corpus of monastic literature, in several different “sets” and collations, gains its collective title from the Greek word nipsis meaning “sobriety,” a concept that was elevated to prominence in Orthodox thought after the 4th-century fathers applied the word and its cognate sophrosyne (“wise temperance”) to be central terms of monastic spirituality, signifying the sober vigilance the ascetic ought to cultivate in the life of attentiveness to God. The Niptic fathers are thus the large assembly of Orthodox ascetical authors who wrote about the spiritual life. Over the course of the centuries many various editors collated the different ascetical writers into compendia and florilegia for ready access by monks to important formative literature. The collections are also known as Paterika, a word signifying “books of the (monastic) fathers.” he single form, Paterikon, often simply means a monastery’s special collation of primary monastic literature designed for exercises of spiritual reading and guidance. The Niptic books and Paterika, therefore, do not exhaust the monastic writings of the Eastern Church, which far exceed them in the amount of literature extant, but they do represent some of the most important collections of those texts which were felt to be standard and exemplary.

The first instances of Niptic books collected into Paterika were popularized in the 4th century as the monastic movement took shape. First at this early stage was the Apophthegmata Patrum, the sayings and deeds of the desert fathers, which were collated at Scete and other monastic centers, and from there passed on to have a wide readership in Byzantium. Latin translations were also made at a very early date. The 4th-century Byzantine writer Palladius, in his Lausiac History (stories of the monks sponsored by the Constantinopolitan aris­tocrat Lausos) produced an early exemplar that caused a literary sensation in its day (not only among ascetical readers) in the imperial capital, which was added to with the History of the Monks in Egypt, known often as the Egyptian Paterikon. The genre was very popular in classical Byzantine times. Cyril of Scythopolis produced a version outlining the deeds and miracles of the Palestinian monks in the 5th century and the Evergetinon, originating at the large Constantinopolitan monastery of Theotokos Evergetes, amounted to a large multi-volume Paterikon collection that had a massive distribution and subsequently formed generations of Orthodox in the “tales and deeds of the saints» To this day many Orthodox, not connected otherwise with the monastic movement, can recount stories and legends derived from this litera­ture, which have become part of the folk memories of the different Orthodox coun­tries. The Philokalia is another example of Paterikon, assembled in the 18th century from a wide body of patristic and later medieval monastic writings, and is perhaps the one most widely known today; but there were several others before it that had an influence on early Russian monasticism, and which continued to be produced in the later history of the Russian Church, such as the Kiev Caves Paterikon (13th century) associated with St. Mark of Pechersky Lavra, the Skete Paterikon (which is an old Slavonic version of the Egyptian desert literature), the Valaam Paterikon, the 16th-century Volokolamsk Paterikon, and others, including Romanian and serbian Paterika collections.

SEE ALSO: Asceticism; Desert Fathers and Mothers; Elder (Starets); Monasticism; Philokalia; St. Paisy Velichovsky (1722–1794)

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Harmless, W. (2004) Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.