"Euergetinus", or "A Collection of God-Speaking Sayings and Teachings of the God-bearing and Holy Fathers, Collected from All God-Inspired Scriptures, Properly and Conveniently Set Forth by Paul, the Most Venerable Monk and Founder of the Monastery of the Most Holy Theotokos Euergetis, Called Euergetinus" is a patristic anthology compiled in the eleventh century by the monk Paul, who lived in Constantinople.

Blessed Paul wanted to give people who are struggling with vice a precise and comprehensive guide to salvation. Therefore, he collected from the patristic heritage what was most useful for this purpose, and brought it together in one book. In it, he strictly and systematically defined all the passions that hurt a person, and divided them into two hundred chapters. Each chapter is devoted to the method of warfare against one passion and the acquisition of the virtue opposite to it. Blessed Paul divided the entire compilation into four volumes, each of which consists of fifty chapters.

This book, once eaten by worms in the libraries of the Holy Mountain and almost unknown to anyone, was found at the end of the 18th century in the Athonite monastery of Koutloumoumousiou by St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. Immediately after the completion of work on the "Philokalia", the Monk Nicodemus began to correct it. He freed the manuscript of the Euergetine from copyist errors and prefaced it with an excellent and spiritually significant preface.

The book was first printed in 1783 in Venice, following the Philokalia, in the printing house of Antonio Bortoli, at the expense of "the most noble citizen of Smyrna, John Canna." "Evergetin" was published anonymously.

This is the first time that the Euergetin has been translated into Russian, but many of the sources—the lives of the saints, the patericons, and collections of patristic instructions—which Blessed Paul used as a compiler, had already been translated (as a rule, from Greek, less often from Latin) at various times and exist both in Church Slavonic and in Russian.

History of Christianity, Apocrypha, Apologetics ru Tatyana Trushova If you found an error - write to e-mail saphyana@inbox.ru ExportToFB21 14.04.2011 OOoFBTools-2011-4-14-13-36-5-856 1.0 Evergetin Publishing House of the Brotherhood of St. Alexis Theophanius Moscow 2008

Evergetin

Volume 1

Prologue of this book

He Who is above the comprehension of all that is comprehensible, the pre-eternal and essential Intellect, is comprehensible not by reason, but by faith, from intelligible essences (νοούμενα). Being Himself beneficent and beneficent by nature, He created the universe out of nothing and nothing, filled it with the Word, made it a life-giving Spirit, and willed that it should be subject to certain rules and regulations.

And He rules over the higher, immaterial (uoεφαί) beings according to certain supramundane laws, according to which they move in divine harmony and proportion: those who dwell above enjoy the illumination available to them, while the lower ones, in turn, receive light from the higher. And in the bodies that are in this material world, he put some essential forces – they are also called natural laws. According to these laws and in accordance with them, they must move and develop, performing the actions that are due to them, so that the world can serve as a prototype of truth.

In man, however, He sowed a certain rational and independent faculty of judgment, and to help him He gave a commandment, which everyone calls the moral law. In accordance with it and according to it, as according to the most exact standard, man must straighten himself out: with all his might he must distance himself from all evil, for it is a deviation from the straightness of the moral law, and strive with reason for everything that is good and virtuous, for in it, in this good, is the goal of moral philosophy.