Misquoting St. Paisios

It is unfortunately common in Orthodox circles to see quotes or sentiments attributed to saints that are clearly not from these saints.

Other people then hear or read these quotes, internalize them, and pass on this falsified knowledge.

These false attributions are worded smoothly and align with contemporary ideas. As a result, they take hold quite quickly among Orthodox Christians who latch onto such quotes based on feeling.

Conversely, the authentic words of the saints quoted with exactitude are often resisted by the faithful.

This, of course, is not surprising:

There are two kinds of progress. Good Progress is when someone goes from the worst behavior to the best. But there is also bad progress, or when someone goes from one bad thing to another that’s even worse. For someone to make progress and become virtuous is difficult; many obstacles hinder a person from doing so. But in evil pursuits, a person progresses with great ease. The evil road is a down-hill road, it is hard to stop. It is like taking a ball and throwing it from the top of a mountain that is close to the sea; the ball will start rolling until it falls into the water.
[…]
The people will progress in the wrong direction, Paul’s prophecy says. Even worse, they will take others down the hill of error and corruption. Those who undertake to guide others down the road of life are blind in both eyes. Just as Christ said, “If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into the pit”
— Metropolitan Augoustinos Kantiotes, Sparks from the Apostles, pp. 156-157

Thus, the good and truthful words from the saints conveyed with exactitude are often very bitter to people and difficult for them to accept.

The falsified words of the saints, however, take hold of the contemporary Orthodox Christian with great ease, and like a ball rolling downhill, quickly accumulate thousands of views, hundreds of reactions and comments.

The post in question

We must ask: Can it be a good thing to put words in the mouths of our saints? Further, can it be good to take untruth, and then share it further to make others stumble as well?

A recent post on a popular Orthodox page, published on October 19th, which has over 40 thousand followers, stated what they believe to be the thoughts of St. Paisios:

Here is a link to the full Facebook post

Here is the particular text for the claim in question:

“He [St. Paisios] considered protestants and Roman Catholics (papists) as believing in the one true God.”

It is important to note that there are no references in this post. No books, citations, links, or book names provided anywhere, at any point. One simply must trust the word of whoever posted this.

The reception of this post

Many people did in fact trust the post at face value.

The post received over 250 reactions, 36 comments, and was shared 46 times, receiving even further reactions on those subsequently shared posts.

Since many of these re-shares are private, we cannot know the full extent of the mistruth that was propagated to so many people. We can only say, through experience, that these sorts of posts tend to take great hold of many Orthodox Christians, and are often reshared for months, and then get additionally reshared every couple of months, getting even more engagement. Much damage is done.

Misconstruing St. Paisios

When Elder Paisios realised what we were doing, he was rather irritated: ‘Why are you taking notes? Are you saving them for an emergency? You should put my words into practice… Who knows what you are saying in these notes! Let me see them.’ When we showed him a sample…the notes of one Sister, his expression changed. He seemed comforted and reassured, and exclaimed, ‘My goodness! She is like a tape recorder! She wrote it exactly as I said it!’
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. II, Prologue

As we can see, St. Paisios was very concerned with the transcription of his words to his nuns being misconstrued, or losing the nuance in which he communicated them. He did eventually agree to have them printed, and thus many of the books we have from the wisdom of St. Paisios the Athonite are from these transcriptions.

Unfortunately, as we see with the attached post, the concern of St. Paisios was well founded. Many read his transcripts, which he desired to be preserved with exactness (“Who knows what we are saying in these notes”), and then people not only refuse to quote him directly, but even paraphrase him in ways that do not come close to capturing his sentiments. They may even outright contradict him.

If one cannot respect the wishes of a saint in quoting their own words, why quote them at all?

Possessing nearly all of the works of St. Paisios, we are unaware of any statement made by St. Paisios that avows what this attached post has claimed.

All Orthodox Are Required to Create Proper Concern in the Heterodox

Let us first establish what the standard should be for our relationship as Orthodox Christians with the heterodox (Protestants and Catholics), with direct quotes from St. Paisios the Athonite:

Every Orthodox person is obliged to generate in the heterodox a good kind of concern, so that they will realise their errors and not rest in false beliefs, which would deprive them of the rich blessings of Orthodoxy in this life, and of the abundant and eternal blessings of God in the next.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 1: With Pain and Love, p. 387

This is a difficult word for many Orthodox in our time (if not ignored completely), so let us be clear:

He does not say hierarchs. He does not say metropolitans. He does not say bishops. He does not say priests. He does not even say theologians.

He says this applies to every Orthodox person. That means the person reading this, or even not reading this. This doesn’t mean it is blessed to argue or debate the heterodox (this too is discouraged by our fathers and saints), but when put in a situation to speak, one must with absolute certainty not lie to the heterodox and provide them with false comfort. With love, without pride, and without arguing or debating, we must tell them that they are outside the church, and that they are mistaken.

You cannot simply circumvent this, just because you think yourself more loving than St. Paisios, or because you believe it to be more loving to allow others to remain outside of the body of Christ, just because you wish for them to like you, and to not offend them. This is shameful, and represents a lack of love.

So, that we may generate “the good uneasiness” in both the heterodox, but primarly the Orthodox Christian, let us go over direct quotes from St. Paisios the Athonite with citations. Let us see what exactly he affirms about them.

Direct quotes from St. Paisios the Athonite about Roman Catholics and Protestants

(This is directed solely at Orthodox Christians. May Protestants or Catholics understand that we do not hate you, but simply wish to tell you the truth, that you may become united with us truly as brothers, and sons and daughter of Christ).

By reasoning we do not allow Christ to do His work. It is time to learn the true Gospel, to be truly Evangelical persons, not Protestants!
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 2: Spiritual Awakening, p. 193

As proven later by the events, the main reason for Panaghia sending me there was to help the eighty families who had become Protestants to return to the Orthodox Church.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 2: Spiritual Awakening, p. 289

Now you see a professor of Theology who does not believe in God and insults the Prophets and the Saints in front of the students. And yet he is not dismissed. Can you tell me, my good man, what you are doing in a Theology Department? What kind of theologians will you prepare for graduation?
This is the result of the influence of Protestants and Catholics! Catholicism is now full of the atheistic spirit! Catholics are even trying to cut out the saints.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 1: With Pain and Love, p. 328

Have you seen what happened to the Catholics? I remember years ago, when I was at the Stomion Monastery in Konitsa, someone brought me an article from a newspaper. It said: “Three hundred nuns protested for not being allowed to watch movies and for having to wear their habits at full length and not up to the knee.” I found it outrageous, and I wondered, “Why, then, did you become nuns?” The article said that eventually they got rid of their habits. Given the way they were thinking, they had already thrown them away! Another time, I saw a Catholic nun who did not differ at all from a laywoman. She was supposedly performing missionary work but looked no different from those very secular young women involved in various charities. We should not allow this European spirit to come into our lives. We should never reach this point.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 1: With Pain and Love, p. 86

Logic is very harmful when we use it to scrutinise the divine, the mysteries and miracles. Logic drove the Roman Catholics, as I have heard, to put the Holy Communion through chemical tests to determine if it is the actual Body and Blood of Christ! But the saints had so much faith that they often saw flesh and blood on the Holy Communion Spoon. Pretty soon, they will be putting the saints through an X-ray machine to establish their sainthood! What the Catholics have done is to get rid of the Holy Spirit and put logic in His place. And now they spend their time with “white magic”
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 1: With Pain and Love, p. 248

A Catholic man with a good disposition came to see me; he was in tears. I said to him, "Among the most important differences that we have with you is that you put the mind first, whereas we put faith first. You have developed rationalism; and, in general, you stress the human factor. With your rationalism, you limit the power of God, because you put divine Grace aside. You put a preservative in Holy Water (Aghiasmos) to keep it from spoiling. We, on the other hand, pour Holy Water on spoiled things, and they become fresh again. We believe in the Grace of God that sanctifies, and for this reason Holy Water remains unspoiled for two hundred years, five hundred years; it never spoils.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 1: With Pain and Love, p. 248

A group of young Catholic men came to my Kalyvi They were very eager and interested to learn more about Orthodoxy. “Please tell us something that will help us spiritually,” they said. “Look,” I replied, "go and take a look at Church History and you will see that a long time ago we were united and then, consider what has brought you where you are today. This will really help you. Do this and when you come back, we’ll have a lot to talk about.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 1: With Pain and Love, p. 387

Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, and so forth, should not be commemorated at the Holy Prothesis. We cannot take out a portion for them or commemorate their names. What we can do is pray for their health and enlightenment, and even read the Supplication Service, praying for them.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 1: With Pain and Love, p. 369

Catholics only fast for one hour before Holy Communion. Are we going to follow in that spirit, blessing our weaknesses and our falls? We do not have the right, because of our weaknesses, to make a Christianity to our measure.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 1: With Pain and Love, p. 400

I couldn’t understand how the Roman Catholics justify certain things.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 2: Spiritual Awakening, p. 356

…a chapter from the gospel also is necessary for our sanctification, as it drives away all the evil. Likewise, the works of the Holy Fathers are necessary in order to understand the gospel. For all patristic texts are as streams issuing forth from the gospel. When we follow the streams, therefore we find the source and are not led into delusion like the Protestants in the ravines.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Epistles

Kalyvi of “Precious Cross”, March 19, 1973.
Sister Abesss Philothei, your blessing.
I have written this epistle in notebook form in order to send it to a few young men in Athens who wish to be monks and were constantly requesting my help. I wrote to them because, in addition to the difficulties of the deplorable worldly environment and their parents’ worldly frame of mind, they were even more harmed by the Protestant ideas of some spiritual-father, hiero-non-monks, who also use every outlandish innovation adopted by certain moernised monasteries and monks of our times. In the end, I did not send it to them, one of the more serious reasons being to prevent spiritual tourism in Kapsala.
I was ready to burn it, but it would have been a pity since I have striven for three days to write it, and also because I had detected some good points in it, which may be of help to the sisters in their daily struggle.
I am confident that you will understand me, and I will not be misunderstood for having dusted off the truth in a blunt manner, because I had to clarify what exacctly what is Orthodox monasticism is, so that those [modernizing] proponents will recognise their wretchedness and be ashamed, and in the future, stop talking such Protestant nonsense.
Rejoice,
your brother, Monk Paisios.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Epistles, pp. 31-32

When I went to the Holy Monastery of Stomion in 1958, there was in Konitsa a Protestant who was supported financially from America and who had proselytized eighty families. He had also constructed a building where the families gathered. Those poor people had great needs and because of their great poverty they were forced to become Protestants, for they were then helped financially. One day one of them said to me, “Because of my great need, I would even become a Jew.” When I heard this, I said to myself, “Something must be done.”
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 2: Spiritual Awakening, p. 173

Question: What about the Protestants, the Evangelicals, the Pentecostals?
Answer: Luther had a complaint with the Pope, and for this he was justified. If he was sincere, then why didn’t he go to the Orthodox Church about which he had no complaint? Instead, he made another “church” of his own. Leave them be. Do not go there again. Go to church, you and your wife should confess to the same spiritual father, and everything will be well.
— St. Paisios, https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2015/05/saint-paisios-and-young-man-with.html

St. Paisios also refused to pray with Roman Catholics:

Once, two Catholics came to my kalyvi. One was a journalist and the other a secretary at the Vatican. “Let’s first say the Lord’s Prayer, Our Father,” they told me.
“To say the Lord’s Prayer,” I said, “we must also agree in our doctrinal faith. For between you and us there is a great chasm.”
“Well then,” one of them said, “will only the Orthodox Christians be saved? God is with all people.”
“Yes,” I replied, “but can you tell me how many people are with God?”
Then they said, “We should show love.”
“And sin has also now become fashionable,” I replied.
“That, too, is within the embrace of love,” they insisted.
“Everyone is talking about peace, love, and harmony,” I told them at last, “but they are all separated from their own selves, as well as from others, which is why they continue to produce more and bigger bombs.”
— St. Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Counsels Vol. 5: Passions and Virtues, p. 289-290

There’s no need for us to tell Christians who aren’t Orthodox that they’re going to hell or that they’re antichrists; but we also mustn’t tell them that they’ll be saved, because that’s giving them false reassurances, and we’ll be judged for it. We have to give them a good kind of uneasiness – we have to tell them that they’re in error.
— St. Paisios the Athonite, The Life of Elder Paisios of Mount Athos by Hieromonk Isaac, pp. 658-659

For a time, together with almost the entire Holy Mountain, he ceased commemoration of Patriarch Athenagoras in response to his dangerous overtures toward the Roman Catholics. However, he did it with pain. “I pray,” he once told someone, “for God to take days away from me and give them to Patriarch Athenagoras, so he can fulfill his repentance.”
— St. Paisios the Athonite

Fearful that someone may reach an incorrect conclusion from all this evidence, let us address the elephant in the room.

A note on “Internet Orthodoxy”

Some will read this and mistakenly conclude “well this is why Internet Orthodoxy is problematic”. Let us address this directly.

Incorrect quotes from the saints frequently come from priests and churches, both online and offline.

Oftentimes in the context of the parish, a priest or churchgoer may not even attribute a teaching to any saint, and simply speak what another priest told them, stating “this is what the church teaches”, when it manifestly does not.

In many ways, the standard for content on the internet is much higher, and can more readily lead people into reading the writings of the saints for themselves.

We will be publishing a separate article which examines “Internet Orthodoxy”. We will challenge a litany of the issues that are often brought forth by people, which entirely misrepresent the issue. But here is the core of the issue:

Those who themselves use the internet, including their priests, have nothing negative to say about the internet… until positions are shared which they don’t like. At this point, they speak dismissively about “Internet Orthodoxy” and then lecture those who engage in it. Not the priests of course, but everyone else.

Their issue isn’t with “Internet Orthodoxy”. Their issue is that people are increasingly congregating and discussing all the different aspects of Orthodoxy, including the hard patristic sayings of the saints, that are being ignored, if not outright persecuted at the parish level.

In the early church, we lived in tight-knit communities where people could come together and congregate to speak about the church fathers, saints, lives of saints, the canons, and so much more. We would call this “the town square”.

In 2025, separated by thousands of miles, our town square is the internet.

Increasingly, people are turning their gaze to this town square where uncensored dialogue and engagement with the holy words of our saints happens.

That town square, which puts forth many patristic materials, by its nature contradicts the words of lukewarm priests and bishops. This is really what people do not like. When one examines these materials, they quickly will start to have a lot of questions and positions that become very bothersome to those who worship the church organization.

And so, this is why people advocate to “Stay off the internet”. It has nothing to do with the internet or technology, but simply is fueled by the desire to limit your interaction and communication with other Orthodox Christians in a way that they can’t directly control, having essentially controlled and pushed this dialogue out at the parish level.

Many interesting things can be said about this at another time.

On presenting patristic quotes

We should respect and honor the memory of St. Paisios and his concern of his words being twisted, by striving to quote his words exactly as he stated them. Should we not show this level of respect to all our saints?

There is little to no excuse for us in these times, as we often own these books and transcribe the texts ourselves from these books to the internet. If we have the spare time to transcribe quotes from books to share to others for a “pat on the back,” we certainly have the time to add a book title and page number.

Citing sources serves multiple purposes:

First, it establishes patristic authenticity. This will be critically necessary for these times we are moving into. “Internet Orthodoxy” will certainly continue to grow, and thus more of these quotes will be shared, and thus, a greater need to verify their authenticity. Further, AI usage, which already makes it trivially easy to falsify quotes or accept hallucinations that misquote the fathers, will become a challenge. Actual citations pointing back to physical books (or trusted sites) will become very important for us.

Second, it gives people the opportunity to read the saints for themselves. Shouldn’t this be our goal? If we post a quote and someone is drawn to read the book that quote is in, this is a great thing, is it not? And just to explain this to the “stay offline” crowd: It is not uncommon for Orthodox Christians to find a book online, ask their spiritual father for a blessing to read it, and receive the blessing. This is extremely commonplace, and many priests are quite fine with this, despite your disdain for the internet. So, if you do not provide citations, you are missing out on a potential blessing from God for someone who might have otherwise been doomscrolling politics or watching TV, to read a holy work they’re actually excited to read, from a venerable Orthodox saint, that can help create an appetite for more patristic writings.

Third, citations help with our pride. By citing, we acknowledge to ourselves and to others that this wisdom does not come from us, or even our own understanding of what a saint said. Adding citations is an act of almsgiving and humble-mindedness that serves others, not ourselves.

Most importantly, a lack of citations prevents correction and enables control. If I have authority in the church and present a teaching without sources, simply by saying “This saint believed [insert thing here],” I am greatly benefitted by withholding citations. For someone to correct me, they would need to have read many or all the writings of that particular saint.

Many of us here own most of St. Paisios’s writings, and this immediately stood out as something quite problematic. However, amidst the numerous reactions, comments and shares on the post in question, not a single person asked for a source or questioned what was presented.

(Meanwhile, many of these same people who reacted positively to false content, then demean “Internet Orthodoxy” when someone posts direct quotes with legitimate citations)

In these times where many seek to depart from the witness of the fathers and saints, “Internet Orthodoxy” shines. It is far easier to proof-text that which is written, and as such, people expect much more rigor for written texts. Conversely, if I do not wish to be corrected by patristic writings, this is best done by speaking at length, in which I really cannot provide thorough citations and page numbers.

And we must acknowledge the darker motivation: There are certainly writers and creators who actively strip all citations from texts they share. The selfish benefit is clear: I may find a great book, and by drip-feeding quotes from it without sources, I force others to be dependent upon me, netting me more “social media reactions” versus allowing or encouraging others to read the book themselves. And so this serves precisely to gatekeep these materials, creating a dependent relationship with those who appreciate the material we post, so that people must rely on us, rather than the direct words of the saints.

Thusly, when we fail to cite our sources, we become complicit in the very softening and fabrication that St. Paisios feared when he worried his words would be “misconstrued.”

Conclusion

St. Paisios, who had immense love for others, was not indifferent to the salvation of others, as we are. He spoke truthfully to those who were not Orthodox, and did not simply say “well Protestants and Catholics believe and worship the same God as Orthodox Christians do” and leave the matter there.

The relationship St. Paisios maintained with Protestants and Catholics was as follows: he refused to pray with them, he encouraged them to read up on the history of the church to correct their ways, he criticized their practices, he was sent directly by the Panaghia to convert many of them, and told people to not go to their churches. He stated that Catholics were full of the atheistic spirit, and that Protestants, through their reading of scripture without the streams of patristic teachers, led themselves into delusion.