Moral-ascetic prose of Paisius Velichkovsky: ideological foundations, specificity of argumentation, language and style

The moral-ascetic work of the church writer Paisius Velichkovsky titled "On Intelligent or Internal Prayer" is being explored in the context of religious-Christian culture. The subject of the research is the ideological content of the moral-ascetic texts of Paisius Velichkovsky, the peculiarities of their argumentative components, and their linguistic-stylistic specifics. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the ideological, artistic, and argumentative features of the author’s spiritual prose—texts that focus on the study of the process of spiritual improvement, achieving the Christian ideal, and the struggle of a person against their vices. The relevance of the work is determined by its foundation in the field of theolinguistics and stylistics—directions of modern philology that have been actively developing for several decades—as well as the attention of contemporary linguists to the axiological component of literary works. The main methods of research include the theolinguistic approach, which studies the relationship between language and religion, and the linguistic-stylistic approach, aimed at establishing patterns of language unit functioning influenced by extralinguistic factors. It has been established that the author addresses issues related to the spiritual and moral improvement of a person, achieving internal harmony, and a conscious desire to control one’s inner life at the level of thoughts in the pursuit of salvation, which correlates with the ideological premises of the religious-philosophical teachings of hesychasm. It is emphasized that the ideological foundations of the moral-ascetic prose of Paisius Velichkovsky derive from the hesychastic teachings that were affirmed in the works of the Church Fathers, including those that the author translated from Greek to Russian. It is noted that the ideological foundations linked to hesychasm set the direction for the content of the analyzed texts, determining the development of ideas of humility and self-abasement, represented through kenotic units; ideas of the intelligent practice, embodied through the use of language units that serve the subject area of hesychasm; ideas of salvation, asserted through soteriological vocabulary; ideas of sobriety, realized through theological-ascetic terms, mainly from the thematic group "nepsis"; ideas of silence, whose linguistic representatives become the terms of hesychasm and analogous tropes. It is shown that the author employs arguments in the structure of “model – anti-model,” testimony, and norm; the linguistic characteristics of the texts include the use of theological-ascetic vocabulary, allegories, and metaphors typical for church-religious texts; a feature of the author’s style is adherence to the traditions of monastic literature.