Also known as Григорий Синаит Млади · Gregory the Younger of Paroria
A disciple of St Gregory of Sinai who continued the hesychast movement at the Paroria monastic settlement on the Byzantine-Bulgarian frontier. He reposed about 1405.
Feast Day
November 27
Draft
Draft — pending review. Not yet verified for publication.
Saint Gregory of Sinai the Younger was a monastic of the late Byzantine period who belonged to the spiritual lineage of Saint Gregory of Sinai, the great teacher of hesychasm, and who carried that tradition of inner prayer forward at the monastic settlement of Paroria on the Byzantine-Bulgarian frontier. He is remembered chiefly as a disciple who continued his master's work rather than for a wealth of recorded biographical detail, and he is to be kept distinct from the elder Gregory of Sinai under whom the movement first flourished.
Much about his life is uncertain. The surviving accounts are spare and were set down well after his lifetime, and he is easily confused with his teacher and with other hesychast monks of the same generation. The tradition received in this database places his repose around the year 1405 and keeps his memory in the Bulgarian calendar.
Timeline 2 moments
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14th centuryDisciple at ParoriaGregory the Younger is formed in the hesychast tradition of Saint Gregory of Sinai at the monastic settlement of Paroria on the Byzantine-Bulgarian frontier.
c. 1405ReposeBy the tradition followed here, Gregory the Younger reposes around the year 1405.
Contributions & Legacy
2 contributions
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Hesychast Lineage and Paroria
Gregory the Younger is counted among the spiritual descendants of Saint Gregory of Sinai, the monk and writer who did more than any other to spread hesychasm, the discipline of inner, contemplative prayer, in the fourteenth century. Driven from Mount Athos by Turkish raids, the elder Gregory had settled in the Bulgarian Empire, where the emperor Ivan Alexander supported the founding of a monastery near Paroria in the Strandzha Mountains of the southeast. That settlement drew monks from Bulgaria, Byzantium, and Serbia and became a center from which the hesychast revival radiated through the Slavic lands.
It was within this milieu that Gregory the Younger lived and prayed. By the tradition followed here he is reckoned a disciple of Saint Gregory of Sinai who continued the hesychast life at Paroria after his teacher's repose, so that the practice of the Jesus Prayer and the eremitic discipline of the elder generation were handed on through him.
Identity and Sources
The records concerning Gregory the Younger are thin and not wholly consistent. Some hagiographical sources identify him with the monk, of Serbian origin, who came to Paroria around the middle of the fourteenth century, studied under disciples of Gregory of Sinai, and later founded the monastery of Gregoriou on Mount Athos; by those accounts he wrote the Life of his master and an account of Saint Romylos, and reposed around 1406, with a feast kept on the seventh of December. The present entry, following the Bulgarian commemoration, places his memory on the twenty-seventh of November and his origin in Bulgaria. Where the sources disagree, the details recorded in this database's own entry are retained, and the variant accounts are noted here rather than asserted.
