The Added Commentary

What distinguishes Stăniloae’s Filocalia from a bare translation is the vast apparatus of notes, prefaces, and commentary with which he surrounded the ascetic texts — a running theological reading that made the Romanian Filocalia an original work in its own right and a workshop for his systematic theology. This file examines that commentary.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

More Than a Translation

Stăniloae’s Romanian Filocalia is not simply the Greek anthology in Romanian dress. Each volume is furnished with introductions to the authors, and — above all — with a dense body of footnotes in which Stăniloae comments on the ascetic and hesychast texts as he translates them (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 6, on the extensive notes and commentary of the Romanian Filocalia; Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, on the commentary as integral to the project). The result is a hybrid genre: a critical translation that is at the same time a sustained theological meditation, in which the modern translator is in continuous conversation with the ancient authors.

This is why the Filocalia has to be counted among Stăniloae’s original works and not merely his editorial labors. The scholarship recognizes the notes as a place where his own theology is worked out in contact with the sources — a running commentary in which the reader watches a major dogmatic theologian think alongside Maximus the Confessor, Diadochus of Photike, the Macarian Homilies, and the hesychast masters (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, treating the Filocalia commentary as a vehicle of Stăniloae’s own thought; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the theological substance of the notes).

The Function of the Commentary

Several purposes run through Stăniloae’s annotations. First, they interpret the ascetic texts theologically, drawing out the dogmatic implications of what can look, on the surface, like practical counsel on prayer and the passions — showing, for instance, how the discipline of watchfulness and the Jesus Prayer are grounded in the doctrines of creation, the incarnation, and deification (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the dogmatic reading of the ascetic texts). The ascetic tradition is thereby exhibited not as a separate department of “spirituality” but as the lived face of dogma — a conviction that governs Stăniloae’s whole theology (see Method and Sources).

Second, the commentary makes the texts contemporary. Stăniloae writes for a twentieth-century Romanian readership living under an atheist state, and his notes repeatedly show the relevance of the Fathers’ teaching to the modern situation, engaging, where useful, modern philosophy and psychology to interpret the ancient descriptions of the inner life (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the contemporary and philosophically-engaged character of Stăniloae’s commentary). The Philokalic authors are treated not as museum pieces but as guides whose analysis of the passions and of the movement toward God still holds.

Third, the notes carry Stăniloae’s distinctive theological accents — the theology of the person and of communion, the reading of creation as gift and as rational (endowed with the logoi of things), the apophatic-cataphatic balance — so that the Filocalia commentary and the later Dogmatics illuminate one another (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the continuity between the Filocalia notes and Stăniloae’s systematic themes; see The World as Gift and Apophatic Theology and Person, Communion, and Deification).

Maximus the Confessor and the Weight of the Notes

The clearest case of the commentary’s originality is Stăniloae’s treatment of St Maximus the Confessor. He gave Maximus a far larger place in the Romanian Filocalia than the Greek original had, translating major and difficult works — including the Ambigua and the Chapters on Love and on Theology and the Economy — and equipping them with commentary adequate to their notorious difficulty (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the enlarged place of Maximus in the Romanian Filocalia and Stăniloae’s translation of the Ambigua). Andrew Louth, himself a leading scholar of Maximus, regards Stăniloae as one of the pioneering modern interpreters of the Confessor, whose reading of Maximus’s cosmic vision — Christ as the one in whom the logoi of all created things cohere — shaped both the Filocalia apparatus and Stăniloae’s own theology of creation (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae as an interpreter of Maximus).

Through the Maximian material especially, the Filocalia commentary becomes the seedbed of Stăniloae’s theology of the world as God’s gift and of the human person as the priest of creation, called to gather the meanings of things and offer them back to God — themes that reappear, developed, in The Experience of God (see The World as Gift and Apophatic Theology and The Experience of God).

The Commentary as Confession

There is, finally, a confessional dimension to the annotations. Composed in part during the years of persecution — and completed after Stăniloae’s own imprisonment — the Filocalia commentary is the work of a theologian who was living the ascetic struggle it describes, not merely studying it (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the existential engagement of Stăniloae with the ascetic tradition; see Imprisonment at Aiud). Stăniloae later spoke of prayer and inner discipline as having sustained him in prison, and his interpreters read the Filocalia project as of a piece with that endurance: the same tradition he was translating was the one that held him (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on prayer and endurance in Stăniloae’s life). The commentary thus has an authority that pure scholarship could not give it — the authority of a reading tested in the conditions the ascetic texts were written to address.

See Also

References

  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 6: the extensive notes and commentary of the Romanian Filocalia; its contemporary and philosophically-engaged character; the enlarged place of Maximus the Confessor and Stăniloae’s translation of the Ambigua; Stăniloae as an interpreter of Maximus.)
  • Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (The commentary as integral to the project and as a vehicle of Stăniloae’s own systematic themes; the dogmatic reading of the ascetic texts; the existential engagement of Stăniloae with the tradition he translated.)
  • Stăniloae, Dumitru (trans., ed., annot.). Filocalia, 12 vols. Sibiu, 1946–1948; Bucharest, 1976–1991. (The annotations, prefaces, and commentary examined in this file.)