The Filocalia Translation

Over some forty-five years — from the first volume at Sibiu in 1946 to the twelfth at Bucharest in 1991 — Stăniloae translated the Philokalia into Romanian, expanding it well beyond its Greek original and reviving the hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer in the modern Romanian Church. This file sets the project in its Philokalic lineage and traces its long, interrupted publication.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox

The Philokalic Lineage

The Philokalia (“love of the beautiful/good”) is the great anthology of Greek ascetic and hesychast texts, spanning the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, compiled by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Macarius of Corinth and first printed at Venice in 1782 (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, ch. 1, on the Philokalia and its 1782 Venice edition). Its purpose was to gather the tradition of inner prayer — above all the Jesus Prayer and the discipline of watchfulness (nepsis) — and to make it available for the renewal of Orthodox spiritual life (see The Jesus Prayer).

Almost at once the collection began to travel. St Paisius Velichkovsky, the Moldavian-based elder who had gathered a community of translators at the Neamț monastery, rendered a selection into Church Slavonic as the Dobrotolyubie (Moscow, 1793), and it was this Slavonic Philokalia that fed the Russian spiritual revival of the nineteenth century, from Optina to The Way of a Pilgrim (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 1, on Paisius and the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie; see St. Paisius Velichkovsky). Stăniloae stood consciously in this line of Philokalic translators. That the greatest of the modern renderings should be Romanian was fitting: Paisius had done his Philokalic work in Moldavia, in the Romanian lands, so that the Philokalia returned, through Stăniloae, to a country that had been one of the cradles of its transmission (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on Stăniloae’s Filocalia in relation to the Paisian inheritance).

Beginning at Sibiu

Stăniloae published the first volume of his Romanian Filocalia at Sibiu in 1946, while he was professor at the Andreian Academy there (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, dating the first volume to 1946; Miller, The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae, T&T Clark, 2000, on the Filocalia project). Four volumes appeared in rapid succession at Sibiu in the late 1940s, before the consolidation of the communist regime made continued publication of such work impossible (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the interruption of the project). [Disputed: the precise years of the first four Sibiu volumes are given with minor variation (the run is generally placed 1946–1948); the sources agree that four volumes appeared at Sibiu in the late 1940s and that the project was then interrupted for decades by the communist takeover (see Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, and Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000).]

The timing is significant. Stăniloae launched the Filocalia precisely as the Orthodox spiritual life it commended was about to come under systematic state pressure. The project was thus, from the outset, an act of preservation and defiance as much as of scholarship: a handing-on of the tradition of inner prayer at the very moment a militantly atheist regime was moving to suppress the monastic and devotional life that sustained it (Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the Filocalia in its historical setting; on the wider repression see The Cost of Witness).

Interruption and Completion

The middle volumes could not be published under the hardest years of the regime, and Stăniloae himself was imprisoned from 1958 to 1963 (see Imprisonment at Aiud). The project resumed only in the relative thaw of the 1970s. From the mid-1970s the remaining volumes appeared at Bucharest, under the imprint of the Romanian Patriarchate’s Biblical Institute, until the series reached twelve volumes with the last appearing around 1990–1991 (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the completion of the twelve-volume Filocalia and its Bucharest continuation; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the full extent of the project). The whole undertaking thus spanned some forty-five years, straddling the entire communist period — begun before it fully closed in, interrupted by it, and completed as it was ending.

The Romanian Filocalia is markedly larger than its Greek prototype. Stăniloae did not confine himself to translating the texts of the 1782 anthology; he expanded the collection, adding works by authors not in the original — most importantly extensive writings of St Maximus the Confessor and of other Fathers — so that the Romanian Filocalia became, in effect, a fuller Philokalic library than any that had preceded it (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the expanded contents of the Romanian Filocalia, including the large place given to Maximus the Confessor). Stăniloae’s own theological work — above all his reading of Maximus, whose Ambigua and other works he translated — grew directly out of this labor (see Method and Sources).

Reviving Hesychasm in Romania

The effect of the Filocalia on Romanian church life was profound and is widely acknowledged. By making the whole hesychast tradition available in the living Romanian language, and by surrounding it with commentary that showed its relevance to the present (see The Added Commentary), Stăniloae helped to nourish a renewal of the tradition of the Jesus Prayer and of contemplative monasticism in twentieth-century Romania, in continuity with the Paisian revival of the eighteenth (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the impact of the Filocalia on Romanian spiritual life; Miller, The Gift of the World, 2000, on the Filocalia as a vehicle of spiritual renewal). The renewal took place, moreover, under the eyes of a hostile state, so that the Filocalia became one of the channels by which the interior life of the Church was sustained through the communist decades.

The Filocalia is inseparable from Stăniloae’s identity as a theologian. It was not a preliminary or auxiliary labor but the matrix of his thought: the systematic theology of The Experience of God (see The Experience of God) rests on decades of intimate work with the very texts — Maximus, Palamas, the ascetic Fathers — that he was translating and annotating in the Filocalia. In him the roles of translator, patrologist, and dogmatician were one (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. 6, on the unity of translation and systematic theology in Stăniloae).

See Also

• The Added Commentary — the notes that made the translation an act of theology
• St. Paisius Velichkovsky — the eighteenth-century Philokalic revival at Neamț in Moldavia
• The Jesus Prayer — the prayer at the heart of the Philokalic tradition
• Method and Sources — how the Philokalic texts feed his dogmatics
• The Cost of Witness — the repression against which the project was carried out

References

• Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ch. 1 on the Philokalia, the 1782 Venice edition, and Paisius Velichkovsky’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie; ch. 6 on Stăniloae’s Romanian Filocalia: the first volume of 1946 at Sibiu, the interruption under communism, the Bucharest continuation and completion in twelve volumes, the expansion beyond the Greek original, and its impact on Romanian spiritual life.)
• Miller, Charles. The Gift of the World: An Introduction to the Theology of Dumitru Staniloae. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. (The Filocalia project as the matrix of Stăniloae’s theology and a vehicle of spiritual renewal in its historical setting.)
• Stăniloae, Dumitru (trans., ed., annot.). Filocalia, 12 vols. Sibiu, 1946–1948; Bucharest, 1976–1991. (The Romanian Philokalia; the primary object of this file.)