The English Philokalia

With G. E. H. Palmer and Philip Sherrard, Ware produced the first complete English translation of the Philokalia directly from the Greek — a project that ran from 1979 to 2023, outlived all three of its original translators, and put the central texts of the hesychast tradition into the hands of English readers for the first time. His share was not only translation but the scholarly framing: the introductions, the notes, and the glossary that made the collection intelligible.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Project

The Philokalia compiled by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth and printed at Venice in 1782 is the great anthology of Greek ascetic and hesychast writing from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. It was translated into Slavonic by St Paisius Velichkovsky and into Russian by St Theophan the Recluse, and through those versions it shaped the spiritual revival of nineteenth-century Russia (see The Philokalia and St Paisius Velichkovsky). In English it existed for most of the twentieth century only in the partial and indirect selections made by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer from Theophan’s Russian — Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart (1951) and Early Fathers from the Philokalia (1954).

The project Ware joined was to render the whole thing, from the Greek. The Philokalia: The Complete Text Compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, was published by Faber and Faber in London: volume 1 in 1979, volume 2 in 1981, volume 3 in 1984, volume 4 in 1995, and the fifth and final volume in 2023.

The Collaborators

G. E. H. Palmer (1904–1984) had been at work on the Philokalic texts since the 1940s and had made the earlier selections with Kadloubovsky. Philip Sherrard (1922–1995) — poet, translator of modern Greek poetry, and scholar of the Greek world — brought a literary ear and a long engagement with the tradition; he lived in the Peloponnese and was among the shapers of the mid-century Western encounter with Orthodoxy. Ware was the youngest by a generation, and it was he who supplied much of the scholarly apparatus: introductions, biographical and textual notes on each author, and the glossary of technical Greek terms — nous, dianoia, nepsis, logismos, prosoche, hesychia — without which the texts are close to unusable in English.

That glossary is one of the quiet achievements of twentieth-century Orthodox scholarship in English. The English theological vocabulary had no stable equivalents for the hesychast lexicon; the Palmer–Sherrard–Ware decisions — above all the rendering of nous as “intellect” in a strictly non-discursive sense, sharply distinguished from “reason” (dianoia) — became the working vocabulary of Anglophone Orthodox spiritual writing thereafter.

The Long Interval and the Fifth Volume

Volumes 1–3 came out at roughly three-year intervals. Then the pace slowed: volume 4 did not appear until 1995, and the fifth not until 2023. The delay reflects the deaths of the collaborators — Palmer in 1984, Sherrard in 1995 — and the increasing weight of the work falling on Ware, who was by then a bishop with a full teaching and pastoral load. Volume 5 contains the longest and most technical material in the collection, including the works of St Gregory of Sinai’s successors and the fourteenth-century Palamite texts.

Ware did not live to see it. He died on 24 August 2022; volume 5 appeared from Faber in 2023, and the labor of completion had by then passed to a widened team of collaborators, so that the final volume is posthumous with respect to all three of the original translators (on the completion of the fifth volume, the volume’s own front matter, Faber, 2023). [Disputed: the precise attribution of the fifth volume's completion. The title page continues to carry the names of Palmer, Sherrard and Ware as translators of the series; the identity and division of labour among the collaborators who finished the volume after Ware's death is stated in the volume's own front matter and is not reported uniformly in secondary notices. The collection reports only what the volume itself states and does not assign individual credit beyond it.]

Ware’s Own Scholarship on the Philokalia

Alongside the translation, Ware wrote the standard scholarly account of the anthology’s making and reception. His Introduction to volume 1 (Faber, 1979) is the repository’s anchor for the question of St Theophan’s recension — that is, of how far the Russian Dobrotolubiye is a translation of the Greek Philokalia and how far a different book. His later essay “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9–35, treats the compilation, the Kollyvades movement behind it, and the Western reception; it is the single most-cited Ware item in this repository.

What the Translation Did

The consequences were large and are still unfolding. Before 1979, a reader of English who wanted St Maximus the Confessor’s Chapters on Love, St Hesychios the Priest, St Diadochos of Photiki, St Peter of Damaskos, St Gregory of Sinai or St Gregory Palamas in the Philokalic recension had either Greek, or a partial rendering made from Russian, or nothing. After 1979 the texts were simply available — in a version that was accurate enough for scholars, readable enough for laypeople, and consistent enough in its technical vocabulary that a whole subsequent literature could be written on top of it.

The translation is a principal reason why the hesychast tradition, the Jesus Prayer, and the language of nepsis and theosis entered ordinary Anglophone Orthodox and even non-Orthodox spiritual discourse in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is also, together with the Festal Menaion and the Lenten Triodion, the reason a fair assessment of Ware must weigh his translations at least as heavily as his own books (see The Festal Menaion and the Lenten Triodion).

See Also

References

  • Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text Compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth. 5 vols. London: Faber and Faber; vol. 1, 1979; vol. 2, 1981; vol. 3, 1984; vol. 4, 1995; vol. 5, 2023. (The complete English translation from the Greek; the Introduction, notes and Glossary; the posthumous completion of the fifth volume.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia.” In The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif, 9–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. (The compilation, the Kollyvades context, the Slavonic and Russian versions, and the Western reception.)
  • Kadloubovsky, E., and G. E. H. Palmer, trans. Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart. London: Faber and Faber, 1951; and Early Fathers from the Philokalia. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. (The earlier partial English selections made from St Theophan’s Russian.)
  • The Philokalia (Venice, 1782), compiled by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth. (The Greek editio princeps underlying the translation.)