Compiling the Philokalia (1777–1782)

The making of the Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers (Greek: Philokalia tōn hierōn nēptikōn): the manuscript St. Makarios of Corinth found at Vatopedi in 1777 and entrusted to Nicodemus to edit; the labor of selection, text-establishment, introduction, and annotation; the contents reaching from Evagrius Ponticus in the fourth century to St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth; the neptic (watchful) and hesychast aim that gives the anthology its unity; and the publication, in two great folio volumes, at Venice in 1782.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

The Commission

The Philokalia began with a discovery. St. Makarios (Notaras) of Corinth, deprived of his see and given to a life of editing and spiritual labor, came to the Holy Mountain and, in 1777, found at the great Monastery of Vatopedi a manuscript collection of the writings of the hesychast and neptic Fathers (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org; Philokalia, Encyclopædia Britannica). Recognizing its worth, Makarios entrusted the young, learned, prodigiously retentive Nicodemus — only two years tonsured — with the editorial labor of turning the manuscript material into a publishable book (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org). The division of labor, as the tradition presents it, set Makarios as the commissioning patron and gatherer of materials and Nicodemus as the working editor who selected, established the texts, wrote the introductions, and saw the whole through the press — though the two are rightly named together as compilers, and the title pages honor both (St. Nicodemus and St. Makarios, comps., The Philokalia, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, vol. 1, London: Faber, 1979, Introduction).

The word Philokalia (φιλοκαλία) means “love of the beautiful” or “love of the good and beautiful” — here, the beauty of holiness, the good things the Fathers teach. (The title was not new: an earlier Philokalia of Origen had been assembled by Sts. Basil and Gregory the Theologian; Nicodemus and Makarios gave the old name to a new collection.)

What the Philokalia Is

The full Greek title — Philokalia tōn hierōn nēptikōn — names the book’s purpose precisely. Neptic comes from nēpsis (νῆψις), “watchfulness” or “sobriety,” the inner vigilance over the thoughts and the heart that is the core discipline of hesychast spirituality (see Watchfulness and the Senses). The Philokalia is, in the editors’ own framing, a collection of texts “written between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries by spiritual masters” of the Orthodox tradition, gathered to guide the reader in the way of inner prayer, the purification of the heart, the guarding of the intellect (nous), and the unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus — the whole path that culminates in union with God (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Introduction; see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

It is, crucially, not a treatise but an anthology — a curated library. Nicodemus’s editorial art lay in what he chose, how he arranged it, and how he framed it. He prefaced the whole with an introduction setting out the book’s purpose, and he supplied brief biographical and introductory notices for the individual Fathers, situating each in the tradition and orienting the reader to the use of the texts (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Introduction).

The Contents: Evagrius to Palamas

The anthology spans roughly a thousand years of the Eastern ascetic and mystical tradition. Among the authors and works it gathers (the English edition preserving the Greek selection) are:

Evagrios the Solitary (Evagrius Ponticus, 4th c.) — the Texts on Discrimination and on prayer, the foundational analysis of the eight thoughts;
St. John Cassian (4th–5th c.) — on the eight vices;
St. Mark the Ascetic and St. Hesychios the Priest — on watchfulness and the law of grace;
St. Neilos the Ascetic, St. Diadochos of Photiki (5th c.) — on spiritual knowledge and discrimination;
St. John of Karpathos, St. Isaiah the Solitary;
St. Maximus the Confessor (7th c.) — the Centuries on Love and on theology, a major presence;
St. Symeon the New Theologian (10th–11th c.) and the Three Methods of Prayer associated with his tradition;
St. Gregory of Sinai (14th c.) — on the Jesus Prayer and stillness;
St. Gregory Palamas (14th c.) — culminating the collection with the theology of the uncreated light and the hesychast defense (Philokalia, Britannica; Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki; Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vols. 1–4).

The arc is deliberate. The collection moves from the early desert analysis of the passions and the thoughts, through the great Byzantine synthesizers, to the fourteenth-century hesychast masters who defended and articulated the experience of the divine light. To read the Philokalia through is to be led along the whole neptic path, from the first struggle with the thoughts to the heights of contemplative union — which is exactly what its editors intended (see The Patristic Mind).

The Hesychast Aim

The Philokalia is not a museum of texts but a manual of practice. Its governing aim is hesychia (ἡσυχία) — stillness, the inner silence in which the heart, purified of the passions and guarded by watchfulness, becomes capable of unceasing prayer and the vision of God. At its practical center stands the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”), the prayer of the heart that the neptic Fathers commend as the chief instrument of watchfulness (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). The whole collection serves the end the Orthodox tradition calls theosis — deification, the participation of the human person in the life of God (see Orthodoxy: Theosis). Nicodemus and Makarios were not antiquarians; they published the Philokalia to revive a living practice they feared was dying, and they framed it for the use of monks and, more daringly, of laypeople willing to undertake the path under guidance.

Venice, 1782

The completed work was sent, like so many Greek books of the age, to Venice — the printing capital of the Greek world under Ottoman rule — and published there in 1782. The first edition appeared in two large folio volumes, well over a thousand pages of double-column Greek, under the title Philokalia tōn hierōn nēptikōn (Philokalia, Britannica; Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki). The financing came, as was usual, through a patron — the sources associate the printing with the support of John Mavrogordatos (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki). The book bore the names of both compilers and Nicodemus’s prefatory matter.

Its appearance is one of the hinge-events of modern Orthodox history. In a single volume the hesychast inheritance of a millennium was put back into print and into circulation, just as the Kollyvades renewal was seeking exactly such a return to the Fathers (see The Athonite Renewal). What happened next — the journey of the Philokalia into Slavonic, Russian, and at last English, and its transformation into a worldwide spiritual classic — is the subject of the next file.

Nepsis and Hesychia: The Two Words That Govern the Book

To grasp why Nicodemus and Makarios gathered just these texts and arranged them as they did, one must understand the two Greek words that stand behind the whole enterprise. Nepsis (νῆψις) is more than a vague “alertness”; in the neptic Fathers it names the sustained, sober watch the soul keeps over the flow of its own thoughts (logismoi), catching each suggestion at its first approach, before it can grow into assent and act (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Introduction; see Watchfulness and the Senses). The image the tradition uses is military and scriptural at once: the watchman on the wall, the sober man warned by the apostle that “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Hesychia (ἡσυχία), in turn, is the stillness toward which watchfulness tends — not mere outward silence but the inner quiet of a heart no longer agitated by the passions, a quiet in which the unceasing remembrance of God becomes possible (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Introduction). The title Philokalia tōn hierōn nēptikōn therefore announces a single coherent spiritual science: the texts are gathered precisely because they teach this watchful path into stillness, and the anthology excludes much else of patristic value because it does not serve that one end (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

The Pedagogical Logic of the Anthology

The Philokalia is arranged broadly by chronology, but its deeper order is pedagogical, tracing the soul’s own ascent. The earliest texts — Evagrios on the eight thoughts, Cassian on the eight vices, Mark the Ascetic and Hesychios on guarding the intellect — equip the beginner for the first and longest labor, the struggle with the passions and the disordered thoughts that feed them (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki; Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Introduction). From this analysis of praktiki, the active purification of the soul, the collection moves toward the texts of spiritual knowledge and discernment — Diadochos of Photiki, Maximus the Confessor — where the purified intellect begins to receive the contemplation of God’s presence in creation and in Scripture. Only at the summit does it set the explicitly hesychast masters, Gregory of Sinai and Gregory Palamas, who treat the prayer of the heart and the vision of the uncreated light directly. The structure thus recapitulates the classic threefold pattern of Eastern ascetic theology — purification, illumination, and union — so that the order of the book is itself a teaching, leading the reader who works through it from the first battle with a stray thought to the threshold of deification (see The Patristic Mind; Orthodoxy: Theosis).

The Individual Fathers and Their Contributions

The unity of the anthology should not obscure the distinct voice each Father brings to it. Evagrios the Solitary supplies the foundational psychology of temptation, the analysis of the eight evil thoughts from which the later Western scheme of the seven deadly sins descends, and the disciplined account of pure prayer (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1). Maximus the Confessor, present at the greatest length of any author, contributes the Centuries on Love and on theology, weaving the ascetic struggle into a vast vision of the cosmos restored in Christ — so that watchfulness over the thoughts is shown to participate in the reconciliation of all things (Philokalia, Britannica). Diadochos of Photiki gives the precise discrimination between consolations that come from grace and those that counterfeit it, a discernment indispensable to the prayer of the heart. Hesychios the Priest offers in On Watchfulness and Holiness one of the tradition’s most concentrated treatments of nepsis joined to the invocation of Jesus. And at the close, Gregory Palamas crowns the whole with the theology that defended the hesychasts of the fourteenth century: the distinction between God’s unknowable essence and his uncreated energies, by which the saints truly behold the divine light without compromising God’s transcendence (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki; see St. Gregory Palamas). To compile the Philokalia was thus to assemble not a chorus of identical voices but a single tradition heard through many of its greatest teachers.

Venice and the Greek Book Under Ottoman Rule

That the Philokalia was printed at Venice and not on Greek soil is not an incidental detail but a fact of the age. Under Ottoman rule the Greek-speaking Church possessed no printing presses of its own capable of such a work; the great houses of Venice, with their long-established Greek typography serving the diaspora and the homeland alike, were the natural and almost the only recourse for an ambitious Greek book (Philokalia, Britannica; Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki). The financing of such a venture depended, as the surviving record indicates, on the support of a patron, John Mavrogordatos, whose backing made the costly two-volume folio possible (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki). There is a quiet irony in the fact that the supreme monument of Athonite hesychasm reached the world through the commercial presses of a Latin city — a reminder that the Kollyvades renewal, for all its insistence on tradition, was also a thoroughly eighteenth-century undertaking, dependent on print, patronage, and the wider Greek world beyond the Holy Mountain (see The Formation of an Editor).

References

Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth, comps. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. and ed. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. Vol. 1. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. The Introduction sets out the title, aim, contents, and the 1782 Venice publication; the four published volumes carry the full selection from Evagrios to Palamas.
Philokalia. Encyclopædia Britannica, britannica.com. (Compiled by Nicodemus and Makarios; published Venice 1782; two folio volumes; from Evagrius to Gregory Palamas; the hesychast aim.)
Philokalia. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Full title; the Vatopedi manuscript; the patron; the list of included Fathers; the 1782 edition.)
Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, July 14. (Makarios’s 1777 discovery at Vatopedi; the commission to Nicodemus to edit the manuscript.)
Scripture cited: 1 Peter 5:8 (the sober watchman). The meaning of nepsis and hesychia and the threefold pattern of purification, illumination, and union are drawn from the translators’ Introduction in Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1.