The Philokalia and Its Diffusion

How an Athonite Greek anthology of 1782 became a world spiritual classic: St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s Church Slavonic Dobrotolyubie (Moscow, 1793), which carried the Philokalia into the Russian monastic revival; St. Theophan the Recluse’s expanded Russian Dobrotolyubie (1877–1889); the role of The Way of a Pilgrim in popularizing the Jesus Prayer; and the twentieth-century English Philokalia of Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware — the diffusion by which Nicodemus’s editorial labor reshaped the spiritual life of the whole Orthodox world and reached far beyond it.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie (1793)

The Philokalia’s afterlife began almost at once, and to the north. St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794), the great Moldavian-Ukrainian elder of Neamţ who had spent years on Mount Athos gathering and translating the ascetic Fathers into Slavonic, had been at work on this very corpus independently. When the Greek Philokalia appeared, his labors converged with it: a Church Slavonic translation of a substantial part of the collection was published at Moscow in 1793 under the title Dobrotolyubie (Добротолюбие) — a calque of the Greek, “love of the good/beautiful” (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki; Philokalia, Encyclopædia Britannica). It was reprinted in 1822.

The consequences were immense and, arguably, exceeded the book’s impact in its Greek homeland. The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie became a primary engine of the Russian spiritual revival of the nineteenth century. It fed the renewal of startsy (eldership) that radiated from Paisius’s disciples to Optina Pustyn and across Russia (see St. Ambrose of Optina, whose monastery published the Paisian patristic editions). The Jesus Prayer, taught in the Philokalia, became through the Dobrotolyubie the living possession of Russian monasticism and, increasingly, of devout laypeople (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

The Way of a Pilgrim

The Dobrotolyubie‘s popular reach is captured in the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim (Otkrovennye rasskazy strannika), whose narrator wanders Russia with a knapsack, a Bible, and a copy of the Dobrotolyubie, learning the unceasing Jesus Prayer from its pages. The little book carried the name and the practice of the Philokalia to a vast readership and, in the twentieth century, to the West (its English translations preceded the full English Philokalia and prepared the ground for it). Through The Way of a Pilgrim, Nicodemus’s anthology — at one remove, and often unnamed — entered the imagination of readers who would never open the folio of 1782.

Theophan the Recluse’s Russian Dobrotolyubie

The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie was, for many nineteenth-century Russians, hard going — Church Slavonic was a liturgical and learned language, not a vernacular. St. Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894), bishop and recluse of Vysha, undertook a fuller translation into Russian, published in five volumes between 1877 and 1889. Theophan did not merely translate; he edited freely — expanding the collection with additional patristic material, abridging or omitting passages he judged too advanced or too technical for general readers (notably some of the more explicit instructions on the bodily technique of the Jesus Prayer), and shaping the whole for pastoral use (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki; on Theophan, see St. Theophan the Recluse). The result was a Philokalia adapted again for a new audience, as Nicodemus had adapted it for his — a reminder that the Philokalia was, from the start, a living and edited tradition rather than a fixed canon. Theophan is also the reviser who gave Unseen Warfare its definitive Russian form (see Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises).

The English Philokalia

The Philokalia reached the English-speaking world in two stages. Selections translated from Theophan’s Russian by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer appeared at mid-century as Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart (1951) and Early Fathers from the Philokalia (1954), introducing the collection to Western readers and to the mid-century revival of interest in Orthodox spirituality (Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Writings from the Philokalia, London: Faber, 1951).

The definitive English rendering came later: a complete translation from the original Greek by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, published by Faber and Faber beginning with volume 1 in 1979 and continuing across subsequent decades (vols. 1–4 published 1979–1995, with the fifth volume completing the project later) (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia: The Complete Text, London: Faber, 1979–). This English Philokalia — scholarly, complete, and beautifully made — carried Nicodemus and Makarios’s anthology to a global readership far beyond the Orthodox Church, and it is the form in which most English-speaking readers, Orthodox and otherwise, now know the work. The translators’ introductions and notes are themselves a major modern scholarly statement on the hesychast tradition.

A World Classic

The trajectory is worth contemplating. An anthology compiled by two Kollyvades monks on Mount Athos, printed in Greek at Venice in 1782 for a Church under Ottoman bondage, became — within two centuries, through Slavonic, Russian, and English — one of the most widely read works of Christian spirituality in the world, a staple of monasteries from Athos to Alaska and a book studied by scholars, sought by seekers, and quoted far outside Orthodoxy. The twentieth-century “Philokalic revival” — the recovery of hesychast prayer and neptic theology as the living center of Orthodox spiritual life — rests on this diffusion (see Influence and Scholarship). Nicodemus the editor could not have foreseen it; but it is the truest measure of his labor.

Paisius Velichkovsky: From Athos to Neamţ

The figure who carried the Philokalia north deserves to be seen in fuller relief, for his labor was not a mere act of translation but a whole life ordered to the recovery of patristic prayer. Paisius Velichkovsky had left the schools of Kiev as a young man dissatisfied with their Latinized learning, wandered among the monasteries of Moldavia and the skete-communities of Mount Athos, and there gathered around himself a brotherhood devoted to the inner prayer of the heart (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki). On Athos he set himself to find, copy, and correct the manuscripts of the neptic Fathers, teaching himself the philological care such work demanded — labor that ran parallel to, and then converged with, the very project Makarios and Nicodemus were pursuing on the same mountain. When he transferred his brotherhood to Moldavia and finally to the great monastery of Neamţ, he made it a workshop of translation and a school of eldership, so that the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie of 1793 emerged not from a desk but from a living community already practicing what the texts taught (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki; Philokalia, Encyclopædia Britannica). This is why the book took root so deeply in the Slavic world: it arrived not as a literary curiosity but as the manual of a flourishing spiritual movement.

The Revival of the Startsy

The most far-reaching fruit of Paisius’s labor was the renewal of starchestvo, the institution of the spiritual elder. The Philokalia everywhere assumes that the prayer of the heart is to be learned not from books alone but under the guidance of an experienced father who can discern the soul’s states and warn it of delusion (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). Paisius embodied this principle, and his disciples carried it from Neamţ across the Russian Empire, where it flowered above all at the hermitage of Optina Pustyn (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki; see St. Ambrose of Optina). The Optina elders, drawing on the Paisian patristic editions their monastery published, became the spiritual physicians of nineteenth-century Russia, sought out by peasants and by the educated alike — a phenomenon unimaginable without the Dobrotolyubie that gave eldership its textual foundation. Through this channel the hesychast tradition the Philokalia preserved passed from the printed page back into the lived succession of master and disciple from which it had originally come (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

The Way of a Pilgrim in Closer View

The Way of a Pilgrim repays a closer look, for it shows the Dobrotolyubie at work in the simplest of hands. Its anonymous narrator, a poor wanderer with a withered arm, is haunted by the apostle’s command to “pray without ceasing” and sets out across Russia to learn how such a thing is possible. An elder gives him the answer and the Dobrotolyubie as his guide, teaching him to say the Jesus Prayer first a fixed number of times, then thousands of times daily, until the prayer descends from the lips into the heart and continues of itself even in sleep. The genius of the little book is that it dramatizes the Philokalic teaching as narrative rather than precept, making the prayer of the heart vivid and attainable to readers who could never have worked through the folio of 1782 (The Way of a Pilgrim; Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki). Its twentieth-century English translations circulated widely beyond Orthodoxy, shaping the Western imagination of “the Jesus Prayer” and preparing a readership that would later welcome the full English Philokalia itself.

The Breadth of the Twentieth-Century Reception

The reach of the completed English Philokalia extended strikingly beyond the Orthodox Church. Because the translators rendered the whole from the original Greek with scholarly apparatus, the work became a primary source not only for Orthodox monastics and laity but for students of comparative mysticism, historians of Byzantine thought, and Christians of other confessions drawn to contemplative prayer (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Introduction). The phrase “prayer of the heart” entered the general vocabulary of spirituality; retreatants and seekers with no connection to Athos took up the Jesus Prayer; academic theology found in the neptic Fathers a coherent tradition of Christian contemplation to set beside the better-known Western mystics. None of this dilutes the book’s Orthodox character — the Philokalia remains a manual for a specific ascetic life lived under guidance within the Church — but it does measure how completely Nicodemus’s anthology has become a possession of the wider Christian world, transmitted through the very diffusion this file has traced (see Influence and Scholarship).

Translation as a Living Tradition

One thread running through this whole history deserves to be named directly: the Philokalia was never a fixed and frozen canon but a living text, reshaped at each stage of its transmission for a new audience. Nicodemus and Makarios had themselves selected and arranged their material from a larger manuscript inheritance; Paisius Velichkovsky rendered a substantial part of it into Slavonic out of his own independent labors; Theophan the Recluse, translating into Russian, edited with notable freedom — adding patristic material, abridging passages he judged too advanced, and softening some of the more explicit instructions on the bodily technique of the Jesus Prayer for the sake of general readers (Philokalia, OrthodoxWiki; see St. Theophan the Recluse). Each translator was at once faithful and creative, handing on the tradition by adapting it. This is not a betrayal of the original but a sign of its vitality: a dead text is transmitted unchanged, while a living one is continually re-edited for the people who must use it. The English translators, by returning to the original Greek and rendering the whole complete, performed yet another act of this living transmission — restoring to English readers the full text behind the abridgments, even as they too added the apparatus their own age required (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Introduction). The Philokalia’s journey is thus a history of editors as much as of readers, each in turn doing for a new generation what Nicodemus first did for his.

References

Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. and ed. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 5 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–. The complete English from the Greek; vol. 1 (1979). Translators’ introductions on the work’s history and transmission.
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, 1954. The earlier English selections made from Theophan’s Russian.
Philokalia. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie, Moscow 1793, by Paisius Velichkovsky, reprinted 1822; Theophan’s expanded Russian Dobrotolyubie, 1877–1889; the English translations.)
Philokalia. Encyclopædia Britannica, britannica.com. (The 1793 Slavonic translation and the work’s diffusion in the Slavic world.)
The Way of a Pilgrim, anonymous Russian (19th c.), various English translations. (The popular vehicle of the Dobrotolyubie and the Jesus Prayer.)