The Editorial Vision

Behind the additions, rearrangements, paraphrases, and omissions of St. Theophan’s Dobrotolyubie lies a single coherent purpose: to make the ascetical Fathers usable as living medicine for ordinary Russian souls. This is the interpretive companion to the factual account of the translation — an account of why the recluse edited as he did, governed by pastoral accessibility, by caution over the dangerous physical methods of prayer, and by a conviction that the Fathers are not museum pieces but a cure to be administered. The same vision that shaped his book shaped how the Philokalia first reached the English-speaking world.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Governing Aim: Pastoral Accessibility

Every editorial liberty St. Theophan took with the Greek Philokalia can be referred back to one governing aim: pastoral accessibility. His purpose was to put the wealth of the ascetical Fathers into clear, modern Russian for a broad readership — educated laypeople, parish clergy, ordinary monastics — and not only for the spiritual adepts who could already read the Fathers in Greek or Slavonic (Ware, Introduction, in Palmer, Sherrard & Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Faber & Faber, 1979; theophaneia.org; predanie.ru). The free-paraphrase character of the work, far from being a defect of scholarship, was the means to a pastoral end.

This is why he expanded the corpus, restoring Fathers the Greek had omitted — St. Isaac the Syrian, St. Ephrem, St. John Climacus, and others — so that the Russian reader would meet the whole school of the heart and not a curated remnant of it. It is why he rearranged the material by author, with a short biographical preface before each writer, so that a reader could come to know each Father as a person and follow his teaching as a connected whole rather than as scattered chapters. And it is why he paraphrased difficult passages, smoothing into intelligible Russian what would otherwise have remained opaque (Ware 1979; predanie.ru). The form of the book is everywhere bent toward the reader’s actual use.

In this St. Theophan was not innovating but completing an impulse already present in his source. St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite’s own preface to the Greek Philokalia had declared its interior, watchful spirituality to be the inheritance of every Christian and not only monks or clergy (theophaneia.org). St. Theophan carried that democratizing conviction across into Russian and gave it a concrete editorial body: an anthology actually shaped so that the parish priest and the literate layman could use it. The biographical prefaces are the clearest token of this intent. A reader who first learns who Abba Isaiah or St. Diadochos was — where he lived, how he struggled, what occasioned his writing — comes to the teaching already disposed to receive it as the testimony of a real ascetic rather than as a set of disembodied maxims. The framing is itself pastoral: it converts a treasury into a companion.

The Democratization of Hesychasm

What St. Theophan accomplished is best named as a democratization of hesychasm — the opening of the interior, watchful prayer of the heart, once guarded chiefly within the monasteries of the holy mountain, to the whole body of literate Christians. The conviction was not his invention. St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite had already, in his preface to the Greek Philokalia, insisted that this spirituality of inner attention was the inheritance of every Christian and not of monks alone (theophaneia.org). What St. Theophan added was a recension actually fitted to make that claim good among a mass readership: a Russian Dobrotolyubie shaped so that the parish priest, the literate layman, and the lay devout could in fact take the book up and use it (Ware 1979; predanie.ru).

The timing was providential. His Russian Philokalia appeared in the later nineteenth century, exactly the moment when rising literacy and cheap printing were creating, for the first time in Russian history, a genuine mass readership for serious religious books. A treasury of ascetical Fathers that a century earlier could have reached only a handful of Greek- or Slavonic-reading adepts could now, in clear modern Russian and in affordable editions, pass into the hands of thousands. St. Theophan’s editorial choices — the expansion of the corpus, the rearrangement by author, the biographical prefaces, the smoothing paraphrase — are best read as so many instruments of this reach (Ware 1979; predanie.ru). The prefaces and the rearrangement in particular function as teaching devices: by setting each Father before the reader as a knowable person, with a life and a struggle, and by gathering his teaching into a connected whole, the editor turned an anthology into a course of formation that an unaided reader could follow.

The trade-off this involved should be weighed honestly rather than concealed. Accessibility was bought at some cost in literal fidelity; the later translators who went directly to the Greek recovered, in full, much of what St. Theophan had paraphrased or abridged (Ware 1979; Philokalia, en.wikipedia). Yet the gain ran the other way and was decisive in its time: his recension reached incomparably more readers, and reached them far sooner, than any scrupulously literal rendering then could have. The from-the-Greek recovery is a genuine and necessary correction; but it presupposes, and was made possible by, the appetite for the prayer of the heart that his more accessible version had first awakened. To put the school of the heart within reach of the ordinary believer at the very hour when the ordinary believer could at last read it — this is the heart of his editorial vision, and the form in which the hesychast inheritance descended to the modern Orthodox world.

Caution Before the Physical Methods

If accessibility explains the additions and the rearrangement, pastoral caution explains the omissions. St. Theophan believed that the explicit psycho-physical techniques of prayer — the prescribed posture, the gaze directed toward the heart, the regulation or restraint of the breath — were perilous when practiced without a living guide, apt to produce prelest (spiritual delusion) and even to harm the body. Hence his readiness to omit or soften the passages in which the Fathers set them out (Ware 1979; on the omissions, see Translating the Dobrotolyubie).

This is no isolated editorial quirk; it is the very same caution that governs his teaching on the Jesus Prayer (see The Prayer of the Heart). His settled counsel was that the Fathers’ physical methods “are not suitable for everyone: indeed without a personal director they are actually dangerous. It is better not to try them” (a position represented in St. Theophan’s teaching on the Jesus Prayer; orthodoxprayer.org). The editor and the spiritual director are here one man: what he advised in his letters of direction, he enacted in his redaction of the Fathers. To hand an unguided reader a precise breathing technique was, in his eyes, to hand him a tool more likely to wound than to heal — and so the editor withheld it. The aim of accessibility and the practice of caution are thus not in tension but are two faces of the same pastoral realism: give the reader what will help him, and keep back what, ungoverned, will hurt him.

The Tension and the Critique

It would be dishonest to present St. Theophan’s editorial vision without registering the cost that later readers found in it. Precisely because he had paraphrased and omitted, some came to prefer to go behind his Russian to the Greek itself. The complete English Philokalia of Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware (1979 onward) was translated from the Greek, not from St. Theophan’s Russian, with the conscious aim of recovering in full what his recension had abridged or softened (Philokalia, en.wikipedia; Ware 1979). For that scholarly project, the free paraphrase was an obstacle to be gone around.

And yet the historically decisive fact runs the other way. The earlier and far more influential English gateway to the Philokalia — the Faber anthologies translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart (1951) and Early Fathers from the Philokalia (1954) — were rendered from St. Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolyubie, not from the Greek (Philokalia, en.wikipedia; Kadloubovsky and Palmer, front matter). For a generation, the Philokalia as the English-speaking world knew it was St. Theophan’s Philokalia. His editorial vision did not merely produce a Russian book; it shaped the very text through which much of the West first encountered the prayer of the heart (see Influence and Translations). The later return to the Greek is a correction that presupposes the reach his version had already achieved.

The Contrast with Brianchaninov

St. Theophan’s editorial temperament stands out most clearly when set beside that of his great contemporary, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov. Ignatius was the more austere and strictly patristic-citational editor and teacher, anchoring his counsel in close, sourced quotation of the Fathers; St. Theophan was the more freely adaptive and pastoral, willing to paraphrase, to rearrange, and to address the ordinary reader in his own idiom (see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov; Influence and Translations, where the comparison is developed at length). Neither approach is the simple superior of the other; together they mark the two poles of nineteenth-century Russian patristic transmission — the rigorist and the accommodating — and the Russian Church canonized both. The contrast throws St. Theophan’s choices into relief: where Ignatius would preserve and cite, Theophan would render and adapt, each according to a different judgment of what best served the reader’s salvation.

Translation as Theology

At the root of all this lies a conviction about the Fathers themselves. For St. Theophan they were not antiquities to be transcribed with curatorial fidelity but a living medicine for souls, and the editor’s whole task was to make the medicine take — to compound it, where necessary, so that the patient could actually receive it. The willingness to expand, to rearrange, to paraphrase, and to withhold the dangerous dose all follow from this single premise: that a text of the Fathers exists to heal, and that fidelity to its purpose can sometimes require liberty with its letter.

This editorial theology is continuous with his anthropology. St. Theophan taught that the human person must be awakened in the spirit, that deepest center where the soul meets God, and that all ascetic labor and all reading of the Fathers is ordered to that awakening (see The Heart as Center). An anthology of the Fathers, on this view, is itself an instrument of that awakening — which is why its form must be governed not by the antiquarian’s scruple but by the physician’s intent. His Dobrotolyubie is, in the end, the editorial expression of a whole understanding of what the Christian life is for.

Seen in this light, even the most contested of his decisions — the omission and softening of the psycho-physical passages — belongs to a consistent whole rather than to a failure of nerve before the tradition. He did not doubt the techniques; he doubted their safety in untrained hands, and he ranked the reader’s good above completeness of transcription. The same hierarchy of values runs through the additions, the prefaces, the paraphrase, and the omissions alike: the text serves the soul, and the editor serves the text only insofar as it serves the soul. It is this unifying judgment, and not any single liberty taken with the Greek, that constitutes St. Theophan’s editorial vision.

References

Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). Introduction, in G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. London: Faber & Faber, 1979. (St. Theophan’s additions, omissions, and paraphrase; the complete English edition translated from the Greek.)
Philokalia. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philokalia). (The 1951 and 1954 Kadloubovsky/Palmer anthologies translated from St. Theophan’s Russian; the 1979 complete edition translated from the Greek.)
Kadloubovsky, E., and G. E. H. Palmer, trans. Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart (1951) and Early Fathers from the Philokalia (1954). London: Faber & Faber. (Front matter identifying St. Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolyubie as the source text.)
orthodoxprayer.org, St. Theophan / Jesus Prayer page. (St. Theophan’s stance that the Fathers’ physical methods “are not suitable for everyone: indeed without a personal director they are actually dangerous. It is better not to try them.”)
theophaneia.org. (St. Nikodemos’s preface on Philokalic spirituality as the inheritance of every Christian; St. Theophan’s pastoral, lay-directed aim.)
predanie.ru, article on the five volumes of St. Theophan’s Dobrotolyubie. (The free-paraphrase character; rearrangement by author with biographical prefaces, in service of accessibility.)