Translating the Dobrotolyubie (1877–1890)

The crowning literary labor of St. Theophan’s reclusion: his five-volume Russian Dobrotolyubie, published 1877–1890 at the expense of the Russian monastery on Mount Athos. Not a literal translation of the Greek Philokalia of Sts. Nikodemos and Makarios but an expanded, rearranged, freely-adapted anthology — adding whole Fathers the Greek had omitted, organizing the corpus by author with biographical prefaces, and deliberately omitting or paraphrasing certain passages — the work that carried Philokalic spirituality to the modern Russian reader and, through its English translators, to the wider world.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Greek Source

The book St. Theophan set out to render into Russian was the Philokalia (Greek Φιλοκαλία, “love of the beautiful/good”), the great anthology of ascetical and mystical texts compiled by St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth and first published at Venice in 1782 (Philokalia, en.wikipedia; Philokalia, orthodoxwiki). Drawn from the Fathers of the Christian East across some eleven centuries and gathered chiefly on Mount Athos, the Greek Philokalia was conceived as a guide to the prayer of the heart, and St. Nikodemos’s own preface had insisted that this interior, watchful spirituality was the inheritance of every baptized Christian and not the preserve of monks and clergy alone — a conviction that St. Theophan would carry directly into his Russian work (theophaneia.org).

The path of the Philokalia into the Slavic world had already been opened before St. Theophan took it up. St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794) had produced a Church Slavonic selection, the Dobrotolyubie, published at Moscow in 1793 (with a second edition in 1822) — a partial rendering rather than a complete one, but the channel through which the Greek anthology first watered Russian and Romanian monasticism (Philokalia, en.wikipedia; orthodoxwiki). St. Theophan’s labor stands as the great Russian sequel to that Slavonic beginning.

Publication, 1877–1890

St. Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolyubie appeared in five volumes between 1877 and 1890, published at Moscow at the expense of the Russian Monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos (OrthoChristian.com/175223.html: “The five volumes of St. Theophan’s translation of the Philokalia were published in 1877–1890”; Philokalia, en.wikipedia). The patronage is itself significant: the Athonite Russian community, the very milieu in which St. Theophan had first immersed himself in the Greek and Slavonic Fathers during his years in the East, underwrote the dissemination of his work to the homeland (see Early Service and the East).

The dating deserves one clarification. [Disputed minor: some tertiary sources cite per-volume dates of 1895–1901 for the Dobrotolyubie; these belong to a later collected reprint issued after the saint’s death (he reposed in 1894), not to the original serial publication, which ran 1877–1890 (OrthoChristian.com/175223.html; Philokalia, en.wikipedia).] The serial run of the reclusion years is the authentic first appearance of the work.

It should also be noted that St. Theophan’s was not the first Russian-language rendering of Philokalic material: an intermediate partial Russian translation had been made by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov (1857), and the two great Russian hierarch-ascetics stand together as the modern transmitters of this tradition (Philokalia, en.wikipedia; see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov). St. Theophan’s distinction was to produce the major, comprehensive, five-volume Russian Philokalia.

A Free Paraphrase, Not a Literal Translation

The decisive scholarly characterization of St. Theophan’s work comes from Bishop Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, in his Introduction to the complete English Philokalia (G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, vol. 1, Faber & Faber, 1979). Ware writes, verbatim:

“Yet another Russian translation, still with the title Dobrotolubiye, was made by Bishop Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894), who included in it several texts not in the original Greek edition, and deliberately omitted or paraphrased certain passages in some of the texts of the Greek edition” (Ware, Introduction, in Palmer, Sherrard & Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, Faber & Faber, 1979).

Two editorial liberties are named here at once — addition and omission/paraphrase — and both are confirmed and amplified by Russian scholarship, which characterizes St. Theophan’s version bluntly as a “free paraphrase” (Russian вольный пересказ), nearer to a substantially expanded and freely-adapted anthology than to a literal translation (predanie.ru, article on the five volumes of the Dobrotolyubie; Добротолюбие, ru.wikipedia).

Rearrangement by Author

St. Theophan organized his Dobrotolyubie largely by author, in a roughly chronological and thematic order, prefacing each writer with a short biographical notice (predanie.ru; Добротолюбие, ru.wikipedia). Here honesty about degree is required: the Greek Philokalia is itself loosely chronological, so the difference is not a wholesale reordering of the corpus but a matter of degree — fuller and more consistent author-blocks, the addition of biographical prefaces, and a steadier grouping of each Father’s material in one place. The effect is of an anthology made more legible and more pastoral, easier for a reader to use as a connected course of reading rather than a treasury to be mined.

The five Russian volumes ran roughly as follows (predanie.ru):

  • Vol. 1 — Antony the Great, Macarius the Great, Abba Isaiah, Mark the Ascetic, Evagrius, John Cassian
  • Vol. 2 — Cassian (on the passions), Hesychios, Nilus of Sinai, Ephrem the Syrian, John Climacus, Barsanuphius and John, Dorotheos, Isaac the Syrian
  • Vol. 3 — Diadochos of Photiki, John of Karpathos, Zosimas, Maximos the Confessor, Thalassios, and others
  • Vol. 4 — given entirely to St. Theodore the Studite
  • Vol. 5 — Symeon the New Theologian, Symeon the Pious, Nikitas Stethatos, Theoleptos, Gregory of Sinai, Nikephoros the Solitary, Gregory Palamas, Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos, Symeon of Thessalonica

What He Added

Several Fathers appear in St. Theophan’s Dobrotolyubie who are not in the Greek Philokalia at all. The confirmed additions include St. Ephrem the Syrian, St. John Climacus, Sts. Barsanuphius and John, Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, St. Theodore the Studite (to whom St. Theophan gave the entire fourth volume), St. Isaac the Syrian (a notable omission from the Greek edition, here restored), and St. Macarius the Great (predanie.ru; Добротолюбие, ru.wikipedia; English reprint volume listings). These additions transform the work from a translation into a genuinely enlarged Russian recension of the Philokalic corpus.

One correction must be stated plainly to avoid a common error: St. Mark the Ascetic and St. Isaiah the Solitary are already present in the Greek Philokalia (vol. 1) and are therefore not new authors introduced by St. Theophan. He may carry fuller selections of their writings, but these are expanded selections of authors the Greek already contained, not fresh additions to the roster (Philokalia, en.wikipedia).

The Psycho-Physical Method: A Careful Divergence

The most theologically sensitive of St. Theophan’s editorial choices concerns the explicit psychosomatic (psycho-physical) method of prayer — the texts prescribing a physical posture, a lowering of the gaze toward the heart or navel, and a regulation or restraint of the breath as aids to the Jesus Prayer. The classic loci are “The Three Methods of Prayer” (attributed to St. Symeon the New Theologian) and the writing of St. Nikephoros the Hesychast (Nikephoros the Monk/Solitary).

Here the documentary record must be reported with precision. The fact of deliberate omission and paraphrase in the Dobrotolyubie is solidly attested by Ware (“deliberately omitted or paraphrased certain passages”; Ware 1979). The more specific claim — that St. Theophan removed the Fathers’ writings on the psychosomatic method out of fear of prelest (spiritual delusion) and bodily harm — is attested by Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, who states that “St. Theophan removed the writings of the Holy Fathers on psychosomatic method from his edition,” though Alfeyev makes this observation chiefly with reference to St. Theophan’s edition of The Way of a Pilgrim (en.wikipedia, The Way of a Pilgrim). [Disputed/inferred: no published passage-level collation has been located proving that the specific breathing texts were cut or softened from the Russian Dobrotolyubie itself, as distinct from his Pilgrim edition. The removal of the psychosomatic material from the Dobrotolyubie is therefore inferred — consonant with Ware’s general statement and with St. Theophan’s well-documented pastoral caution — rather than directly documented by a text-by-text collation (Ware 1979; Alfeyev, in en.wikipedia, The Way of a Pilgrim).] The caution at work here is the same that governs his whole teaching on the Jesus Prayer (see The Prayer of the Heart).

The Paisius Velichkovsky Legacy

St. Theophan’s work stands consciously in the line of St. Paisius Velichkovsky. By his own account he began his translation independently, during his years on Mount Athos and in the Christian East, and then enriched his edition by studying St. Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie once it was available to him; his Russian version expanded the corpus beyond both the Greek and the Slavonic and aimed it explicitly at a broad lay readership — carrying forward St. Nikodemos’s own conviction that Philokalic spirituality belongs to every Christian (theophaneia.org). One distinction guards against a frequent confusion: the wandering narrator of The Way of a Pilgrim carried St. Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie in his knapsack, not St. Theophan’s Russian one — the two must not be conflated (Philokalia, en.wikipedia). St. Theophan’s contribution was thus the broad, modern-Russian, lay-accessible recension that would in turn become, through its translators, the gateway of the Philokalia into English (see Influence and Translations).

See Also

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. (The authoritative scholarly statement that St. Theophan “included in it several texts not in the original Greek edition, and deliberately omitted or paraphrased certain passages.”)
  • Philokalia. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philokalia). (Venice 1782 Greek edition; St. Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie, Moscow 1793/1822; Brianchaninov’s 1857 partial Russian translation; St. Theophan’s five-volume Russian version.)
  • Philokalia. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Philokalia). (Compilation by Sts. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth; Slavonic and Russian transmission.)
  • “St. Theophan the Recluse and the Philokalia.” OrthoChristian.com/175223.html. (“The five volumes of St. Theophan’s translation of the Philokalia were published in 1877–1890.”)
  • Добротолюбие [Dobrotolyubie]. Russian Wikipedia (ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Добротолюбие). (Organization by author with biographical prefaces; characterization as вольный пересказ, “free paraphrase”; the added Fathers.)
  • predanie.ru, article on the five volumes of St. Theophan’s Dobrotolyubie. (Volume-by-volume contents; the added Fathers; the free-paraphrase character.)
  • The Way of a Pilgrim. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_a_Pilgrim). (Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev on St. Theophan’s removal of the psychosomatic-method writings and editing of passages liable to cause prelest, chiefly re the Pilgrim edition.)
  • theophaneia.org. (St. Nikodemos’s preface on Philokalic spirituality as the inheritance of every Christian; St. Theophan’s independent start and use of St. Paisius, and his lay-readership aim.)