A Map of the Inner Life

The Philokalia was compiled not as an archive of ancient texts but as a practical guide — a manual of hesychast prayer and of the purification of the heart, meant to be used. Beneath the diversity of its authors, genres, and eleven centuries there runs a single aim: to lead the reader from the war against the passions, through the acquisition of the virtues, to pure prayer and the vision of God.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

A Practical Book

The compilers of the Philokalia did not think of themselves as antiquarians. In the preface to the 1782 edition, St. Nikodemos presents the book as a remedy offered to a needy age — a treasury of the fathers’ teaching on watchfulness and prayer, brought out of the obscurity of manuscripts that lay “hidden in corners and in the darkness” of the libraries of the Holy Mountain, and set before all who seek salvation (St. Nikodemos, Preface to the Philokalia, Venice, 1782, summarized in Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012). The book is, in intention, a practical work: its purpose is not that its readers should know about prayer but that they should pray, and be transformed.

This practical aim explains a feature that has surprised many later readers: the compilers directed the book not only to monks but, in principle, to Christians living in the world. Nikodemos writes in the preface that the treasures of watchfulness and prayer are offered to all the Orthodox — a claim that would prove consequential, and controversial, since much of the material presupposes monastic conditions and the guidance of an experienced elder [Disputed: how far the Philokalia is meant for laypeople. Nikodemos's 1782 preface offers the book to all Orthodox Christians "living in the world," a striking universalizing claim (Ware, "St Nikodimos and the Philokalia," 2012); but the texts themselves repeatedly warn that their methods are perilous without a spiritual guide, and later editors and commentators — including St. Theophan the Recluse in his Russian recension — were more cautious about placing the higher techniques before beginners (see [Theophan the Recluse and the Russian Dobrotolyubie](../06-the-russian-philokalia/theophan-the-recluse-and-the-russian-dobrotolyubie.md) and [Reading the Philokalia](../09-philokalic-spirituality-today/reading-the-philokalia.md)). The tension between the book's universal offer and its own cautions is a live one.] (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the preface’s universal address and the later editorial caution). Whatever its intended readership, the book is framed throughout as a guide for use, not a text for study.

The Threefold Way

The unity beneath the Philokalia’s diversity is best seen in the pattern of the spiritual life that nearly all its authors share. It is the ancient threefold scheme, taken up from Evagrius and the desert and given its classic Orthodox form: praktike — the active life of ascetic struggle, the purification of the soul from the passions; physike or natural contemplation — the vision of God in and through His creation; and theologia — the direct knowledge of God in prayer, the union of the purified intellect with its Maker (Ware, Introduction, English Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, Faber, 1979, on the threefold pattern; cf. Evagrius, as transmitted in the Philokalia). The 1782 title page states the same movement in the language of purification, illumination, and perfection of the nous (the intellect or spiritual perception). Almost every text in the collection can be located somewhere on this map: the war against the eight (or seven) thoughts, the acquisition of the virtues, the guarding of the heart, the descent of the mind into the heart in prayer, and — at the summit — the illumination of the whole person by the uncreated light.

This shared architecture is what makes the Philokalia a coherent book rather than a mere miscellany. Its authors span from the fourth-century desert to the fourteenth-century hesychasts of Athos, and they differ in vocabulary and emphasis; but they describe, in the compilers’ presentation, a single continuous path (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the underlying unity). St. Maximus the Confessor’s dense theological “centuries,” St. Hesychios’s aphorisms on watchfulness, St. Diadochos of Photiki’s chapters on spiritual knowledge, and St. Gregory of Sinai’s instructions on the Jesus Prayer are, on this reading, so many maps of the same country, drawn from different vantage points (see The Authors from Antony to Palamas).

The Purification of the Heart

At the center of that map stands the heart (kardia). In the Philokalic anthropology — biblical and patristic rather than merely emotional — the heart is the deep center of the person, the meeting-place of intellect, will, and feeling, the place into which the grace of baptism is planted and from which both sin and holiness arise (the English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, Glossary, s.v. “heart”; St. Diadochos of Photiki, On Spiritual Knowledge, in the Philokalia, vol. 1). The whole labor the book teaches is the purification of this heart: the cleansing of it from the passions and the impassioned thoughts that darken it, so that the intellect, gathered out of its dispersion among external things, may “descend into the heart” and there be united to God in unceasing prayer (Ware, Introduction, English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979; see The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart).

This is why the Philokalia gives so much attention to what look like technical matters: the discernment of thoughts (diakrisis logismon), the guarding of the senses, the role of the breath and the bodily posture in prayer, the “return of the mind into the heart.” These are not ends but means to the purification and unification of the person. The goal throughout is the “purity of heart” the Lord blessed — “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8) — which the fathers read as the very definition of the spiritual life’s aim: the cleansed heart is the heart that sees God (St. Diadochos and St. Maximus, in the Philokalia, vols. 1–2; cf. St. John Cassian’s puritas cordis, the desert inheritance the Philokalia carries forward; see The Desert Fathers).

Unity Beneath Diversity

The Philokalia’s coherence is therefore not the coherence of a single author but of a single tradition and a single goal. Its texts were written by hermits and bishops, in Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, Constantinople, and Athos, over more than a thousand years; some are simple and some are among the most difficult in Greek Christian literature. What holds them together is that they all describe, from within, the one path of watchful prayer that leads to the purification of the heart and the vision of God — and that a single pair of editors, working within a single ascetic revival on Mount Athos, judged them all to belong to that path and arranged them to teach it (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; McGuckin, “The Making of the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., 2012). The book is, in the end, less an anthology than a map: a chart of the inner country, compiled from the reports of those who had crossed it, and offered to those who would set out. Its extraordinary later history — the Slavonic, Russian, and English editions that each set off a revival of prayer — is the story of that map being taken up and used (see The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie; The Modern Philokalia).

See Also

References

  • Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (Introduction on the threefold way and the heart; Glossary, s.v. “heart,” “intellect [nous].”)
  • 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. (Nikodemos’s preface; the universal address and the later caution; the unity of the collection.)
  • McGuckin, John Anthony. “The Making of the Philokalia: A Tale of Monks and Manuscripts.” In Bingaman and Nassif, eds., 2012.
  • Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers. Comp. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth. Venice, 1782. (Nikodemos’s preface.)
  • Scripture: Matthew 5:8 (“Blessed are the pure in heart”); the biblical roots of the Philokalic doctrine of the heart.