The Love of the Beautiful

The title Philokalia is a Greek compound meaning “love of the beautiful” or “love of the good” — the beauty being the beauty of holiness and of God. The book so named is an anthology of the “neptic” (watchful) fathers, gathered around a single practical theme: the guarding of the heart and the unceasing prayer of the Name of Jesus.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word and Its Beauty

The Greek word philokalia (φιλοκαλία) is built from philia, love, and kallos, the beautiful — “love of the beautiful.” In classical Greek it could mean love of the fine or the good, even a taste for elegance; in the Christian ascetic vocabulary that the compilers inherited, the “beauty” in view is the beauty of God and of the soul restored to the divine image, the kalon that is at once the beautiful and the good (Kallistos Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012, on the meaning of the title). The title thus announces a program: the texts within it are gathered because they teach the love of true beauty — the beauty of holiness, of virtue, and of the vision of God — and the way by which a soul disfigured by the passions is made beautiful again.

The word was not coined for this book. An earlier and famous Philokalia — the Philocalia of Origen — had been compiled in the fourth century by St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory the Theologian as an anthology of choice passages from Origen (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, noting the precedent). When St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth gave the name to their eighteenth-century collection, they placed it deliberately in this tradition of the florilegium — the “anthology,” literally a “gathering of flowers” — a genre of Byzantine spiritual literature in which choice texts of the fathers are excerpted and arranged for edification (John Anthony McGuckin, “The Making of the Philokalia: A Tale of Monks and Manuscripts,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., 2012, on the florilegic genre). The Philokalia is, in form, a gathering of the most beautiful and useful texts on prayer that its compilers could find in the manuscripts of Mount Athos and beyond.

The Full Title and the Neptic Fathers

The book’s own title page states its subject more fully than the single word does. The 1782 Venice edition is entitled Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers, gathered from our holy and God-bearing fathers, in which, through the philosophy of the practical and contemplative life, the intellect (nous) is purified, illumined, and made perfect (from the Greek title page, Φιλοκαλία τῶν ἱερῶν νηπτικῶν, Venice, 1782; translated and discussed in the English Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, Faber, 1979, Introduction). Two things stand out in that title. First, the subject is the neptic fathers. Second, the aim is a threefold movement of the nous — purification, illumination, perfection — which is the classical Orthodox scheme of the spiritual ascent.

Nepsis (νῆψις) is the key word. It means “wakefulness,” “watchfulness,” or “sobriety” — the alert, vigilant attention of a soul that guards the thoughts entering the heart, as a watchman guards a gate. It is drawn from the New Testament exhortations to “be sober, be watchful” (1 Peter 5:8; cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:6), and the fathers gathered in the Philokalia are called neptikoi, the watchful ones, because this vigilant guarding of the heart is the discipline they all teach (Ware, Introduction, English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, on nepsis as the central concept; cf. St. Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness, in the Philokalia, vol. 1). Metropolitan Kallistos Ware calls nepsis “probably the single most important concept” in the whole anthology, and the Philokalia is often described, in shorthand, simply as “the book of the neptic fathers” (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). To read the Philokalia is to be trained in this watchfulness: to learn to observe the first movements of a thought (logismos) before it becomes an image, an assent, and a passion, and to meet it with the Name of Jesus.

An Anthology, Not a Treatise

It follows from its title and genre that the Philokalia is not a single treatise with a single argument, nor a systematic theology, nor even a continuous narrative like The Ladder of Divine Ascent. It is an anthology: a collection of some three dozen separate works, by around thirty named authors, written across eleven centuries, excerpted and arranged by the compilers (the English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, Introduction, on the character and scope of the collection; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). Its texts differ in date, in genre, in difficulty, and even in the precision of their language: some are brief “centuries” of one hundred numbered sentences for meditation, others are letters, treatises, or questions and answers.

This anthological character is essential to understanding the book. It means that the Philokalia has no single “argument” to be summarized, but rather a common spirit and a common practice running through very different texts (see A Map of the Inner Life). It also means that the compilers exercised real editorial judgment — in what they chose, what they left out, and how they arranged and attributed the pieces (see Nikodemos and Makarios; The Arrangement and the Texts). One consequence is that some works appear under the name the manuscript tradition had given them rather than that of their true author: the treatise On Prayer: 153 Texts, printed in the Philokalia under the name of St. Neilos, is now generally recognized to be the work of Evagrius Ponticus, whose name had become suspect after the condemnations associated with the Fifth Ecumenical Council [Disputed: the attribution — the Philokalia follows the manuscripts in ascribing *On Prayer* to St. Neilos of Ancyra, but modern scholarship attributes it to Evagrius Ponticus; see the discussion in [The Authors from Antony to Palamas](../03-the-contents/the-authors-from-antony-to-palamas.md) and I. Hausherr's demonstration cited there] (the English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, note to the text on prayer; on the Evagrian attribution, see the discussion in Section 03).

Why “Beautiful”

Why call a manual of ascetic struggle — of fasting, vigil, the war against thoughts, and the tears of repentance — a book about beauty? The answer lies in the Orthodox conviction that holiness is beauty and that the purified heart is the truly beautiful thing. The fathers of the Philokalia do not treat asceticism as an end in itself; they treat it as the removal of what disfigures the soul, so that the divine image in which the human being was made may shine out again and the “beauty” of the soul be restored (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the title’s theological sense). The goal of all the watchfulness the book teaches is the vision of God and the transfiguration of the person in the light of His beauty — the deification (theosis) that is the horizon of the whole collection (see Nepsis, Theosis, and the Vision of Light; and Theosis). The title is therefore not decorative but doctrinal: the Philokalia is the “love of the beautiful” because it teaches the way to the source of all beauty, and the making-beautiful of the soul that walks it.

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 nepsis, the scope of the collection, and the note on the On Prayer attribution.)
Φιλοκαλία τῶν ἱερῶν νηπτικῶν [Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers]. Compiled by Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth. Venice: Antonio Bortoli, 1782. (The title page and its statement of the book’s aim.)
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. (The meaning of the title; nepsis; the Philocalia of Origen precedent.)
McGuckin, John Anthony. “The Making of the Philokalia: A Tale of Monks and Manuscripts.” In Bingaman and Nassif, eds., 2012. (The florilegic genre and the sources.)
Scripture: 1 Peter 5:8; 1 Thessalonians 5:6 (the New Testament roots of nepsis).