Nikodemos and Makarios

The Philokalia was compiled by two saints of the eighteenth-century Greek Church: St. Makarios of Corinth (1731–1805), who gathered and selected the texts, and St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809), who edited them, wrote the prefaces, and saw the book through the press. It was first printed at Venice in 1782 — a single folio volume of over a thousand pages, the fruit of their labor over the manuscripts of Mount Athos.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

Two Saints and a Book

The Philokalia is the joint work of two men, and the division of labor between them is reasonably well attested. St. Makarios Notaras, metropolitan of Corinth (1731–1805), a member of the distinguished Notaras family who had resigned his see and withdrawn to a life of ascetic retirement, was the collector: it was he who searched out the manuscripts, chose the texts, and conceived the plan of the anthology, drawing especially on the great library of the monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos and other Athonite collections (Kallistos Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012; John Anthony McGuckin, “The Making of the Philokalia: A Tale of Monks and Manuscripts,” in the same volume). St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain (1749–1809), the younger man and the greater scholar, was the editor: he prepared the texts for the press, corrected them, supplied the introductory notices to each author, and wrote the general preface that frames the whole (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012).

The full life of St. Nikodemos — his birth on Naxos as Nicholas Kallivourtsis, his monastic tonsure on Athos, and his vast literary output, which besides the Philokalia includes the Evergetinos, the treatise Concerning Frequent Communion, the Rudder (Pedalion) of the canons, and editions of St. Symeon the New Theologian and others — is treated in his own collection and is not repeated here (see St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite). What matters for the Philokalia is that its editor was among the most learned monks of his age, at home in the manuscript tradition of the Holy Mountain, and animated by the conviction that the neptic fathers held a treasure the Church of his day had half-forgotten (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; on Nikodemos’s learning, McGuckin, “The Making of the Philokalia,” 2012).

The Manuscripts of the Holy Mountain

The raw material of the Philokalia was the manuscript heritage of Mount Athos. The texts the compilers gathered had for the most part never been printed; they survived in codices, some ancient and some copied and recopied, in the libraries of the twenty ruling monasteries and their dependencies. Makarios and Nikodemos worked over these manuscripts — comparing copies, choosing readings, and deciding what to excerpt — and the result reflects both the riches and the limits of what Athos held (McGuckin, “The Making of the Philokalia,” 2012, on the manuscript basis; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). It is a book born of the Holy Mountain: gathered from its libraries, shaped by its ascetic life, and carrying its hesychast tradition into print for the first time (see Mount Athos).

Because the compilers depended on the manuscripts, they also inherited the manuscripts’ attributions — including their errors. The most famous is the treatise On Prayer: 153 Texts, which the Greek manuscripts, and following them the Philokalia, ascribe to St. Neilos of Ancyra, but which modern scholarship attributes to Evagrius Ponticus, whose name the tradition had suppressed after his association with Origenism [Disputed: the attribution of *On Prayer* — St. Neilos in the Philokalia and its manuscripts; Evagrius Ponticus in modern scholarship, following I. Hausherr; see [The Authors from Antony to Palamas](../03-the-contents/the-authors-from-antony-to-palamas.md)] (English Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, Faber, 1979, note to the text). The compilers’ choices of arrangement, attribution, and inclusion were real editorial acts, and the book bears their stamp (see The Arrangement and the Texts).

The 1782 Venice Edition

The finished book was printed in 1782 not on Athos — which had no press — but at Venice, then a great center of Greek printing for the Orthodox under Ottoman rule, at the press of Antonio Bortoli (the title page of the Philokalia, Venice, 1782; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). The financing came from a lay patron, the Wallachian prince John Mavrogordato, whose support made the costly folio possible (McGuckin, “The Making of the Philokalia,” 2012, on the patronage). The book appeared as a single large volume of over a thousand pages — the English translators note the original ran to some 1,200 folio pages of dense Greek — bearing the long title that names its subject as the “holy neptic fathers” and its aim as the purification, illumination, and perfection of the intellect (English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, Introduction, on the physical book and its title).

A notable feature of the first edition is its reticence about its own makers: the names of Makarios and Nikodemos appear nowhere on the title page, and the general preface is unsigned, in keeping with the monastic reticence about authorship — though their identity was never in serious doubt and is confirmed by the wider evidence of their lives and other works (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, noting the anonymity of the first edition). The 1782 Venice text is the editio princeps, the ancestor of every later edition; a second Greek edition appeared at Athens in 1893, and the standard modern Greek edition, in five volumes, was published in Athens in 1957–1963 (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the later Greek editions).

Companions of the Same Labor

The Philokalia was not an isolated project but the greatest of a cluster of books that Makarios and Nikodemos, with their circle, brought to press within a few years, all serving the same program of return to the Fathers and renewal of the Church’s inner life. In the same period they published the Evergetinos (1783), a large anthology of patristic ascetic teaching arranged by theme, and the treatise Concerning Frequent Communion (1783), which argued for the restoration of frequent reception of the Eucharist (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; on the Kollyvades publications, see The Kollyvades Movement). These books share a single vision, and the Philokalia is best understood as its centerpiece: a return to the sources of Orthodox spirituality, offered to an age its compilers judged to be in need of exactly that recovery. The story of that vision — the Kollyvades revival — is the subject of the companion file.

See Also

References

  • 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 compilers and their roles; the 1782 Venice edition; the anonymity of the first edition; the later Greek editions; the companion publications.)
  • McGuckin, John Anthony. “The Making of the Philokalia: A Tale of Monks and Manuscripts.” In Bingaman and Nassif, eds., 2012. (The manuscript basis; the Vatopedi library; the Mavrogordato patronage.)
  • 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 physical book, its title, and the On Prayer attribution.)
  • Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers. Comp. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth. Venice: Antonio Bortoli, 1782. (The editio princeps.)