The Arrangement and the Texts

How the anthology is put together, and what its greatest pieces are. The compilers arranged the texts in a broadly chronological order by author, and cast much of the material in the Byzantine genre of the “century” — one hundred numbered sentences for meditation. The classics of the collection — Maximus’s Four Hundred Texts on Love, Hesychios’s On Watchfulness and Holiness, Diadochos’s On Spiritual Knowledge, and others — reward slow, repeated reading rather than continuous perusal.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

A Chronological Arrangement

The Philokalia is organized principally by author, and the authors are set in a broadly chronological sequence, so that the reader moves from the fourth-century desert toward the fourteenth-century hesychasts as the book proceeds (English Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, Faber, 1979, Introduction; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012). This arrangement is not perfectly systematic — the compilers followed the state of their manuscripts and their own judgment, and the sequence has some irregularities — but its effect is to display the tradition as a historical development, an unfolding of one teaching across the centuries (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012).

Each author is introduced by a short biographical and bibliographical notice, written by St. Nikodemos, which situates the writer and commends his work (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the editorial apparatus). The modern English edition preserves this chronological structure but redistributes the material across five volumes for convenience, with the great fourteenth-century hesychast texts — Gregory of Sinai, Palamas, the Xanthopouloi — falling in the fourth and fifth volumes (English Philokalia, vols. 4–5, Faber, 1995, 2023). The original 1782 Venice edition presented the whole in a single folio (see Nikodemos and Makarios).

The Genre of the “Century”

A striking number of the Philokalia’s texts share a single literary form: the century (Greek hekatontas), a set of exactly one hundred short numbered paragraphs or aphorisms. Maximus’s texts on love come in four such centuries; Diadochos writes one hundred texts; Hesychios, Thalassios, Maximus’s theological chapters, and many others use the same form (St. Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love; St. Diadochos, On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts, both in the Philokalia, vol. 1; Ware, Introduction, English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, on the “century” form). The genre was a Byzantine commonplace for spiritual teaching, and it shapes how the book must be read: a century is not an essay to be read straight through but a string of concentrated sayings, each meant to be pondered on its own, so that the hundred texts together form a kind of rosary of meditation (Ware, “How the Philokalia is to be read,” in his introductory material and in “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the meditative use of the centuries).

This form is one reason the Philokalia resists being read like an ordinary book. Its most concentrated texts are designed for slow, repeated, prayerful reading — the monastic practice of meditatio, chewing over a short text until it yields its meaning — rather than for rapid comprehension (see Reading the Philokalia). The compilers assumed a reader who would return to the same hundred sentences many times over years, not one who would finish the book and move on.

The Great Texts

Within the anthology, certain works have always stood out as its classics — the texts to which readers and later editors return, and which have most shaped the tradition.

  • St. Maximus the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love (the Centuries on Love). The theological heart of the collection: four centuries on the ascent from the passions through dispassion (apatheia) to love, the greatest of the virtues and the crown of the spiritual life. It is among the most read of all the Philokalic texts and gives the anthology its intellectual weight (St. Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, in the Philokalia, vol. 2; deferred to St. Maximus the Confessor).
  • St. Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness. The classic sustained treatise on nepsis: the guarding of the intellect, the war against thoughts at their first appearance, and the unbroken remembrance of Jesus as the soul’s weapon and light (St. Hesychios, in the Philokalia, vol. 1).
  • St. Diadochos of Photiki, On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination. One hundred texts of extraordinary balance and psychological subtlety, a decisive early witness to the invocation of the Name and to the experience of grace and its withdrawals (St. Diadochos, in the Philokalia, vol. 1).
  • St. Mark the Ascetic, On the Spiritual Law and On Those Who Think They Are Made Righteous by Works. Terse, paradoxical teaching on grace, works, and the hidden gift of baptism (St. Mark, in the Philokalia, vol. 1).
  • St. Gregory of Sinai and Sts. Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos. The great fourteenth-century practical guides to the hesychast life and the Jesus Prayer, standing near the end of the collection and offering its fullest instructions on the prayer of the heart (in the Philokalia, vol. 4; see The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart).

Alongside these stand St. Philotheos of Sinai’s Forty Texts on Watchfulness, St. Peter of Damascus’s long treasury (which alone fills much of the third volume), the texts under St. Symeon the New Theologian’s name on the methods of prayer, and Nikephoros the Monk’s On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart — each a landmark of the tradition (English Philokalia, vols. 3–4, Faber, 1984, 1995).

What the Arrangement Teaches

The shape of the book carries a message of its own. By ordering the texts chronologically and by gathering so many “centuries” of watchfulness and love, the compilers presented the reader not with a system but with a cumulative witness: the same inner path, described again and again, from the desert to Byzantium, in a hundred voices that agree. The arrangement invites the reader to see the consistency of the tradition — to recognize in Hesychios and in Gregory of Sinai, nine centuries apart, the one discipline of the guarded heart and the invoked Name (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the anthology as a display of the tradition’s unity). And the “century” form, with its demand for slow rumination, quietly instructs the reader in how the book is meant to be used: not consumed but prayed, a few sentences at a time, over a lifetime (see Reading the Philokalia).

See Also

References

  • Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vols. 1–5. London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 1981, 1984, 1995, 2023. (The arrangement of the texts; the “century” form; the classic works of Maximus, Hesychios, Diadochos, Mark, Gregory of Sinai, and the Xanthopouloi.)
  • 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 chronological arrangement; Nikodemos’s editorial notices; the meditative reading of the centuries.)