The Authors from Antony to Palamas

The Philokalia gathers the writings of some thirty authors across eleven centuries, from the fourth-century desert to the fourteenth-century hesychasts of Athos. This file walks that span — Antony, Evagrius (printed under the name of St. Neilos), Mark the Ascetic, Diadochos of Photiki, Maximus the Confessor, Hesychios, Philotheos, Symeon the New Theologian, Nikephoros, Gregory of Sinai, and Gregory Palamas — noting where the guide defers a major figure to his own collection, and where the attribution of a text is disputed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Eleven Centuries in One Book

The Philokalia describes itself as a gathering of texts “written between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries,” and this vast chronological span is one of its defining features (English Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, Faber, 1979, Introduction). Its authors are not a school in the narrow sense; they are the successive witnesses of a single tradition of watchful, inner prayer, from its roots in the Egyptian desert to its flowering in the Palamite hesychasm of late Byzantium. To read the anthology from beginning to end is to travel that tradition’s whole length. The compilers arranged the texts in a roughly chronological order (see The Arrangement and the Texts); the survey below follows the same broad line.

The Fourth and Fifth Centuries: The Desert Roots

The Philokalia opens in the world of the desert fathers (see The Desert Fathers). It begins with texts under the name of St. Antony the Great, the father of monasticism, though the Exhortations attributed to him here are of uncertain authorship and reflect a somewhat Stoic-philosophical cast that has raised doubts about the ascription [Disputed: the opening texts attributed to St. Antony are of contested authorship; the English translators note that they may not be authentically Antony's and stand somewhat apart from the rest of the collection in tone (English *Philokalia*, vol. 1, 1979, note to the Antony texts)]. There follow works by St. Isaiah the Solitary and St. Evagrios — and here lies the anthology’s most famous attribution problem.

Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399), the brilliant systematizer of desert spirituality whose theology of the intellect and of pure prayer underlies much of the whole tradition, had been posthumously condemned for his Origenist speculations in the sixth century, and his name became suspect. Much of his ascetic writing survived only because it circulated under other names. In the Philokalia his great treatise On Prayer: 153 Texts is printed not under his own name but under that of St. Neilos of Ancyra (St. Neilos the Ascetic), following the manuscript tradition [Disputed: the authorship of *On Prayer: 153 Texts*. The Philokalia and its Greek manuscripts ascribe it to St. Neilos of Ancyra; modern scholarship, following the demonstration of Irénée Hausherr (*Les leçons d'un contemplatif: le Traité de l'Oraison d'Évagre le Pontique*, Paris, 1960), attributes it to Evagrius Ponticus. The English translators print it under Neilos as in the Greek Philokalia but note the Evagrian authorship (English *Philokalia*, vol. 1, 1979). The compendium reports the attribution as disputed and does not collapse it.]. This case is emblematic of how the Philokalia inherited its texts: through a living manuscript tradition that carried both the writings and their sometimes mistaken labels (see Nikodemos and Makarios).

Two fifth-century authors of the first rank follow. St. Mark the Ascetic (Mark the Monk) contributes treatises on the spiritual law, on repentance, and on baptism, prized for their teaching that grace is given in baptism and unveiled through the keeping of the commandments (English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, on Mark). St. Diadochos of Photiki (fifth century), bishop in Epirus, contributes On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts, one of the most influential texts in the whole collection: it is a decisive early witness to the invocation of the Name of Jesus and to the doctrine that grace, after baptism, dwells in the depths of the heart (St. Diadochos, On Spiritual Knowledge, in the Philokalia, vol. 1; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012, on Diadochos’s importance for the Jesus Prayer).

The Sixth and Seventh Centuries: Gaza, Sinai, and Maximus

The anthology continues with the fathers of the Gaza tradition, Sts. Barsanuphius and John and St. Dorotheos of Gaza (in some texts), and with the Sinaite tradition, including St. Hesychios the Priest of the monastery of the Burning Bush at Sinai, whose On Watchfulness and Holiness is one of the classic texts of nepsis — a sustained treatise on the guarding of the intellect and the unceasing remembrance of Jesus (St. Hesychios, On Watchfulness and Holiness, in the Philokalia, vol. 1; see The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart).

Towering over this stretch of the collection is St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), the greatest theologian in the Philokalia and one of the greatest in the Orthodox tradition. He is represented above all by the Four Hundred Texts on Love (the Centuries on Love), together with further “centuries” on theology and on the divine economy and other works — dense, closely reasoned meditations that give the anthology its theological backbone (St. Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, in the Philokalia, vol. 2). Maximus’s thought — his cosmic vision, his doctrine of the logoi, his teaching on love and dispassion — is treated in his own collection and is deferred here (see St. Maximus the Confessor).

The Later Byzantine Centuries: Symeon and the Hesychasts

Moving into the second Byzantine millennium, the Philokalia includes St. John of Damascus, St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic, St. Philotheos of Sinai (whose Forty Texts on Watchfulness belong with Hesychios among the classics of nepsis), St. Elias the Presbyter, St. Theognostos, St. Peter of Damascus — whose long treatise fills much of the third volume — and others.

Then comes St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), the great Byzantine poet of the conscious experience of grace and the vision of the divine light, represented in the Philokalia by texts on faith and on the three methods of prayer (the last of these, The Three Methods of Prayer, is transmitted under his name though its authorship is debated). Symeon’s theology of the felt presence of the Holy Spirit is deferred to his own collection (see St. Symeon the New Theologian).

The anthology culminates in the fourteenth-century hesychast fathers, the immediate context of the Palamite controversy. St. Nikephoros the Monk (Nikephoros the Hesychast), a thirteenth–fourteenth-century Athonite, contributes On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart, a key text for the bodily “method” of the Jesus Prayer — the joining of the invocation to the breath and the turning of the attention into the heart (St. Nikephoros, in the Philokalia, vol. 4; see The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart). St. Gregory of Sinai (c. 1265–1346), who carried the hesychast prayer from Sinai and Crete to Athos and thence to the Balkans, contributes major works on the commandments, on stillness, and on the practice of the Jesus Prayer (St. Gregory of Sinai, in the Philokalia, vol. 4).

The collection closes with the hesychast theologians of the age of the controversy: St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), archbishop of Thessalonica and the defender of the hesychasts against Barlaam, represented by the Topics of Natural and Theological Science and other texts — the theological summit of the anthology, deferred to his own collection (see St. Gregory Palamas); and the fourteenth-century masters St. Kallistos and St. Ignatios Xanthopoulos, whose Century on the hesychast life is one of the fullest practical syntheses of the whole tradition, standing at the very end of the book and drawing its threads together (Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos, in the Philokalia, vol. 4; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the closing texts).

Deference and the Shape of the Whole

This survey has, at every major name, pointed the reader to a fuller treatment elsewhere — Maximus, Symeon, and Palamas to their own collections, the desert authors to the Desert Fathers guide. This is deliberate: the Philokalia collection treats the anthology and its shared tradition, and defers the great individual authors, whose thought exceeds what any excerpt can convey (see Master README, on deference). What the survey shows is the anthology’s essential unity in diversity: an eleven-century arc of witnesses to one inner path, gathered so that the reader may see the whole tradition of watchful prayer laid out in a single book (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). How the compilers arranged that arc, and which of its texts are the greatest, is the subject of the companion file.

References

Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vols. 1–4. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–1995. (The texts of Antony, Isaiah, Evagrios/Neilos, Mark, Diadochos, Hesychios, Maximus, Philotheos, Symeon, Nikephoros, Gregory of Sinai, Palamas, and the Xanthopouloi; the introductory notes on authorship and attribution.)
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 span of authors; Diadochos and the Jesus Prayer; the closing hesychast texts.)
Hausherr, Irénée. Les leçons d’un contemplatif: le Traité de l’Oraison d’Évagre le Pontique. Paris: Beauchesne, 1960. (The demonstration that the Philokalia’s On Prayer under Neilos is the work of Evagrius Ponticus.)