Theophan the Recluse and the Russian Dobrotolyubie

St. Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894) produced the most influential of all the pre-modern editions of the Philokalia: a five-volume Russian Dobrotolyubie (1877–1889), rendered not into archaic Slavonic but into living Russian, and considerably enlarged beyond the Greek original. Theophan was, however, a deliberate and interpretive editor: he added many texts the Greek had not contained and omitted or softened others — most notably the physical technique of the Jesus Prayer — choices that have been both praised and questioned.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

A Philokalia in Living Russian

St. Theophan the Recluse — Georgy Govorov, sometime bishop of Tambov and then of Vladimir, who resigned his see to live as a recluse at the Vysha Hermitage — undertook in his years of seclusion a vast labor of spiritual writing and translation, at the center of which stood his Russian Dobrotolyubie, published in five volumes between 1877 and 1889 (on Theophan and the dates of the Russian Dobrotolyubie, see Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012; the biographical facts are treated in St. Theophan the Recluse). Theophan’s own life and teaching are deferred to his collection; the concern here is his edition of the Philokalia and the editorial mind behind it.

The first and most consequential of Theophan’s choices was linguistic. St. Paisius’s Dobrotolyubie was in Church Slavonic — sacred, venerable, and, for most nineteenth-century Russians, hard to read (see Paisius Velichkovsky and the Slavonic Philokalia). Theophan rendered the whole into contemporary Russian, deliberately making the Philokalic tradition accessible to educated laypeople and ordinary clergy, not only to monks (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on Theophan’s Russian version and its accessibility). This democratizing of the text is one reason the Russian Dobrotolyubie had so wide an influence and became, for the Russian-speaking world, the Philokalia.

An Editor, Not a Mere Translator

Theophan did not simply translate the Greek Philokalia into Russian. He reconceived the collection, and his edition differs substantially from the original in both content and, at points, in wording. Three kinds of editorial intervention stand out.

Additions. Theophan greatly enlarged the collection. He included many ascetic and neptic texts that the Greek Philokalia had not contained — drawing on the wider patristic corpus available to him — so that his five volumes hold considerably more than Nikodemos and Makarios had gathered. Among the most important additions is a much fuller representation of St. Isaac the Syrian, the great seventh-century mystic of the East Syrian tradition, whom the Greek Philokalia had barely included but who is central to the Russian ascetic sensibility (on Theophan’s additions and the expanded scope of the Russian Dobrotolyubie, Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). The Russian Dobrotolyubie is thus not a translation of the Greek Philokalia but a new, larger anthology built upon it.

Omissions and abridgements. At the same time, Theophan left out or condensed material he judged unsuitable. Most significantly, he was wary of the physical “method” of the Jesus Prayer — the instructions on breathing, posture, and the location of the attention in the heart found in Nikephoros the Monk, Gregory of Sinai, and the text under St. Symeon’s name — and he abridged, omitted, or heavily qualified this material in his edition, out of concern that readers without a spiritual guide would misuse the technique and fall into delusion (prelest) [Disputed: the character and wisdom of Theophan's editorial alterations. That Theophan omitted or softened the psychosomatic technique of the Jesus Prayer is well attested (Ware, "St Nikodimos and the Philokalia," 2012, notes his caution about the physical method). Whether this was a prudent pastoral safeguard for a lay readership, or an unwarranted alteration that obscured part of the authentic hesychast tradition, is judged differently: some commend Theophan's caution as responsible editing for a wide audience, while others (and the modern trend of translation, including the English Philokalia, which restores the full texts) prefer to present the tradition entire and let it be read under guidance. The compendium reports the alteration and the two assessments and does not adjudicate.] (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on Theophan’s caution about the physical method; on the technique itself, see The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart).

Reworking. More broadly, Theophan sometimes paraphrased rather than translated closely, smoothing and clarifying the sometimes difficult Greek for his readers, and occasionally adjusting emphases in line with his own pastoral theology of prayer (the general character of Theophan’s method is discussed in Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). His edition is, in this sense, a work of interpretation as much as of transmission — which is both its strength (its clarity and accessibility) and the ground of the reservations about it.

Theophan’s Own Teaching on Prayer

Theophan’s editorial choices were governed by a definite pastoral theology of the Jesus Prayer, which he set out in his own voluminous letters and treatises on prayer (deferred to St. Theophan the Recluse). He taught prayer as an inward movement in degrees — from oral prayer, to mental prayer, to the prayer of the heart in which mind and heart are united — and he insisted that what matters is not any bodily technique but the standing of the mind before God in the heart with reverence and attention (on Theophan’s teaching of the degrees of prayer, the standard accounts; cf. Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). For Theophan, the “descent of the mind into the heart” was to be sought through attention, humility, and the grace of God, and the mechanical aids were at best secondary and at worst dangerous. His edition of the Dobrotolyubie reflects this conviction throughout: it is a Philokalia shaped to form lay and monastic readers in interior prayer safely, under the eye of a cautious pastor.

The Most Widely Used Philokalia

For all the questions about its fidelity, Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolyubie became the most widely read form of the Philokalia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was Theophan’s Russian text — not the Greek — that lay behind the Jesus Prayer as popularized in The Way of a Pilgrim (see The Way of a Pilgrim), and it was from Theophan’s Russian, not the Greek original, that the first substantial English selections were made in the 1950s by Kadloubovsky and Palmer (see The English Philokalia). For the better part of a century, when the world read “the Philokalia,” it was very often Theophan’s expanded and edited Russian version that it read (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the reach of the Russian Dobrotolyubie). Alongside Theophan, the other great voice of the nineteenth-century Russian neptic recovery was St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, whose related but distinct transmission 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. (Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolyubie, 1877–1889; the rendering into living Russian; the additions, including Isaac the Syrian; the omission and softening of the physical method; the reach of the Russian version.)
  • 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 relation of the Greek, Slavonic, and Russian editions; the restoration of the full texts in the English translation.)
  • Kadloubovsky, E., and G. E. H. Palmer, trans. Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. (Translated from Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolyubie; evidence of the reach of the Russian text.)