The Philokalic Renaissance
The Philokalia did more than survive into the modern age; it helped shape the twentieth-century renaissance of Orthodox theology. From Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae’s monumental Romanian Filocalia to the Greek and Russian émigré recovery of St. Gregory Palamas and the theology of deification, the neptic tradition moved from the monastery to the center of Orthodox self-understanding — so much so that Metropolitan Kallistos Ware could title his survey of modern Orthodox thought “from the Philokalia to the present.”
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
A Book at the Head of a Revival
One measure of the Philokalia’s modern importance is that Andrew Louth, in the standard English survey of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, dates the whole modern Orthodox revival from it: his book is called Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, and its argument is that the Philokalia and its diffusion — Slavonic, Russian, and Western — form the taproot from which the flowering of modern Orthodox theology grew (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, Introduction). The neptic and hesychast tradition the Philokalia preserved supplied modern Orthodox theologians with an alternative both to Western scholasticism and to Western liberalism: a theology grounded in prayer, in the experience of God, in deification, and in the patristic and Palamite inheritance (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012).
Stăniloae and the Romanian Filocalia
The most monumental modern edition of the Philokalia is the Romanian Filocalia of Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae (1903–1993), arguably the greatest Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century. Stăniloae began publishing his Romanian Filocalia at Sibiu in 1946, with further volumes following in 1947–1948, before Communist repression — including Stăniloae’s own imprisonment — interrupted the work; publication resumed in Bucharest from 1976, and the edition grew to twelve volumes, completed by the early 1990s (on the Romanian Filocalia, its dates, and Stăniloae’s imprisonment, the standard accounts of Stăniloae; and Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Stăniloae’s Filocalia is far more than a translation: he enlarged the collection with additional texts of his own choosing, and above all he furnished it with extensive introductions and copious theological commentaries of his own, so that the Romanian Filocalia is at once an edition of the neptic fathers and a major original theological work (on Stăniloae’s method of enriching the Philokalia with new texts, introductions, and commentaries, the standard accounts; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Stăniloae and the Philokalia). The whole of Stăniloae’s own dogmatic theology is steeped in the Philokalic vision of the world transfigured through prayer and of the human person deified in communion with God.
The Recovery of Palamas and Deification
The other great strand of the Philokalic renaissance was the twentieth-century recovery of St. Gregory Palamas and the theology of deification, carried above all by the Russian emigration and by Greek theologians. In the Russian Paris of the interwar and postwar years, and among their students, theologians such as Vladimir Lossky — whose Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) placed the essence–energies distinction and deification at the heart of Orthodox theology — and Fr. John Meyendorff — whose scholarly rehabilitation of Palamas (A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1959) recovered the hesychast theologian for modern scholarship — made the Palamite and Philokalic tradition central to the Orthodox theological identity (on Lossky and Meyendorff and the recovery of Palamas, Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see Nepsis, Theosis, and the Vision of Light, and St. Gregory Palamas). Because the Philokalia is, as this guide has argued, a Palamite anthology (see The Kollyvades Movement), the twentieth-century return to Palamas was at the same time a return to the Philokalia, and vice versa: the two recoveries were facets of one movement.
The Living Athonite and Elder Tradition
The Philokalic renaissance was not only academic. It was carried, and is carried, by living representatives of the hesychast tradition — the elders of Mount Athos and their spiritual children, in whom the Philokalia is not a text studied but a life lived (see Mount Athos). The twentieth-century Athonite renewal, and the great modern elders associated with it, embody the same neptic tradition the Philokalia anthologizes, and their witness has done as much as any book to commend that tradition to the contemporary Church — these figures being treated in their own collections rather than here (the modern Athonite elders are deferred to their collections; on the Athonite renewal and the Philokalic tradition, Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). The renaissance thus has two faces: the theological recovery in the schools, and the living continuation in the monasteries — the same two faces (book and living teacher) that have marked the Philokalic tradition from the beginning (see The Philokalia Comes to Russia).
An Irony and Its Meaning
There is a striking irony in this history, already noted in this guide. The Philokalia was born of a backward-looking revival — the Kollyvades, defenders of an old rubric against the innovations of their age (see The Kollyvades Movement) — and yet it became the seed of one of the most creative and forward-looking developments in modern Orthodox thought (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The explanation lies in the nature of the tradition the book preserved. Because the Philokalia transmitted not a period style but the perennial core of Orthodox spiritual experience — watchful prayer, the purification of the heart, deification, the vision of the uncreated light — it proved endlessly fertile: each age that returned to it found in it not an antique to be curated but a living source to be drawn from. The “return to the Fathers” turned out to be, again and again, a way forward. From the Greek folio of 1782, through the Slavonic and Russian revivals, to Stăniloae’s Romania and the diaspora recovery of Palamas and the complete English translation, the Philokalia has shown a singular power to renew the spiritual and theological life of the Orthodox Church wherever it has been taken up — a power this guide’s final section considers in its bearing on the search for prayer today.
See Also
- The English Philokalia — the modern translation that carried the book to the West
- Nepsis, Theosis, and the Vision of Light — the Palamite theology the renaissance recovered
- The Kollyvades Movement — the backward-looking revival that produced the book
- The Enduring Influence — the assessment of the book’s power to renew
- St. Gregory Palamas — the theologian at the center of the recovery
References
- Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Philokalia at the head of the modern Orthodox revival; Stăniloae and the Romanian Filocalia; Lossky, Meyendorff, and the recovery of Palamas; the irony of a traditionalist book seeding a creative renaissance.)
- 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 modern reception; the neptic tradition at the center of Orthodox self-understanding.)
- Stăniloae, Dumitru, trans. and comm. Filocalia, 12 vols. Sibiu and Bucharest, 1946–1991. (The Romanian Filocalia; the additional texts, introductions, and commentaries.)
- Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Paris, 1944 (Eng. trans. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957); Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. London: Faith Press, 1964 (French orig. 1959). (The twentieth-century recovery of Palamas and deification.)