Reading the Philokalia

The Philokalia is a powerful and a dangerous book, and its own tradition says so. Its higher teaching — the physical methods of the Jesus Prayer, the pursuit of inner experiences — is not meant to be taken up by beginners from the page alone; the neptic fathers, the Russian teachers, and modern commentators alike insist on the guidance of a spiritual father, on humility and repentance as the foundation, and on slow, prayerful reading rather than eager consumption. This file gathers those cautions and asks how the book is rightly read today.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

A Book with a Warning Label

Almost everyone who has commended the Philokalia has, in the same breath, warned about it. The reason is that the book contains detailed instruction in advanced techniques of inner prayer — the coordination of the invocation with the breath, the turning of the attention into the heart, the disciplines that can, rightly used and under grace, lead toward the higher states of prayer, and, wrongly used, toward psychic disturbance or spiritual delusion (plani, Slavonic prelest) (see The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart). The tradition’s word for the great danger — prelest — names precisely the peril of a solitary reader who takes up the methods on his own authority: mistaking imagination, emotion, or the suggestions of the enemy for the grace of God, and being led into pride and delusion (on prelest as the characteristic danger, the Russian teachers, esp. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov; see Ignatius Brianchaninov and the Neptic Revival).

The cautions come from every level of the tradition. The Philokalic authors themselves repeatedly insist that the higher prayer requires an experienced guide and cannot be safely pursued alone (St. Gregory of Sinai and the Xanthopouloi, in the Philokalia, vol. 4). St. Theophan the Recluse was so wary of the physical method that he abridged or omitted it in his Russian edition, judging it unsafe for a general readership (see Theophan the Recluse and the Russian Dobrotolyubie). St. Ignatius Brianchaninov built much of his teaching around warnings against unguided ascent and the pursuit of “experiences” (see Ignatius Brianchaninov and the Neptic Revival). And modern Orthodox teachers, including Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, have consistently repeated the same counsel: the Philokalia is not a do-it-yourself manual (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012, on the need for guidance).

The Need for a Guide

The deepest of these cautions is the insistence on a spiritual father. The whole neptic tradition presupposes the relationship of elder and disciple — the starets who has himself walked the way and can discern the disciple’s condition, distinguish grace from delusion, and give the personal, adapted counsel that no book can give (see Spiritual Direction; and The Philokalia Comes to Russia). This is not incidental to the Philokalia but structural: the book is one half of a whole whose other half is the living teacher, and the entire history of its fruitful transmission — Paisius and his disciples, the Optina elders, the Athonite fathers — has been the history of the book joined to living guidance (see The Philokalic Renaissance). The Way of a Pilgrim itself, the great popularizer, makes the point in narrative form: the pilgrim does not learn the prayer from the Dobrotolyubie alone but from a starets who gives him the book and interprets it (see The Pilgrim and the Jesus Prayer).

The honest difficulty for the modern reader is that such guides are rare, and most who now pick up the Philokalia have no starets to turn to. The tension is real, and the tradition’s universalizing impulse — Nikodemos’s 1782 offer of the book to all Orthodox, laypeople included — sits uneasily beside its insistence on guidance [Disputed: how the Philokalia should be used in the absence of a spiritual father. Some counsel that, lacking an experienced guide, one should confine oneself to the simplest practice of the Jesus Prayer and to reading the Philokalia for general nourishment, avoiding the technical methods altogether (the cautious view of Theophan, Ignatius, and much modern counsel). Others, appealing to Nikodemos's own universal offer of the book, hold that a humble reader, within the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church and with the counsel of a parish priest, may safely draw much from it. The compendium reports the tension and the counsel of caution, and does not presume to resolve a matter that belongs to spiritual direction.] (see A Map of the Inner Life, on Nikodemos’s universal address and the later caution).

Foundations Before Heights

A second, related caution concerns order. The Philokalia’s own architecture puts the purification of the heart before the vision of God — praktike before theoria, the war against the passions before pure prayer (see Nepsis, Theosis, and the Vision of Light). The characteristic error the tradition warns against is inversion: reaching for the heights of contemplative experience while neglecting the foundations of repentance, humility, obedience, the commandments, and the ordinary sacramental life of the Church (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on repentance and humility as the foundation; the constant emphasis of Ignatius Brianchaninov). The Philokalia is not, on its own terms, a shortcut to mystical experience; it is a summons to a whole life of ascetic struggle and prayer, within which the higher gifts are given by grace, in God’s time, and never as the reward of technique.

How It Is Read Today

Given all this, how is the Philokalia rightly read now? The counsel of its modern interpreters converges on a few points. It is read slowly: the “century” form and the density of the texts demand rumination, a few passages returned to over and over, not continuous perusal (see The Arrangement and the Texts). It is read selectively and in order of difficulty: beginners are pointed to the more accessible and foundational texts — Maximus on love, the practical counsels — rather than plunging into the technical methods of the later hesychasts (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). It is read within the Church: as nourishment for a life of prayer, repentance, confession, and communion, under the counsel of a priest or spiritual father where one can be found, and not as an esoteric technique pursued in isolation. And it is read as prayer, not merely as information: the aim is not to master the book but to be formed by it into a person of prayer (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). Read so — slowly, humbly, in order, and in the Church — the Philokalia remains what its compilers intended: not a curiosity but a guide, and one of the surest the tradition possesses.

See Also

• The Enduring Influence — the assessment of the book’s power and reach
• The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart — the methods the cautions concern
• Ignatius Brianchaninov and the Neptic Revival — the great teacher of caution
• Spiritual Direction — the guidance the book requires
• The Arrangement and the Texts — the “century” form and slow reading

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 cautions; the need for a guide; repentance and humility as foundation; how the book should be read today.)
• Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vols. 1 and 4. London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 1995. (The Philokalic authors’ own warnings on the need for guidance; the “century” form.)
• Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus and The Arena, various English editions. (The classic warnings against prelest and unguided ascent; cited as representative.)