The Enduring Influence

Why did a thousand-page folio of Byzantine ascetic texts, compiled by two eighteenth-century Athonite monks, become one of the most influential spiritual books of the modern world? This closing assessment weighs the Philokalia’s extraordinary reach — across four languages, two and a half centuries, and the boundaries of Orthodoxy itself — and asks what it offers, and what it demands, of the modern search for prayer.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Measure of the Influence

The bare facts of the Philokalia’s reach are remarkable. A single Greek edition of 1782, quietly published at Venice and at first little noticed in the Greek world, became within a generation, through St. Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie (1793), the seed of a vast Russian spiritual revival — the rebirth of eldership, the flowering of Optina, the recovery of the Jesus Prayer (see The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie). Through St. Theophan’s Russian version (1877–1889) and The Way of a Pilgrim it reached a mass readership; through the twentieth-century translations it crossed into the West and beyond the Orthodox Church; through Stăniloae’s Romanian Filocalia and the diaspora recovery of Palamas it helped shape the whole renaissance of modern Orthodox theology (see The Modern Philokalia). Metropolitan Kallistos Ware could reasonably call it one of the most influential works, spiritually and theologically, in the recent history of the Orthodox Church, and few would dispute the judgment (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015).

Why It Traveled

Several qualities help explain why the book proved so portable and so fertile. First, it is practical rather than polemical: it is not tied to the controversies of any one age but describes an interior path that any serious Christian, in any century, can walk — which is why each new age and language found it not dated but immediately usable (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Second, it is comprehensive: by gathering eleven centuries of witnesses to one tradition, it offers not one author’s system but the massed testimony of the whole hesychast inheritance, an authority no single treatise could carry (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; see A Map of the Inner Life). Third, it addresses a perennial hunger — the desire for real, experiential knowledge of God, for a prayer that is more than words — which the modern world, for all its distraction, has not lost but sharpened (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). And fourth, it came, again and again, joined to living teachers — Paisius, the Optina elders, the Athonite fathers — who made its cold text a living fire (see Reading the Philokalia).

The Philokalia and the Modern Search for Prayer

The Philokalia’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century appeal is inseparable from a wider phenomenon: the modern search, inside and outside the churches, for contemplative depth. In an age of noise, distraction, and the felt shallowness of much religious life, the Philokalia offers something austere and concrete — a tradition of silence, attention, and inner prayer, with a serious anthropology of the heart and a real discipline for the transformation of the person (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). It has drawn not only Orthodox but Catholic and Protestant contemplatives, and readers with no church at all, precisely because it addresses the interior life with a seriousness and specificity that much modern spirituality lacks (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; on the Western reception, see The English Philokalia).

This wide appeal is also, as the preceding file argued, a danger. The Philokalia can be mistaken for a technology of experience — a set of methods to produce inner states — and torn from the whole life of repentance, humility, sacramental communion, and obedience within which its authors set it (see Reading the Philokalia). Read so, it can mislead; read whole, within the Church and under guidance, it is a sure guide. The book’s modern popularity thus cuts both ways: it is a sign of a real hunger, and a standing occasion for the tradition to insist, once more, that the prayer of the heart is a gift of grace given to the humble and repentant, not a prize seized by technique (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; the constant emphasis of the Russian teachers, Ignatius Brianchaninov and the Neptic Revival).

A Sober Assessment

What, in the end, should be said of the Philokalia’s place? A sober assessment would hold together several things. It is, first, a genuine treasure — the single most complete gathering of the Orthodox tradition of inner prayer, and by common consent one of the great spiritual books of the Christian East (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). It is, second, a demanding treasure: not a devotional miscellany but a rigorous and at points perilous guide to a whole way of life, which asks of its reader ascetic struggle, humility, and submission to the Church’s discipline, and which warns repeatedly against its own misuse (see Reading the Philokalia). It is, third, a living book: its history is not a closed chapter but an ongoing transmission, still being translated, still being read under Athonite and parish guidance, still shaping Orthodox theology and spirituality in the present (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; see The Philokalic Renaissance).

The deepest reason for its endurance may be the simplest. The Philokalia describes, from a hundred angles and across eleven centuries, one thing that does not change: the way a human heart is purified and united to God through watchful, unceasing prayer in the Name of Jesus (see The Hesychast Heart). Because that reality is perennial — because the human vocation to see God and be transfigured in His light is not a period style but the abiding truth of the Christian life — the book that maps it has never gone out of date, and shows no sign of doing so. From the manuscripts of the Holy Mountain to the modern reader’s hands, the Philokalia continues to do what its compilers hoped: to draw those who take it up toward the love of the true beauty, which is God Himself (see The Love of the Beautiful).

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. (The Philokalia’s influence and reach; its appeal to the modern search for prayer; the dangers of its misuse; the assessment of its place.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Philokalia’s fertility across ages and languages; the Western and modern reception; the ongoing transmission.)
  • Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vols. 1–5. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–2023. (The anthology whose enduring influence is assessed.)