The Work
The Philokalia (Philokalia ton Hieron Neptikon - 'Love of the Beautiful Among the Holy Fathers Who Practiced Wakefulness') is a collection of texts by thirty-six Eastern Christian monastic writers composed between the fourth and fifteenth centuries, compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809) and St. Makarios of Corinth (1731-1805), and published in Venice in 1782 by the printer Antonio Bortoli. The collection runs to approximately 1,500 pages in the standard Greek edition.
The Philokalia was not a new composition but a compilation and editing of existing texts, many of which had circulated separately in manuscript form in the monastic tradition of Mount Athos and the Eastern Orthodox world. Nikodimos and Makarios selected texts specifically focused on the inner life of prayer - the purification of the nous (mind/spirit), the practice of hesychia (stillness/inner quiet), and the Jesus Prayer - and organized them in approximate chronological order from the fourth century (Evagrius Ponticus, Antony the Great) to the fourteenth (Gregory Palamas).
A Slavonic translation by Paisios Velichkovsky, published in Moscow in 1793, sparked a widespread renewal of hesychast spirituality in Russia and inspired the anonymous spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim (c. 1880). The complete English translation by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware was published in five volumes by Faber and Faber (London) between 1979 and 1995 and remains the standard English edition.
Biblical Engagement
1 Thessalonians 5:17 ('Pray without ceasing') is the text most frequently cited and most fundamentally at stake in the entire Philokalia. The tradition's central question is: how is unceasing prayer possible for a person who must eat, sleep, work, and engage in ordinary life? The answer developed by the hesychast tradition, drawn primarily from the Desert Fathers and systematized by Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1359), is the practice of the Jesus Prayer - a short, repeated prayer that can be internalized to the point of becoming continuous, synchronizing eventually with the rhythms of breathing and heartbeat.
The Jesus Prayer itself - 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner' - draws on multiple biblical sources: the divine name 'Lord' (Kyrios, the Greek equivalent of the divine name YHWH), the confession 'Jesus Christ, Son of God' from Peter's confession in Matthew 16:16 and the baptismal confession of Acts 8:37, and 'have mercy on me, a sinner' from the prayer of the tax collector in Luke 18:13 ('God be merciful to me a sinner') and the cry of the blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10:47 ('Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me'). The prayer is a distillation of the entire biblical drama: divine identity, christological confession, and penitential supplication compressed into a single formula.
Matthew 6:6 ('But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly') is the basis for the hesychast practice of interior withdrawal - not necessarily physical solitude (though the desert tradition valued physical solitude) but the movement of the nous inward, closing itself to external distractions and opening itself to God in the 'secret place.' Evagrius of Pontus (346-399), the most philosophically sophisticated of the Philokalia's contributors, understood this inner withdrawal as the condition for 'pure prayer' - prayer that is no longer formed by images or concepts but rests in the direct presence of God.
Romans 8:26 ('Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we not know what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered') is the New Testament foundation for the hesychast understanding of prayer as ultimately the Spirit's activity rather than the human person's. The nous must be purified - freed from logismoi (intrusive thoughts) and passions (disordered desires) - in order to become receptive to the Spirit's prayer within. The Philokalia's practical teaching is essentially a pedagogy for this purification.
John 17:21-23 ('That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us... that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me') is the eschatological horizon of the hesychast tradition: theosis (deification, divinization) - the participation of the human person in the divine life that is the ultimate goal of the Christian spiritual journey. The hesychast tradition, and especially Gregory Palamas, understood theosis not as an obliteration of the human person but as the deepening of human-divine union in which the human person becomes a participant in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) while remaining distinct from God.
Key Contributors and Their Biblical Themes
Evagrius Ponticus (346-399) provides the Philokalia's foundational analysis of the inner life: his account of the eight logismoi (intrusive thoughts - gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride, which became the basis for the Western seven deadly sins) is grounded in Psalm 37 and Matthew 15:19. His famous definition of prayer - 'Prayer is the laying aside of thoughts' - draws on Matthew 6:6's command to enter the inner room and close the door to external distraction.
Makarios the Great (fourth century) provides rich imagery of the heart as the dwelling place of God - drawing on Matthew 5:8 ('Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God') - and describes the divine light that fills the purified heart in terms drawn from the Transfiguration accounts (Matthew 17:1-8, Mark 9:2-9).
John Climacus (c. 579-649), whose Ladder of Divine Ascent is represented in the Philokalia, draws on Jacob's ladder (Genesis 28:12) and the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12) to describe the stages of spiritual ascent.
Maximos the Confessor (c. 580-662) provides the most sophisticated theology of theosis, drawing on 2 Peter 1:4 ('partakers of the divine nature'), John 17, and the Pauline 'in Christ' language to develop an account of deification that became the authoritative Orthodox position.
Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1359) provides the theological defense of hesychasm against its critics (especially the Calabrian monk Barlaam), drawing on the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-8) to argue that the divine light seen by the disciples on Mount Tabor was genuinely divine - not a created symbol of divine presence but the divine energies themselves, in which the deified human person participates.
Historical Context
The compilation of the Philokalia was an act of deliberate spiritual renewal in response to the crisis of Eastern Christianity under Ottoman rule. Mount Athos, the 'Holy Mountain' off the coast of Thessaloniki, had been the center of Orthodox monastic life since the tenth century, but the eighteenth century saw a significant decline in the quality of monastic education and practice. Nikodimos and Makarios, themselves Athonite monks, undertook the compilation as a means of restoring the hesychast tradition to its proper place at the center of Orthodox spirituality.
The Slavonic translation by Paisios Velichkovsky (1722-1794) had enormous consequences for Russian Christianity. Velichkovsky had spent years on Mount Athos studying the hesychast tradition and returned to Moldavia to establish a community of several hundred monks practicing the Jesus Prayer. His translation (the Dobrotolubiye) sparked the renewal of Russian monasticism in the nineteenth century, producing such figures as Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833) and the startsy (spiritual elders) of Optina Monastery, who influenced Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the flowering of Russian religious culture in the nineteenth century.
Theological Significance
The Philokalia's most significant theological contribution is its preservation and articulation of the hesychast tradition - the Eastern Orthodox practice of inner stillness and the Jesus Prayer - as a coherent spiritual methodology with a clear theological rationale. It demonstrated that the monastic spirituality of the Desert Fathers was not a merely historical curiosity but a living tradition capable of transforming ordinary Christian life.
The Philokalia's theology of theosis - the participation of the human person in the divine nature through grace - represents the Eastern counterpart to Western theologies of justification and sanctification. The hesychast tradition, with its emphasis on the transformation of the human person through the direct experience of divine light, has been enormously influential on the ecumenical dialogue between Eastern and Western Christianity in the twentieth century.
Legacy
The English translation (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1979-1995) introduced the Philokalia to a wide Western readership and contributed to the significant growth of interest in Orthodox Christianity among Western Christians in the late twentieth century. The Jesus Prayer has been adopted by Christians across denominational lines as a practice of contemplative prayer. Thomas Merton wrote admiringly about the hesychast tradition; the Benedictine tradition of centering prayer draws on similar resources.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Matthew 5:3-12 (the Beatitudes, the program of inner transformation), Matthew 6:1-18 (private prayer in the secret place), Matthew 17:1-8 (the Transfiguration, the model of divine light), Luke 18:9-14 (the tax collector's prayer, the source of 'have mercy on me, a sinner'), Romans 8:14-27 (the Spirit's intercession), 1 Corinthians 13:12 (seeing God face to face - the eschatological horizon of hesychast prayer), and 2 Peter 1:3-4 (participation in the divine nature).
Further Reading
- Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (1979) - the best brief introduction to Orthodox theology and spirituality by the principal English translator of the Philokalia; essential preparation for reading the Philokalia itself. - Irénée Hausherr, The Name of Jesus (1978) - a scholarly account of the history of the Jesus Prayer, tracing its development from the earliest Desert Fathers to its systematization in the hesychast tradition. - The Way of a Pilgrim (anonymous, c. 1880; translated by R.M. French, 1930) - the most accessible account of the Jesus Prayer practice, narrating the journey of a Russian peasant who learns to pray without ceasing through a series of encounters with staretz teachers; the Philokalia in narrative form.