The book was made on Mount Athos in the 1770s by two monks, Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth, working through the manuscript libraries of the monasteries, and printed at Venice in 1782 because there was no Greek press under Ottoman rule capable of it. Their principle of selection was narrow and deliberate: only texts on inner prayer and watchfulness, from Evagrius Ponticus in the fourth century to Gregory Palamas and his circle in the fourteenth. Some thirty-six authors, arranged roughly by date.
Its effect was not felt first in Greek. Paisius Velichkovsky translated a selection into Church Slavonic as the Dobrotolubiye in 1793, and through his disciples it reached the Russian monasteries and then, in Theophan the Recluse's expanded Russian version, a lay readership. The nineteenth-century Russian religious revival (the elders of Optina, the reintroduction of spiritual fatherhood, the figures Dostoevsky drew on for Zosima), runs through this book. The anonymous Way of a Pilgrim, whose narrator walks across Russia with a copy of the Philokalia in his knapsack learning to say the Jesus Prayer without ceasing, put it in front of a general readership and eventually a Western one.
A note on what it is. The Philokalia is not scripture and makes no such claim; its authority is that of a tradition of practice, transmitted normally under a spiritual father. Its own authors warn repeatedly against attempting the physical methods without guidance. Its twentieth-century Western reception, largely by readers without that setting, has been closer to a manual of technique than the compilers intended.