Philokalia

The Philokalia has one subject, and it is not asceticism in the popular sense of fasting and vigils. Its subject is nepsis, watchfulness, the sober attention a person pays to the movements of their own mind, and the discrimination by which a thought is noticed as it arrives, before it has become consent. The vocabulary is consistent across eleven centuries of authors: logismoi, the thoughts that present themselves; prosoche, attentiveness; diakrisis, discernment; apatheia, the state in which the passions no longer determine what one does; nous, the faculty of direct spiritual perception, which the tradition locates in the heart rather than the head and which is not the same thing as the intellect.

Bound up with watchfulness is unceasing prayer, and above all the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", repeated until it continues on its own. The later texts describe a physical method (a posture, attention to the breath, the mind brought down into the heart), which was controversial in its own time and drew the charge from Barlaam of Calabria that the hesychast monks were omphalopsychoi, navel-gazers. Gregory Palamas defended it, and the councils of the 1340s and 1350s vindicated him; his distinction between God's unknowable essence and his uncreated energies, in which the divine light of Tabor is genuinely God and genuinely perceptible, became Orthodox doctrine and is the theological backbone of the collection's last layer.

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.