Virtually every spiritual tradition has an authoritative scripture or scriptures that serve as a foundational text for its beliefs, practices, and spirituality. For Christians, that collection of texts is the Holy Bible. But the fracturing of the Christian Church in the fifth century (following the Council of Chalcedon in 451), the eleventh century (the break between what came to be known as the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches), and the sixteenth century (the Protestant Reformation) has produced a dizzying variety of spiritual traditions. Each of these traditions in turn has its own set of subsidiary texts that serve as spiritual classics within the particular tradition. These secondary texts give expression to each tradition’s appropriation of the Bible. Each spiritual tradition reflects a lived interpretation of scripture.
For the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the principal spiritual text has come to be the Philokalia, an anthology of older texts edited by Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809) and Makarios of Corinth (1731-1805) and published in 1782. These monks of the Greek Orthodox Church collected sayings on prayer and spirituality from Eastern, mostly monastic writers that span more than a millennium, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. The Philokalia, more than any other text, reflects the Eastern Church’s interpretation of the Bible’s meaning. In the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim, the pilgrim asks a staretz, or spiritual father, whether the Philokalia is “more exalted and holier than the Bible.” The staretz answers:
No, it is not more exalted or holier than the Bible, but it contains enlightened explanations of what is mystically contained in the Bible, and it is so lofty that it is not easily comprehended by our shortsighted intellects. Let me give you an illustration. The sun is the greatest, the most resplendent and magnificent source of light, but you cannot contemplate or examine it with the simple naked eye. You would need to use a special viewing lens, which, though a million times smaller and dimmer than the sun, would enable you to study this magnificent source of all light and to endure and delight in its fiery rays. Thus the Holy Scriptures are like a brilliant sun, for which the Philokalia is the lens needed in order to view it.
Philokalia is a Greek word meaning “love of the beautiful.” Two of the Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory the Theologian (329-389) and Basil the Great (c. 330-379), edited a collection of the writings of Origen, the great third-century theologian of Alexandria, and gave it the title Philokalia. In subsequent centuries, other small works of monastic spirituality also took the same title. The full name of the present text is The Philokalia of the Neptic Saints gathered from our Holy Theophoric [“God-bearing”] Fathers, through which, by means of the philosophy of ascetic practice and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined, and made perfect— a title that serves not only to distinguish it from the earlier collections but also calls attention to the importance of “watchfulness” (translating the Greek nepsis) for the spiritual tradition represented in the work of Nikodimos and Makarios.
Nikodimos and Makarios were both monks of Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic republic located on a peninsula in northeastern Greece. It is generally regarded as the most important center of Orthodox monasticism. Although the first formal monasteries were founded in the tenth century, Athos had already attracted monks such as Peter the Athonite and Euthymios the Younger in the ninth century.
The contemplative tradition of the Holy Mountain (as Mount Athos is known in Greece) had reached its height in the fourteenth century, but by the seventeenth it had become prey to secularizing influences from the West. Realizing the danger to the authentic spiritual character of Mount Athos, the leaders of the Athonite monasteries sought to recover its true heritage. One leader in this was Nikodimos. Although best remembered for the Philokalia, he authored or translated over a hundred books on the spiritual life. Makarios, a fellow monk who later left the Holy Mountain to become archbishop of Corinth, aided him in the compilation of the Philokalia.
~Allyne Smith, Philokalia: The Eastern Christian Spiritual Texts (Selections Annotated & Explained. Translation by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware).
