By Fr. Maximos (Constas)
The Orthodox Church is a bottomless spring of spiritual wisdom, granting the eternal life of Christ to all who ardently seek it. Through the millennia this wisdom has been captured for us in part in the writings of the Fathers, the lives of the saints, and the various collections of sayings of the monastic fathers. Among the most prized literary possessions of the Church is the spiritual classic The Philokalia, which compiles the centuries of the Church’s spiritual wisdom for the faithful in their battle against the passions towards the attainment of virtue and the holiness of Christ.
There’s always more to say about technology but I think we said enough and made the key points. In the last talk we spoke of the surface appearances and distractions from the depth, and now it’s time to turn in the direction of the depth and slowly begin to explore what sort of resources the Church has for us to become people of the depths and people of prayer.
I’d like to talk to you about the Philokalia as a collection of writings and how it came together. The word “philokalia” generally means anthology. It’s an ancient Greek word pretty much equivalent to the Latin “florilegium”—like floral. You go into the literary garden and you clip the beautiful buds and you put them into a literary bouquet. The Greek “anthologia” is the same thing—a collection of beautiful buds or flowers, and the word “philokalia” from antiquity was used to mean an anthology. Two of the three Cappadocians, Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian, made an anthology of excerpts from the writings of Origen that they called a philokalia. In the case of the Philokalia, the spiritual collection with that name, I think we’re justified in reading more into the word than just the older idea of collection, because this is way that St. Nikodemos, one of the editors, understands the name.
The word “philokalia” means the love of beauty, as “philosophia” means the love of wisdom. Dionysius the Areopagite in On the Divine Names says “kalos” means beauty, so “philokalia” is the love of beauty, but here of course the love of divine beauty. St. Dionysius also offers an etymology of the word “kalos” which comes from the word “kalin: which means “to call, invite, or beckon,” because beauty is that thing which calls us, draws us, that beckons us, and we’re all drawn to beautiful things, and of course the beauty that inheres in all beautiful things is the beauty of the Divine. So the ultimate beauty that exerts its magnetic pull on us is not a beautiful face, or landscape, or piece of music, but it is ultimately the beauty of the Divine which is refracted or reflected in these earthly beauties. So “philokalia” means the love of the beautiful.
It’s’ a collection of writings, either whole or in part, from forty or so ecclesiastical writers on prayer, and on the spiritual life very broadly understood. By that I mean the struggle with the vices, the acquisition of virtues—everything that can fall under the spiritual life. And this collection runs from the fourth—fifteenth centuries, so in a sense it’s a kind of library that seeks to present comprehensively all of the spiritual riches of the Orthodox Church. It was published in the late eighteenth century in Venice by two men who were later canonized—St. Makarios of Corinth and St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, who collaborated to compile and edit it. It’s important to note that despite its having been published in 1782, it’s not to be thought of as a kind of eighteenth century invention. Some people think it’s a later, specifically Athonite thing. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and actually it’s part of a much more ancient collection of writings.
Already beginning in the third-fourth centuries, ascetic literature began to proliferate. There are simply a lot of writings to read, and the material continued to proliferate, and many lifetimes aren’t enough to read through it, so it was natural and necessary for people to start to select certain works from the large body of literature and give them a kind of priority. Out of the larger body of ascetical literature a canon within the canon began to appear, and I think this is something people have lost sight of, because we tend to read very randomly now. “Oh, I think I’ll read The life of Moses by St. Gregory of Nyssa because that seems interesting, then I’ll have a look at something by Evagrius.” There’s a great pool of literature and we think we can select things at random. That is not how people being formed in the spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church read. There was a curriculum, if you will. There was a canon within the canon that was part of the way people were formed. This is already the case with the sayings of the desert fathers—there were multiple collections that were redacted and came to be formed. There were many local collections from various sketes that were combined, and so there was a process by which this often unwieldy literature was made much more accessible for people.
If we jump forward to the ninth century, there’s a work by Patriarch Photios of Constantinople called the Library or Myriobiblos, which is essentially a series of hundreds of book reviews, including everything from classical to ecclesiastical to scientific literature. He was very learned and read voraciously and wrote essays on what he wrote. Some of these are important because he reviews books that don’t exist anymore and we know about them only from his work, especially works from pagan antiquity. There is a section in which he reviews ascetic literature, and if you look at the authors and works he reviews you can already see that something like the Philokalia is beginning to take shape, because much of what he selects is also in the Philokalia. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a time of anthologies and compilations—it’s when the great Gerontikon is established and also the Evergetinos, which is a multi-volume work that excerpts material from saints’ lives, ascetic writings, Church Fathers, and arranges them under thematic headings, such as patience, poverty, repentance, etc. Paul, of the Evergetis monastery, from a lifetime of reading culled all of these good bits about various topics and arranged them, and we’re very glad he did because if we want a quick survey from the spiritual tradition on any locus or topic you can go right there. This is what happened with the ascetical literature, forming a curriculum.
The high watermark of this process was in the late Byzantine period under the hesychasts such as St. Gregory Palamas, Philotheos Kokinos, Theophanos of Nicea, Ignatius and Kallistos—there are so many remarkable writers form this period. These men were masters of prayer, of the spiritual life, and they had the responsibility for forming and initiating others into this life; and part of that initiation included a reading list. So we have compilations from the hesychastic period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that contain up to sixty percent of the same writings in the Philokalia. This isn’t just some eighteenth century invention, but a tradition of reading for spiritual formation and initiation into the life of prayer that was basically crystallized in the late Byzantine period under the hesychasts, and then diffused into the Slavic world, with close contact between Byzantine theologians and hesychasts and the Slavic world. We have manuscripts on places like Mt. Athos that we call pre-philokalic collections or philokalias before the Philokalia. I say all of this because I think it’s important to point out that it’s not a latecomer to the life of the Church but rather something that’s been a part of the Church’s experience from antiquity.
~ “Prayer of the Heart in an Age of Technology and Distraction” delivered by Fr. Maximos (Constas) on Feb. 2014 to the clergy of diocese of LA and the West of Antiochian of N. America at the invitation of His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph. The audio version of this lecture first appeared on Patristic Nectar Publications, and is published here by permission.
Fr. Maximos is the presidential research scholar at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of theology in Brookline, MA. He is an Athonite monk, one-time professor at Harvard Divinity School, accomplished author and translator and lectures internationally in both academic and parochial venues.
