Afterword of the translator
The reader has now become acquainted with one of the most significant books of the Eastern Church, which, ever since it first appeared, has remained the principal handbook of inner prayer. The publication of the Philokalia (Dobrotolyubiye) in Ukrainian — a book Ukraine has awaited for more than two centuries — is a great event for every Ukrainian who thirsts for the mysterious depths of Eastern Christian spirituality. This first Ukrainian-language edition is also special in that it appears in the native tongue of the venerable elder Paisius Velychkovsky, who was the first to translate the Philokalia from Greek into Slavonic. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this giant of prayer and of translation for Ukraine, for the Slavic peoples and for the whole world. At a time when Eastern theology in Ukraine was in deep crisis and theological education was dominated by the dry scholastic schemes of school theology, Paisius proposed the way of the living experience of the knowledge of God, initiating a movement of return to the depths of patristic theology — a theology unthinkable without the experience of inner prayer, without the purification and transfiguration of man and his growth towards the glory of deification.
The Tradition of the Church and the postmodern search for experience
To what extent may we speak of the relevance of this edition today, amid the stormy challenges of the postmodern age? In order to grasp how urgently the texts written by Christian ascetics and mystics — those who later came to be called hesychasts — are needed, one should consider the significance of the Tradition (paradosis) of the Church in an age that accepts no authorities and is dominated by religious and axiological pluralism. The authority of Tradition carries no weight if — and this «if» is decisive for the way a postmodern seeker of fundamental orientations perceives the texts of the Holy Fathers of the fourth to fourteenth centuries — the preaching of the tradition remains merely an external declaration of truth and is not the testimony of a deep experience of dialogue with the One who is the source of truth. On this depends whether the word, spoken or written, will touch the depth of the listener’s personality, or whether it will remain merely one more interestingly argued idea among the variety of other religious proposals offered to the contemporary seeker of truth in refined psychological wrappings and technological packaging.
The decisive experience of a Christian is the experience of communion with God’s truth, which, transforming a person, dynamically brings him to the fullness of likeness to God and essentially unites him with the divine Archetype. This experience of life takes place in the deepest and most defining layers of the human being, which are the foundation of all the other, more superficial psychophysical processes. The chief and realistic pathos of this experience is a twofold process of uniting a person both with his transcendent divine source, which is an absolute unity in three Persons (Jn 17:21), and with himself, as «the image and likeness of God» (cf. Gen 1:26-27). The unity, wholeness or integrality of the person is the ideal of human life. Union with God and inner wholeness are interdependent dimensions of the inner formation of man and of the relationship between God and man.
Postmodernism, by contrast, is characterised by its bent towards destroying the unity between the creature and the Creator, towards breaking the bond between them, which leads to an inner «crushing» of human nature. These processes of degradation resemble the Fall, whose chief consequence was separation from God and self-enclosure, leading to inner decay, whose most dramatic manifestation was death, the separation of the soul from the body. Behind the scenes of the information and technological revolution of postmodernity there often reigns a deadly pathos of «crushing», of division, of «disintegration», which seeps into every dimension of human life. In the chaos of these fragmenting processes the most dangerous is the fragmentation of consciousness, which renders a person incapable of perceiving the world and all the phenomena of life in their harmonious wholeness. The «rupturing» of consciousness and «fragmented» thinking are accompanied by a radical opposition to truth. For postmodernism, however, truth no longer exists, since a multiplicity of truths has become fashionable. A ruptured consciousness and fragmented thinking leave a person without any systematic approach to evaluating the guiding values of human life, unable to build a personal hierarchy of values and to determine his priorities accordingly. In complete uncertainty amid the many «truths» offered by the world, pure subjectivism and the hedonistic happiness of the individual become the criterion of judgment, and the chief criterion in any choice is expressed by the words «I like it — I don’t like it», «interesting — uninteresting». In fact truth is no longer even interesting. What matters is the self-affirmation of the individual, egocentric by nature, as opposed to responsibility and compassion. And such a process leads to relativism, chaos and the destruction of the basic foundations of human life and of society. The deadly postmodern current, produced by a fragmented consciousness, is aimed at destroying man’s true humanity. It leads to a rupture between soul and body and attempts finally to rehabilitate every distortion — bodily, psychical and spiritual. The unity of spirit, soul and body, harmoniously joined in man, is at last torn apart, fragmented and destroyed. Emphasising the carnal manifestations of life, postmodernism proclaims the «liberation» of the body from the soul into the «freedom» of sinful attraction in man. Postmodernism’s aversion to a single truth determines all its actions. At the core of its vicious worldview lies mockery of truth, goodness, beauty and purity, and the presentation of fragmentation, absurdity, mortality and ugliness as the new contemporary values.1
Note 1: M. M. Dunaev, «Postmodernist Scandals», in Tserkov i vremya, no. 2 (2003), p. 125.
In describing the chief features of the postmodern age, we should also note those positive elements and challenges that create a new field of expectations and hopeful prospects. Despite all the negative and destructive consequences of the present «spiritual atmosphere», it must be said that the postmodern «gust of wind» has brought some very important positive re-evaluations and rethinkings of the past. Postmodernism is a child of Christian civilisation. Throughout history Christians have often lacked precisely that deep, existential, decisive experience which is decisive for the postmodern person: to be exactly what one claims to be. The present generation is weary of proclamations and abstract theorising «on a theme». It longs for a deep and living experience of participation in that which — or rather in Him who — is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Postmodern man, thirsting for a true mysticism of the contemplation of the divine life, waits with longing for the witness of experience. Statements of fact are not enough. Convictions must be lived by the person in the deepest strata of his spiritual self-awareness. That is precisely why the postmodern generation is interested in a person who possesses a deep existential experience of inner wholeness and an experience of relationship with the Persons of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is possible only in the experience of the inner communal conciliarity of the Church. In the philosophy and theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the term «experience» became a key word.2
Note 2: T. Špidlík, The Spirituality of the Christian East [Ukrainian translation from the Italian by M. Prokopovych], Lviv: Lviv Theological Academy, 1999, p. 72.
The Philokalia: a book of experience, the living Tradition of the Church
The living experience of the knowledge of God, of deep wholeness and of reunion with oneself and with God also became the leitmotif of the life and ascetic labour of the Ukrainian hesychast Paisius Velychkovsky, and of his spiritual and translational offspring, the Philokalia. Man as a person of experience is the central theme of the theology — or rather of the testimony of experience — of the ascetic fathers whose writings are gathered in the anthology entitled Philokalia. This collection of patristic works may be regarded as a handbook for coming to know the truth about human nature and about man’s calling to a direct and real participation in the life of God. The texts of the hesychast fathers of the fourth to fourteenth centuries are an organic part of the Holy Tradition of the Church. In order rightly to understand the relevance and the authority of these ancient and seemingly «outlived» texts, which at first sight might interest only a narrow circle of scholars, we must adequately grasp what Holy Tradition means for the Christian as an organic part of the Body of Christ.
Holy Tradition is not simply a set of ancient texts expressing «frozen» and immovable formulas of Christian doctrine, but above all the dynamic reality of the Church’s communion in the Holy Spirit. Patristic writings, the formulations of the decisions of Church councils and liturgical texts are the visible and verbal side of Tradition, expressing the invisible, grace-filled and living experience of the Church’s organism. «Tradition is […] the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, a life which grants to every member of the Body of Christ the capacity to hear, to receive and to know the Truth in the light proper to it, and not in the natural light of human reason.»3 The life of the Church does not consist in preserving and preaching some idea, ideology or rational truth. The life of the Church is the life of the Mystical Body of Christ, of which every Christian is a member from the moment of baptism. This life is, for the Church, a natural and organic participation in the life of the Most Holy Trinity. Therefore the experience of every member of the Church is a lived experience of profound communion with Christ in the Holy Spirit. This is manifested most fully in the Mystery of the Church, the Eucharist, when the blood of Christ fills the veins and the Body of Christ, received as food, builds up the body of the communicant. It is precisely this deepest, living, dynamic, direct and real experience of the union of man and God in the Church, from the first century until now, that grounds the understanding of the «livingness» of the Church’s Tradition, as opposed to a so-called static understanding. According to the static understanding, Tradition is the sum of theological knowledge accumulated over two millennia and handed on from one generation of Christians to the next. Yet, in the words of Sergius Bulgakov, «Tradition is not archaeology binding the present with the shadow of the past, but the spiritual self-identity of the Church’s life.»4 At the centre of this self-identity stands, on the one hand, the mystical experience of the Church as one single organism of Christ in the one and only Most Holy Trinity, and, on the other, the deep personal experience of «organic» unity with God through the Church on the part of the individual member of this organism, that is, of every Christian.
Note 3: V. N. Lossky, «Tradition and traditions», in Zhurnal Moskovskoy Patriarkhii, no. 4 (1970), p. 67.
Note 4: S. Bulgakov, Orthodoxy, Moscow, 1991, p. 76.
The texts contained in the Philokalia are the testimony of an experience of participation in the divine life of the Church and the counsel of experienced ascetics on how to walk the path of mystical knowledge of God. Thus Tradition, as the «fruit and expression of experience», is the handing on of «the practice of experiential participation in the Church’s mode of existence», that is, a «handing on of experience», a «communion that endures in one and the same experience».5 Christos Yannaras notes that this is an experience of participation in the concrete relationships that constitute the «Body» of the Church,6 in the relations between man and God. These relations create the deepest and most living dialogue, which leads to the fullness of eternal life, to the endless dynamic of likeness to God and of deification. The best earthly image of the depth, reality and livingness of such a dialogue is the bond between a mother and the child within her womb.
Note 5: C. Yannaras, «The Challenge of Orthodox Traditionalism», in Concilium Special: Fundamentalism as an Ecumenical Challenge, ed. H. Küng and J. Moltmann, London: SCM Press, 1992, p. 82.
Note 6: C. Yannaras, ibid.
The words of the holy apostle John the Theologian about the handing on of the living experience of participation in the Incarnate Word may serve as a collective image of the testimonies of the holy ascetics and mystics of the Church of Christ, who, keeping the Tradition (cf. 1 Cor 11:2), bore witness to it in the texts gathered in the Philokalia: «That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have touched, concerning the Word of life — and the life was made manifest, and we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us — that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ» (1 Jn 1:1-3). And eternal life and participation in its Source are not a textual rarity kept under seven locks like a precious archaeological find; they are the living and life-giving pulse of the dialogue between God and man, which we read in the hesychast fathers of the Philokalia. The various authors of this anthology of patristic texts, though separated from one another by centuries, are united by the experience of participation in one and the same divine nature (cf. 2 Pet 1:4). The content of the texts of the Philokalia therefore expresses various dimensions of the one, timeless Holy Tradition of the Church; it is not a distant and legendary past, a spiritual archaeology, an idealised antiquity describing the «golden age» of the ascetic feats of the saints as something inconceivable for Christians today. The texts of the Philokalia are a verbal testimony to mystical communion with the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who is always the same and unchanging. It is precisely in this sense that we should understand the exhortation of the apostle Paul: «So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter» (2 Thess 2:15).
The Greek Philokalia
The religious and political situation in the former Byzantine Empire during the three centuries after the fall of Constantinople (1453) was marked by the drama of cultural and national decline and by a deep crisis in the spiritual and theological life of the Greek Church. This critical state affected not only higher theological education but even elementary schooling, which could be obtained only in a few Greek schools and in the clandestine institutions of monasteries and village parishes. In the middle of the eighteenth century Eugenios Voulgaris (1716-1806), a Greek intellectual educated in Italy who became a monk, initiated the intellectual and moral-spiritual renewal of the Orthodox peoples of the former Byzantium. The main direction of his efforts was the renewal of Orthodoxy.7 It was precisely in the context of the national and religious revival of the Greek people, begun by Voulgaris and continued by his disciples, that the Kollyvades movement arose,8 among whose leaders were Makarios of Corinth and Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain.
Note 7: See P. Deseille, La spiritualité orthodoxe et la Philocalie, Paris: Bayard, 1997, pp. 65-67.
Note 8: «Kollyvades», from the Greek kollyva, boiled wheat eaten after services commemorating the departed. On the Kollyvades movement in detail see Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, p. 8.
Saint Makarios of Corinth (1731-1805), who became bishop of Corinth in 1764, was known as a traditionalist who, labouring for the renewal of Church life, sought to raise the spiritual and educational level of the clergy.9 In the difficult circumstances of the Turkish occupation he was obliged, from 1774 until his death, to move from one monastery to another, living now in the small sketes of Mount Athos, now on the islands of Patmos and Chios.10 As Kallistos Ware notes, it was Saint Makarios who took the initiative in publishing the Greek Philokalia. He worked intensively at searching out and selecting the texts of the Fathers of the Church.11
Note 9: See Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, p. 7.
Note 10: On the life and work of Saint Makarios of Corinth see M. J. le Guillou, «La renaissance spirituelle du XVIII-e siècle», in Istina, no. 7 (1960), pp. 95-128; C. Cavarnos, St Macarius of Corinth, Belmont, 1972; D. Stiernon, «Macaire de Corinthe», in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, vol. 10 (1977), cols. 10-11.
Note 11: See Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, p. 10.
Saint Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain (1748-1809), a gifted intellectual from a wealthy Greek family, having received a good education, renounced the possibility of further advancement that lay open before him. In 1773-1774 he met Makarios of Corinth, who influenced his final decision to prefer the monastic path to the continuation of studies in the West. In 1775 he settled on Athos, where he lived and struggled until his death. During this time Nikodemos wrote about 109 works of various lengths, for which he was called «the encyclopaedia of Athonite learning of his time» and «a great theologian».12
Note 12: See ibid., p. 8. On the life and work of Saint Nikodemos in detail see Hieromonk Kliment (Zedergolm), On the Life and Labours of Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, St Petersburg: Znamenie, 1998, 47 pp. (reprint of the 1865 edition); I. Citterio, L’orientamento ascetico-spirituale di Nicodemo Agiorita, Belmont, 1974; G. S. Bebis, Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain: A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, tr. P. A. Chamberas, New York: Mahwah, 1989, pp. 5-65.
The aim of the Kollyvades was the spiritual-ascetic and liturgical renewal of the Church on the foundation of the patristic tradition. They laid particular emphasis on the need to restore the practice of frequent participation in the Eucharist and to return to the living experience of the inner prayerful work of the hesychast fathers. The path to spiritual and theological revival lay through wide educational and publishing activity, consisting above all in the publication and dissemination of patristic works.13 The fruit of the labours of Makarios and Nikodemos was the publication of three works: two anthologies of patristic texts on asceticism and on the hesychast practice of inner activity — the Philokalia (1782) and the Evergetinos (1783)14 — and the book On Continual Communion (1783).
Note 13: Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, p. 10.
Note 14: The collection of patristic texts Evergetinos (from the Greek evergetes, benefactor), compiled in the eleventh century by the venerable Paul (d. 1054), founder of the Evergetis monastery in Constantinople, was discovered by Makarios of Corinth on Athos in 1777, together with a number of other texts dating from the fourth to the fourteenth century which entered the Philokalia. See Kallistos of Diokleia, ibid., p. 10.
The Greek collection of patristic texts devoted to the hesychast practice of inner activity was called Philokalia, which means «love of the beautiful, of the good» and, accordingly, «love of God» as the source of beauty and goodness. The word may also mean love of the path that leads to union with divine beauty.15 This Greek collection contained the ascetic and mystical works of thirty-six fathers of the fourth to fourteenth centuries. In choosing authors and texts, Makarios did not include works already published. He paid particular attention to texts that either had never been published or were found only in rare editions.16 Kallistos Ware, proposing another view of the main criteria for selecting the material published in the Greek Philokalia, notes that Makarios did not decide alone which texts and authors to prefer, but appealed to an ancient Athonite tradition of various collections on prayer, that is, to the earlier «philokalic» tradition of the Holy Mountain, which expressed a «deeply rooted plan of spiritual formation […] widespread among Athonite monks in the late Byzantine and post-Byzantine period».17
Note 15: Ibid. As Kallistos Ware notes, the word may also mean «a collection of good things», an anthology. According to him, Makarios and Nikodemos gave this name to their collection of patristic texts in imitation of Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian, who in 358-359 compiled an anthology of the writings of Origen and called it Philokalia. See ibid.
Note 16: See Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, p. 11.
Note 17: See ibid.
Before the publication of the Philokalia in Venice the local authorities appointed censors from the University of Padua, who certified that the patristic texts belonging to this collection contained «nothing contrary to the holy Catholic faith and to good moral principles (Con licenza de’ superiori, e privilegio)». Thus the Philokalia, a collection of the works of the Holy Fathers — thirty-six hesychast ascetics — written over the course of a millennium and intended above all for the hesychast monks of the Orthodox Church, received the appropriate permission from the censors of a Catholic university.
Paisius Velychkovsky and the Philokalia
The chief merit of Saint Makarios of Corinth and Saint Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain lies in the gathering, editing and publication of the Greek collection of the classics of Byzantine spiritual and ascetic literature. The merit of Saint Paisius Velychkovsky lies in the gathering and translation of patristic texts into Slavonic. The summit of Paisius’s labour was the publication of the Philokalia, a book which in the Ukrainian and other Slavic lands became the chief handbook of the hesychast practice of inner activity and of the Jesus Prayer. Some contemporary researchers even maintain that the compilers of the Greek Philokalia, Makarios of Corinth and Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, followed «point by point the designs of Paisius, his conception and orientation, reviving the spiritual contemplative tradition».18 Paisius Velychkovsky is rightly called the renewer of monastic life in Rus’, the initiator of the revival of the deep practice of inner unceasing prayer joined with constant spiritual sobriety. Paisius is a typically Ukrainian seeker of true prayerful activity, of true spiritual guidance, of genuine and undistorted patristic sources which would always be at the Christian’s side as experiential witnesses and directions on the way of the knowledge of God, replacing, so far as possible, the absence of a spiritual guide.
Note 18: Ciprian (Zaharia), archim., «Biserica Ortodoxă Română şi traducerile patristice şi filocalice în limbile moderne», in Paisianismul, Bucharest, 1996, p. 49, quoted in V. Savchuk, «St Paisius Velychkovsky and the revival of the hesychast tradition in the Romanian Church in the 19th-20th centuries», in Proceedings of the Kyiv Theological Academy, no. 2 (1999), p. 153. According to the Life of Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain: «[Nikodemos] learned of the good name of the monk Paisius, Ruthenian by origin, who was in Moldavia and had under his guidance more than a thousand brothers. He taught them the prayer of the heart, and since Nikodemos loved this divine practice, he set out in search of it.» See The Life and Labours to the Glory of Our Church Accomplished by the Most Venerable and Most Blessed and Worthy Monk Nikodemos, Described by His Brother in Christ the Hieromonk Euthymios, quoted from I. Citterio, p. 79.
Saint Peter (Paisius) Velychkovsky19 was born on 21 December 1722 in Poltava, in the family of the archpriest Ivan Velychkovsky and his wife Iryna. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were archpriests and rectors of the Holy Dormition cathedral of Poltava. Peter’s great-grandfather, Ivan Velychkovsky (d. 1701), was a well-known Ukrainian poet of the Baroque age. His mother Iryna was the granddaughter of a Jewish merchant named Manda, who in the second half of the seventeenth century embraced Orthodoxy together with his whole family and founded the new merchant line of the Mandenkos. Peter’s godfather was Colonel Vasyl Kochubey. Peter was the eleventh child in the Velychkovsky family. Shortly after his father’s death in 1727 his mother sent him to study at the church school attached to the Dormition cathedral in Poltava. After the death of his brother Ivan, who had taken his father’s place, the metropolitan of Kyiv Rafail Zaborovsky (1734-1747) issued a charter granting the archpriestship of Poltava to the thirteen-year-old Peter and ordered that he be sent to study at the Kyiv Theological Academy, which he entered in the autumn of 1735.20 The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was at that time at the height of its flourishing. It was the only higher Orthodox school of general education on the Western European model in Eastern Europe, with more than a thousand students.21 Peter Velychkovsky studied at the Academy until 1739. Among his contemporaries there were such famous figures as Heorhiy Konysky and Hryhoriy Skovoroda.22 Yet the heart of the gifted youth was drawn not to studies which «bring no benefit»,23 but to monastic labour. Therefore in 1740, after completing one more class of rhetoric, the eighteen-year-old Peter chose the monastic life. He stayed first in the monastery of Liubech and then in that of Medvediv, where he received the rank of rasophore with the name Platon.24 Later he moved to the Kyiv Caves Lavra, and in 1742 he left Ukraine for ever and settled in the skete of Trăisteni in Moldo-Wallachia. It was in this skete that he met his future spiritual guide, a native of Ukraine, the elder Basil of Poiana Mărului25 (1692-1767), who, having founded a skete at Merlopolyana, organised there a workshop in which the monks copied the works of the holy fathers devoted to the hesychast practice of inner prayer. It was the elder Basil who initiated his young countryman Platon into the depths of hesychast prayer.26
Note 19: The principal sources for the life, ascetic path and creative work of the elder Paisius Velychkovsky are his Autobiography (unfinished, reaching only his twenty-fourth year). See Paisius Velychkovsky, Autobiography. Life, Holy Trinity-St Sergius Lavra, 2006, 276 pp.; St Paisius Velychkovsky: Autobiography, Life and Selected Works from Manuscript Sources of the 18th-19th Centuries, comp. P. B. Zhgun and M. A. Zhgun, gen. ed. D. A. Pospelov and O. A. Rodionov, Moscow: Russian St Panteleimon Monastery on Athos, 2004, 368 pp. (Smaragdos Philocalias). The Life of the elder Paisius Velychkovsky was written by one of his closest disciples, Mytrofan (1727-1815), a native of Pereyaslav from a Cossack family. See Mytrofan, schemamonk, Life of the Moldavian Elder Paisius Velychkovsky, Moscow: Palomnik, 1991, 104 pp. Among foreign-language editions, note the publication of the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University containing English versions of the Autobiography and the Life: The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1989, 172 pp. (Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, IV). Of the principal monographs two should be mentioned: S. Chetverikov, The Truth of Christianity. The Moldavian Elder Paisius Velychkovsky, His Life, Teaching and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism, Moscow: Krutitsy Patriarchal Metochion, 1998, 420 pp.; Metropolitan Ilarion (Ivan Ohiyenko), «Paisius Velychkovsky», in Lives of Great Ukrainians, Kyiv: Lybid, 1999, pp. 128-239.
Note 20: S. Chetverikov, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
Note 21: S. Chetverikov, p. 19. On the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy of that period see Z. I. Khyzhnyak, The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv: Vyshcha Shkola, 1981, 236 pp.; Z. I. Khyzhnyak and V. K. Mankivsky, A History of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv: KM Akademia, 2003, 184 pp.; The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Names, 17th-18th Centuries: An Encyclopaedia, comp. Z. I. Khyzhnyak, ed. V. S. Bryukhovetsky, Kyiv: KM Akademia, 2001, 735 pp.
Note 22: S. Chetverikov, p. 18.
Note 23: The young Peter expressed his impressions of his studies thus: «I hear only the names of pagan gods and sages — Cicero, Aristotle, Plato […] Learning wisdom from them, people today have departed from the right path: they utter clever words, but within they are filled with gloom and darkness, and all their wisdom is only of the earth. Looking at the fruits of this learning in the example of clergy who, like worldly dignitaries, live in great honour and glory, adorn themselves with costly garments and ride on splendid horses, I fear and tremble lest I too, having learned outward wisdom and become a monk, should fall into still worse infirmities.» S. Chetverikov, p. 30.
Note 24: S. Chetverikov, pp. 36-38.
Note 25: A. Tachiaos calls the Ukrainian elder Basil of Poiana Mărului the first hesychast teacher of the Orthodox East in modern times, whose influence on the formation of Paisius’s personality and on all Eastern monasticism can hardly be overestimated. See V. Savchuk, op. cit., p. 154. On the figure of Basil of Poiana Mărului, the spiritual father of Paisius Velychkovsky, and on his teaching about the Jesus Prayer, see the doctoral dissertation of D. Raccanello, La preghiera di Gesù negli scritti di Basilio di Poiana Mărului, Alessandria, 1986; also D. Raccanello, «La figure de Basile de Poiana Mărului et son enseignement sur la Prière de Jésus», in Irénikon, 61 (1988), pp. 41-66; D. Raccanello, «Vasilij de Poiana Mărului», in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, vol. 16 (1995), cols. 292-298.
Note 26: P. Deseille, p. 62.
Platon spent almost four years in the monasteries of Wallachia, learning the Romanian language, listening to the instructions of the elders and gathering «from those holy fathers the spiritual honey that flowed from their lips».27 In 1746, at the age of twenty-four, Platon moved to Athos. At that time the monasteries of the Holy Mountain were passing through a moral, spiritual, political and economic crisis. «Ignorance, national enmity and grave vices had penetrated the Athonite monasteries.»28 Platon could not find a spiritual guide among the elders of the Holy Mountain, despite the fact that there were many ascetics of Slavic origin there. Three years later — years spent by Platon in spiritual struggle and growth — his elder and spiritual guide Basil of Poiana Mărului arrived on Athos and in 1750 tonsured the monk Platon into the mantle with the name Paisius. Soon Paisius accepted the young monk Vissarion as his disciple, and four years later new ascetics joined him, first eight Moldavians and then four more monks of Slavic origin. Thus was formed a new monastic community under the guidance of Paisius Velychkovsky, who was ordained priest in 1758. The services in this community were celebrated alternately in Romanian and in Slavonic.29 As the community grew, the monks moved to the cell of the Prophet Elias, which belonged to the monastery of Pantokrator, and founded there a skete with the rule of a coenobitic monastery.30
Note 27: Mytrofan, schemamonk, Life of the Moldavian Elder Paisius Velychkovsky, Moscow: Palomnik, 1991, pp. 25-26.
Note 28: L. Polyakov, «Schema-archimandrite Paisius Velychkovsky (on the 160th anniversary of his repose)», in Zhurnal Moskovskoy Patriarkhii, no. 10 (1954), p. 54.
Note 29: I. Citterio, «The teaching of Saint Paisius Velychkovsky according to written testimonies», in Pravoslavnaya obshchina, no. 42 (1997), p. 80. See also V. Savchuk, op. cit., p. 178.
Note 30: On the skete of the Prophet Elias on Athos, founded by Paisius Velychkovsky, see Metropolitan Ilarion (Ohiyenko), «The Ukrainian Zaporozhian skete on Athos», in Vira i Kultura, no. 5-6 (1955).
I. Citterio, studying the distinctive features of Paisius’s spiritual guidance, notes that alongside his authority among the monks of Athos as a practitioner and teacher of the prayer of the heart, Paisius had the gift of spiritual leadership over a numerous monastic community and the gift of preserving peace and unity among monks of different nationalities (in Paisius’s community Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks lived together).31 Paisius Velychkovsky later became the spiritual guide of many Athonite ascetics, and even of the patriarch of Constantinople Seraphim II, who was resting there.32 When in 1763 the community grew to sixty-four monks, it became impossible to remain on Athos, given the difficulty of organising and providing for their needs. That same year, after seventeen years in the Athonite school of inner activity and spiritual sobriety, Paisius and his brothers left Athos and returned to Moldavia. At first the monastic community settled in the monastery of the Holy Spirit at Dragomirna, granted to them by the Moldavian ruler Grigore Callimachi, which at that time was in decline. Because of political circumstances, in 1775 Paisius and his community, which by then numbered 350 monks, moved to the monastery of the Beheading of John the Baptist at Secu, where he remained until 1779. In 1779 Paisius also accepted the direction of the monastery of Neamţ, to which he later moved. This monastery was a well-known centre of monastic asceticism in Moldavia, and thanks to the spiritual labour and work of Paisius Velychkovsky and his spiritual children it was transformed into a great multinational centre of theological and ascetic enlightenment for the Orthodox East, a centre of «unheard-of attractive power».33 In 1787 the number of monks at Neamţ reached seven hundred.34 Saint Paisius Velychkovsky fell asleep in the Lord in the seventy-second year of his life, on 15 November 1794, leaving behind him a school of inner prayerful activity at the monasteries of Neamţ and Secu which numbered more than a thousand disciples of various nationalities.35 The «philokalic» heritage of Paisius did not remain at Neamţ, but spread through his disciples to more than a hundred monasteries of the Russian Empire of that time, restoring in them the spirit of deep asceticism, of the inner Jesus Prayer, and of the reading of patristic works as spiritual guides in inner activity.
Note 31: I. Citterio, p. 62.
Note 32: L. Polyakov, p. 56. On Paisius as a spiritual guide and teacher of asceticism see L. Polyakov, «The elder Paisius Velychkovsky as a teacher of asceticism», in Zhurnal Moskovskoy Patriarkhii, no. 10 (1956), pp. 44-55.
Note 33: A.-E. Tachiaos, «The revival of Orthodox spirituality by the elder Paisius Velychkovsky (1722-1794)», paper delivered at the second international conference marking the millennium of the Baptism of Rus’, Moscow, 1989, p. 261.
Note 34: L. Polyakov, p. 58.
Note 35: V. Savchuk, pp. 180-181. Besides the nationalities mentioned above, the multinational monastic brotherhood under the guidance of Paisius Velychkovsky also included Armenians, Hungarians, Turks and Jews. Ibid., p. 181.
The literary and translation work of the elder Paisius Velychkovsky
From earliest childhood Peter Velychkovsky showed a love of reading. As soon as he learned to read, he read through all the books of spiritual content in his home and in the library of the Dormition cathedral of Poltava: the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, the Lives of the Saints, the Psalter, the Horologion, the homilies of Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Ephrem the Syrian and others.36 From the time of his stay in the Ukrainian monasteries (at Liubech, at Medvediv, at the Kyiv Caves Lavra) the young monk immersed himself in patristic texts and began to copy them. At Liubech in particular he copied for himself the work of John Klimakos, and later, on the way to the monastery of Medvediv, he met a collector and copyist of patristic works, the hermit Hesychios.37 From his first acquaintance with patristic texts Paisius saw that the already scarce translations of patristic writings differed greatly in their various versions and that their quality was unsatisfactory. The errors and omissions of translators had been multiplied many times over by uneducated and careless copyists. Having tried to correct the texts of such fathers as Hesychios of Jerusalem, Philotheos of Sinai, Theodore of Edessa and Isaac the Syrian, comparing various editions, Paisius understood that such an approach did not solve the problem. It was necessary not only to correct the existing patristic texts but to translate many of them anew.38 This problem became still more acute on Athos, when the need to find spiritual guidance led Paisius not only to seek out Slavonic translations of patristic works but also the ancient Greek originals, with which he began to compare the Slavonic versions. It was precisely the impossibility of finding a spiritual guide that became one of the chief reasons for Paisius’s deep immersion in biblical and patristic texts, which became for him teacher and counsellor both on his own spiritual path and in the prayerful life of the disciples he guided. The chief characteristic of an elder, according to Paisius, is that he «must teach nothing out of his own head, but only in accordance with the Scriptures and the Holy Fathers».39
Note 36: S. Chetverikov, p. 16.
Note 37: Ibid., p. 49.
Note 38: I. Khibarin, «The literary and translation work of the elder Paisius (Velychkovsky)», in Zhurnal Moskovskoy Patriarkhii, no. 12 (1956), pp. 59-60.
Note 39: I. Citterio, p. 73.
On Athos there gradually formed around Paisius a school of copyists and translators of patristic texts of a spiritual and ascetic character, which would later reach its full flowering at the monastery of Neamţ in Moldavia. Velychkovsky’s stay on the Holy Mountain was chiefly a time of gathering manuscripts, while his later life in the Moldavian monasteries was the time of translating them. Paisius’s literary activity, harmoniously joined with ascetic labour and spiritual guidance, continued until his death. In old age the ailing Paisius, sitting on his bed surrounded by books and suffering from pain, translated, re-read and corrected his translations by night. He carefully reviewed the work of his disciples, and some of his own translations he collated with the best Moldavian versions.40 Paisius approached his translations with extraordinary responsibility and exactingness, and would not allow them to be used so long as the least doubt about their perfection remained.41
Note 40: I. Khibarin, p. 60.
Note 41: Ibid., p. 61.
At Dragomirna, Paisius together with the brethren translated into Slavonic and Moldavian the works of such fathers as Anthony the Great, Isaiah the Solitary, Peter of Damascus (the second book), Theodore the Studite, Mark the Ascetic, Nikitas Stethatos (three hundred chapters), Kallistos, patriarch of Constantinople, Ignatios Xanthopoulos, and the Life of Saint Gregory of Sinai. Alongside these new translations, Paisius corrected older versions of the works of Hesychios, Diadochos, Makarios the Great, Philotheos of Sinai, Neilos of Sinai, Abba Thalassios, Gregory of Sinai, Symeon the New Theologian, Cassian the Roman and others. The elder Paisius himself did not engage directly in authorship. He wrote an autobiography (reaching only his twenty-fourth year), as well as letters, discourses and replies to enquiries, all of which had spiritual and practical aims.42 This applies in particular to the Six Chapters on the Prayer of the Intellect, which he composed in opposition to a teaching then spreading in Ukraine that denied the prayer of the intellect.43 The elder translated only into Slavonic, with the exception of the book of Nil Sorsky, which he translated into Romanian. The texts of the ascetic fathers translated by Paisius were used directly and vividly both in the daily reading which Paisius introduced at Dragomirna and in the private reading of the monks. One day the works of the fathers were read in Romanian, the next in Slavonic. At the monastery of Neamţ, which since the sixteenth century had had the reputation of a centre of learning and possessed a splendid collection of manuscripts in its library, the work of Paisius’s brotherhood became still more lively. The elder’s chief assistants were the monks Ilarion, Makariy, Onoriy, Atanasiy, Natanail, Pavlo and others. Some of his assistants he sent to study Greek at the Academy of Bucharest. Of the thousand manuscripts preserved in the library of the monastery of Neamţ, two hundred and seventy-six date from the time of Paisius’s stay there, and forty-four of them were written by the hand of the Ukrainian elder himself.44
Note 42: S. Senyk, «Preface to the edition of the works of Saint Paisius Velychkovsky», in Proceedings of the Kyiv Theological Academy, no. 1 (1997), p. 51.
Note 43: L. Polyakov, p. 57.
Note 44: V. Savchuk, pp. 183-184.
Paisius Velychkovsky’s titanic labour over patristic texts culminated in the publication of the Philokalia at St Petersburg in 1793. The full title of this edition is: Dobrotolyubiye, or the Words and Chapters of Sacred Watchfulness, Gathered from the Writings of the Holy and God-inspired Fathers, in Which, by Moral Philosophy of Action and Contemplation, the Intellect Is Purified, Illumined and Made Perfect. Other translations of ascetic works by Paisius appeared in 1849 in a collection entitled Gleaned Ears for the Food of the Soul. The patristic works translated by Paisius which concerned various dimensions of monastic ascetic struggle and belonged to such authors as John Klimakos, Maximos the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Abba Dorotheos, Barsanuphios and John, Isaac the Syrian, Abba Thalassios and Theodore the Studite began to be published in the Russian Empire only half a century after his death.45
Note 45: I. Khibarin, pp. 61-62.
Hesychasm and deification
The Philokalia is a book about the mystical path of the knowledge of God, which opens to the reader through the experiential testimonies of those practising ascetics who walked this path and, for the spiritual profit of their descendants, told of it. The chief aim of the Christian’s spiritual life is defined by Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain in the preface to the Greek edition of the Philokalia: «God, the blessed Nature, the most perfect Perfection, the creative Principle of all that is good and beautiful, Himself transcending every good and every beauty, from eternity foresaw in His supreme divine plan the deification (theosis) of mankind.»46 «Deification», as a key concept of Eastern Christian theology, occurs several times in the Philokalia and is the chief mystical theme of the fathers’ testimony. «Deification» is a synonym of the concept «salvation», which expresses the deepest truth about the nature of man and about his calling to a real and direct participation in the divine life of the Most Holy Trinity. This mysterious design of God concerning man is already disclosed in the Old Testament (Ps 82:6; Ps 8:5-6) and is finally proclaimed in its fullness by the incarnation of the Son of God, who, becoming man, reveals the mystery of God’s call to man: «You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect» (Mt 5:48). There are no limits to this divine perfection of man. If man’s perfection is to be the same as the perfection of God the Father, then man must become as God Himself is — and this is possible only through a direct union of man with God, which takes place in the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word of God.
Note 46: Philokalia, vol. 1, p. XIX, quoted from Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, p. 14.
Participating in the divine glory (Jn 17:20-26), a person becomes a partaker of God’s family (cf. 2 Pet 1:4; Eph 2:18), which is fully present in the person of Jesus Christ (cf. Col 2:9-10). In Him and through Him human nature mysteriously participates in the life of the living God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That is why the apostle Paul says: «It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me» (Gal 2:20). A person, partaking of the divine nature, becomes a son or daughter of God. In Christ the Holy Spirit restores the divine sonship of mankind, and therefore the notion of «adoption» is one of the most important characteristics of the mystery of deification: «You are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ» (Gal 4:4-7). Heir of what? Heir of the divine life. Deification becomes the chief leitmotif of the evangelical preaching of the Fathers of the Church, who, through the spiritual experience of their lives, testify to us about the chief gift that God prepared for man even before He created the world: to become sons of God by grace. It is enough to read only a few words from the sacred patristic tradition to ponder the mystery of man’s vocation: «He, Jesus Christ, became the Son of Man in order that man might become the son of God» (St Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3, 10, 2); «The Word of God, because of His immeasurable love, became what we are, in order to make us what He Himself is» (St Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 5); «He became man that we might be made God» (St Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation 54, 3).
The gift of deification is not only a possibility of the age to come; it is accomplished already here by the ascetic way of the inner purification of the heart and the intellect through the deep practice of inner unceasing prayer. Deification concerns the fullness of human nature. In spirit, soul and body, preserving his nature, the human person becomes a god by grace, according to the divine majesty and beauty of the deifying glory. The purification and deifying transformation of the human being is a transfiguration of all the dimensions of its existence, which are the components of the wholeness of a new man, a god by grace. The deification of man is not something metaphorical, nor is it merely a moral likeness to the Archetype, but the most real change and glorification of the whole of human nature. The chief condition for attaining deification is the fulfilment of the commandments and inner purification. This is precisely the moral and ethical dimension of Christian asceticism, whose goal is assimilation to the holy and perfect God.
The purification of the inner man is the chief prerequisite of deification, and therefore the goal of Christian morality is to make a person worthy and ready to receive the gracious gift of deification. Purification and transfiguration are the ascetic’s chief tasks in attaining deification. This task can be realised through inner activity, which consists in penetrating with one’s mind into one’s inner world, in constantly analysing what tries to penetrate us, to seize our attention, imagination, fantasy and thoughts, and finally to enslave our intellect and heart. Inner work is a continuous labour: on the one hand, of eliminating everything impure, destructive and disintegrating, and on the other, of cultivating purity, of «gathering oneself together», an evolving inner process of assimilation to God. Such an inner dynamic of self-recollection is not an individualistic closing in upon oneself, but an openness to God and to His action in our deep interior. That is why the inner work of a Christian, the mobilisation and concentration of all human powers in the heart, takes place in constant cooperation (synergeia) with God’s energy, with the grace of the Holy Trinity.
Inner asceticism, which is the chief substance of the patristic texts of the Philokalia, has two dimensions. The first is spiritual sobriety (nepsis), which consists in constant watchfulness, in attention to the processes taking place within us, in a spiritual and prayerful «filtering» of evil thoughts and movements of the soul, in the rejection of fantasies and products of the imagination that give birth to sinful passions. The second is inner peace, stillness of heart, the quieting of the intellect (hesychia), which makes it possible, after rejecting the noise of various thoughts and inner passionate movements, to hear the inner voice of God and to enter into dialogue with Him. That is why Christian ascetics who have gained deep peace and stillness in cooperation with God are called hesychasts.
Attaining spiritual sobriety and watchfulness is the Christian’s chief task on the way to deification. The chief means of accomplishing this task is, according to Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, «a truly wonderful method […]. It is to pray unceasingly to our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God; not merely to pray with the mind […], but to turn the intellect towards the inner self, […] and thus inwardly, in the very depths of the heart, to call upon the most holy name of the Lord and to ask for His mercy, concentrating our attention solely on the meaning of the words of the prayer, allowing nothing else from outside to invade within, but keeping the intellect free from all forms and colours.»47 The constant remembrance of God and standing before Him in the unceasing «Jesus Prayer» gradually leads to the destruction of the sinful passions and to the transformation of all sinful human movements. All human powers that served the sinful passions, being purified, are focused on the chief goal: union with God in the mystery of deification.
Note 47: Philokalia, vol. 1, p. XX, quoted from Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, p. 15.
Kallistos Ware sums up the essence of the hesychasts’ method of inner prayerful work, which the fathers call the «royal way», in five main points:
1. Unceasing prayer.
2. Prayer in the depths of the heart.
3. The rejection of all images and thoughts during prayer.
4. The invocation of the holy name of Jesus Christ.
5. The use (optional) of bodily techniques (control of the breathing, inclining the head towards the breast, and so on).48
Note 48: See Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, p. 15.
The patristic texts were selected with the aim of giving the Christian ascetic the fullest and most detailed counsels of those teachers who have the right to be guides, since they teach from their own spiritual experience. As one reads through the Philokalia, the question arises: for whom is this book intended? For monastics? After all, it was written by monks and would seem to be addressed to monks alone. Yet such monastic exclusivism was not the intention of the compilers and editors of the Greek edition, who gave a clear answer to this question already in the preface. Makarios and Nikodemos stress that this book is «for the common benefit of the Orthodox», for «all […] who share in the Orthodox calling, laity and monks alike».49 For every Christian is called to unceasing prayer (cf. 1 Thess 5:17), not only hesychast monks. To abide in constant prayerful activity is the natural business of a righteous person, the universal calling of every Christian to the same degree that all Christians are called to salvation and deification. To each, regardless of the kind of service and of the talents given him, God in baptism has opened a direct and real possibility of participating in His life. The realisation of this possibility depends on the concrete person, not on his state in life. Summing up the Christian universalism of man’s calling to deification and, accordingly, to inner prayerful activity as the path towards it, let us quote in full the appeal of the editors of the Greek Philokalia given in the preface: «Come, all you who share in the Orthodox calling, laity and monks alike, who seek to discover the Kingdom of God that is hidden within you, the treasure hidden in the field of the heart (cf. Mt 13:44), which is Jesus Christ. Having freed yourselves from the slavery of base things and from the wandering of the intellect, having cleansed your heart of the passions through the reverent and unceasing invocation of our Lord Jesus Christ and through all the other interconnected virtues taught in this book, you may on this path attain unity within yourselves and also with God, as the Lord said in His prayer to the Father: ‘That they may all be one […] even as we are one’ (cf. Jn 17:21-22).»50
Note 49: Philokalia, vol. 1, p. XX, quoted from Kallistos of Diokleia, ibid., p. 15.
Note 50: Philokalia, vol. 2, pp. XXIII-XXIV, quoted from Kallistos of Diokleia, ibid., pp. 19-20.
The significance of the «philokalic» work of Paisius Velychkovsky
The labour of Paisius Velychkovsky was extraordinary both in terms of time and in terms of the quantity and quality of the patristic texts he worked on. The elder is called the initiator of a new revival and the renewer of Ruthenian monastic life, the first Ruthenian monk-guide and director in ascetic and spiritual reading. Thanks to Paisius the Slavic monasteries, poor in the works of the hesychast fathers, were enriched with them, which led to the flourishing of monasticism and to the return of many monasteries to a monastic way of life in accordance with the patristic tradition.51 The revival of monasticism, to which Paisius contributed most of all, concerns above all the revival of hesychasm in Ukrainian Christianity52 and in other Eastern Christian traditions of spiritual asceticism. Just as Makarios of Corinth and Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain did in Greece, so Paisius Velychkovsky played a key role in the Slavic lands in reviving the interest of wide circles of monastics and laity in the heritage of Byzantine hesychasm and in the forgotten patristic works of the classics of Byzantine spiritual and ascetic literature.53 As I. Citterio notes, the distinctive feature of Paisius’s role is that he «does not reconstruct or reform monasticism, but enlivens it, makes it capable of drawing anew from the source of grace proper to monastic life. In this the spiritual genius of Paisius is revealed.»54
Note 51: I. Khibarin, pp. 59, 62.
Note 52: On the phenomenon of hesychasm in Ukrainian monasticism see S. Senyk, «L’hésychasme dans le monachisme ukrainien», in Irénikon, no. 2 (1989), pp. 172-212.
Note 53: H. Alfeyev, The Sacred Mystery of the Church. An Introduction to the History and Problems of the Name-glorifying Disputes, vol. 1, St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2002, p. 222.
Note 54: I. Citterio, p. 66.
The contemporary Greek theologian and researcher of Paisius Velychkovsky’s work, A. Tachiaos, assessing the elder’s mission, observes: «We are dealing with a truly astonishing phenomenon, difficult to interpret by means of the usual categories of social thought. Setting out from the spirituality of a practical character which prevailed in that age in Russia and on Athos, and through very tenuous contacts with the great teacher of the prayer of the intellect, the elder Basil of Poiana Mărului, Paisius became a most wise self-taught teacher and theoretician, who restored and developed Orthodox mysticism on a universal scale.»55 And he continues: «The life and work of Paisius Velychkovsky cannot be rightly evaluated unless they are considered from a universal and pan-Orthodox perspective, for his significance is not limited to one country or nation. His relations with the archbishop of Corinth, Makarios Notaras, and their collaboration in preparing the edition of the Philokalia bear the best witness to this. The elder Paisius took from the Greek world the treasures of a forgotten Orthodox spiritual heritage and offered them to the whole Orthodox world. It is important to note that the great Greek religious writer of the eighteenth century Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, to whom we owe the revival of that same tradition in the Greek world, decided to become a disciple of the elder Paisius. It thus becomes evident that the whole ‘philokalic revival’, whose echoes reach our own day, is indebted to the personality and activity of the elder Paisius Velychkovsky.»56
Note 55: A.-E. Tachiaos, «The revival of Orthodox spirituality by the elder Paisius Velychkovsky (1722-1794)», Moscow: Publication of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1989, p. 262; 260-266.
Note 56: A.-E. Tachiaos, p. 266.
Thanks to his «philokalic» work, the figure of the Ukrainian elder Paisius Velychkovsky stands in the same rank as such hesychast ascetics as St Symeon the New Theologian, St Gregory Palamas, St Nil Sorsky, St Josaphat Kuntsevych,57 St Seraphim of Sarov, the elder Basil of Poiana Mărului and many others. Belonging to different religious-historical and cultural-national contexts, they were united by one goal — deification — and by one, the «royal», path towards this goal: hesychia.
Note 57: S. Senyk, The Spiritual Profile of St Josaphat Kuntsevych, Lviv: Svichado, 1994.
Editions of the Philokalia
1782 — the Greek anthology of patristic texts gathered and edited by Makarios of Corinth and Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain appears under the title Philokalia (Venice).
1793 — the Slavonic translation of the Greek Philokalia, made by Paisius Velychkovsky, is published (St Petersburg).
1822 — the second edition of the Slavonic Philokalia appears.
1857 — an edition of the Philokalia translated into Russian and supplemented, edited by Ignatius Bryanchaninov (1807-1867), appears (St Petersburg).
1877-1889 — another Russian-language edition of the Philokalia in five volumes, translated and supplemented by Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894), appears (Moscow).
1883, 1885, 1905, 1913 — the first volume of Theophan the Recluse’s translation of the Philokalia is reprinted at least four times.
1893 — the second edition of the Greek Philokalia appears.
1946-1981 — a translated and supplemented Romanian version of the Philokalia, planned in ten volumes, begins to appear under the editorship of Dumitru Stăniloae (1903-1993). The first four volumes appeared in 1946-1948, and the other six between 1976 and 1981.
1951, 1954 — two volumes of an English version of the Philokalia, translated from the Russian text of Theophan the Recluse, appear. Over the following thirty years this edition was reprinted ten times (two in the 1950s, three in the 1960s and five in the 1970s).
1953, 1968 — the first and second editions of an abridged version of the Philokalia in French appear.
1957 — a German version of the Philokalia appears, based on the French translation.
1957-1963 — the third edition of the Greek Philokalia in modern Greek is prepared.
1979-1986 — a new translation of the Philokalia from Greek into French appears.
1981 — the first volume of the Philokalia in Finnish appears.
1979 — a new English translation of the Philokalia from the Greek original begins to be published; it has since been reprinted several times.
1982-1987 — four volumes of the Philokalia in Italian appear.
1984-1988 — a complete translation of the Philokalia into modern Greek appears.
1992-1998 — a two-volume anthology entitled The Little Philokalia appears in modern Greek.58
Note 58: On the history of the publication of the Philokalia in various languages see Kallistos of Diokleia, «The Spirituality of the Philokalia», in Sobornost, no. 13 (1), 1991, pp. 20-22; A Monk of the Eastern Church, The Jesus Prayer, Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987, pp. 76-79.
Viktor Zhukovsky