As there is so little useful information beyond a general introduction freely available online in English on the Philokalia, it seemed helpful to post my class notes from a semester-long class on the Philokalia held by Fr Maximos (Constas) of Simonopetra. He has a couple of forthcoming books on the Philokalia—one, a translation and commentary on St Nikodemos’ prologue to the Philokalia is soon to appear from Eighth Day Press; another, a book on the Philokalia itself, is in preparation for Harvard University Press. He is also the editor of a translation series The Philokalic Library, published by Newrome Press; as of mid-2025, two volumes have been published.
Spring Semester 2015, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology
15 January 2015—The Philokalia
(Fr Maximos isn’t back yet. Nick Junes is leading class.) Next week: Fr Basil Arabatzis, guest lecturer. Got a syllabus.
22 January 2015—The Philokalia
Guest speaker: Fr Basil Arabatzis
(Fr Maximos will probably be back this weekend.)
Fr Arabatzis has known Fr Maximos for years—he was ordained in New York in the parish Fr Maximos grew up in.
The Philokalia is more than a collection—it presents where the heart is, in a classical way. It’s about the wisdom of the heart of the Church. The more you look into the heart of the Church, the more clear things become. In our lives we often think if we do A B C D things we’ll be alright; but we end up back at step one. You’ve watched “Ostrov”. It repays viewing multiple times—more appears with each viewing. Note the difference between The Mountain of Silence[Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality (Doubleday, 2001)] and the Philokalia—one is fun, the other hard. The Philokalia is something we’re meant to take little bits of, but often: a few lines, a page or two, and that’s it. Fr Arabatzis only quotes one to three lines—”That’s about all that sticks with people.” Fr Arabatzis: “If you have two hours free, use an hour and a half for prayer, and half an hour for reading.” By the early 1970s, there were only about 1,000 monks on Mount Athos. But not now. No matter how long the decline may be, going from bad, to so-so, to worse—one year, two, four—things can change. The change in Mount Athos effected by Archimandrite Aemilianos occurred during a particularly dark time. It’s about how we let God into our souls in those dark times. The soul can be as though covered by a thick layer of ice, or as if a wall is built around it—God waits for you to melt it, to tear it down.
Handout: St John Cassian, “On the Eight Vices”—these vices are parts of that wall around the heart. An example from sports—if you don’t exercise and practice, you can get serious injuries. On anger—note politicians and how there’s an aura of anger about them in their speaking. On gluttony—food is meant to support life. The struggle with food is everywhere, and is easier or harder for different people. If you try and you fail, that’s okay: get back to it. On porneia/unchastity—as with food, there’s bodily pleasure involved as well as mental. On guarding one’s thoughts—control what goes in.
Dark days are to be expected in life—don’t put down your guns (asceticism) and give up in despair/despondency. On spiritual warfare in our lives—life is the battlefield; expect difficulties. But God still walks with you, and things will get better. The Metr Kallistos chapter [chapter 1, “St. Nikodimos and the Philokalia”, pp. 9–35; 277–84, in The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality (SGL Press, 1980)]: “What is the distinctive appeal and effectiveness of the Jesus Prayer?” Four things: simplicity, completeness, the Name, and discipline. All the people in the Gospels who address Christ use something the Jesus Prayer: “Lord/Son of David, have mercy [on me/my servant/et al.]” Syllabus—Next Wednesday, the first paper is due: on St Nikephoros.
29 January 2015—The Philokalia
Fr Maximos is back. His conference in Greece was cancelled because the government collapsed and elections were held that Sunday. The conference has been rescheduled for May, so he may miss a class or two in May. St Paisios was recognized [‘canonized’] while he was there! The Kollyvades’ feast day is Saturday of Bright Week. We will try to have Liturgy that day—Vespers the night before, with readings, canons, the whole thing. Fr Arabatzis actually prays—not all priests, bishops, and seminarians pray. Services are not enough. For some people, it’s theater. One of the reasons “our” church is not doing well is because it’s not a praying church. When you see failures, it’s because prayer is not there. But where you see virtuous behavior, cooperation, and love, prayer is there. Nor will you find it in “ethnic celebrations or other noisemaking”. In the Orthodox Word article [Fr Maximos Constas, “Transfigured in the Night: Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra”, The Orthodox Word 50.3 (2014): 105–51]: the Vigil is said to be the other side of the coin of the Liturgy. There is no faith without works. There is no point in attending services without a private prayer life, and vice versa. Annoyance at the service is a result of not praying. One can’t replace the public service with laps of a prayer rope. Prayer is to cultivate the seed of the Holy Spirit granted/planted at baptism. Both need each other—public service and private prayer—neither works alone. Prayer is like reading: the more one prays, the easier it is to pray more. The hard thing is to just stop doing things, and then to go pray. Just stopping is the courtyard of prayer. You need physical stillness and silence, a difficult thing to find with all our devices. (The Athens conference was on Digital Culture and Orthodoxy—how Orthodox Christians should behave on social media, etc.)
This is not strictly speaking an academic class. It is practical, about practice. The intention is not theoretical but practical: for the students to learn of the Philokalia and the Jesus Prayer in order to practice prayer. “People who are interested in theories generally don’t have a practice.” Theoretical differences and the allegiances to theories can be used to make one feel different, more special and distinct from others, rather than focusing on similarities of practice: we have the same jobs, salaries, cars, towns, class, grocery stores, “we wear the same one pocket t-shirts from The Gap”, etc. In not making time for prayer, we are saying rather “I don’t believe in the possibility of my own transformation.” This is the most serious course Fr Maximos teaches here: “This is serious because it’s about your life, and your life is serious.” People change over the course of it as they begin to pray. The problems we have are because we’re disengaged from ourselves and from God, living false lives. People today are looking for a true person: a bishop, a priest, etc, and they’re not finding it. Fr Maximos teaches this course intentionally in the spring so that the readings can be part of one’s spiritual readings during Lent. We may meet for only an hour [instead of two and a half], or not at all on some days, or have a makeup class. Keep a journal of things in the Philokalia that really strike you: this is the grace of God working through the sacred author. They’re gifts that have been given to you. Enjoy the reading. Slow down and split the reading over the course of the week. St Nikodemos: “No one can be saved without reading spiritual books.” Pick one up and read it. Who knows? The grace of God may come upon you. Then your heart is moved and you want to repent. Give these books, the words of Saints, the attention and respect they deserve. They’re the literary expressions of profound spiritual experience, and are bridges to that experience when read appropriately, which is to say spiritually. Each writing requires an appropriate form of reading. Think of the difference between readings you truly care about and those you don’t. You receive and treasure a letter from a friend, one whom you love, who you haven’t heard from in a long time, and who you’re worried about, and the sight of whose handwriting brings love. Contrast this with newspapers which are read and thrown away daily. Saying this is not an academic class doesn’t mean it’s dumbed-down, just that it’s different: these are important works and important practices.
On the Philokalia. It was first published 1782. Φιλοκαλία—φιλία + (τὸ) κάλλος/(τὰ) κάλλη. It is both a collection of beloved texts, and work on love of the Divine beauty. St Dionysios the Areopagite etymologizes κάλλος as from καλεῖν—something that calls you. The Philokalia contains works from 36 writers, who lived from the 4th to the 15th centuries. The compilation seeks to encompass all of Orthodox spiritual writing. People have the idea that it’s only an 18th century collection, that such a thing was only first compiled then. But there are a large number of earlier manuscripts dating back to the Palaeologan period, 1261–1453, from during the Hesychastic Controversy especially. The work of St Nikephoros we read (“On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart”, Philokalia 4.194–206) started the controversy. It was over the question “Is the experience of grace in prayer something created or uncreated?” Only God can unite to God. In those days, monks were given a set of classic readings. These were about 40–50% the same as the Philokalia: the pre-Philokalic collections, mentioned earlier. There are a number of core texts shared by all of them. In 1793 the Philokalia was translated into Slavonic, with the calqued title Dobrotolubye, “Good-love”. Saints Makarios and Nikodemos published the Philokalia in order to energize the Greek people spiritually, but it had little effect among them. The Greek state was founded in 1821, with a Bavarian king named Otto, and with an entourage of cultural agents who worked to impose a Western European notion of Hellenism: a Classical, ancient world version of what it meant to be Greek. There was a massive campaign against monasticism, along with the introduction of a Western style of paintings and architecture in churches. But the effect intended by Saints Makarios and Nikodemos in Greece was realized in the Slavonic and Russian world. St Herman of Alaska had a copy of the Slavonic translation of the Philokalia in Alaska. It wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s that the Philokalia finally had an impact in Greece. [No doubt the influence of Kontoglou et al. Note that his student Ralles Kopsides illustrated the beautiful Astir edition of the Philokalia.] G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky’s 1951 English partial translation of the Russian translation of the Philokalia, titled Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart, led the Greeks to realize the importance of the Philokalia. It is not meant to be simply read straight through. The editors Saints Makarios and Nikodemos decided to arrange the texts by author in their chronological order rather than the order they were intended to be read in. Perhaps they did this in order to show a long continuity in the face of the recent Enlightenment. It was never intended to be read chronologically, however. There’s an order in which to read a small number of texts first as a “path of entry”—these are on the syllabus. After this initiation, then you can read freely within the collection and outside it, knowing how to read and what to focus on. St Nikephoros is the first text on every list. On the readings: Chapter 10 of St Nikodemos, “On Guarding the Mind and the Heart”. Even in the development of the embryo, the heart is beating before there’s a brain. And those heart cells live for a person’s entire life. The world looks different when viewed from the center of the chest. For Plato and Aristotle, wonder is the beginning of philosophy. Metr Kallistos’ omission of St Nikodemos’ introduction was intentional, meant to recontextualize the Jesus Prayer and sort of gnosticize it, in order to scare readers away from saying the Jesus Prayer. Inward attention is important, attention to the heart, because you received the grace of the Holy Spirit in your heart. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” That grace was given as a seed, meant to be cultivated, and not only at the end of life. The Jesus Prayer is for that cultivation.
29 Jan 2015—my room, studying.
Something Fr Maximos (above) mentioned in the Philokalia class about the wild and unpredictable mood swings of the human mind—through pain, sorrow, anger, joy, etc.—made me think that this phenomenon is precisely reflected in the Psalms, and that is likely why the book of Psalms became the first prayer book of the Hebrews and Christians. They map out the human condition’s emotional expressions in relation to God and the world around us. As it’s been said: “In the Prophets God speaks to man; in the Psalms man speaks to God.” [Who said this? I learned it from one of my Jewish professors.]
4 February 2015—The Philokalia (make-up class)
There’s an icon in the Greek city Veria (Βέροια) called the Panaghia Melikiotissa (Παναγία Μελικιώτισσα). A girl dreamt of seeing her sister and an unknown beautiful woman who said, “I’m the Panaghia Melikiotissa and I’m in your city; come see me.” This icon has a history. In the Greek Civil War, some villagers of Meliki locked themselves in the church, and rebels shot through the windows. No villagers were harmed, and all the bullets hit the icon of the Panaghia Melikotissa. The bullets are still in it! Someone at some point painted blood dripping out of the bullet holes, so it’s being restored to remove that ghastly addition. It’s in the conservation workshop that the girl, her friends, and some others found the icon. This story was related to Fr Maximos by a nun at the conservation workshop, which is attached to the monastery.
On the writing assignment of Reflections: stick to the format. Perhaps also note the flow from one reading to the other.
St Nikodemos “chapter 10”: The focus on or prevalence of baptism is striking. The separation of personal and liturgical life is artificial, as though one is spiritual and the other is not. Inward attention is not solipsism or attending to some sort of “god in me”, but a turning in toward the grace God placed in us at baptism. On the “heart” as the center of spiritual presence. The heart starts beating 23 days into gestation. Those cells continue to live in the person until their death. The heart is the core of self from which the person grows. The Byzantines had a fascinating tradition regarding the heart: as the heart was the first thing formed and the face last, so at death the order is reversed, and on the 40th day the heart is dissolved. Note the reaction of the recipient of the Jarvik artificial heart: it was basically a metronome—the heart rate never changed. There was a British documentary of people who’d received heart transplants: they reported strange after-effects of taking on traits of the anonymous donors. This was unexplained and is—at present—still inexplicable. We’re psychosomatic wholes, a pile of reactions. We’ll come back to the idea of Orthodox Christian anthropology, but here are a few pieces tonight relating to the mind.
[Below is an attempt to reproduce two diagrams Fr Maximos drew on the board, and that I copied into my notes.]
ἐνεργεία activity, energy, actuality
^
δύναμις power–potential–potency
^
οὐσία essence
[ἐν δυνάμει : “potentially”]
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ activity of mind
οὐσία
HEART καρδία
Every substance has potential and actuality when it fulfills its design: an acorn is potential, an oak is actuality. The idea in relation to the heart is that the root or source is there in the chest, in the center of the person. Thoughts that seem not to flow from one’s heart are a result of our being fragmented and fallen beings in a fragmented and fallen world. The image of the Church is a body. Traditional cultures are unified: art, dance, etc., all cohere. A good example is Japanese culture. St Nikephoros: “So if you want to return to yourself…”—the fall is not just from God but from our own selves. We want to be whole, to be one person, with no separation from self, neighbor, or God. St Dorotheos of Gaza depicts God as the center of a circle, and as we follow the radii in going inward toward God, we also come closer to one another. We’re constantly being distracted by things outside of ourselves, worrying about the past or future, and never in the moment. God doesn’t exist in our regrets and worries. Here in this moment, God is present, yet we’re completely absent. The Presentation is an instructive feast: God comes to us as a 40-day infant, needing care. Your prayer and a return to yourself doesn’t require the approval of a bishop or a standing council or whatever. St Maximos in Questions to Thalassios: The Holy Spirit is active in the world to get people into the Church, and among the Jews to get them to recognize Christ in the Scriptures—in both, it is movement toward divinization. “The Philokalia is therapy for the lapsed baptized”—Fr Maximos. On the breathing techniques described in the Philokalia: it’s really not for everybody. St Nikodemos, p. 160: Avoid continual breathing. One should hold one’s breath until the inner consciousness says the Prayer once. In states of higher concentration, we tend to stop breathing. Fr Maximos doesn’t know anyone on Mount Athos who does this breathing technique, even under the direction of a spiritual father. Some monks say it so fast it’s a buzz. Do not say it too fast, nor too slow so that it’s highly emotional, but slow enough that you can attend to the words. The usual way to breathe while praying it: inhale, say the prayer, then exhale. The classic way, though, is the way to go: while inhaling (Lord…), while exhaling (…have mercy…). It will naturally sync with your breathing, as would anything you say repeatedly. We’re very distracted; we sometimes sit to pray and can’t—it’s very frustrating. When that happens, say the first part of the prayer while inhaling, then take a short pause, then say the rest while exhaling. It’s just a way to get focused again. It only takes a couple of times. Maybe that’s what St Nikodemos is talking about. On Mount Athos most say Κὐριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ ἐλέησον με. Sometimes you need τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν. The name is common to all. On St Nikephoros: The introduction in volume 4 of the Ware, et al. translation contains one distortion and one outright lie in regards to St Gregory Palamas’ evaluation of St Nikephoros. It is about reorienting your life: returning to yourself, and turning inside to find the treasure God placed there. St Nikephoros’ piece is in response to an attack/resistance he’d been confronted with. These things are often resisted, lost, and then rediscovered and revived. [Note: this resistance, mockery, and dismissal, are things Fr Maximos wants to hear about. The ego wants to fight back. Note the resistance—it’s expected.] There’s a genuine fear of the loss of one’s self—the only thing we’ve always supposedly known. It’s the superficial ego construct that you know—a caricature of yourself. It’s the caricature that has to go. What’s left is the icon of you: the glorified beauty of a person. From the wild to the cultivated. “If I go down this road, I don’t know what I’m going to be.” Most don’t come to the spiritual life until after some bad things have happened.
5 February 2015—The Philokalia
No class this coming week. We’ll meet the week after, Wednesday and Thursday as we did this week. The reading is long, complex, difficult, yet important. It’ll be good to talk about it over two nights. (Fr Maximos: “The first time I read it, I hated it. The second time…. The third time I don’t know what happened.”) Remain conscious of the readings. Handouts: Elder Aimilianos on how to read the Scriptures (from “On Abba Isaiah”)—good for approaching any spiritual reading. Fr Maximos, “Outline of the Historical Development and Publication of the Greek and Slavonic Philokalia.” Fr Maximos, “How to Read the Philokalia: syllabi given for reading the Philokalia by various”. There’s a logic to starting with St Nikephoros’ work (attending to the heart), and St Hesychios’ work (attention to thoughts). [Evgenia Kadloubovsky smoked out of a long tortoiseshell cigarette holder.] Now to St Hesychios (Philokalia 1.161–198). He was from Sinai after the time of St John Climacus and drew on the same sources. Eastern monasticism has a unity of practice. (Why should the Church imitate the fragmentation of society with small groups?) St Hesychios is present in all the pre-Philokalic mss. “Method” is from (ἡ) μέθοδος < μετὰ + ἡ ὁδός: the idea is to follow someone on the path. He raises the problem of thoughts (λογισμοί). It can have a neutral meaning, as in modern Greek, but in ecclesiastical literature, it always connotes dark thoughts. The idea is that we’re usually all distracted all the time, avoiding inner noise with the radio or gadgets on, etc; we’re never done. Sitting down to pray, you’ll be distracted by two levels of thoughts. One level is idle thoughts of things we need to do—just gently recall your attention inward and return to prayer. These days we insist on healthy organic food, but let all kinds of thoughts run free in our minds. Getting past those, in a second level there are rather deeper recurring thoughts—your passions, fears, and anxieties. Giving yourself the space, you’ll recognize these thought-feelings, which bear emotional weight. You can—wrongly—end up identifying them as your personality. Some are not even aware of the difference between their thoughts and their personalities. You can have all this negative stuff coming out of your mind, like “How come you don’t experience God?” “All logismoi are thieves because they steal your heart from God.” When you’ve allowed the thoughts to influence/control you for so long, it’s very difficult to change; it will take longer and more effort. “You can’t be watching Game of Thrones and think you’ve got God in your heart.” If all that craving would cease for just a moment, you would find God. You can be confronted with a you that you’re uncomfortable with in this second level. It’s because of this second level that it’s especially good to have a spiritual father to help/guide you. The logismoi can be disturbing and that’s when you need someone to tell you, “It’s alright.” We all have darkness in us. To think you don’t, that you’re different: you have no idea of human nature. There’s a state of prayer in which there are no thoughts. We have images of ourselves, and these can be damaged. Perhaps only our images relate to one another? The thoughts are passive; the Jesus Prayer is intentional. One must let go of the thoughts and images. If you can’t control your thoughts/impulses, you can’t control your life. (An aside: in icons you see martyrs with beatific faces and haloes, freed from their passions; their tortures also look peaceful.) “You don’t do anybody any good by spewing your psychic junk on them.”—Fr Maximos. The 3 day rule: if something persists for 3 days, sometimes just saying it to another person takes care of it. Just writing it and having to share it, you’re confronted with how petty it is. St Hesychios, “On Watchfulness and Holiness, written for Theodoulos.” The heart warmed by prayer is like a campfire drawing toward it serpents, so “you have to play spiritual whack-a-mole.” How can you be a true servant of Christ if you’re a slave to your impulses? You can do the right thing for the wrong reason. Great similes: “mirror”, in section 23; “seal” reshaping the mind [section?]; “spider” in section 27; “dolphin” in section 156. Scripture is used in interesting ways, much differently and more subtly than in, e.g., Chrysostom. At this point we’re just looking at a few minutes of Jesus Prayer, not 6 or 24 hours or even 1 hour—just a few minutes. God allows us to see neither our own virtues nor our own sins—as He sees them—or we’d lose our virtues or be destroyed in horror. We’re so generous at forgiving ourselves, and we are to forgive others just as easily. Without guarding, the mind is like a lamb, naive and young, in the pasture with a ravenous beast approaching, and the lamb starts running to the beast (section 144). Hesychios’ systematized description:
1) Provocation προσβολή
2) Momentary disturbance παραρριπισμός
3) “Coupling” ὁμιλία
4) Assent συγκατάθεσις
5) Prepossession πρόληψη
6) Passions πάθοι
A passion is the end result of having given in to something so often that you no longer have any power over it—you’re passive. Thoughts in the mind are like flies in a room: if there’s dirt in there, there will be more. There are airplanes that fly over Mount Athos, but they have no airport. They just let them fly by.
Bring your papers to the Wednesday class.
13 Feb 2015 (studying at Caffé Nero in Jamaica Plain):
Reading for the Philokalia class. On Kallistos and Ignatios of Xanthopoulos “Directions to Hesychasts, in a hundred chapters.” (Writings from the Philokalia 164–270).
.2: “…and so have often begged us wretches for a word, and a written rule for your own good, and also possibly, for others’….”
[The addressee had asked for a written monastic rule; this century provides it.]
.4: The rule is reducible to : “try in all ways and with all effort to live in accordance with the laws laid down in Christ’s Divine Commandments” [which are what? The Beatitudes? It would be nice to have this explicitly stated or have them all enumerated somewhere, particularly prior to reading this selection.]
This leads to ascension to the image bestowed at baptism by grace.
.5: It’s a grace of glory. Grace leads toward “the very summit of perfection, to its very highest degree—love, which is God.”
.6: Repentance and obedience to the commandments restore that glory when dimmed by passions.
.7: “Most of all is it necessary to keep the first and original commandments which are, as it were, the mothers of the rest, and to consecrate to them the greater part of of one’s activity.” [In this I would expect “Love God with all your heart…” “…and your neighbor as yourself” to be the “mother of the rest”, but they define another route, in the following.]
.8: Calling on the name of Christ, with peace and love—this is the beginning: faith, peace, and love.
.9: Calling on Christ’s name in faith and hope to obtain mercy and life. In peace we are reconciled with God and men. And in love we unite with God, who is love.
Ah! We’re leaving!
18 February 2015—The Philokalia (make-up class)
Saturday of Bright Week is the feast of the Kollyvades, so we’ll maybe have a late night thing/Vigil, Liturgy in morning, and then a picnic/barbeque on Saturday. Bob Simon, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, a very kind man, died in a car accident in New York this week. His interview with Patriarch Bartholomew may be the most sympathetic interview of him ever. Simon won 32 Emmy awards. “He was somebody from another era, really.”—Fr Maximos.
It’s very difficult to maintain one’s spiritual life well without a community. There’s a story about the last few of monks of a monastery who ask a rabbi friend why they’ve lost members and not attracted new members. He said, “I don’t know. I have the same problem in my synagogue. But I think one of you might be the Messiah.” The monks changed toward one another after that. And eventually more were drawn to the monastery.
Give the person their freedom. That’s a part of Simonopetra’s practice. A community needs rules, because it’s hard to live in community.
People get discouraged in their spiritual lives, focusing on what they aren’t doing or can’t do. That’s not the best thing to bring forward in your relationship with God. St Paisios: “Let’s talk about what you can do. Can you attend Liturgy Sunday and prepare for communion? Can you fast Wednesday and Friday and for the larger fasts? Can you read a little every night?” “Yeah” to all. “So do that. Don’t focus on your faults, but on what you can do.”
There’s a “Fellowship of the Holy Name” founded by a David (Something), a former Benedictine but now a Pentecostal Christian, who advocates praying the Jesus Prayer, but with a strong Eastern non-Christian flavor.
We need silence. We need time for self-reflection, and time to critically respond to what one is taking in.
Books:
9789605276874—collection of texts from Philokalia, orig. and mod. Gk.
0912927690—on Elder Basil of Poiana Marului, the spiritual Father of St Paisiy Velichkovsky.
9789605183028—Elder Aimilianos’ commentary on St Hesychios.
AND a critical edition of the Greek text of St Isaac the Syrian, with a collation of all the Greek texts: 9789608753792
On Sts Kallistos and Ignatios:
While there is the Prayer, there is a wider practice, too. Also, is it a coincidence that the reading leading into a community life is also a collaborative work (two or more authors)? Also the person/elder relationship is not simply one-way. The obedience itself is transformative, for Christ was Himself supremely obedient to God’s plan. Also, all are created in the image of God, so obeying anyone is an icon of obeying Christ. While these writings are directed toward monks, specifically hesychastic monks, what can be adduced from the recommendations for a rule here? The major theme is the recovery of the grace given at baptism—a sacrament of the Church and liturgical, wholly and surely. The grace you have comes through the Church from God. Maybe we need some kind of “renewal of vows” like married people do? Monks losing their way usually get it back upon reading their vows again. From the beginning of this work, he says had we not lost the baptismal grace, you wouldn’t be asking me for a rule, and we wouldn’t need ascetics and monasteries, etc, etc. Grace and/or baptism are both/either mentioned in our earlier readings, but there it’s much more explicit. The request to the authors was for “initiation into the Holy Scriptures”. This is no “how to do exegesis”, but a demonstration of what was requested. (It would be good to investigate the appearance of these citations and clusters of them in previous hesychastic/Palamite/pre-Palamite works.) [The answer also in itself is an example: rather than a “how to”, it is a superb demonstration . One doesn’t learn from another who doesn’t know what must be taught. This in itself is a support of both the elder and community, in the larger sense.] “A spiritual father is to protect a person’s freedom.”—a bishop friend of Fr Maximos. This isn’t thinking for someone else, but rather keeping them from sin, which is from having their freedom destroyed by sin. A self-willed person is subject to his impulses. The empowerment comes with a certain level of spiritual maturity, not to someone new to the Church.
19 February 2015—The Philokalia
Bob Simon’s funeral service was held in the Metropolitan Opera House, only the second ever to occur there. This Sunday there’ll be a “60 Minutes” tribute. Leslie Stahl will read the messages received, with Fr Maximos’ message being read last, about the fathers of the Holy Mountain praying for him, and will add “as we are too.”
On Sts Kallistos and Ignatios.
For the Reflections, pick the one big thing in the reading that sticks with you.
Don’t forget the quote—it’s interesting to Fr Maximos to see things as others have seen them.
Bring the questions to class and ask them.
“Fantasy” φαντασία—the impassionate faculty of the mind which receives sense perceptions and reforms them into things that don’t exist. “Thoughts are thieves because they steal you from God.” You have to make judgments on the impressions transferred to the mind by the soul, and there, properly (supposedly), the intellect reforms them for better use. Guarding the heart keeps those fantasies from implanting in the heart and growing there: enjoying a revenge plot, e.g.
25 February 2015—Evagrios on Prayer. Reading for Philokalia class.
Prologue
1–4: On setting aside impassioned thought in prayer, as Moses set aside his sandals, made of flesh.
5–8: On tears in prayer
9–12: Setting aside distractions in prayers
13–27: Against anger
28–30: On spiritual prayer
31–40: On what to pray for
41–43: Proper reason for prayer
44–51: Spiritual battle in prayer
52–58: Virtues and prayer [logoi in 52!]
59–66: God as the source of prayer.
67–68: Against imagery in prayer
69–74: Guarding the intellect in prayer
75–81: Angels and prayer
82–87: Calm psalmody in prayer
88: Persevere and the gift of prayer will be granted
89: Thankfulness in prayer
90–99: Demonic attacks in prayer
100–105: Against earthly concerns in prayer
106–113: Against distraction in prayer
114–117: Against imagery in prayer
118–123: 6 beatitudes: 3 of the undistracted intellect, 3 of the proper monk
124–127: The monk and prayer
128–131: On bodily needs and poverty
132–7: On virtue
138–40: Demonic attacks in prayer.
141–8: Repentance necessary for prayer
149–153: On quality prayer.
12 March 2015—The Philokalia
The Westchester, Illinois parish has an active bookstore and an annual book fair with a speaker. This year the speaker was Fr Maximos on St Maximos. There were talks on three nights, about an hour each. He’d stop after about 20 minutes to make sure everyone was still with him, and let them ask questions.
On the Saint Abba Philemon—The general consensus is that he lived in the 6th century. [Sensible—enough time for Sketis, etc, to have recovered, but before the Persian invasion.] Evagrios has a work called “Rebuttals”—answers that are Scripture (like Jesus to the devil in the wilderness). The Jesus Prayer is a μονολόγιστος (monologic) prayer. The text demonstrates that the idea of “Schools” in theology of the time is a stretch. There was an early communication between all areas. Within 100 years of St Basil’s death his ascetic works were popular everywhere. [Fr Maximos’ father: “Life is like bananas: everything comes in bunches.”] Note 2Pt 1.5–8: qualities leading to others. How does stillness lead to ascetic effort? The stillness allows one to become aware of the world around—seeing oneself and one’s surroundings clearly, and seeing that there is work to do. So comes the work to correct those things needing change. The goal is a relationship with God, so it’s only natural to want to clear them out of the way. “We don’t fast in order to achieve a state of hunger.” Desire, longing, yearning, love—what is the role of these in that life? “Don’t cover your wound because that’s where the light enters.” —Rumi. Note St Basil’s Letter [number?]: How can one understand the gifts of the Spirit, without the Spirit?
St John Cassian—Fr Maximos doesn’t know when the Greek translation was done [St John Cassian’s Conferences were written in Latin], but much earlier than St Nikodemos. There’s a strong emphasis on order: immediate and mediate goals. St John Cassian avoided the term dispassion/ἀπαθεία because Jerome hated it, and who wants to pick a fight with Jerome? St John Cassian spoke of purity of the heart. We need to treat ourselves to the Church, having ourselves and our lives in service to the Church rather than trying to change the Church or whatever. There are examples in here of “Monks Gone Mad”. (ha)
26 March 2015—The Philokalia
There’s a relatively new translation out of the Life of St Symeon the New Theologian by St Niketas Stethatos. [Richard P. H. Greenfield, trans. The Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian (Harvard University Press, 2013).]
St Symeon the New Theologian “On Faith”—from his Catecheses. Faith/belief = πίστις. English can mask the import of the word choice. How does faith relate to life activity in this? What is faith in this text? There are various answers, but faith being a gift from God is the best answer: a relationship due to God’s grace. Since the establishment of the institutional Church, it’s the Church that’s persecuted Christians, and those Saints have a greater sanctity than those persecuted by outsiders because, like Christ, they were persecuted by their own and yet persevered. p. 16, paragraph 2: The potential is given at baptism, and activated by desire for it. It is God’s gift along with a “preeminent characteristic of our natures”, free will. Metaphors related to sin moved from weight-based to monetary (as in Christ’s various parables)—and so righteousness/faith also comes to be monetized as credit which may or may not be doled out where needed. This monetized view is not solely “Western”; it’s been part of the Church since the beginning. When sinning, you’ve become a debt slave to the devil, instead of freely—in more than one sense—doing God’s will or your own. Think how much more powerful these metaphors were when people could actually be enslaved for debt. In this text is the first mention of the Theotokos as intercessor.
II. “The Three Methods of Prayer” is a mistranslation—it is “The Method of Prayer”. Find a sentence that says “There are three methods…”! Wrong. It is “There are three forms (τρόπει) of prayer….” The The first form relies on imagery—but this is easily turned to deception by the devil. Though it’s an internal psychological event, it’s still to some degree external. Without a powerful consciousness, imagery is just an expression of your own internal messed-up-ness. The person confuses his own action with God’s grace and wants it to never end. The second form is when regarding the self-organized thoughts, self-esteem takes over and then no progress is made—the enemy remains unknown, attacking via thoughts from within. These are images invested with dark energy, motivational ones leading to worse thoughts or worse actions toward others. (All of us are all of these people doing these three forms of prayer.) The third form is very rare: that of complete obedience to God and one’s spiritual father, becoming “dead to every worldly and bodily attachment.” p. 70, bottom: The intellect keeps watch over the heart while it prays—a more intellective heart is more effective. p. 71, top: The intellect is in the heart, or at least participates in the life of the heart—it remains there and repels intruders. p. 72, bottom: The intellect has to search out the heart “where all the powers of the soul reside.” The intellect is in darkness until reaching its place in the heart. That integration is the result of grace. p. 74, bottom: Curtail passions. Use Psalmody. The intellect repels distracting thoughts.
St Gregory Palamas’ Triads (9 works in 3 trilogies) are absolutely foundational for hesychastic theology, an irreducible aspect of Orthodox Christian theology. The first six have a parallel structure: 1) the critique of pagan philosophy 2) the Jesus prayer 3) the knowledge of God. The third trilogy is different: 1) divinization 2) the uncreated light 3) the distinction between essence and energies. There’s been no period since his time when he was not read or venerated. The second Sunday of Lent is devoted to him. In his day there were criticisms of the Jesus Prayer and of its underlying assumptions. This is a hermeneutical theology, describing how and whether people can receive God’s revelation. The recipient (each person) is compromised, so the message must be therapeutic in itself. p. 334, last paragraph: The heart is the shrine of the intellect. At the bottom/end: the anti-hesychasts are confused, not knowing how the body even works. p. 334, no. 3: The heart is the body’s/soul’s center; the intellect acts in the heart. One must look inward for the image of the body in the body—the heart—so the intellect goes into there.
St Silouan the Athonite: “My body is the cave of my soul. My soul is the cave of the Holy Spirit.”—when someone said “What are you doing here? You should be living in a cave!”
16 April 2015—The Philokalia
St Diadochos of Photiki today. Fr Maximos may write a book of sermons for the earlier days of Holy Week, with two or three short sermons per service for people to read or for priests to use for sermon preparation. It’s usually the real faithful who come and want to learn. He did about eight sermons in San Diego, along with chanting all week; each sermon was on one of the troparia chanted.
George Steiner—an excellent essayist on English literary criticism, has a book, Real Presences, in which he inveighs against the effect deconstructivism has had: commentary has overtaken art, stripping the works of wonder and presence. He suggests an experiment: ban all commentary, only other art could be made/used as commentary. So use a Picasso painting as commentary on one by Velazquez, or the Aeneid as a commentary on the Iliad, or, say, writings based in a life of humility from the Desert Fathers as a commentary on Scripture.
Note the dichotomy between the charismatic/prophetic and the bureaucratic/priestly: they lie on opposite ends of the spectrum of routine. How can a bureaucracy mediate a religious experience? Will the Spirit thrive on such rocky soil? The institution is a double-edged sword. The challenge is to limit the machinery—it’s like a cancer that grows. Christ was radical, and has been tamed. [Organism vs. Organization]
Note a book: Following in the Footsteps of the Invisible, a full translation by Cliff Ermatinger of St Diadochos’ works. One of his writings is of a “vision” dialogue between St Diadochos and John the Baptist. (!) He was an anti-monophysite, as St Photios notes. This is a very early text. There’s this idea that the Jesus Prayer is a very late thing, either tied to the Hesychastic Controversy or The Way of a Pilgrim. Yet there in St Diadochos is written “We all need to practice the ‘Jesus Christ…’” (τὸ Κύριε Ἰησοῦ…)—the Jesus Prayer. He talks of invocation (ἐπικαλέω), and the memory/recollection of God. He lived in the mid-late fifth century. And the Jesus Prayer wasn’t invented by him. Devotion to the name of Christ goes all the way back to the New Testament: “…the name of Jesus….” This is a landmark, however, because of its age and the development already apparent—the life of the mind, etc. The physical techniques seem to have developed later, but devotion to the name is always there. St Diadochos’ history is obscure. He knows Evagrios and the Macarian Homilies. St Diadochos is in all the pre-Philokalic manuscripts. Everyone read him. He was a huge influence on St Symeon. In St Diadochos, αἴσθησις appears—it has a very broad meaning, but in Patristic Greek, it usually connotes sensation and sense perception, the latter presupposing mind. Those two are part of sensation in humans. It comes to mean in some writers awareness, consciousness, and perception. Another word with which αἴσθησις is paired is ἡ πείρα : experience. Both terms were technical terms in Messalianism. Messalianism was a kind of tendency toward extremism/pietism, saying baptism can’t even fix a soul; it involved much personal prayer (not liturgy) and rigorous asceticism. [‘Messalian’ originally comes from the Syriac ܡܨܠܝܢܐ mṣalyānā ‘one praying’.] The goal was to receive conscious assurance ((ἡ)πληροφορία) of salvation. St Diadochos rehabilitates this language, rescuing it from the Messalians. Bringing sensation/αἴσθησις into spirituality is somewhat radical of St Diadochos, as the focus is usually on γνώσις/knowledge or intellection. In St Diadochos, the true human is one thing, not fragmented, as in the pre-Fall human state having an immediate perception of God. “Will” also seems to be folded into αἴσθησις. In the Fall, singularity becomes duality. In and through sensations, fixations occur and are habituated, and then the mind becomes enslaved to mindless sensation. “You end up being torn into a thousand pieces.” Separating from God, the ultimate one love to sense, we fragment into our distractions. A part of us can be exclusively fascinated by sensations, multiple ones, and further splitting. St Diadochos died at the age of 100, and his work was taken up by St Maximos the Confessor and glossed in one of his minor works. Asceticism flows from anthropology: different anthropologies produce different asceticisms. In these writers, the rhetoric of existential dualism is so extreme for the precise reason of ensuring effectiveness, of eliciting results. It can be confused with ontological dualism, but that’s not the case. Because our situation, so subject to the mind of the flesh, is so dire, they use more extreme language in order to make any kind of impact on us at all. Pastorally, people need to be reconnected with their natural love for God, thus these works mention God’s grace given to the beginners. Fr Maximos had a monk on Mount Athos tell him: “God is like a pastry shop owner who once in a while gives free samples in the street. You get them hooked and then they have to come to the shop (the Church) and pay (struggle/ascesis) for more.” Section 15: it’s all αἴσθησις!
Saturday morning, 8am Orthros followed by Liturgy: Feast of the Kollyvades!
23 April 2015—The Philokalia
Obedience has come up in a number of texts. This grates against American values. The idea is: either obedience to Christ and His body, the Church, or obedience to your passions. Most of us do the latter already, and giving that up is a form of dying. St Symeon the New Theologian: “You don’t want to die? If you don’t want to die, you’re dead already.” That death leads to great human potential. Otherwise, one is left in the addiction to passions: addiction to food, obesity, drugs, etc. The documentary “Fed Up” on the food industry, and especially the sugar industry, is revealing. Around 80% of American schools have contracts with fast food and soft drink companies. To these companies, people are merely objects or resources to exploit. There’s a whole system out there working to trap you in passions both new and old. “If you’re not preaching Christ, you’re wasting your time.” People want to hear that, but even more want to see it by example. “Thy will be done.”—that’s obedience. Note the book: Spiritual Guidance on Mount Athos: it’s a collection of papers from a conference in Cambridge last year. It’s hit or miss [—sounds mostly miss]. There’s almost a fear nowadays of embracing values. Note another book: Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford, a book on work. There’s also a new book by him: The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in An Age of Distraction. Very Philokalic! Today we see not just a crisis of value, but a loss of value, in simply seeking distraction of any sort. Freedom in America is freedom of preference; it’s not allowed to comment on or critique another’s preferences. This is a system established by the industries, and a societal problem. We need periods of silence, focus, and attention. How do you maintain a coherent self? How we encounter the world outside our head depends on what we have in our head. Crawford’s answer is to have actual skilled practices. Our attention is a resource being exploited by industries. The question of what to attend to is an issue of what to value. “The body is in one place, the mind in another.” This leads to an ethical void. Public and community life is affected: everyone is insulated in their own cocoon of devices, etc.
We can’t meet next week. Fr Maximos will be at Bob Simon’s public memorial service. The Simon family wants him to speak. We’ll meet Friday May 1, 2pm–430pm. We’re reading The Way of a Pilgrim. The R. M. French translation has a very warm ecclesiastical feel to it. Read whichever translation you have.
In the past, Fr Maximos has started the class with these historical readings. The larger context is the Turkish/Ottoman period, 1453–1821, nearly four centuries. One can’t generalize the entire period for all regions, for all social strata. ThePhilokalia was published in 1782, in the context of the Enlightenment (Greek διαφώτιση)—a deliberate response to it. This was just after the American and French revolutions. Then there was the fall of Napoleon in 1814, and the creation of the Greek state in 1821. The Philokalia was meant to influence all Greek culture, but it didn’t, largely due to the historic context. The French and Russians in Ottoman Greece were fomenting revolt. This period is called the “Neohellenic Enlightenment”. In 1821 in Greece, with the founding of the state, the Ottoman past was erased: Katharevousa was invented, and the mosques all destroyed. In Athens, both Byzantine churches and Ottoman buildings were destroyed in order to get down to the Classical remains. The Byzantine Empire lasted over 1,000 years. Its high culture was very complex. Aristocratic creative elites influenced the entire culture. In 1453 that elite layer was lopped off. The Greeks became peasants. Look at the food. By the 17th century, they’d re-formed an elite layer: the Phanariotes in Constantinople—so-called as they dwelt in the Phanar district in the city. They were influential and wealthy, and owed their entire existence to their usefulness to the Muslim rulers, and they were to guarantee that the people obeyed. The situation for Greeks elsewhere was generally still bad in the 17th century. For more than a century they’d been dealing with a number of systemic discriminatory issues: 1) political disenfranchisement; 2) economic impoverishment (in the Peloponnese, 2/3 of the land was owned by 10% of the population [Turks]); 3) loss of land/displacement; 4) loss of religion (due to conversion to Islam); 5) legal disenfranchisement (as with number 3, it made various kinds of sense to convert to Islam); and 6) cultural isolation—from their own culture, from Muslim culture, and from the West (the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution were all missed) as well as from other Greeks elsewhere. By the 16th century, the Phanariotes emerge. By the 18th century, the Greeks had largely rebounded, having a large number of towns. The Turks didn’t work—they had others to work for them. There was a thriving Greek diaspora. Without the diaspora there would be no Greece: then as well as today. Diaspora Greeks sent money back, arranged trade, etc. Wealthy Phanariotes were even sent into Moldavia and Wallachia to be princes and kings. A sort of movement in various Greek circles was that of the “Great Idea”, to regain standing and self-determination. The discussion was over whether to infiltrate society from the inside, taking over from within; or, to start over outside, somewhere else. Ultimately, it was decided by Western powers, who took a chunk of the Ottoman Empire and proclaimed it Greece. There is a common (mis)perception was that Greek theology didn’t exist in the Turkish period, or that there was lots of Western influence. The theological history of the period is really not well known, generally. Some have said that the theology of the time was decadent, that it had decayed from a better past. Some blame Florovsky for this concept, who had a kind of disdain for the Ottoman period. Yet! The Ottoman period was a golden age on Mount Athos. There was a general return to cenobitic life, away from the idiorhythmic. There were major renovations of the monasteries, paid for with money from Serbia and the Danubian provinces. The Ἀθωνιάδα—the Athonite Academy— provided liberal arts instruction on Mount Athos, a test case for how far they could push Orthodoxy together with the Enlightenment. There was rising literacy, and Greek books published in Venice were popular throughout the Empire: at least 5,000 books. There was also the rise in the phenomenon of New Martyrs. New Martyrs were Orthodox Christians who became Muslim for various reasons, then came back to Church, and insisted on making public recusal of Islam—Muslim law requires capital punishment for apostasy. The “Anointers of Martyrs” were special Athonite monks who prepared them before their recusal. Mount Athos was the center of missionary activity, noting particularly St Kosmas Aitolos. Crosses were set up in each town he visited and taught in. He was trained at the Athoniada, and a monk of Philotheou Monastery. Numerous metochia were established: income-generating properties granted to monasteries by various donors for ongoing support, which meant perpetual support for the monasteries. If monks have to work beyond a certain amount they’re no longer monks. The Greek revolution ends this golden age on Athos—for the first time in history, Athos was occupied by Ottoman garrisons. All the lead—used as water-proofing—was stripped off the roofs and upper walls of the monasteries. This was the time of the Kollyvades. Historically, they’ve divided people. Originally, it was a dispute on liturgical practices. Κόλλυβαδες “Kollyvades” was originally a term of derision, based on kollyva κόλλυβα or κόλυβα. They were called ecclesiastical obscurantists, dredging up old canons, etc. Others see them—as we do now—as initiating a sort of spiritual renewal and revival of church life and spirituality in the Patristic tradition. They faced serious opposition. The controversy divided Mount Athos and the Constantinople Patriarchate. It started at Skete of St Anna. The monks there were having pannikhidia (memorials) with long, long canons, from Saturday evening into Sunday morning, durinng which time memorials for the dead were banned by ancient canon law. The Skete of St Anna was building a church, and had 12,000 names to commemorate (donors, etc.)—they didn’t do it Friday to Saturday because Saturday was market day, when they would take their goods to Karyes to get food. (Were there really not better ways to deal with this situation?) St Nikodemos, in “A Confession of Faith” decribes that days are symbols—each has its own spiritual qualities. “In the same way that Pascha attracts the Spring to itself….” “So that the uncreated and created are subjected to the same rhythm….” The controversy came to embrace other things: strict typikon adherence, no icon blessings, strict division of the Greater and Lesser Blessing of Waters, the priest’s ‘silent prayers’ in Liturgy were to be silent, not read aloud, etc. The Philokalia was published in the midst of all these quarrels. Fr Maximos: “I do not go from zero to Eucharist in 30 minutes or whatever”—on the lack of Orthros/1st Hour before Liturgy in American parishes. The Kollyvades scattered when their opponents turned to murder, and they spread out throughout the Aegean. The Philokalia had no impact in Greek world, but the 1794 Slavonic translation was like a supernova, reviving spiritual life in the Russian and Slavic lands—a copy was even sent to St Herman in Alaska. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when Greeks could get back to that place, that the 3rd edition of the Philokalia was published in 1957 in the five volume Astir edition.
24 April 2015—on The Way of a Pilgrim; for Philokalia class paper.
My edition: Helen Bacovcin, translator, The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way. New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 1978.
Foreword by Walter J. Ciszek, S.J.
Order in which the Monk introduces the Philokalia to the Pilgrim:
Chapter 1:
—St Symeon the New Theologian
—St Gregory of Sinai
—Sts Kallistos and Ignatius
—St Nikephoros
Jesus Prayer: The Pilgrim starts at 3,000x (2 days); then 6,000x (10 days); then 12,000x (2 weeks).
Chapter 2:
Reads the Philokalia in order to check that he’s not deluding himself in prayer.
Reading a chapter or more of the Gospels when desiring to drink, and 66 Jesus Prayers when desiring to drink are equated with curing two other men of the desire to drink. [This can, of course, be superficially and wrongly taken as advice to give to anyone: “Just pray it 66 times and you’ll no longer be an alcoholic!” This is perhaps a/the reason St Theophan the Recluse recommended one of his readers/addressees to avoid reading this book.]
“And what is more valuable, the Jesus Prayer or the Gospel?”
“They are equal in importance,” I answered, “because the holy name of Jesus Christ contains within itself all the truths of the Gospel. The holy Fathers say that the Jesus Prayer is the abbreviation of the Gospel.”
—St Theoleptos of Philadelphia
“The holy Fathers are right in saying that the Philokalia is a key to the mysteries found in Holy Scripture.”
Interesting that summers are the given season in which the Pilgrim makes the most progress, in stationary rest in one place or another, and with spiritual direction or companionship.
—Chapter 109 of St Hesychios
The forest guard, admirable in his asceticism and renunciation of the world, is yet unfulfilled, lacking the interior/spiritual life.
—The Pilgrim reads the Philokalia from beginning to end.
—Ought not to begin interaction with the Philokalia by reading in chronological order, but rather:
1. The second part of St Nikephoros
2. St Gregory of Sinai (but not the short chapters)
3. St Symeon the New Theologian on 3 forms of prayer and the lesson on faith.
4. Sts Kallistos and Ignatius
Or, even more simply: St Patriarch Kallistos (“in the fourth part of the book”)
Chapter 3:
“He said that secret prayer is found within the depths of each man and that it is carried on in the soul of itself; and any man who knows how to listen, hears the soul’s call to outward [read ‘inward’? typo?] prayer.”
Chapter 4:
“…it the enemy does not succeed in turning us away from prayer by vain and sinful thoughts, then he brings to mind instructive and beautiful thoughts only to turn us away from prayer, which he cannot tolerate.”
“…if I discover at the end of the day that more time was spent in edifying thought and conversation than in real interior prayer of the heart, I should regard this as intemperance or spiritual greediness. This is especially true for beginners, who should spend much more time in prayer than in other acts of piety.”
“The fact is that we are alienated from ourselves and have little desire really to know ourselves; we run in order to avoid meeting ourselves and we exchange truth for trinkets while we say, ‘I would like to have time for prayer and the spiritual life but the cares and difficulties of this life demand all my time and energies’…. It is this choice which man makes that either leads him to wisdom or keeps him in ignorance.”
“Prayer without interior feeling is not very effective either for the one who recites it or for the one who listens to it; everything depends on interior life and on attentive prayer! But how few people are occupied with interior activity! The reason for this is that they don’t really want it, they have no yearning for spiritual life and interior enlightenment.”
[The book is So Very Russian: overly dramatic, with confusing locale changes (I have no idea in ch. 4 where the Pilgrim is now—present or past, Odessa or where) a huge cast of characters, and very dramatic scenes of redemption and piety.]
Suzette Phillips
“ANONYMOUS (mid-nineteenth century) The Way of a Pilgrim” pp 293–304 in Christian Spirituality: The Classics. Arthur Holder, ed. New York: Routledge, 2010.
From pp. 294–295:
«The Way of a Pilgrim has long been considered an anonymous work written by an uneducated strannik living in mid-nineteenth century Russia (1853–61). The tales were believed to recount his real-life experiences which were initially transmitted orally and then later recorded by the monks of Mount Athos. New evidence, however, suggests that The Way of a Pilgrim was written as a theological and literary text by one or several churchmen—including Hegumen Tikhon, St. Theophan the Recluse, St Amvrosii of Optino, Archimandrite Mikhail Kozlov, or Arsenii Troepolskii. ¶Recent historical critical analysis claims that the earliest version of the tales is the work of two monks. The first author is believed to be Archimandrite Mikhail Kozlov (1826–84). Kozlov had originally been an “Old Believer” who converted to official (canonical) Orthodoxy and spent much of his life as a missionary. The second author is thought [295] to be Arsenii Troepolskii (1804–70), also a wanderer, who traveled between monasteries. Evidence suggests that Troepolskii used and supplemented Kozlov’s work. The strannik, therefore, may have been a real person after all, or rather two people, Kozlov and Troepolskii. ¶The publication history of The Way of a Pilgrim is complex. An 1881 version published in Kazan is thought to be the first edition. Troepolskii’s reworking of Kozlov’s writings is believed to have been the basis for the text, while it is suspected that Troepolskii’s writings in turn were edited and supplemented by Hegumen Paisii Fedorov, superior of Saint Michael the Archangel Monastery of Cheremis in Kazan. Several editions quickly followed, with a fourth edition published in Moscow by 1884. ¶The earliest known redaction of the four tales is thought to be the Optino redaction, a translation of which is found in T. A. Smith’s The Pilgrim’s Tale. This redaction, originating no earlier than 1859, was derived from a lost text composed by Kozlov. It is distinct from the later Athos, Sergiev, and Abbreviated redactions. The Athos redaction, of which there are no known copies, is similar to the Optino redaction. It is assumed to have been used by Fedorov as the basis of the 1881 Kazan edition. The Sergiev redaction is preserved in two manuscripts, Sergiev and Panteleimon. An Abbreviated redaction was published by the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos in 1882. This redaction, derived either from the Athos or Sergiev redaction, was published independently of the 1881 edition. ¶St. Theophan the Recluse’s 1883 edition is a further redaction of that text. In this version, the role of the spiritual father is heightened and the Philokalia emphasized. A new edition of Theophan’s text was published by the monastery of Saint Michael the Archangel in 1884. It is this 1884 publication of The Way of a Pilgrim that was translated in 1930 into English by R. M. French and later received universal distribution in multiple languages. This spiritual classic has remained in print and enjoyed a growing readership. Four different English translations have since appeared.»
[The above excerpt turns out to be wrong on most points regarding the origin of the book. In fact, a full manuscript draft of the book was found in the papers of Arseniy Troepolskiy; the various other manuscripts were those which he had shared with others at various points in the long process of editing the main manuscript, which was never published. So a mix of his previous drafts was worked over by others and published piecemeal. Troepolskiy was a monk of several monasteries, and his autobiographical and other writings demonstrate that the Wanderer is based on his own life and writings. For readers of Russian, Alexey Pentkovskiy (Алексей Пентковский) is the one doing amazing work on the manuscripts. Pentkovskiy, spelled Pentkovsky, also wrote the lengthy and rather convoluted Introduction found in the Classics of Western (!) Spirituality edition ‘The Pilgrim’s Tale’ which accompanies the T. Allan Smith translation, which also includes several textual notes by Pentkovskiy. His work on that edition came prior to the discovery of the papers of Monk Arseniy (Troepolskiy).]
Fr Maximos (Constas) “The Philokalia: An Annotated Bibliography (Sample Pages).” n.d.
s.v. 1881: Aimé Solignac DC 12A (1984) 886.
[This reference is to Dictionnaire de spiritualité. The article is “Pèlerin Russe (Récits d’un)”, by Aimé Solignac. It’s a relatively short article with publication information, but now out-dated by A. M. Pentkovskiy’s work.]
Stanton, Leonard J. “Three Levels of Authorship in The Way of a Pilgrim.” SVTQ 33.3 (1989), 221–234.
This is line-counting biblical, patristic, and contemporary sources. Not helpful.
Reflection paper(s):
1.) Detailed, one-page description of contents
2.) two-page analysis of contents
3.) memorable sentence
4.) three questions
1.5 line-spacing
1 May 2015—The Philokalia
Fr Maximos: “One of the lessons of this class is that you can’t be present for someone if you’re not present to yourself.” Bob Simon (his public memorial was yesterday) said repeatedly that the Mount Athos program was the best he’d ever done; he told his daughter that it changed him.
On The Way of a Pilgrim. What are some reactions of first-time readers? The Jesus Prayer is actually more authentic when one realizes that we are wanderers all in this world, dissatisfied with the world and detaching from it. Evangelia: “I appreciated how a rule became a lifestyle.” Thoreau has an essay on the theology of walking. Most people read The Way of a Pilgrim without any contact with the Philokalia. Constantine: “…depraved of attention…”—a mistake, but an interesting one. Real practice is not informed by theory—teachers need to know the theory, but practice can excel without it.
What are some reflections by those who’ve read it before? People have this ability to connect with narratives, much more so than theory. Some find The Way of a Pilgrim to be a sort of Gospel, with the Philokalia like the Epistles of Paul. “The very works of Scripture possess a gracious power.”—in the The Way of a Pilgrim somewhere.
An interesting thing to look into: the texts cited in The Way of a Pilgrim, which edition(s) did they come from?
[My notes inexplicably end there, mid-class.]