The Philokalia

A thousand years of monastic writing on watching your own mind, compiled in 1782 — and unusually precise about how a thought turns into a compulsion.

What it is

An anthology of Greek Christian texts on prayer and the inner life, spanning roughly the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, compiled and published in Venice in 1782.

The title means love of the beautiful, or of the good. It runs to five volumes in the standard English edition, and gathers around thirty-six authors, including Evagrius Ponticus, Maximus the Confessor, Diadochos of Photiki, Hesychios, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai and Gregory Palamas.

Its subject throughout is nepsis — watchfulness — and the guarding of the heart.

Where it came from

It was assembled by Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, a monk of Athos, and Makarios of Corinth, as part of a movement to revive hesychast practice within Orthodoxy.

A textual detail worth noting: Evagrius Ponticus, one of the most important contributors, appears partly under the name of Neilos, because Evagrius had been condemned for Origenism at the Second Council of Constantinople. Substantial portions of the tradition's founding psychology circulated for over a millennium under someone else's name in order to survive.

Its spread was largely Slavic. Paisius Velichkovsky translated a selection into Church Slavonic as the Dobrotolubiye in 1793, and it took hold in Russia in a way it had not in Greece. Theophan the Recluse produced an expanded Russian version in 1877. And the anonymous Way of a Pilgrim, circulating from the 1880s, told the story of a wanderer learning the Jesus Prayer from exactly this book — which did more for its readership than any recommendation.

The complete English translation by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware began appearing in 1979 and was completed only in recent years.

How it is read

Slowly, and traditionally under guidance. The texts assume a monastic setting and a spiritual father, and Nikodimos's insistence in his preface that the material was suitable for all Christians, not only monks, was contentious at the time and remains so in some quarters.

The psychological material is what makes it valuable to a modern reader. Evagrius and those following him analyse the process by which a thought becomes a compulsion, and the sequence is described with real precision: the initial suggestion, which is involuntary and carries no fault; the moment of attention, in which the mind turns toward it; the coupling, in which a dialogue begins; assent; and finally the settled passion, at which point the thing is no longer being chosen.

The practical instruction follows from the analysis. Intervention is possible early and becomes progressively harder, so the work is watchfulness at the point of first arising rather than struggle later on.

Anyone who has done attentional practice in any tradition will recognise the description. It was written by desert monks in the fourth century, refined over a thousand years, and it holds up.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the collection is a genuine primary source of the first importance for Christian contemplative practice, and that its late compilation date does not make the contents late.

We can say the observational psychology is acute and largely independent of the theology. The account of how attention gets captured, and of the narrowing window in which it can be redirected, is a description of something anyone can check.

We can say the framework it sits in is not optional to the authors. The logismoi are not merely unhelpful cognitions; they are understood as assaults, sometimes demonic, and the goal is not equanimity but purity of heart leading to union with God. Extracting the technique and leaving the purpose is possible, and it is the same operation performed on Buddhist practice under modern mindfulness, with the same question attached.

We cannot say what the authors experienced. What can be said is that they were unusually careful observers of their own minds and wrote it down for other people's use, which is the most anyone can ask of a contemplative source.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is read

What we can and cannot say

Further reading