Patristic & Ascetical Texts
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EssentialPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe PhilokaliaAn anthology of texts on watchfulness and prayer, written between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries by some thirty-six Fathers, from the desert of Egypt to St Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts of his generation, gathered by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth and printed at Venice in 1782. Its full title says what it is for: the Philokalia of the neptic Fathers, in which, through the philosophy of practice and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined and made perfect. It teaches the guarding of the heart, the war with the passions and the Jesus Prayer, and it assumes a reader who has a spiritual father. The name is older than the book: Sts Basil and Gregory the Theologian had given it to their anthology of Origen. St Paisius Velichkovsky’s Slavonic version, the Dobrotolubiye, reached Russia in 1793 and is the book the pilgrim of The Way of a Pilgrim carries, and St Theophan the Recluse made a larger Russian one. The English translation from the Greek came out in four volumes between 1979 and 1995, and the fifth in 2023.EssentialPatristic & Ascetical TextsOn the Holy Spirit (St Basil)Written about 375 for Amphilochius of Iconium, and provoked by a quarrel over a preposition. St Basil had given glory to the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit, and was attacked for it, since the customary form put the Spirit lower. His answer is that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son because He is God, and the treatise assembles the evidence for it from Scripture and from what the Church does. The twenty-seventh chapter is the classic Orthodox statement about unwritten tradition: the sign of the cross, turning east to pray, the words of the epiclesis and the blessing of the water are nowhere in Scripture and no one doubts them. Six years later the Second Council put his teaching into the Creed.EssentialPatristic & Ascetical TextsOn the Incarnation (St. Athanasius)St Athanasius’ short treatise on why the Word became flesh, the second half of a single work whose first is Against the Heathen. It was written in his youth, before the Arian controversy by the traditional reckoning, or in his first exile in the 330s by a later one. Its argument begins with the Fall as a slide back toward the nothing from which humanity was made: God could not let His image perish, and He could not take back His word that death would follow the transgression. So the Word took a body capable of death, gave it up for all, and raised it, and death was undone from within. A portrait that has been defaced, he says, is not thrown away: the one it depicts comes again, so that the likeness can be renewed on the same wood. Near its end stands its most quoted sentence, He was made man that we might be made god. C.S. Lewis introduced its English translation of 1944, and used the occasion to urge readers to take an old book for every new one.EssentialPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Triads (In Defence of the Holy Hesychasts)St Gregory Palamas wrote these nine treatises, in three sets of three, between 1338 and 1341, to answer Barlaam the Calabrian, who had mocked the Athonite monks as navel-gazers and denied that anyone could see the light of God. The argument runs on two legs. The body is not a prison and prayer is not disembodied, so a bodily method is not absurd. And God is genuinely unknowable in His essence and genuinely participable in His energies, which are not a creature and not a part of Him, so what the saints see on Tabor and in the cell is God Himself. Every formula the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351 used is already here.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsAscetical Homilies of St. Isaac the SyrianSt. Isaac of Nineveh (7th century), a Syriac-speaking bishop who became a hermit. His Ascetical Homilies are among the most profound mystical texts in Christian literature: on humility, solitude, tears, prayer, the love of God for all creation, and the mystery of divine compassion. Widely read in Orthodox monasteries. His vision of God's love as an all-consuming fire has challenged readers for centuries.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsExact Exposition of the Orthodox FaithThe third and largest part of St John of Damascus’ Fount of Knowledge, written at the Lavra of St Sabbas in the eighth century, after a book of philosophical definitions and a catalogue of heresies. It sets out in a hundred chapters what the Greek Fathers had taught: the one God and the Trinity, creation, angels and man, providence, the incarnate Christ with His two natures and two wills, the Theotokos, and then baptism, the Eucharist, the veneration of icons and the resurrection. Its method is announced at the start of the whole work: to say nothing of his own, but to gather what the most eminent teachers had worked out. It was the Church’s textbook for centuries. Burgundio of Pisa translated it into Latin in the 1150s, divided into four books, and Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas both drew on it, so it is the channel through which much of the Greek Fathers’ theology reached the medieval West.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Corpus AreopagiticumFour treatises and ten letters under the name of the Athenian converted by St Paul: On the Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. The Mystical Theology is eleven pages long and is the source of the whole apophatic vocabulary of the East, ending in a series of denials that deny even the denials. The Celestial Hierarchy is where the nine ranks of angels come from. The authorship was questioned as early as the sixth century and is now dated around 500, which the Orthodox tradition has absorbed without difficulty: what carried it was St Maximus the Confessor, whose Ambigua, with the scholia that went under his name, read it in a way no Origenist or Monophysite could use.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Great Canon of St Andrew of CreteTwo hundred and fifty troparia that take the whole of Scripture, from Adam to the thief on the cross, and turn every figure in it into an accusation against the one singing. The singer has outdone Cain, murdering his own conscience, and fallen short of Abel; Leah and Rachel are action and contemplation; the man who fell among thieves on the way to Jericho is the singer again. Before almost every troparion comes the same refrain: have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me. It is read in four parts in the first week of Great Lent and whole, with the Life of St Mary of Egypt, on the Thursday of the fifth week, standing, with prostrations.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Ladder of Divine AscentSt John Climacus’ book on the monastic life, written at Sinai in the seventh century at the request of the abbot of Raithu, and the reason he is called Climacus, from klimax, a ladder. It has thirty steps, one for each hidden year of Christ before His baptism, and they climb from renunciation of the world through obedience, mourning, the war with each passion in turn and the long battle with pride, to discernment, stillness, prayer and dispassion, and at the top to faith, hope and love, the greatest of which is love. It is written in short, hard sayings that are easy to remember and hard to forget. Monasteries read it through every Great Lent, and the Fourth Sunday of Lent keeps his memory. The twelfth-century Sinai icon of the Ladder shows what the book warns of: monks climbing toward Christ, and some of them pulled off the rungs by demons.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Lenten TriodionThe service book of the ten weeks before Pascha, from the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee to Great Saturday. Its name comes from the three-ode canons it uses on weekdays. It carries the pre-Lenten Sundays that set up the fast, the whole of Great Lent, the Saturdays of the Souls, Lazarus Saturday, Palm Sunday and the services of Holy Week including the twelve Passion Gospels and the Lamentations at the tomb. Most of the finest hymnography in the Byzantine rite is in this book, and a good deal of the Church’s actual teaching on repentance is in it rather than in any treatise.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Mystical Theology of the Eastern ChurchVladimir Lossky’s book, published in French in Paris in 1944 and in English in 1957, and for many readers in the West the first account of Orthodox theology in its own terms. Its opening claim governs the rest: there is no Christian mysticism without theology, and above all no theology without mysticism. From there it moves through the apophatic way of the Areopagite, the Trinity as the ground of everything, the distinction between God’s essence and His energies, the person set against the nature, the work of the Son and the work of the Spirit, and deification as the goal of the whole. Lossky wrote as a son of the Russian emigration and a critic of Fr Sergius Bulgakov’s sophiology, and with Fr Georges Florovsky he shaped the return to the Fathers that marked Orthodox theology in the twentieth century. Later Orthodox scholars have found his contrast between East and West drawn too sharply in places, and have said so without ceasing to read him.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe PentecostarionThe book of the fifty days from Pascha to Pentecost and the Sunday of All Saints after it. It holds the Paschal service itself, Bright Week, the Sundays of Thomas, the Myrrhbearers, the Paralytic, the Samaritan Woman and the Blind Man, then Mid-Pentecost, the Ascension, the Fathers of the First Council and Pentecost with its kneeling prayers. The tone of the book is unmixed: for fifty days there is no kneeling, no fasting on Wednesday or Friday during Bright Week, and Christ is risen replaces almost every opening prayer.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Sayings of the Desert FathersA collection of what the monks of Egypt actually said, written down after they were dead by people who had heard it from people who had heard it. Nothing in it is systematic. A brother asks a word and an old man gives him one sentence, and the sentence is usually about not judging anyone, or about staying in the cell, or about what to do when you have failed again. It survives in two great arrangements, one alphabetical by the father who spoke and one by subject, and it is the raw material behind almost all later Orthodox ascetic writing. Read straight through it is also very funny, which is not an accident.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Way of a PilgrimAn anonymous Russian account, first published at Kazan in 1881 and enlarged in 1884, of a wanderer who heard the words pray without ceasing read at the Liturgy and could find no one to tell him how. A starets finally does: he gives him the Philokalia and the Jesus Prayer, and sets him to say it three thousand times a day, then six thousand, then twelve, until the prayer moves from his lips into his heart and begins to say itself. The pilgrim then walks across Russia toward Siberia with dried bread, a Bible and the Philokalia in his knapsack, and tells what the prayer did to him and to the people he met. The book’s own starets insists that the prayer is learned under obedience, and Orthodox writers since have warned against reading it as a technique to be tried alone. Its author has never been securely named. In English it became the best-known book on the Jesus Prayer, helped by J. D. Salinger, whose Franny carries it in her handbag.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsAgainst Heresies (St. Irenaeus)The most important early Christian anti-Gnostic work (c. 180 AD). Exposes Gnostic systems and refutes them using Scripture, Tradition, and apostolic succession. Develops the theology of 'recapitulation': Christ sums up all of humanity in Himself, reversing Adam's fall. Foundational for Orthodox understanding of Tradition and ecclesiology.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsDobrotolubiye (Slavonic Philokalia)The Slavonic Philokalia, the Love of the Good, translated by St Paisius Velichkovsky and his monks at Neamt in Moldavia from the Greek collection of St Nikodemos and St Makarios, and printed at Moscow in 1793. It carried the tradition of watchfulness and the Jesus Prayer from Athos into the Russian monasteries, and through Paisius’ disciples into Optina, where it gave the elders their teaching. It is the book the pilgrim of The Way of a Pilgrim carries in his knapsack and reads by the roadside. St Theophan the Recluse later made a larger Russian version in five volumes, still called by the same name, which put the texts in the language the whole of Russia could read.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsFor the Life of the World (Fr. Schmemann)By Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1963), a sacramental theology classic. Presents the Orthodox vision of all of life as sacrament: creation as God's gift, the Eucharist as the center of Christian life, and Christianity as joy and thanksgiving rather than mere morality or ritual. Perhaps the best 20th-century book on Orthodox faith for the non-specialist.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Didache (Teaching of the Twelve)The earliest known Christian catechetical text (c. 50-120 AD), discovered in 1873. Contains instructions on ethics (the 'Two Ways': life and death), baptism, fasting, prayer (including the Lord's Prayer three times daily), the Eucharist, and church order. Provides a window into the worship and life of the earliest Christian communities.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Rudder (Pedalion)The canonical collection of the Greek Church, compiled by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain with Agapios the Monk and first printed in 1800. It gives the canons of the Apostles, of the Ecumenical and local councils and of the Fathers, each followed by Nikodemos’ own commentary and by a note on how it is actually applied, which is what makes it a rudder rather than a law code. It is the standard reference for Orthodox canon law in Greek practice, and its footnotes are where a reader meets the principle that the canons are steered rather than obeyed mechanically.Patristic & Ascetical TextsThe Arena (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov)A comprehensive guide to the spiritual life written by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807-1867), a Russian bishop and ascetical writer. Systematic presentation of Orthodox asceticism for monks, beginning with novices: prayer, fasting, watchfulness, humility, dealing with thoughts. Addressed to monks and to all who seek the way of true monastic life.Patristic & Ascetical TextsShepherd of HermasAn early Christian text (c. 100-160 AD) that was widely read and nearly included in the New Testament canon. Contains visions in which the Church appears to Hermas, and commandments and parables given him by an angel in shepherd's clothing. Important for its teaching on repentance after baptism and the possibility of a 'second repentance.' Influenced Eastern Christian penitential theology.