The Philokalia

An 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.