Modern Orthodox Thinkers

From the Philokalia to the Present Day

Andrew Louth

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780281071272
• eBook ISBN: 9780281071289
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

A lively and perceptive account of the lives, writings and enduring intellectual legacies of the great Orthodox theologians of the past 250 years. This book explores and explains the enduring influence of some of the world's greatest modern theologians. Starting with the influence of the Philokalia in nineteenth-century Russia, the book moves through the Slavophiles, Solov'ev, Florensky in Russia and then traces the story through the Christian intellectuals exiled from Stalin's Russia - Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Florovsky, Lossky, Lot-Borodine, Skobtsova - and a couple of theologians outside the Russian world: the Romanian Staniloae and the Serbian Popovich, both of whom studied in Paris. Andrew Louth then considers the contributions of the second generation Russians - Evdokimov, Meyendorff, Schmemann - and the theologians of Greece from the sixties onwards - Zizioulas, Yannaras, and others, as well as influential monks and spiritual elders, especially Fr Sophrony of the monastery in Essex and his mentor, St Silouan. The book concludes with an illuminating chapter on Metropolitan Kallistos and the theological vision of the Philokalia.

1

The Philokalia and its influence

This first chapter is called ‘The Philokalia and its influence’, because I want to suggest, and indeed argue, that the Philokalia has a kind of emblematic significance for modern Orthodox theology, marking a watershed in the history of Orthodox theology. It was published in 1782 in Venice – at that date printing was not allowed in the Ottoman Empire.¹ It is an anthology – which is what the Greek title, Philokalia, means – of Byzantine ascetic and mystical texts from the fourth or fifth to the fourteenth century: a collection of diverse texts spanning nearly a millennium. It was compiled by two monks who belonged to the monastic communities of the Holy Mountain of Athos: St Makarios, by then bishop of Corinth, and St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain. It was but one aspect of a movement of renewal among the Athonite monks, in which St Nikodimos played a leading part, a renewal that had many different dimensions.

For the publication of the Philokalia was not an isolated event; it was part of a movement of renewal in the Orthodox Church that stemmed from the monastic community of Athos, the Holy Mountain.² It was a movement of renewal that was deeply traditional – though, in some ways, more traditional in ideal than in reality. The name given to the group of monks was the Kollyvades, named after kollyva, the food made of wheat grains eaten at memorial services for the departed. The Kollyvades were concerned to restore the traditional practice of holding such services on Saturdays, not Sundays. It might seem a small point, but concern with tradition often focuses on details. More generally they were concerned with the restoration of the traditions of Byzantine monasticism: a return to the Fathers, a return to an understanding of monasticism that focused on prayer, both communal and private, and in the latter case particularly the Jesus Prayer. The controversy on Mount Athos in the fourteenth century – the hesychast controversy – and in particular the role St Gregory Palamas played in it was for these monks emblematic of Orthodoxy. The focus on the prolonged and serious practice of prayer went along with another feature: the importance of spiritual fatherhood, or spiritual eldership. It was bound up, too, with a stress laid on frequent communion.

Some sense of the concerns of this movement of renewal can be gained from looking at the enormous activity of St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, one of the editors of the Philokalia.³ As well as the Philokalia, he edited together with Makarios of Corinth the vast collection of monastic wisdom drawn from the Fathers, collected by Paul Evergetinos in the eleventh century, called the Synagoge, or just the Evergetinos.⁴ Nikodimos also edited the Rudder, or the Pidalion, a collection, with commentary, of the canons of the Orthodox Church.⁵ He prepared editions of St Symeon the New Theologian (together with Dionysios Zagoraios, though most of the work seems to have been Nikodimos’) – the standard edition, though difficult to find, until the edition in Sources Chrétiennes in the last century – of the Gaza ascetics, Saints Varsanouphios and John, and of St Gregory Palamas, though this edition was lost as a result of the arrest of Nikodimos’ printer in Vienna; it would be another 150 years before an edition of Palamas began to appear.

St Nikodimos also composed works of spiritual guidance and direction. It is striking that these works betray dependence on works of Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic spirituality: his work, Unseen Warfare, is a translation of Lorenzo Scupoli’s Combattimento Spirituale,⁶ he produced a translation of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, and his works on confession and frequent communion are also based on Catholic sources. His Handbook of Spiritual Counsel is his own,⁷ as is his invaluable commentary on the canons for the Great Feasts, his Eortodromion.⁸

Nikodimos, then, was concerned with renewal in all aspects of the life of the Church: its canonical structures, its liturgical and sacramental life, the nature of spiritual guidance, as well as providing resources for a return to the springs of Orthodox theology that he found in the spiritual writers of the Church. His enthusiasm for contemporary Catholic devotional writing is notable; it must express genuine appreciation for Catholic spirituality, as he had no lack of access to patristic material. This appreciation of post-Reformation Western spirituality, both Catholic and Protestant, remains a feature of the spirituality inspired by the Philokalia, though many Orthodox seem rather embarrassed by it.

If we are to see the Philokalia as a turning point in the history of Orthodox theology, then there seem to me to be various entailments, both negative and positive. First of all, it suggests a break from the route down which Orthodox theology had gone since the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, if not from the beginnings of the union movement in the thirteenth century. For, in the wake of the Reformation disputes, Orthodox theology had found itself caught up in those disputes as it tried to explain itself to Protestants and Catholics, both of whom sought the support of the Orthodox in their disputes with each other. The history, beginning with Cyril Loukaris’ endorsement of a rather Calvinist theology, and its opposition by Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem and Peter Moghila, we can’t go into here, but it led to Orthodox theology being expressed in the terms and categories of Western theology. The return to the Fathers, part of the Philokalic revival, entailed a rejection of such an approach to theology.

Something similar happened in the Russian world, only there it became institutionalized. Early in the seventeenth century, Peter Moghila founded the spiritual academy in Kiev, and introduced teaching based on Latin, Catholic textbooks. This became the model for the spiritual academies set up by Peter the Great as part of his reforms in the Church, and remained so well into the nineteenth century. The Philokalic return to the Fathers can be seen as a repudiation of the way theology was conceived and taught, both among the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire and in the Orthodox Russian Empire. But theology as inspired by the Philokalia was not just negatively opposed to the developments in the teaching of theology in the Orthodox world; such inspiration had a positive dimension, though it was one that remained implicit, and needed working out in practice.

As already mentioned in the Introduction, the Philokalia presents itself as a volume of writings ‘in which, through ethical philosophy, in accordance with action and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined and perfected’ (title page). This implies an approach to theology, not as a set of doctrines, as set forth in the creeds or the councils, but an approach to knowing God in which the intellect is prepared for union with God by purification, illumination and perfection. This suggests several things. First of all, this is the language of prayer in the Christian tradition: prayer understood not just as petition, asking God for things, but prayer as engagement with God, an engagement that takes place through the ‘three ways’ of purification, illumination, and perfection or deification. Furthermore, it suggests an understanding of knowledge in theology, which is not a collection of information, but rather knowledge of God that involves some kind of participation in him. It suggests, in short, an understanding of theology much closer to what we find in the Fathers, where there is no real separation between the object of knowledge and the process of knowing, where to come to know God is to be assimilated to God in some way, where knowledge of God entails what came to be called, especially in the Greek tradition, deification or theosis.

A sketch of the influence of the Philokalia, mostly in Russia

The Philokalia was published in 1782 in Venice. It represents the recovery of a tradition, the tradition that found confirmation in various church synods in the course of the hesychast controversy in the fourteenth century. Evidence as to how far the Philokalia marks a new starting point or a signal publication representing a more widespread movement is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, Nikodimos himself says of the works he has gathered together in the Philokalia that they ‘have never in earlier times been published, or if they have, lie in obscurity, in darkness, in a corner, uncherished and moth-eaten, and from there dispersed and squandered’.⁹ On the other hand, there is manuscript evidence for what might be called ‘proto-Philokalias’,¹⁰ and from the history of Païssy Velichkovsky it would appear that he had already been engaged on the translation of the texts that were eventually published as the Slavonic Philokalia or Dobrotolubiye for some years before the Philokalia was published in Venice by St Nikodimos. Perhaps the truth is that the revival of the tradition of which the Philokalia is the signal example was the revival of a tradition that had been reduced to a trickle, observed by a small minority of monks on the Holy Mountain, but that this revival was somewhat more widespread than Nikodimos suggests in the Introduction to the Philokalia, from which the remark quoted is taken.

As we have already mentioned, while Sts Makarios and Nikodimos were compiling the Philokalia, St Païssy Velichkovsky was already translating into Slavonic some of the works that came to be included in the Philokalia. When this collection was published in 1793, it was called the Dobrotolubiye, the word being a calque of the Greek philokalia, with no independent meaning as a Slavonic word (and thus simply suggesting to the Slav ear the meaning ‘love of beauty’), making clear that Païssy thought of it as a rendering of St Makarios and Nikodimos’ collection. St Païssy had, however, come to the Holy Mountain already aware of a living tradition of hesychast spirituality. This may ultimately be traceable to the hesychast tradition of St Nil Sorsky and the Non-possessing monks,¹¹ some of whom may have migrated to the Romanian princedoms of Wallachia and Moldavia during the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. More immediately he owed his knowledge of Philokalic spirituality to a Romanian elder, St Basil of Poiana Mărului, whom he had met during his period in the monasteries of Moldavia in 1742–6, after his studies at the Moghila Academy in Kiev, and who tonsured him as a monk in 1750 on Mount Athos.¹²

It used to be thought that St Païssy had simply selected from the Greek Philokalia in making his translation, but it now looks rather as if his selection derived from similar sources to the Greek anthology, while having close parallels with it (for it may, before publication, have been checked against the Greek text); as Metropolitan Kallistos has put it, ‘during 1746–75 Paisy, working independently, translated into Slavonic nearly four-fifths of the material [I think that must mean authors] subsequently included in the Greek Philokalia of 1782’.¹³

For the purposes of our story, it is the publication of the Slavonic Dobrotolubiye, 11 years after the Greek Philokalia, that is important. For while the Greek Philokalia seems to have had little immediate influence, no doubt because of the prolonged struggle throughout the nineteenth century for liberation on the part of the Greeks from the Ottoman yoke, that is not true of the Slavonic Dobrotolubiye. The Dobrotolubiye in its Slavonic form was destined to have a remarkable influence. One of the intentions of St Nikodimos, as he makes clear in his Introduction, was to make the riches of the tradition represented by it ava...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Philokalia and its influence
• 2. Vladimir Solov′ev and Sophia
• 3. Fr Pavel Florensky and the nature of reason
• 4. Fr Sergii Bulgakov and the nature of theology
• 5. Nikolai Berdyaev – creativity, freedom and the person
• 6. Fr Georges Florovsky and the neo-patristic synthesis
• 7. Apophatic theology and deification: Myrrha Lot-Borodine and Vladimir Lossky
• 8. St Maria of Paris (Mother Maria Skobtsova) and Orthodoxy in the modern world
• 9. Modern Orthodox dogmatic theology: 1 Fr Dumitru Stăniloae
• 10. Modern Orthodox dogmatic theology: 2 St Justin Popović
• 11. Paul Evdokimov and the love and beauty of God
• 12. Neo-Palamism: Fr John Meyendorff and some Greek neo-Palamites
• 13. Liturgical theology: Fr Alexander Schmemann and the Greeks Ioannis Foundoulis and Fr Vasileios
• 14. Theology of patristic renewal: Metropolitan John of Pergamon (Zizioulas) and Fr John Romanides
• 15. Lay theologians: 1 Philip Sherrard
• 16. Lay theologians: 2 Dimitris Koutroubis, Christos Yannaras, Stelios Ramfos
• 17. Lay theologians: 3 Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Olivier Clément
• 18. Spiritual elders: 1 Mother Thekla (Sharf) and the English acculturation of Orthodoxy
• 19. Spiritual elders: 2 St Silouan and Fr Sophrony: seeing God as he is
• 20. Theology in Russia under communism: Fr Aleksandr Men′
• 21. Metropolitan Kallistos and the theological vision of the Philokalia
• Further reading
• Search items