What can we learn from the Early Church III: Paul Collins

Here is part three of our mini series. This text comes from Paul M. Collins, a Priest in the Church of England and a Reader in Theology at the University of Chichester, UK.

Early Church texts and the construction of identity

The editing, collecting and publication of Early Church texts is something which has come to be recognised as having profound effects on Christian identity.

The first of two selections from the ‘Philokalia’ published in 1951 [translated from Russian] by Faber and Faber on the encouragement and recommendation of T.S. Eliot, provided the Anglophone world with its first encounter with a collection of Early Church and Medieval texts. These selections were taken from a Russian edition of the Philokalia by Theophan the Recluse, who translated the collection from Church Slavonic into Russian in 1877 adding some more texts to the original collection. Interest in these texts arose from a revival on Mount Athos in the mid eighteenth century in the practice of prayer of the heart (hesychasm) which is often associated with the Jesus Prayer. The publication of The Way of the Pilgrim (1884) in Russia popularised this form of prayer and also encouraged the reading of the Philokalia. So perhaps it is no surprise that when Russian Orthodox theologians fled to the West after the Bolshekiv revolution that the Philokalia became a primary source for (re-) constructing Orthodox identity. So what is the Philokalia?

During the second half of the eighteenth century Greek Orthodox theologians and monks began to recognise that their tradition was threatened by influences from Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and the Enlightenment. During the same period there were new intellectual developments among educated Greeks termed ‘modern Hellenism’. This was a secular ‘movement’ that looked back behind the Christian era to ancient Greece, as well as being influenced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. This evoked a spiritual and theological revival associated with a group of monks from Mount Athos known as the Kollyvades. Among that group were Makarios of Corinth (1731 – 1805) and Nikodimos the Hagiorite (1749 – 1809), who are understood to be the editors of the collection of texts known as the Philokalia, published in Venice in 1782.

The Philokalia

Perhaps the first thing to recognise about this collection of texts from the Early Church and Medieval periods is that the reason for its publication, is an awareness among Orthodox monks and theologians that there is a problem. A problem associated with the new learning of the Enlightenment as well as the different perspectives of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. In other words the Philokalia may be interpreted as a product of the Enlightenment. It is a deliberate collecting together of early and medieval Christian sources in support of a tradition of Hesychast or contemplative prayer, which is seen as a distinctive Orthodox practice. It is also offered as an answer, a distinctive answer, to the issues which the Enlightenment and the perspectives of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism brought to bear upon Orthodoxy. This answer is rooted in an appeal to two core practices: nepsis and hesychia. Nepsis relates to virtues such as sobriety and watchfulness; and hesychia to the inner stillness of the heart. In other words this is an appeal to inner, rather than external action and to the concerns of the kingdom within each believer.

The editors of the Philokalia express in this collection the perspective that the Greek Church and nation need to be reminded of their distinctive heritage, and that this is best done through reading the mystical theology of the Early Church and Medieval periods. The method of the editors is to use these sources as a resource in order to combat the perspective of the Enlightenment philosophers. So the purpose of the Philokalia is primarily practical and is intended not just for specialists i.e. monks but for all. The title page states that it is for the ‘benefit of all the Orthodox’. Most texts included in the collection were written by monks for monks, but the editors had a much broader audience and purpose in mind. Nikodimus understood that the vocation to ‘pray without ceasing’ is for all Christians, those married as well as monks: those with families; farmers, merchants and lawyers. The preface of the Philokalia recognises that not everyone agrees with such a broad ‘democratic’ intention and purpose. Indeed there might even be risk involved in making the texts available. The editors were clear that having a spiritual director is important and yet they took the risk of publishing the Philokalia. In this way the Philokalia may be said to be a product of the Enlightenment in a positive sense, in that its promotion of a democratic reception of the Tradition is akin to the agenda of the Encyclopaedists.

The editors of the Philokalia were followers of the Hesychast practices of prayer associated with Gregory Palamas a monk of Mount Athos in the fourteenth century. Andrew Louth suggests that the editors created a ‘canon’ for the Hesychast tradition.

What the Philokalia does is to canonize a tradition of hesychast spirituality stretching right back from the hesychast controversy to the fourth century; quite what lies behind this creation of a canon is not clear, though it is very likely that the selection derives from many years, probably centuries, of monastic formation: … But once seen as part of a tradition, works are read with presuppositions that may be foreign to the spirit in which they were originally written.

So how are the preconceptions and intentions of the editors to be understood and received? Some scholars have argued that Nikodimos was influenced significantly by Roman Catholic spirituality, canon law, and theology. But Nikodimus does not use texts from the Counter Reformation in the Philokalia. The collection is not framed as an attack on ‘the West’, rather the collection is offered to all Christians: monks and laity as ‘a mystical school of … prayer’.

As an influential collection of texts, the Philokalia can be said to be a ‘hermeneutical filter’ which conditions the self-understanding of the Orthodox as well as the perception of the Orthodox by the ‘non-Orthodox’. It has become a hermeneutical filter between early and medieval sources and their reception in the twentieth century, providing the basis for the construction of Orthodox identity and practice. In summary Louth writes that,

The Philokalia … has had an enormous impact on modern Orthodoxy: virtually all the great names of twentieth century Orthodox theology … can be regarded as standing in a “Philokalic” or “Neo-Palamite” tradition. This tradition of “Byzantine mysticism” is then a living tradition, which only makes it the more difficult to approach it in a critical, scholarly way. Most scholarly work on Byzantine mysticism that has been done in the past hundred years, including the edition of texts, has been done from within this tradition, with the result that the perspective represented by the Philokalia has been taken for granted.

The emergence of Neo-Palamism within Orthodox theological discourse in the twentieth century shaped the ‘evolution’ of Orthodox identity. Within this discourse two figures dominate the landscape, Gregory Palamas and Maximos the Confessor. Orthodox identity today is a synthesis of the ideas of these two writers constructed by Orthodox authors in the twentieth century. This means that texts of the Early Church and Medieval periods are now being interpreted in the light of these twentieth century constructs of identity. And the reading and reception of early and medieval sources is being interpreted through the ‘canon’ of the ‘Philokalia’. This suggests that attention to the effects of the collecting, editing and translating of Early Church texts can reveal the unintentional and unforeseen consequences for the construal of the past and for the construction of identity in the present.

Paul Collins is the author of Trinity: A Guide for the Perplexed