Versiunea românească aici: De ce nu toate Filocaliile sunt la fel.
On the shelves of Orthodox bookshops today you can find books bearing the title Philokalia that do not contain the same texts. The Greek edition printed in Venice in 1782 does not overlap exactly with St. Theophan the Recluse’s Russian Dobrotolubiye. Nor do Father Dumitru Stăniloae’s twelve Romanian volumes mechanically reproduce either of these versions. The English edition by Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware — whose final volume appeared only in 2023 — has its own selection. And between all of these stands a Philokalia few people know: the Romanian manuscript tradition, older than the printed Greek edition itself. All of them bear the same name.
This difference is not a bibliographic curiosity. It says something about how, from one century to the next, one of the most important books of Orthodoxy has been transmitted — and, above all, about how it has not been transmitted.
The present article traces the path of the Philokalia along parallel lines: the original Greek line, the Romanian manuscript and Slavonic line of St. Paisius Velichkovsky and his disciples, the Russian line of St. Theophan, the modern academic line of Father Stăniloae, and a brief look at the English versions. The point of the article is not to enumerate translations, but to address a fundamental question: what happens when an anthology of spiritual experience is moved from a living thread of discipleship onto a translator’s desk?
1. The Origin: Athos, Venice, 1782
The Philokalia was printed in Venice in 1782, at the initiative of St. Makarios of Corinth and through the compiling and editorial work of St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain. The full Greek title — Philokalia tōn hierōn Nēptikōn — means “the love of the beauty of the holy neptic fathers,” that is, of those who lived watchfully, with a guarded mind, in ceaseless attention to the heart.
It was a massive anthology: texts written between the 4th and 15th centuries, from Evagrius Ponticus and Macarius the Egyptian to Gregory Palamas and Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos. Some thousand folio pages, gathered on Mount Athos — especially from the library of Vatopedi Monastery — from manuscripts that, many of them, had circulated between monasteries for centuries without ever being printed.
Its appearance was not a simple publishing event. It was born in the midst of the Kollyvades movement — a movement of spiritual renewal in 18th-century Greece, formed around St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, St. Makarios of Corinth, and Athanasius of Paros. They called for a return to the patristic sources, the practice of unceasing prayer of the heart, and frequent communion. It was, in a sense, a resistance against two simultaneous dangers: the Ottoman domination, which was suffocating outward spiritual life, and the infiltration of Western theology (Calvinist and scholastic) into the theological language of Greek Orthodoxy.
Publishing the Philokalia in Venice — one of the few European centers where Greek books could be printed — was an act of cultural resistance. The goal was not academic but pastoral: to give the Church back the tools of a spiritual life that was being lost.
The compilers did not gather texts at random. Their criterion was practical. They gathered the writings that taught directly nepsis, watchfulness, and the prayer of the heart — the fundamental disciplines of Eastern monasticism. They left out important patristic texts that did not address this theme explicitly. The Philokalia is not an anthology of Orthodox theology in general; it is a manual of hesychia.
One essential detail: in 1782, even on Athos itself, hesychast practice was in decline. Many monks, after centuries of Ottoman occupation and repeated decay, had lost living contact with the tradition the texts presuppose. The printing was, in a way, an attempt to save what was no longer being transmitted orally.
Paradoxically, this crisis of transmission explains why the Philokalia produced its greatest fruits not where it appeared, but where it was received into a community that was already practicing it.
2. The Romanian Line: Paisius, His Disciples, and the Primacy of Dragomirna
Here the article must correct a widespread perception — and a historical reality that philological research has brought to light only in the last four decades.
Paisius did not bring hesychasm to Romania. He took it from Romania to Athos.
St. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794) was born in Poltava, Ukraine, and studied at the Kyiv Theological Academy. But his path to hesychasm did not run through Athos first — it ran through the Romanian Principalities.
Here we must dwell on a context that standard historiography often passes over. In the 18th century, the Romanian Principalities became the refuge of Slavonic hesychast monasticism. In the Russian Empire, Peter the Great’s 1721 “Spiritual Regulation” and the 1724 “Proclamation on Monasticism” suffocated monastic life through severe administrative restrictions. In the part of Ukraine then under Polish occupation, Orthodoxy was persecuted by Catholic authorities through the Unia — entire monasteries were shut down for refusing union with Rome. The only Orthodox space where the Athonite rule could still be practiced freely was the Romanian Principalities — under Phanariot princes who encouraged culture, but above all under a clergy and a society that received monasticism as something natural.
In this context, in 1713, a young Slavonic monk fled from Poltava and arrived at Dălhăuți Monastery in the Buzău mountains: St. Basil of Poiana Mărului (1692–1767). During the fifty-four years he spent in the Romanian Principalities, he formed an entire hesychast school — his brotherhood at Dălhăuți numbered over forty monks, Moldavians, Wallachians, Transylvanians, and Russians. He wrote practical introductions to the philokalic writings of Sts. Nilus of Sora, Philotheus, Hesychius, and Gregory of Sinai — texts that prepared the reader for direct engagement with the Philokalia before it had even been printed.
When Paisius, still a young novice, arrived in 1743 at Dălhăuți and then at Trăisteni, he met Basil. Basil became his first real teacher of the Jesus Prayer. Years later, in 1750, when Paisius was already on Athos, Basil himself came to the Holy Mountain on pilgrimage and tonsured him there under the name Paisius.
This detail changes the standard narrative. The Philokalia and its practice did not arrive in Romania “from Athos” through Paisius as a one-way movement. Hesychasm was already a living and multinational phenomenon in the Romanian Principalities when young Paisius began to learn it — and the Romanian lands were, at that historical moment, the most important refuge of hesychast monasticism for the entire Slavonic Orthodox world. What Paisius did later, after his return to Moldavia in 1763, was to systematize and enlarge a tradition that was already waiting for him — a tradition that was itself the result of the fact that the Romanian Principalities offered the monastic freedom that the Russian Empire and Catholic Poland no longer permitted.
Dragomirna, 1769: The First Philokalia Translated into a Modern Language
Between 1763 and 1775, Paisius served as abbot of Dragomirna Monastery, under the patronage of Metropolitan Gavriil Calimachi. Around him gathered a multinational brotherhood — drawn from all the Slavonic and Greek Orthodox lands — which functioned simultaneously as a community of prayer and a workshop of translation. Paisius sent monks specially to Athos to obtain the best Greek manuscripts; the texts were then collated, translated, and verified as a team, and every chapter passed through the filter of a community that was already living the content of the text.
On 4 May 1769, at Dragomirna, the monk Raphael — a highly skilled copyist who had come to Dragomirna for a year from the brotherhood of Horezu Monastery in Oltenia — completed a manuscript of 626 pages. It was a philokalic anthology in the Romanian language, containing patristic texts on spiritual perfection. Today it is known as the Philokalia of Dragomirna and is catalogued as BAR Rom. ms. 2597 at the Library of the Romanian Academy.
The significance of this manuscript has been properly understood only in recent decades. Until the 1980s, paleography experts believed that the first translation of the Philokalia from Greek was the Russian version by St. Theophan the Recluse, from 1877. Modern research has changed the picture: the Philokalia of Dragomirna is the first translation of a philokalic anthology into any modern living language — thirteen years before the printing of the Greek Philokalia in Venice, one hundred and eight years before Theophan’s Russian Dobrotolubiye.
This is not a matter of national pride. It is a fact that changes the usual geography of transmission. The Romanian monastic world did not receive the Philokalia “from the West” or “from the Greeks” as a belated reflection. It translated the texts directly from Athonite manuscripts, through Paisian discipleship, in a period when the Greeks themselves were only beginning to gather them for printing.
The Disciples and the Fruits
After the Austrian occupation of Bucovina in 1775, Paisius retreated with his brotherhood to Secu Monastery, and in 1779 he settled permanently at Neamț Monastery. Under his leadership, Neamț grew to approximately 700 monks — while the entire Paisian community, comprising Neamț, Secu, and dependent sketes, exceeded at the time of his repose in 1794 more than one thousand monks of five nationalities — Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, and Bulgarians. There was no other brotherhood of such scale and diversity in all of 18th-century Orthodoxy. At Neamț, too, Paisius’s disciples produced a second Romanian translation of the Philokalia — the Philokalia of Neamț (BAR Rom. ms. 1455), this time translated from the Slavonic Dobrotolubiye which their master had in the meantime published. This one also remained in manuscript, circulating in monastic circles.
Alongside these, dozens of other Paisian anthologies and florilegia circulated. “Lilies of the Field” — an anthology of patristic counsels for monks, enormously popular, of which the Library of the Romanian Academy preserves 20 copies today, and the Library of the Holy Synod three more. One of the catalogued copies belonged to Țigănești Monastery, spent time in the library of the Romanian Prodromou Skete on Athos, and was brought back to Romania by the hieromonk Daniel Sandu Tudor — the later Father Daniel of the Burning Bush movement.
All these translations and copies required people. At Dragomirna and Neamț, a whole generation of Romanian scholar-translators was formed, who knew ancient Greek and Church Slavonic, and who were not merely philologists but living practitioners of the texts they translated: Macarius the Teacher (from Transylvania, trained at the St. Sava Academy in Bucharest), who translated Isaac the Syrian and John Climacus; Hilarion the Teacher, from the Diocese of Râmnic; Isaac the Teacher, who continued the tradition until 1817. Macarius also wrote a Romanian grammar at Sihla in 1772 — a necessary tool for the formation of the younger translators of the Paisian brotherhood.
But Paisius’s most important fruit was not the books. It was the people. His disciples formed, in their turn, other disciples, generation after generation. This is the point at which we must state a thesis explicitly: Romania is not the passive beneficiary of the philokalic tradition. It is one of its central nodes of transmission.
Among the direct or close disciples of St. Paisius in the Romanian space:
- St. Joseph of Văratec († 1828), who followed the Paisian teaching from Dragomirna to Secu and Neamț, and then laid the spiritual foundations of Văratec Monastery — one of the largest women’s monastic communities in the 19th-century Orthodox world.
- St. George of Cernica († 1806), who carried the Paisian tradition into Wallachia, to the monasteries of Cernica and Căldărușani.
- The Venerable Irinarh Rosetti († 1859), who founded Horaița Monastery, sketes on Athos, and the church on Mount Tabor.
- Gregory the Teacher, disciple of the Paisian brotherhood, who later became Metropolitan of Wallachia.
- Sophronius and Silvester, spiritual fathers at Neamț — the first in the Slavonic language, the second in Romanian — who continued the Paisian work directly in the mother-monastery after the elder’s repose.
- Hilarion of Secu, a Paisian spiritual father who maintained the rule at Secu Monastery.
The Paisian spirit was not limited to his direct disciples. Metropolitan Veniamin Costachi of Moldavia († 1846), though not a direct disciple, lived and governed the Church of Moldavia in the spirit of Paisius — showing that Paisian influence shaped not only monastic life but also the hierarchy of 19th-century Romanian Orthodoxy.
Through this network, the Paisian line reaches, across six or seven generations, to the great spiritual figures of 20th-century Romania: St. Cleopa Ilie, Father Paisie Olaru, Father Arsenie Papacioc. This is not a coincidence. It is the same thread.
What distinguishes the Paisian line from the other lines we shall see below is precisely this living character of transmission. The book was merely an instrument. The real transmission happened through discipleship — from elder to young monk, through confession, through daily prayer, through the brotherhood. The Philokalia of Paisius was not a book to be read. It was a book to be worked.
The Slavonic Dobrotolubiye (Moscow, 1793)
In 1793, one year before his repose, the Slavonic version — Dobrotolubiye — appeared at the Synodal Press in Moscow. The initiative for the printing, in fact, did not come from Paisius himself but from Metropolitan Gavriil of Saint Petersburg (1730–1801), who asked the elder of Neamț to send the texts translated by his brotherhood. Before printing, the translations were reviewed by the professors of the Kyiv Theological Academy. The detail matters: the highest Russian hierarchy recognized the value of Paisius’s work and did everything it could to have the edition printed officially, under the authority of the Holy Synod.
This edition became the spiritual handbook of nineteenth-century Russia, and the first Philokalia to escape the strict monastic perimeter and reach laypeople.
The Fruits: What the Paisian Line Changed in the Orthodox World
We must pause here. Because if the article were to limit itself to discussions of translations, manuscripts, and philology, it would miss the essential. The whole point of Paisius’s work was a living transformation of the Orthodox world. And this indeed happened — on a scale that few readers today grasp.
The Synaxarion of the Orthodox Church summarizes the effect explicitly: the translations of St. Paisius and the activity of his disciples in Russia led to a widespread spiritual renewal and to the restoration of traditional monastic life, which endured until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
A few of the concrete fruits of this renewal:
St. Seraphim of Sarov (1759–1833), the most beloved saint of Russia since St. Sergius of Radonezh. His connection with Paisius is not merely contextual but direct, through discipleship: the young Seraphim received his blessing to enter Sarov Monastery from Dositheus of Kyiv, a direct disciple of St. Paisius. That is, the spiritual formation of the greatest Russian saint of the modern era passed through the hands of a Paisian disciple. This is not a minor detail — it is the very link that connects the Moldavian Neamț to the Russian wilderness of the 19th century.
The Optina eldership (starchestvo). Optina Pustyn Monastery, south of Moscow, became in the 19th century the most important spiritual center of Russia. And its roots were Paisian, through two successive generations. Elder Theodore of Sanaxar († 1791), a direct disciple of Paisius, formed in northern Russia an entire generation of monks in the Paisian spirit. His own disciple, Elder Leonid (Lev) of Optina († 1841), became the first great elder of Optina and opened the golden age of Russian starchestvo. He was followed by Elder Macarius († 1860), who published at Optina an entire series of Paisian patristic translations, making them accessible to all of Russia. Optina was not merely a place where the Philokalia was read — it was a monastery born from the Paisian tree.
To Optina came, over the decades, a large part of the Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century — philosophers, writers, men of culture searching for something that official Russia could no longer give them. Gogol came and sought spiritual counsel here in the last years of his life. And in 1878, Dostoevsky arrived at Optina immediately after the death of his son Alexei, together with the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. He spoke with Elder Ambrose — the successor of Leonid and Macarius, and thus the direct continuator of the Paisian line — about suffering and consolation. He returned home to begin The Brothers Karamazov. Elder Zosima, the central figure of the novel, is modeled directly after Ambrose of Optina; Zosima’s cell as Dostoevsky describes it is a copy of Ambrose’s cell.
That is: without Paisius Velichkovsky — who had been formed in the Buzău sketes and had written the Slavonic Philokalia at Neamț — there would have been no Optina as we know it, and no Brothers Karamazov in the form we read it. The chain is direct, historically documented, not metaphorical.
The scale of diffusion is difficult to appreciate today. The Greek professor Antonios-Emilios Tachiaos, one of the leading academic authorities on Paisianism, documents that one hundred and three (103) monasteries in Russia were directly influenced by the spirit of Paisian hesychastic monasticism, through the Slavonic disciples of Paisius — Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians — who spread throughout 19th-century Russia and Ukraine. Among these: Valaam and Solovki in the north, the Lavra of St. Alexander Nevsky in Saint Petersburg, Optina in central Russia, Simonov and Novospask in Moscow, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, New Athos in the Caucasus — and numerous women’s monasteries. A single Moldavian elder, who had left Poltava and settled at Neamț, renewed through his disciples approximately a quarter of 19th-century Russian monasticism.
“The Way of a Pilgrim,” published anonymously in 19th-century Russia, popularized the Jesus Prayer throughout the world. The book describes a Russian peasant wandering the steppes with Paisius’s Dobrotolubiye in his pack and the Jesus Prayer on his lips. This was the first time the philokalic practice decisively left the monastery and reached the laity. Translations of this book into nearly every language of the world, including the Western languages of the 20th century, carried Paisian practice to American readers who had never heard of Neamț or Dragomirna.
St. Herman of Alaska († 1837), the first saint of American Orthodoxy, was sent as a missionary to Alaska in the very year of Paisius’s repose (1794). The philokalic tradition thus reached, through the disciples of the Paisian line, as far as the shores of North America, in the same year that the elder of Neamț was ending his life.
These are the fruits of a translation. Or, more precisely: the fruits of a translation made from within a living spiritual life, with disciples ready to carry it forward. The Paisian Philokalia transformed Russian literature, produced saints, nourished monasteries, reached as far as Alaska. This is the standard by which we shall judge, further on, the other editions.
3. The Russian Line: St. Theophan the Recluse and the Editor Who Filters
Paisius’s Slavonic Dobrotolubiye remained in use in Russia throughout the 19th century, but its language — Church Slavonic — became increasingly inaccessible to laypeople. The need for a version in modern Russian arose. After a first attempt by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov (1857), the version that became standard was that of St. Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894), published starting in 1877 in five volumes.
Theophan was a man of rare spiritual depth. Bishop of Tambov and then of Vladimir, he voluntarily retired to Vysha Monastery in 1866 and spent the last twenty-eight years of his life in reclusion, writing and translating. His sanctity is real and recognized. But his work on the Philokalia must be examined carefully, for it is not a simple translation of the Greek or Paisian edition.
Theophan was a theologian-editor who made substantial interventions:
- He added texts — new writings by Theodore the Studite, by Symeon the New Theologian, and others, that were not in the original Greek edition. The corpus grew by approximately 10-20%.
- He omitted — the most striking omission is the complete absence of Peter of Damascus, the second most voluminous author in the Greek Philokalia after Maximus the Confessor, who occupies a large part of volume III of the Venetian edition. Theophan excluded him probably because Peter’s writings had already been translated separately into Russian by the hieromonk Juvenal Polovtsev at Optina Monastery. But the concrete result is that the reader of the Russian Dobrotolubiye has no access to Peter of Damascus through the Philokalia.
- He paraphrased — passages he considered too technical or liable to mislead the unformed reader. In particular, he filtered out the passages on the psycho-somatic method of prayer: the posture of the body, the rhythm of breathing, the descent of the mind into the heart.
- He restructured — the edition is organized thematically, not chronologically as in the Greek. Volume IV, for example, is devoted almost entirely to Sts. Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, and Gregory Palamas.
- He replaced — in a parallel work, St. Nikodimos’s Unseen Warfare, Theophan simply replaced the chapters on prayer because the original had Western influences (from Scupoli), writing in their place his own chapters on the prayer of the heart according to the Orthodox tradition.
All these interventions had a pastoral justification. Theophan was not acting from arrogance but from care for his reader — a 19th-century Russian who was not an Athonite monk and who, if he received the texts raw, risked misapplying them. And the pastoral result cannot be contested: Theophan’s Dobrotolubiye became the standard book of the modern Russian faithful, was printed in enormous runs, nourished two generations until the 1917 Revolution, and after the fall of communism was the first Philokalia to return to Russian bookshops. Its cultural influence — different from that of the Paisian Philokalia, but real — is immense. Without Theophan, 20th-century Russian Orthodoxy would not have had access to the Philokalia in a language it could understand.
But the result, viewed with hindsight, is a mediated Philokalia. The texts no longer reach the reader exactly as the authors left them. A chapter of Gregory of Sinai in Theophan’s edition is not identical to the same chapter in the Greek edition or in Paisius. And the ordinary reader does not know this.
There is something else that matters, and it is perhaps the most significant point. Unlike Paisius, Theophan worked alone, in reclusion. He did not form a brotherhood of disciples to continue the living tradition. His influence was exercised through books, not through discipleship. He produced a Philokalia with immense cultural fruits, but there is no “Theophanite line” of elders carrying his work forward as there is a Paisian line. This is not a criticism — these are different gifts. But it matters for today’s reader, who must know what he is holding in his hands.
4. The Modern Line: Father Dumitru Stăniloae
The printed Romanian Philokalia in twelve volumes, published by Father Dumitru Stăniloae between 1946 and 1991, is one of the most ample achievements of Orthodox theology in the 20th century. The volumes total over five thousand pages. Each text is accompanied by commentary, notes, and cross-references. The work is impressive.
But it must be viewed with clear eyes.
Method and Corpus
Stăniloae worked directly from Greek, based on the Venetian edition (1782) and the Athens edition (1893), with support from Migne’s collection and from older Romanian sources — including the translation of Bishop Gherasim Safirin (a manuscript preserved at Frăsinei Monastery), the translations of the hieromonk Serafim Popescu, and a corpus of Romanian manuscripts copied at the Prodromou Skete on Mount Athos and brought to Romania by two Romanian monks.
The context of this retrieval deserves clarification, because it is itself part of the history of Paisian transmission. The Romanian manuscripts of the Philokalia already existed at Prodromou, gathered and prepared for printing as early as 1937 by the Romanian brotherhood there. The brotherhood lacked, however, the means to print them on site and was seeking support back home. The answer came from Transylvania: Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan of Transylvania sent, one after the other, two monks from Sâmbăta de Sus Monastery, with the mission of copying and bringing these manuscripts — at the request and in support of Father Stăniloae.
The first was the hieromonk Arsenie Boca, then still a celibate deacon, who spent about three months at Prodromou in March–May 1939. The second was the hieromonk Serafim Popescu, who stayed about a year at Prodromou between 1940 and 1941, under the guidance of archimandrite Antipa Dinescu, a former abbot of the skete. The longer time spent on Athos by Serafim Popescu — and the fact that he worked systematically in the skete’s rich library — suggests that the larger portion of the philokalic material was brought by him; Arsenie Boca contributed a smaller volume, consistent with the 87 days he spent on the Holy Mountain. Together, the two delivered the material to Father Stăniloae, who began translating the first volumes in 1944. This is serious philological work, not a simple transposition.
An important thing to keep in mind: Stăniloae made a restoration with respect to Theophan. He brought back into the Romanian Philokalia texts that Theophan had omitted — first of all Peter of Damascus, to whom he devoted almost the entire fifth volume (published in 1976, after 28 years of forced interruption of the translation). In this respect, Stăniloae is closer to the original Greek Philokalia than Theophan is.
Still, his edition does not mechanically reproduce Venice either. He rearranged the order of authors and texts, and expanded the corpus with patristic additions. Some scholars speak of a “Romanian philokalic corpus” of approximately 20 volumes, if all the additions and commentaries are included.
Censorship and Resistance
The story of publishing volumes V–XI during the communist period is an act of intellectual resistance that this article cannot pass over in silence. Stăniloae had to go almost daily to the Department of Cults to argue the necessity of printing each volume. The duel with the censors reached absurd heights: at one point, the censors tried to ban the word “man” altogether, demanding its replacement with “believer,” under the pretext that “man” belonged exclusively to the socialist “new man,” and that “mystical” texts could not speak on behalf of humanity in general.
Stăniloae managed to preserve the integrity of the text. The Philokalia circulated in thousands of copies, often without covers or on poor paper, sometimes given clandestinely to those who had the courage to ask for it.
This heroism is real and deserves honor. But it does not change the question about the editorial nature of the work.
Where the Problem Lies
The problem is that Stăniloae’s Philokalia is the work of a translator-theologian, not of a disciple formed in the Paisian line.
He did not receive the texts through living discipleship, from an elder who read them with him in the evening and explained what a desert father of Sinai meant when he spoke of “the movement of the mind.” He received them through books, through critical editions, through correspondence with fellow theologians. He studied in the universities of the West — Athens, Munich, Berlin, Paris. He wrote his Orthodox Dogmatic Theology as a systematic work, Western in method even when the content was purely Eastern.
This changes something fundamental in the result. The translation is impeccable philologically. The commentaries are erudite. But the text is no longer transmitted from within a community that practices it — it is explained, from the outside, to a presumably ignorant reader. This is felt in the critical apparatus of the volumes: a vast quantity of footnotes, references to Western editions, comparisons with modern thinkers, dialogue with psychology and philosophy. The Paisian Philokalia in manuscript, by contrast, was almost bare of notes. The text, without commentary. Because it was assumed that the person reading it had an elder to ask.
The difference also shows in the fruits. Paisius formed, through his disciples, a monastic network that endured and transmitted itself into the 21st century. Stăniloae formed readers, doctoral students, theologians. These are different works, with different value. His Philokalia naturally reaches theology professors, Orthodox intellectuals; it did not spring from a monastic brotherhood but from a scholar’s study — and this is visible in its language and its apparatus.
Therefore — and here is the central thesis of this section — Stăniloae’s Philokalia must be read with awareness of what it is: a work of extraordinary academic retrieval, a partial restoration with respect to Theophan, a heroic act of cultural resistance — but not a direct continuation of the Paisian line. It is the edition that gives you access to the texts, not to their practice.
An Important Epilogue: The Philokalia of Prodromou (2001)
What keeps the Paisian line alive, beyond Stăniloae’s edition, is a historical fact that only recent research has brought to light: the source manuscript from which Stăniloae worked always had a wider existence than what reached him.
In 1922, the Romanian brotherhood at the Prodromou Skete on Athos had already prepared for printing a complete Romanian Philokalia, made up of the old Paisian translations — a manuscript that was to be sent to Romania for printing but remained unprinted, probably due to a lack of financial means and to the political conditions of the interwar period. This is the manuscript about which, as the historian Virgil Cândea observed, it was only later discovered that it had been “composed in the brotherhood of the Romanian Prodromou Skete of the Holy Mountain, with a view to printing in Romania.”
When Boca and Serafim Popescu arrived at Prodromou in 1939 and 1940-1941, respectively, they copied fragments from this material — as much as they could transcribe during their time at the skete — and brought them to Romania. Stăniloae used these fragments as auxiliary sources for the first volumes of his translation. But the complete 1922 manuscript remained unpublished at Prodromou for nearly eight more decades.
Only in 2001, at Universalia Publishing House, was the complete 1922 manuscript finally printed for the first time under the title The Philokalia of Prodromou, with an edition prepared by Doina Uricariu and an introductory study by the academician Virgil Cândea. The dedication of the volume speaks for itself: the edition is “dedicated to the first translators two centuries ago from the brotherhood of Elder Paisius of Neamț Monastery and to the scholarly monks of the Romanian Prodromou Skete of the Holy Mountain.”
For today’s reader, this has important significance. The Philokalia of Prodromou is not a competing alternative to Stăniloae, but the original Paisian source itself — the complete material of the Romanian translations prepared in 1922, which Stăniloae knew only fragmentarily through the copies of 1939–1941. For anyone who wishes to see what the Romanian Paisian line sounded like in its integral form, straight from the pen of the Paisian teachers or their disciples at Prodromou, the Philokalia of Prodromou is the closest restitution of the source — a completion, not a competitor, of the Stăniloae edition.
5. The English Line: A Brief Note
For completeness, and for readers in the diaspora who use English materials of spirituality, one thing is worth mentioning. The standard academic translation in English is the Palmer–Sherrard–Ware edition, at Faber & Faber. The first volume appeared in 1979; the fifth — the last — appeared only in 2023. In other words, for over forty years, even the academic English translation was incomplete.
There are also other versions, of uneven quality — some much shorter, others paraphrased after Theophan’s model, some signed by clerics who are less rigorous patristically. Anyone seeking seriousness in English should look for the Palmer–Sherrard–Ware edition. Anyone with access to Romanian has, in any case, a better instrument than all the English versions.
6. Conclusion: What We Transmit When We Transmit the Philokalia
The history of the Philokalia shows something important about how a living spiritual tradition is preserved.
The text alone is not enough. The Greek Philokalia of 1782 was published in Venice and remained, for decades, a rare book even in Orthodox monasteries. It bore great fruits only where it met people prepared to receive it from within a living practice — first at the sketes of Buzău, where Basil of Poiana Mărului was forming the young Paisius; then at Dragomirna and Neamț, where Paisius and his brotherhood translated it before its Greek printing; then at Cernica, at Văratec, at Horaița, through the disciples who gave birth to other disciples.
The other lines of transmission — the Russian line of Theophan, the modern Romanian line of Stăniloae, the English lines — are all, in different ways, operated by translators who worked more from outside the practice than from within it. They were work for the reader, not for the disciple. They are precious, they are necessary, they are often the work of saints. But they cannot replace living transmission.
For the English-speaking reader of today, this is both good news and a warning.
The good news: the full Palmer–Sherrard–Ware edition is now available in English, and English-speaking Orthodoxy is richer in resources than at any previous time. There are also, by God’s mercy, monasteries in the English-speaking world — in America, in Britain, on Athos with English-speaking brotherhoods — where the Paisian thread of discipleship continues, in a living form.
But we speak, first and foremost, of something else: of the method transmitted. The elder’s guidance of the disciple. Frequent confession. The Jesus Prayer received with a blessing and verified over time. The reading of philokalic texts in the context of a brotherhood that was itself formed in this practice. This is what was transmitted, from Basil of Poiana Mărului and Paisius, from them to George of Cernica and Joseph of Văratec, from them further on, to Father Cleopa, Father Paisie Olaru, Father Arsenie Papacioc — and from them to their disciples, many still alive. This thread does not run through the printed Philokalia. It runs through people.
We therefore have, in our tradition, three things: Stăniloae’s Philokalia as modern academic translation, the Philokalia of Prodromou as a restitution of the Paisian source, and living Paisian discipleship in the monastery as practice. They are complementary, not competing — none of them replaces another.
The warning: a Philokalia read alone, without a guide, without a brotherhood, without discipleship, is like a cookbook in a foreign language. You can learn to recognize it word by word and still go hungry. Paisius knew this. Theophan knew this. Stăniloae knew it too, and he said so in the prefaces to his volumes with more insistence than most readers notice.
The Philokalia is a map, not a road. The road is made by walking — usually, along the footsteps of someone who knows where it leads.
See also the upcoming companion article: How to Read the Philokalia: The Unwritten Order No One Ever Told You.
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