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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 22 - Page 3 |
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The Philokalia The Philokalia (or 'Love of the Good,') is a large and important book in the inner tradition. In the eighteenth century, long before its translation into English, the texts used in the earliest version of this work sparked a major renewal in the inner tradition that shaped the form it now takes in Eastern monasticism. This renewal of the inner tradition, led by the Russian Paisious Velitchkovsky, began on Mount Athos, and then spread, first to Moldavia, and afterwards to Russia. The Greek version of the Philokalia, formed by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain primarily from the texts collected by Velitchkovsky, provides a primary technical instruction for the monks of the Eastern Church who carry on the same tradition to this day on Mount Athos, as well as in many other parts of the world Since then, the parallel volume to the Philokalia, the Gerontikon -- teaching-stories about the same early fathers, in very Middle Eastern style -- has been translated several times with varying degrees of success. Thomas Merton, too, selected from this collection stories that are meaningful to modern man.3 Another émigré, almost certainly a direct successor to the Russian seekers of the nineteenth century, Boris Mouravieff, wrote in the 1960's, in French, his own attempt to summarize his own discoveries in this field and those unpublished by those who had gone before him, and I have myself had the honour to publish the three volumes of his main work4 between 1990 and 1993. Other key texts have been published more recently, also as a result of Father Nikon's initiative: Unseen Warfare, also by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, edited again by Theophan, and the Art of Prayer, by Abbot Chariton of the monastery of Valamo, an ancient and at one time enormous monastery which preserved its spirituality in difficult times by moving across the border from Russia to Finland. Thus, many of the ancient texts are now more readily accessible. Their readership is increasing, because many, many readers obtain sudden insights from within their pages. But their message in full nobody in the West can read, for it is a message of repentance, metanoia, and it cannot be read in any depth and then ignored. So the gap in understanding still remains between Christian East and Christian West. All of this great effort has not yet revealed anything clearly, but it has definitely shown that there is something here to discover, although it is very difficult to discover it in full.
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