About the book: 'Philokalia' itself means love of the beautiful, the exalted, the excellent, understood as the transcendent source of life and the revelation of Truth. It is through such love that 'the intellect is purified, illumined and made perfect'.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text (Volume One) is a collection of texts written between the fourth and fifth centuries by spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition. It was compiled in the eighteenth century by two Greek monks, St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain of Athos (1749-1809) and St Makarios of Corinth (1731-1805), and was first published at Venice in 1782. A second edition was published at Athens in 1893, and this included certain additional texts on prayer by Patriarch Kallistos not found in the 1782 edition. A third edition, in five volumes, was also published in Athens during the years 1957-1963 by the Astir Publishing Company. It is on the Astir edition that our English translation is based.
First published in Greek in 1782, translated into Slavonic and later into Russian, The Philokalia (1979) has exercised an influence far greater than that of any book other than the Bible in the recent history of the Orthodox Church.
The complete Philokalia (five volumes) covers the period from the fourth to the fifteenth century. Volume One takes us up to the eighth century and is thus the common heritage of Orthodox and Catholics.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text (Volume One) is translated from the Greek and edited by G E H Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware.
About the translators and editors: Gerald Eustace Howell Palmer (1904-84) studied at Oxford and was the Member of Parliament for Winchester from 1935 until 1945. He collaborated in many translations, including The Philokalia.
The Most Reverend Kallistos (Ware), Metropolitan of Diokleia was born in England in 1934 and studied at Oxford. He embraced the Orthodox faith in 1954 and was ordained in 1966, in the same year he became a lecturer at Oxford. He was appointed to a Fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1979 and was consecrated as auxiliary bishop in 1982. He retired in 2001 and was elevated to Metropolitan in 2007. He is the author of The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way.
Philip Sherrard (1922-1995) was educated at Cambridge and lectured at Kings College, London and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies from 1970 to 1977. He translated the works of George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, making their work available to the English-speaking world. He was baptised into the Orthodox Church in 1956.
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