The Francisco-Benedictine musician John Michael Talbot described hesychia as being like sitting on the edge of a pool, and letting the detritus subside. The Greek spiritual movement associated with the word hesychia is called hesychasm, and its monastic practicioners are hesychasts. The goal of this inner prayer is the encounter with God through purity of heart, through seeking hesychia - peacefulness, stillness. I believe that in its later volumes (they arranged roughly chronologically) it is more specifically about The Jesus Prayer (I’ll discuss that prayer soon, I think). It is about ‘inner prayer’, about the inner kingdom, about the prayer of the heart. In fact, it is not even about the entire life of prayer. Thus, the external aspects of Christian spirituality, such as fasts and vigils, are lacking. This multi-volume anthology is not a comprehensive guide to the entire ascetic life. You may recognise some of the authors they included: Ps.-Antony the Great, Evagrios ‘the Solitary’ (aka ‘Ponticus’, in the original attributed to St Neilus of Ancyra), St Maximus the Confessor, St Makarios the Great, St Gregory of Sinai. The collection was assembled on Mt Athos, the monastic/spiritual heart of Orthodoxy, in the 17th century by Sts Nikodimos and Makarios. The inescapable, inimitable Met Kallistos Ware (for many of us, our first introduction to Orthodoxy, through The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way) is one of the translators. So far, the English translation includes four out of a proposed five. The authors range from the fourth through the fifteenth centuries. The Philokalia is a multi-volume anthology of Greek spiritual texts on the subject of prayer. Since it is what my brother and I are slowly wading our way through (and hopefully becoming better pray-ers as a result), here we go. I realised that I’ve not actually told the reading public what The Philokalia is. ‘Ah yes, that book you’ve been blogging about,’ is an approximation of the response. 1, as a way to signify who Kallistos Ware is. In conversation over Skype recently, I held up my copy of The Philokalia, vol.
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