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Metropolitan Kallistos Ware: „Word and Silence in the Philokalia”, North Park University in Chicago in February 2011
Kallistos Ware
„Word and Silence in the Philokalia”, North Park University in Chicago in February 2011
Transcript
Bradley Nassif: Now for our keynote speaker, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. Metr. Kallistos comes to us this evening to celebrate the launch of the first collection of scholarly essays that has ever been written [on The Philokalia]. This book will be published by Oxford University Press later this year and it’s titled The Philokalia: Exploring a Classic Text in Orthodox Spirituality with the foreword by Kallistos Ware. It has been edited by Dr. Brock Bingaman and myself. You were given the table of contents when you came into the auditorium this evening, so if you have that, and you’d like to know what it looks like, you’re welcome to see the table of contents and all the different authors that we have that have contributed to this work.
As you will see, it has been written by a team of ecumenical scholars coming from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant traditions. That’s because The Philokalia is a book for all Christians, not just Orthodox ones. The book is tentatively scheduled for publication later this fall, hopefully in time for the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion. As so happens with collected essays, one contributor or another misses the deadline of the submission and that’s what delayed the book from being offered tonight to the Metropolitan. So, we have to celebrate it eschatalogically, if you please. It’s already fulfilled but not yet consummated.
Metr. Kallistos, you were not aware of this when you came here this evening but we are dedicating this book to you tonight. On behalf of all the Orthodox clergy who are here, the writers and editors of these essays, we honor you with this collection for all that you have done to promote the The Philokalia over the years. He has been one of the chief translators, along with G. E. Palmer and Philip Sherrard. So we hope that it is a fitting tribute to the man who is, in all likelihood, the most significant Eastern Orthodox theologian living in the 21st century. So the timing of this is fitting. In fact, the lead article that Metr. Kallistos has written for this book describes The Philokalia as “a time bomb, whose time has come. Not in the 18th century but in the modern world, 200 years later.” So it’s actually more influential now than when it first came out.
The topic of his lecture this evening is “Word and Silence in The Philokalia.” For those of you unfamiliar with him, you can read the back of this, and he has all the academic credentials that you can imagine. He’s a professor emeritus of Eastern Christian Studies at Oxford University; he had been there for many, many years. He is the author of a classic text called The Orthodox Church. This is a textbook which we are using in my class this semester on the Eastern theological tradition. And, as I say, the translator of The Philokalia and so much more.
But to simply talk about his academic credentials really doesn’t do the justice to this man. If I left you this evening with that kind of normal introduction, it doesn’t begin to get him. I am reminded of the story told in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers about St. Anthony the Great, the great patriarch of the desert in 4th-century Egypt, which reminds me of Metr. Kallistos. And the story of Anthony goes like this:
Three fathers used to go and visit Blessed Anthony every year and two of them used to discuss their thoughts and the salvation of their souls with him. But the third always remained silent and did not ask him anything. After a long time, Abba Anthony said to him, “You often come here to see me, but you never ask me anything.” And the other replied, “It is enough for me to see you, Abba.”
And that’s the way it is with Metr. Kallistos. His very presence is a transforming presence. He doesn’t have to say anything; just to be in his presence is to be changed. Welcome with me, please, Metr. Kallistos.
Metr. Kallistos: Professor Bradley Nassif has just spoken to us about the new book on The Philokalia, to be published this autumn. This is an exciting and important event, both for Orthodox and for Christians of other traditions. And I count it a privilege to be numbered among the contributors to this volume.
As Prof. Nassif has just told you, The Philokalia is a collection of spiritual and mystical texts by some 36 authors, dating from the fourth to the 15th century, all except one from the Christian East. And what do these 36 authors speak about? Many themes, but chiefly about inner prayer, about the quest for God in the secret kingdom of the heart, that kingdom of which Christ spoke when he said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
Now tonight I certainly will not attempt to summarize in detail the contents of The Philokalia, but using The Philokalia as my guide, let me speak to you about a particular form of inner prayer—the Jesus Prayer, or Invocation of the Holy Name. While The Philokalia is much more than a guide to the recitation of the Jesus Prayer, yet the Invocation of the Name forms a vital connecting thread, a leitmotif that draws the whole work into living unity.
Now, by way of introduction, let me set before you, as in an icon, a decisive moment in the Old Testament: Moses at the Burning Bush, as described in Exodus 3. As Moses stands before the bush in the desert, that burns but is not consumed, God says to him two things. And he says these same two things to you and me and to everyone who seeks to enter into the mystery of living prayer.
First of all, God says to Moses, “Take off your shoes.” Now, on the interpretation of the Greek Fathers, for example, St. Gregory of Nyssa, shoes, made from the skins of dead animals, signify the deadness of repetition, boredom, inattentiveness. “Take off your shoes” then, means, symbolically: “Free yourself from what is lifeless, from enslavement to the trivial, the mechanical, the repetitive. Shake off the deadness of boredom. Wake up. Come to yourself. Open your spiritual eyes. Cleanse the doors of your perception. Look and see! Listen!”
Now the term used in Orthodox ascetical and mystical theology for this experience of waking up in Greek is nepsis—N-E-P-S-I-S—which means sobriety, watchfulness, alertness. And this experience of nepsis in indicated in the original Greek title of The Philokalia. It is called “Philokalia ton Hieron ton Neptikon” which means “Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers” or “The Fathers Who Taught Wakefulness.”
Wake up! That’s always been my problem. Ever since childhood, all too easily I’d drop off to sleep. Once I even fell asleep at one of my own lectures. I was unwise enough to give the lecture sitting down. As it continued, I grew more and more drowsy and as I drifted off into sleep I could hear a voice droning on and suddenly I realized it was my own voice. And I had no idea what I was saying.
