Philokalía

We asked the Elder, “what is the best translation of ‘Philokalia’?”, and straightaway received this spontaneous answer:

“Philokalia: Unbridled eros for the lightning flashes and energies of the divine beauty, which adorns the microcosm and the macrocosm with a cohesive and comprehensive harmony and washes the innermost bowels of the human psychosomatic hypostasis and heart in its light, its virginal, inconceivable beauty and its utterly melodious, roaring silence, in order that the person (ánthropos) may reign as a divine person (theánthropos, god-man), in the image and likeness of Him who formed him, the Triune God.

And again, Philokalia is also the collection of the texts of the neptic fathers, who are, namely, kings, prophets and priests of the Holy Spirit; texts that are mystical and poetic initiations, in essence, reductive elaborations of the Song of Songs, capable of liberating and resolving, healing and transforming, the passions and the dead-ends of human nature into the new creation of the Kingdom of God the Father in Jesus Christ our Lord, through the Holy, presiding and life-generating Spirit.”

The above is excerpted from the book Beauty Will Save the World, by Gregory Wolfe, originally posted at the blog Between Jerusalem and Constantinople.