The Philokalia, Volume 2

The Passions Are Not Sins but Misdirected Energies: Maximos’ Proto-Psychological Cartography

The dominant voice in this volume belongs to Maximos the Confessor, who occupies more space in the Philokalia than any other writer — a fact that the editors note with precision and that reveals their theological priorities. What Maximos accomplishes across the Four Hundred Texts on Love, the Two Hundred Texts on Theology, the Various Texts, and the commentary On the Lord’s Prayer is nothing less than a unified field theory of human desire, will, and cognition anchored in Chalcedonian Christology. His opening move in the Texts on Love is diagnostic: “Love is a holy state of the soul, disposing it to value knowledge of God above all created things. We cannot attain lasting possession of such love while we are still attached to anything worldly.” This is not pietistic instruction. It is a statement about the structure of attention. Maximos posits that dispassion (apatheia) engenders love, that hope engenders dispassion, and that patience engenders hope — constructing a causal chain that mirrors what Edward Edinger would later describe as the ego-Self axis: a graduated series of psychological transformations in which each stage creates the conditions for the next. Where Jung’s model locates psychic energy (libido) as the animating force that can be captured by complexes, Maximos identifies philautia — self-love — as the master passion from which all others derive. Self-love is not vanity but the root orientation of psychic energy toward the created self rather than toward God. This is structurally identical to what depth psychology calls narcissistic identification: the ego mistaking itself for the totality.

The Two Wills of Christ as a Model for Psychological Integration

The introductory note to Maximos places his entire spiritual project within the context of his opposition to Monotheletism — the heresy that Christ possessed only a divine will and not a human one. The editors make the stakes explicit: “Human nature without a human will is an unreal abstraction: if Christ does not have a human will as well as a divine will, He is not truly man; and if He is not truly man, the Christian message of salvation is rendered void.” This is not a doctrinal footnote but the metaphysical foundation for everything Maximos writes about prayer, virtue, and inner transformation. The two-wills doctrine means that deification (theosis) does not annihilate the human but perfects it through voluntary cooperation. What we see in Christ, Maximos insists, is “a human will, genuinely free yet held in unwavering obedience to His divine will.” This has direct implications for any psychology of transformation. James Hillman’s critique of monotheistic ego-psychology — his insistence in Re-Visioning Psychology that the psyche is inherently polyvalent — finds an unexpected interlocutor here. Maximos would agree that the human will is not to be flattened or abolished but would insist that its multiplicity resolves not into polytheistic imaginal play but into the synergy of two distinct but harmonized wills. The “voluntary cooperation of manhood with divinity” that Maximos describes is a model of integration that neither collapses the human into the divine nor leaves the human autonomous. It is closer to what Donald Kalsched describes in The Inner World of Trauma as the restoration of the personal spirit after it has been sequestered by defensive dissociation — the return of a living human agency that can freely orient itself toward something greater than its own survival.

The Therapeutic Architecture of the Volume: Why the Editors Chose the Anthology Over the Original

A subtlety that most readers pass over is the editors’ frank acknowledgment that the Various Texts (500 passages attributed to Maximos) are not his authentic compositions but a “Maximian anthology” assembled by a later compiler, probably in the eleventh or twelfth century. The editors then ask — and answer — the obvious question: why did Nikodimos and Makarios include this later compilation rather than Maximos’ original To Thalassios? “The original text is very lengthy and at times highly obscure; the compiler, while sometimes increasing the obscurity by omitting vital passages, has on the whole selected the sections more immediately relevant to the spiritual life.” This is not scholarly compromise. It is a deliberate editorial act rooted in the Philokalia’s fundamental purpose as a therapeutic text — a text designed to transform the reader, not merely inform. The same logic governs the inclusion of the Theoretikon attributed to Theodoros the Great Ascetic, which the editors acknowledge may date as late as the seventeenth century and is “apparently incomplete, lacking both opening and conclusion.” Authenticity in the Philokalia is measured not by authorial attribution but by belonging to “the spiritual tradition which the collection as a whole represents.” This criterion parallels the way the Jungian analytic tradition treats its own canon: what matters is not whether a particular amplification traces to the correct mythological source but whether it activates the psychic reality it describes.

St Thalassios and the Economy of Attention

Thalassios the Libyan, whose four centuries of texts on love, self-control, and life in accordance with the intellect close this volume, offers what amounts to a manual of attentional hygiene. “Seal your senses with stillness and sit in judgment upon the thoughts that attack your heart.” “There are three ways through which thoughts arise in you: through the senses, through the memory, and through the body’s temperament. Of these the most irksome are those that come through the memory.” This taxonomy of thought-origins is remarkably precise: sensory input, memorial associations, and somatic temperament are identified as distinct vectors of psychic disturbance, with memory singled out as the most dangerous. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score arrives at a strikingly convergent conclusion when it identifies trauma’s preferential encoding in implicit memory and somatic states as the principal obstacle to psychological freedom. Thalassios’ prescription — stillness, prayer, love, and self-control as “a four-horsed chariot bearing the intellect to heaven” — is not escapism but the deliberate restructuring of the attentional field so that memory-driven passions lose their automatic grip on consciousness.

Why This Volume Matters Now

Volume 2 of the Philokalia is the hinge on which the entire collection turns: it is where ascetic practice acquires its metaphysical justification and where the phenomenology of the passions achieves its most systematic articulation. For anyone working in depth psychology, it offers something no modern text provides — a fully integrated account of psychic transformation that refuses to separate ontology from practice, theology from therapy, or the question of what the human being is from the question of what the human being does with attention, will, and desire. Maximos’ insistence that the human will must be free precisely in order to cooperate with the divine — neither abolished nor left to its own devices — remains the most sophisticated premodern model of what genuine psychological integration demands.