The Philokalia, Volume 2

Name: The Philokalia, Volume 2
Author: G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (trs.)

The Philokalia, Volume 2 is a work by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (trs.) (1981).

Core claims

Volume 2 of the Philokalia is not a continuation of Volume 1 but a decisive shift in register: from the apophthegmatic and ascetic counsel of the desert tradition toward the architectonic metaphysics of Maximos the Confessor, making it the point where Orthodox praxis becomes inseparable from Christological ontology.
St Maximos’ Four Hundred Texts on Love function as a phenomenology of attachment disguised as gnomic spirituality — they map the passions not as moral failings but as distortions of the soul’s natural energies, anticipating by thirteen centuries the structural logic that depth psychology would rediscover in the concept of complex formation.
The volume’s inclusion of the “Maximian anthology” — a later compilation of extracts deliberately chosen over Maximos’ more complete but more obscure original — reveals the Philokalia’s editors as practitioners of a therapeutic pedagogy: they shaped the text not for scholarly completeness but for transformative encounter.

How does Maximos the Confessor’s concept of philautia (self-love) as the root passion compare to Edward Edinger’s account of ego-inflation in Ego and Archetype, and what does this comparison reveal about the structural parallels between patristic and Jungian models of psychic distortion?
In what ways does Thalassios the Libyan’s taxonomy of thought-origins (senses, memory, and bodily temperament) anticipate or diverge from Bessel van der Kolk’s analysis of trauma encoding in The Body Keeps the Score?
How might Maximos’ two-wills Christology function as a corrective to James Hillman’s polytheistic critique of ego-psychology in Re-Visioning Psychology, particularly regarding the question of whether psychic multiplicity requires a unifying center?