ABSTRACT
Many have attracted the attention of modern Christians due to the publication of the excellent English translation in four volumes of the Philokalia, an eighteenth-century compilation of texts ranging from the fourth century to the end of the fifteenth by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth.2 It is worth noting that the Philokalia did not represent the first florilegium of this kind, however; while having perhaps as their ancestors the seventh-century Pandects by a monk named Antiochos3 and Anastasios of Sinai's Questions and Answers* most Byzantine monastic florilegia were compiled in the eleventh century or later. The Synagoge of Paul of Evergetis, compiled between 1049 and 1054,5 the Pandects of Nikon of the Black Mountain6 and the florilegia of John the Oxite,7 written later in the eleventh century, are among the most important representatives of this genre.8 Whereas theologians and lay people with an interest in spiritual texts may have studied treatises on their own or in compilations such as the Philokalia, I feel that these genres have been greatly neglected by historians of the Byzantine period. Surely, if hagiography can be viewed as 'invaluable for understanding everyday life and mentalités',9 then so can the texts more explicitly written by and for monks themselves. Spiritual treatises may not contain the sensational accounts of ascetic feats or the lively narratives found in hagiography, but they do provide a vivid picture of the trials and aspirations of people involved in a religious way of life. In some ways the two genres complement each other, one representing the public and the other the internal, monastic view of the eastern Orthodox saint.
