The Home of Hesychasm

Hesychasm — from the Greek hesychia, “stillness” or “quiet” — is the Orthodox tradition of inner silence, the unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus, and the experience of God as Uncreated Light. Athos is its heartland: the place where, in the fourteenth century, the hesychast method and its theology were most fully developed and defended, above all by St. Gregory Palamas, and vindicated by the councils of Constantinople; and the place from which, in the eighteenth century, the Philokalia carried that tradition across the Orthodox world. This file treats Athos as the home of hesychasm, deferring the theology of Palamas to his own collection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

Hesychia and the Jesus Prayer

The core of hesychasm is very old and very simple. Hesychia — stillness, quiet, the silencing of the passions and of the mind’s restless wandering — is the goal of the ascetic life as the desert fathers already conceived it: the state of inner peace in which the monk can attend to God alone (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 2015, on hesychia; on the desert roots see The Desert Fathers). The classic instrument for attaining and guarding this stillness is the Jesus Prayer — the short, constantly repeated invocation “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me [a sinner]” — prayed until it becomes unceasing, descends from the lips into the mind and from the mind into the heart, and unites the whole person in the remembrance of God (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015, on the Jesus Prayer; see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). This practice of unceasing prayer of the name reaches back through the whole monastic tradition to the desert, and Athos received it as part of its inheritance from the moment of its founding (see The Early Hermits and Saint Athanasius).

By the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the hesychast tradition on Athos had developed a more articulated method — a “psychosomatic” technique in which the invocation of the Name was joined to the regulation of the breath and a bodily posture of attention, as an aid to gathering the mind into the heart — associated with such Athonite teachers as St. Nikephoros the Hesychast and St. Gregory of Sinai, the latter of whom spread the hesychast practice from Athos through the Balkans (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015, on the fourteenth-century hesychasts; Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London: Faith Press, 1964, on the Athonite hesychast method and its teachers). It was this developed Athonite hesychasm — the monks who “kept their minds in their hearts” and claimed to experience the Uncreated Light — that became, in the fourteenth century, the centre of the greatest theological controversy of the late-Byzantine Church.

The Fourteenth-Century Flowering

The hesychast controversy erupted when the practices and claims of the Athonite hesychasts were attacked by the Calabrian scholar Barlaam, who ridiculed the psychosomatic method and denied that the light the monks claimed to see could be anything but a created phenomenon — for God, he held, is utterly beyond experience (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964, on Barlaam and the controversy). The defence of the hesychasts was undertaken by St. Gregory Palamas, himself a monk of Athos, who articulated the theology that the light of Tabor and of the hesychasts is the true, uncreated glory and energy of God — that God, unknowable and unparticipable in His essence, truly communicates Himself and is truly experienced in His uncreated energies, so that the vision of the Light is a real participation in God Himself (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015, on the essence-energies distinction). The full exposition and defence of this theology — the essence-energies distinction, the Uncreated Light, the reality of deification — belongs to St. Gregory himself, and this guide defers it to his collection (see St. Gregory Palamas; on deification see Orthodoxy: Theosis).

What belongs here is the Athonite dimension: that hesychasm was, precisely, the prayer of the Holy Mountain, and that in defending it the Church was defending the spiritual experience of its monks. The controversy was resolved in the hesychasts’ favour by a series of councils at Constantinople — in 1341, 1347, and 1351 — which vindicated Palamas and the hesychast tradition and condemned its opponents; the Palamite theology thus became the settled teaching of the Orthodox Church, and the year of the councils’ triumph is commemorated in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964, on the councils of 1341–1351; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015). The fourteenth century is remembered as the golden age of Athos in part for this reason: the Mountain was not merely the home of a spiritual practice but the source of a theology that the whole Church received (see Charters, Empires, and Ottoman Centuries).

The Philokalic Revival

The hesychast tradition never died on Athos, but it was renewed and diffused in a decisive way in the eighteenth century through the Philokalia. Amid the Ottoman-period revival of learning and strict observance associated with the Kollyvades movement (see Charters, Empires, and Ottoman Centuries), St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite — a monk of Athos — and St. Makarios of Corinth compiled the Philokalia, a great anthology of hesychast and ascetic texts drawn from the fathers of the tradition, from Evagrius and the desert to the fourteenth-century hesychasts, and published it at Venice in 1782 (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015, on the Philokalia; see The Philokalia). The Philokalia gathered the scattered patristic teaching on inner prayer into a single accessible corpus and gave the hesychast tradition a renewed and portable form.

Its influence was immense and reached far beyond the Mountain. St. Paisius Velichkovsky, formed in the Athonite and Moldavian monastic world, translated the Philokalia into Church Slavonic (the Dobrotolyubie), carrying the hesychast revival into the Russian and Romanian lands, where it fed the great flowering of eldership (starchestvo) at Optina and elsewhere and shaped the whole spiritual renewal of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015, on Paisius and the Slavonic Philokalia; see St. Paisius Velichkovsky). Through the Philokalia and its translations, the anonymous Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim brought the Jesus Prayer to a wide lay readership, and the prayer of the heart became, in the twentieth century, the common inheritance of Orthodox spirituality East and West (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015; see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). The Holy Mountain was the source and heartland of this whole movement — the place where the tradition was preserved, developed, defended, and, in the Philokalia, gathered and sent out to the world.

The Heartland

To call Athos the “home of hesychasm” is thus not rhetoric but history. It was on the Mountain that the hesychast method was most fully developed; it was an Athonite monk, Palamas, who gave it its theology; it was Athonite councils’ worth of monastic experience that the Church vindicated in 1341–1351; and it was Athonite monks, Nikodemos and Makarios, who gathered the tradition into the Philokalia and, through Paisius, sent it across the Orthodox world (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2015; Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on Athos as the home of hesychasm). And it was to this same tradition of inner prayer that the Mountain returned in its twentieth-century revival, when the hesychast life of the desert once again became the engine of renewal for the whole of Athos — the subject of the next file (see The Twentieth-Century Revival).

References

Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964. (The Athonite hesychast method; Barlaam and the controversy; the essence-energies theology; the councils of Constantinople of 1341, 1347, and 1351.)
Ware, Kallistos (Bishop of Diokleia). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (Hesychia, the Jesus Prayer, the fourteenth-century hesychasts, the Philokalia, and St. Paisius Velichkovsky and the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie.)
Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. (Athos as the home of hesychasm and the setting of the fourteenth-century flowering and the eighteenth-century Philokalic revival.)
Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text. 5 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1979– . (The English translation of the anthology compiled by Sts. Nikodemos and Makarios.)