Hesychasm and the Prayer of the Heart

At the center of Orthodox monastic prayer stands hesychasm — the pursuit of hesychia, inner stillness, through the unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus until the prayer descends from the lips into the heart. This file traces the hesychast tradition from the desert through Sinai to Athos, the practice and theology of the Jesus Prayer, the psychosomatic method and the vision of the Uncreated Light, and the fourteenth-century vindication of the hesychasts by St. Gregory Palamas — deferring the Philokalic texts and the full doctrine of the Jesus Prayer to their own treatments.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (hesychast)

Hesychia: The Prayer of Stillness

Hesychia means “stillness,” “silence,” “quiet” — the inner tranquillity of a heart at rest in God, free from the turbulence of the passions and the noise of distracting thoughts. From it comes hesychast (hesychastes), a term used in the tradition both for the solitary who withdraws for stillness and, more specifically, for those who practice the discipline of inner prayer. Hesychasm is not a late invention but the mainstream of monastic prayer, and its roots reach back to the desert: the Egyptian and Sinaite fathers taught watchfulness (nepsis) over the thoughts, the guarding of the heart, compunction, and the constant remembrance of God, and it is out of that soil that the specific practice of the Jesus Prayer grew (Kallistos Ware, “The Origins of the Jesus Prayer,” in The Study of Spirituality, ed. Jones, Wainwright, and Yarnold, SPCK, 1986; and Ware’s introductions to the Philokalia, vols. 1 and 4, Faber, 1979–95; the desert roots are treated in The Desert Fathers).

The Jesus Prayer

The characteristic instrument of hesychasm is the Jesus Prayer: the short invocation “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me [a sinner],” repeated continually until it becomes as natural and ceaseless as breathing. The prayer joins the confession of the name of Jesus — before which “every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:10) and by which alone there is salvation (Acts 4:12) — with the cry of the publican, “God, be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13), and the plea of the blind man, “Son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:47). Its practice answers the apostolic command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17): by fixing the mind on a single short formula, the monk seeks to gather the scattered attention, to descend with the mind “into the heart,” and there to stand before God in unbroken remembrance. The classic descriptions distinguish stages: the prayer of the lips (oral), the prayer of the mind (mental attention to the words), and the prayer of the heart, when the invocation becomes self-acting and unites mind and heart in a continual, warm remembrance of God (Kallistos Ware, The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality, SLG Press, 1974; and the full treatment in Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer, to which the doctrine of the prayer is deferred).

The Jesus Prayer is not confined to monks — it has spread widely to the laity, above all through the Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim — but it is in the monastery that it has always had its natural home, forming the substance of the monk’s cell rule and of the prayer that continues through manual labor and the night watches (see The Vows and the Monastic Day). The great anthology of hesychast texts, the Philokalia, compiled by Sts. Macarius of Corinth and Nikodemos the Hagiorite and published in 1782, gathered the tradition’s teaching on watchfulness and the prayer of the heart from the fourth to the fourteenth century; its transmission is deferred to The Philokalia and to St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite.

The Psychosomatic Method

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries certain Athonite masters — Nikephoros the Hesychast, and the tradition codified under the name of St. Symeon the New Theologian — described a “psychosomatic” method as an aid to inner prayer: a bodily technique of regulating the breath and inclining the head toward the heart, coordinating the invocation with the rhythm of breathing, so as to help the mind descend into the heart and remain attentive (the method is described in the treatise attributed to Symeon and in Gregory of Sinai; see Ware, introduction to the Philokalia, vol. 4, 1995; and A Monk of the Eastern Church [Lev Gillet], The Jesus Prayer, SVS Press, 1987). The tradition has always insisted that this bodily technique is a subordinate aid, never the essence of the prayer, and is not to be attempted without the guidance of an experienced elder, lest it become mechanical or dangerous (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; and see The Elder and the Disciple). The heart of hesychasm is not a technique but repentance, humility, and the grace of God; the method serves the prayer, not the reverse.

Gregory Palamas and the Vindication of the Hesychasts

In the fourteenth century the hesychast practice provoked a great controversy that issued in one of the defining doctrinal settlements of Orthodoxy. Around 1337 the Calabrian philosopher Barlaam attacked the Athonite hesychasts, ridiculing their psychosomatic method (calling them, mockingly, omphalopsychoi, “men with their souls in their navels”) and, more fundamentally, denying that the monks could truly experience God — arguing that the light they claimed to see in prayer could not be God himself, who is utterly transcendent and unknowable, but at most a created effect (John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, Faith Press, 1964; Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, SVS Press, 1974). The hesychasts’ champion was St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), a monk of Athos and later archbishop of Thessalonica, who defended them in his Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts (Gregory Palamas, The Triads, trans. Nicholas Gendle, Classics of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1983).

Palamas argued that the monks genuinely see and are united to God — not to his essence, which remains forever unknowable and unparticipable, but to his uncreated energies, his very life and grace and glory truly communicated to the creature. The light the hesychasts behold is the same Uncreated Light that shone from Christ on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8) — not a created symbol but the true, uncreated glory of God, seen by purified human eyes as a real anticipation of the deified life of the age to come (Palamas, The Triads; Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964). This essence–energies distinction gave theological grounding to the whole ascetic and hesychast enterprise: because God’s uncreated energies are really communicated, the goal of the monastic life — deification, real union with God — is genuinely attainable, and the vision of the Light is not delusion but grace (and see Ascesis, Hesychia, and Theosis). Palamas’ teaching was vindicated by a series of councils held at Constantinople in 1341, 1347, and 1351, which condemned Barlaam and his later ally Akindynos and affirmed the hesychast doctrine as the faith of the Church; the “Synodikon of Orthodoxy” was expanded to proclaim it, and Palamas was canonized in 1368 (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964, on the councils of 1341–51 and the canonization; the fuller treatment of Palamite theology belongs to his own collection and to the theosis essay).

The Heart of Monastic Prayer

The hesychast tradition is thus not one option among others within Orthodox monasticism but its inner core — the answer to the question of what the monk actually does in the long hours of the cell. The whole ascetic structure treated in this collection — the withdrawal, the obedience, the fasting, the vigils, the manual labor — is ordered to purifying the heart so that unceasing prayer can take root there, and the goal of that prayer is nothing less than the vision of God and union with him by grace. This is why the tradition places hesychasm at its summit and why Athos, its heartland, is the reference-point of the whole monastic world (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, 1974). The prayer of the heart is the point at which monastic asceticism passes over into mystical theology, and the ascetic labor of the monk becomes the seeing of the Uncreated Light.

References

Palamas, Gregory, St. The Triads. Trans. Nicholas Gendle. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1983. (The defense of the hesychasts; the Uncreated Light; essence and energies.)
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964. (The controversy with Barlaam; the councils of 1341, 1347, 1351; the canonization.)
Meyendorff, John. St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Hesychasm as the core of Eastern monastic prayer.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974. (The practice and stages of the Jesus Prayer; the psychosomatic method as a subordinate aid.)
Ware, Kallistos. Introductions to The Philokalia, vols. 1 and 4. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–95. (The hesychast tradition and its sources.)
A Monk of the Eastern Church [Lev Gillet]. The Jesus Prayer. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (The history and practice of the prayer.)
Scripture: Luke 18:13; Mark 10:47; Acts 4:12; Philippians 2:10; 1 Thessalonians 5:17; Matthew 17:1–8.