Ascesis, Hesychia, and Theosis

Everything in this collection — the desert, the rules, the tonsure, the prayer, the eldership — is ordered to a single end: the transformation of the human person into God by grace. This file traces the three moments of that transformation as the tradition understands them: ascesis, the struggle against the passions; hesychia, the stillness in which the purified heart becomes capable of God; and theosis, deification, real union with God through his uncreated energies — the goal that gives the whole monastic life its meaning.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Goal Gives the Struggle Its Meaning

Orthodox asceticism is not a project of self-punishment or moral athleticism for its own sake. Its severities are strictly instrumental, ordered to a goal that transfigures them: the healing of the human person and its union with God. The tradition names this goal theosis, deification — the astonishing patristic claim, summarized in St. Athanasius’ formula, that “God became man that man might become god” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54; and the same in Irenaeus and Maximus; see the full treatment in Orthodoxy: Theosis). Because this is the end, the monastic life can be understood as a single ordered movement from the healing of the passions, through the purified stillness of the heart, to union with God — a movement the fathers often map in three stages: praktike (the practical struggle, purification), theoria physike (the contemplation of God in creation), and theologia (the direct knowing of God), or, in the classic triad, purification (katharsis), illumination (photismos), and deification (theosis) (Evagrius’ scheme of praktike and theoria, transmitted through the tradition; the threefold way in Ps.-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor; see John Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, SVS Press, 1974, and Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, SVS Press, 1976).

Ascesis: The Struggle Against the Passions

Ascesis (Greek askesis, “training,” “exercise,” borrowed from the vocabulary of the athlete) is the disciplined struggle by which the monk cooperates with grace to be freed from the passions. The “passions” (pathe) in this technical sense are not emotions as such but the disordered movements of the soul — gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, dejection, acedia (listlessness), vainglory, and pride, the classic list of the “eight thoughts” (logismoi) codified by Evagrius of Pontus and transmitted to the West as the “seven deadly sins” through John Cassian (Evagrius, On the Eight Thoughts; John Cassian, Institutes 5–12 and Conferences 5, on the eight principal vices; trans. Boniface Ramsey, Paulist Press, 2000 and 1997; deferred to St. John Cassian). The ascetic weapons against them are the tools the whole collection has described: fasting, vigil, and manual labor to discipline the body and starve gluttony and acedia; obedience and the disclosure of thoughts to break self-will and pride; poverty to root out avarice; watchfulness (nepsis) over the thoughts to intercept a temptation before it becomes a passion (the analysis is developed throughout the Philokalia; see Hesychasm and the Prayer of the Heart).

The fathers are careful about the body. Asceticism mortifies not the body itself — which is God’s creation and destined for resurrection — but the passions that misuse it; the aim is not to destroy desire but to reorder it, turning eros toward God (Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, SVS Press, rev. ed. 1995; Lossky, The Mystical Theology, 1976). The goal of the whole struggle is apatheia (dispassion) — not apathy or insensibility, but the state of a soul so healed of the tyranny of the passions that it is free to love; and apatheia, in Evagrius’ famous saying, has love (agape) as its daughter (Evagrius, Praktikos 81; trans. in The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, Cistercian, 1972). Dispassion is thus not the end but the threshold: the purified heart is one made capable of love and of God.

Hesychia: The Stillness of the Purified Heart

As the passions are quieted, the monk enters more deeply into hesychia, stillness — the inner silence in which the heart, no longer torn by the passions and no longer scattered among distracting thoughts, becomes single and attentive, capable of standing before God in unceasing prayer (see Hesychasm and the Prayer of the Heart). Hesychia is both the fruit of ascesis and the condition of contemplation: it is the “return of the mind into the heart,” the gathering of the whole person into a unified attention that the Jesus Prayer serves and sustains. In this stillness the illumination of the heart takes place — the beginning of the direct knowledge of God, the reception of the divine light, the transformation of the mind (nous) that the fathers describe as its purification and enlightenment (Lossky, The Mystical Theology, 1976, on the descent of the mind into the heart; Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas, 1974). Ascesis clears the ground; hesychia is the silence in which the seed of prayer can grow into the tree of contemplation.

Theosis: Union with God by Grace

The summit is theosis, deification — real union with God, in which the human person, purified and illumined, is made a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) and shares in the very life of God. Here Orthodox theology draws its decisive distinction, articulated by St. Gregory Palamas in the hesychast controversy: the human person is united not to the divine essence, which remains forever transcendent, unknowable, and unparticipable, but to the divine energies — God’s own uncreated grace, life, and glory, truly communicated to the creature (Palamas, The Triads, trans. Gendle, Paulist Press, 1983; Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, 1974; and see Hesychasm and the Prayer of the Heart and the full account in Orthodoxy: Theosis). Because the energies are truly God and truly communicable, deification is not a metaphor or a mere moral improvement but a real participation in God, and the Uncreated Light seen by the saints is the visible manifestation of this deifying grace — the same light that shone from Christ on Tabor (Matthew 17:2). Deification does not annihilate the person or dissolve it into an impersonal divine ocean — the very error the tradition most fears — but fulfills the person, making the human being most fully itself precisely in its union with God (Lossky, The Mystical Theology, 1976).

The Whole Life as One Movement

Understood this way, the monastic life is revealed as a single, coherent movement, and the pieces treated across this collection fall into place. The flight to the desert and the withdrawal from the world (Section 01–02) clear the space for the struggle. The rule, the vows, the obedience, and the daily round (Sections 03–04, 07) order and sustain the ascesis. The prayer of the heart (Section 05) is the means by which stillness is won and God is sought. The elder (Section 08) guides the disciple safely through the whole ascent. And the goal of all of it — the reason a person would sell everything, flee to the wilderness, and give a lifetime to prayer and struggle — is theosis: to see God as he is and to be made like him (1 John 3:2), to become by grace what God is by nature. The monk is simply the Christian who pursues this one goal with an undivided heart, and the whole apparatus of monasticism exists to serve it (Ware, The Orthodox Way, 1995; Lossky, The Mystical Theology, 1976). This is why the tradition can call so austere a life a joy, and the “angelic life”: it is the anticipation, already begun in the purified heart, of the deified life of the age to come.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria, St. On the Incarnation. Trans. John Behr. Popular Patristics Series. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011. (§54, “God became man that man might become god.”)
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. (Purification, illumination, deification; the descent of the mind into the heart; union by energies not essence.)
Meyendorff, John. St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The Palamite theology of deification and the Uncreated Light.)
Palamas, Gregory, St. The Triads. Trans. Nicholas Gendle. New York: Paulist Press, 1983. (Essence and energies; deification.)
Evagrius of Pontus. The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer. Trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972. (The eight thoughts; apatheia and its daughter love, Praktikos 81.)
John Cassian, St. The Institutes and The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. New York: Paulist/Newman Press, 2000 and 1997. (The eight principal vices.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. (Ascesis, the passions, dispassion, deification.)
Scripture: 2 Peter 1:4; Matthew 17:2; 1 John 3:2.