The Life of Prayer

St. Dimitri’s teaching on the inner life: the prayer of the heart in the secret “closet,” the constant remembrance of God, and his counsel on unceasing prayer — that ceaseless prayer is attained not by some single technique but by praying often, until the soul is habituated to turn to God always. His teaching set within the Orthodox tradition of interior prayer that reaches from the Desert Fathers to the Russian masters of the Jesus Prayer.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1757)

The Closet of the Heart

The heart of Dimitri’s spiritual teaching is the inward turn of prayer figured in the title of his treatise, The Inner Man in the Closet of the Heart (see The Spiritual Alphabet and the Inner Man). Reading the Lord’s counsel “enter into thy closet … and pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6) in the patristic way, Dimitri teaches that the true closet is the heart and the true prayer is interior: the withdrawal of the mind from the scattering of the senses and its recollection within, where it stands before God in secret. The patristic tradition had long read this verse so. The “closet” or inner chamber into which one withdraws and shuts the door is not, on this reading, merely a private room but the hidden interior of the soul; the shutting of the door is the closing of the mind against the clamor of the senses and the wandering of thoughts; and the prayer “in secret” is prayer offered where no eye sees, in a place so inward that the one praying is scarcely aware of it himself save as the presence of God. To pray thus is to descend from the surface of the self, where the soul lives dispersed among its sensations and concerns, into the still center where it can attend to God alone.

This is the classic Orthodox understanding of noetic prayer — prayer of the nous, the mind descended into the heart — and Dimitri stands within it, a Russian witness in the early eighteenth century to the same interior tradition that the Desert Fathers had founded and that the Russian masters of the Jesus Prayer would later systematize (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Jesus Prayer). The continuity is real and not merely formal. The Desert Fathers had taught the guarding of the heart and the gathering of the mind; the Hesychast tradition had developed from it a whole discipline of the nous united to the heart in the invocation of the Name; and Dimitri, for all the baroque coloring of his idiom and his age, is teaching the same essential thing — that prayer is, first and last, the standing of the recollected mind before God in the secret of the heart.

Unceasing Prayer by Praying Often

Dimitri’s most quoted counsel concerns the apostolic command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) — a command that has always raised the practical question of how unbroken prayer is possible for souls who must also work, sleep, and attend to the world. It is one of the oldest difficulties in Christian ascetic literature: the Apostle plainly commands ceaseless prayer, yet no one can hold an explicit petition before the mind every waking moment, still less while sleeping or laboring. The tradition has answered the difficulty in several ways — by understanding unceasing prayer as a disposition of the heart, or as the continual remembrance of God, or as the brief Name repeated until it prays itself. Dimitri’s answer is characteristically plain and pastoral: unceasing prayer is reached not by a single feat but by frequent prayer, by praying often, until the turning to God becomes the soul’s habit and second nature. As the teaching is summarized from The Inner Man: how is it possible to pray unceasingly, except by praying often? (The Inner Man, trans. Nun Christina; summarized at benjaminasimpson.com).

The counsel is wise and accessible — it does not demand of the beginner an impossible continuity but sets him on the road to it through repetition, the small constant returning of the mind to God that, multiplied, becomes ceaseless prayer. Its pastoral genius lies precisely in not asking too much at the start. The soul that despairs of praying always can still pray often; and the man who prays often enough, and long enough, finds that the act has worn a channel in him, so that the mind turns to God of its own accord even when he has not consciously summoned it. What begins as a deliberate, repeated discipline ends as a habit of the heart — and a habit, by definition, is what one does without ceasing. The unbroken prayer the Apostle commands is thus not the starting point but the fruit; one does not begin by praying without ceasing but arrives there, by the long road of praying again and again. This is teaching fitted for the very people Dimitri spent his episcopate trying to reach: not only monks with leisure for the podvig of prayer, but the half-taught clergy and laity of his diocese, who needed a counsel they could actually begin to follow.

The Remembrance of God

Bound up with this is Dimitri’s emphasis on the remembrance of God (pamiat’ Bozhiia) — the keeping of God constantly in mind, the awareness of His presence carried through the whole of life. Remembrance and forgetfulness are, in the ascetic tradition, the two poles of the spiritual life: to sin is in some sense to forget God, to live as though He were not present; to be holy is to remember Him, to walk continually in the sense of His nearness. The frequent prayer Dimitri counsels is the means by which this remembrance is established and held — each act of prayer a renewal of the memory of God, so that the intervals between forgetting grow shorter and the awareness of His presence becomes the abiding background of the soul’s life. The goal is a soul so habituated to God that it does not forget Him amid its occupations but lives in continual reference to Him, referring its work and its rest, its joys and its trials, to the One always present.

This is the same mnēmē Theou — the remembrance of God — that the whole neptic tradition names as the aim of the watchful life, the inner standing-before-God that watchfulness (nepsis) guards and frequent prayer sustains. The reader can see here how tightly Dimitri’s three emphases are bound: frequent prayer produces the habit, the habit is the unceasing prayer the Apostle commands, and the substance of that ceaseless prayer is the continual remembrance of God. They are not three teachings but one, viewed from three sides. And for all its baroque-era idiom — its warmth, its Passion-centred coloring, its debt to the schools of Kyiv — this teaching is recognizably continuous with the most ancient stream of Christian asceticism, the same that flows from the deserts of Egypt to the Philokalia and the Russian masters of the heart.

A Christ-Centred Devotion

Dimitri’s prayer was markedly Christ-centred, given especially to the contemplation of the Passion and the Crucified — a devotional warmth that modern scholarship has gathered under the heading of his “baroque” spirituality (the title of a recent study, Jesus Crucified: The Baroque Spirituality of St Dimitri of Rostov; see Feast and Scholarship). His meditations and prayers dwell on the love of God shown in the Cross and call the soul to answering love and repentance. This is prayer of the heart in a second sense: not only the descent of the mind into the heart, but the kindling of the heart’s affection toward the Crucified, the gazing of the soul upon the wounds of Christ until it is moved to compunction and love. The two senses are not at odds. The recollection of the mind in the secret closet and the warming of the affections before the Cross belong to one and the same life of prayer; the inward stillness Dimitri teaches is not a cold emptiness but the quiet in which the love of Christ can be felt.

Whatever one makes of the “baroque” form — the question of its Western coloring is weighed in The Kyivan Learning in Petrine Russia — its substance is an affective, Christ-loving piety wholly at home in Orthodox tradition, which has never lacked for tears before the Passion or love poured out upon the Crucified. The idiom is of its age; the thing itself is as old as the Gospel.

The Teaching and the Man

Dimitri’s teaching on prayer is of a piece with everything else in him. The bishop who founded a school and preached against ignorance, the compiler who gathered the lives of the saints, the polemicist who wrote against the schism — all of this rested on a man of interior prayer, who in his own death was found, the tradition records, on his knees before an icon of the Saviour (see Repose 1709). That death is itself the seal upon the teaching: the man who had taught that one prays unceasingly by praying often, and that the goal is a soul so habituated to God that it turns to Him always, was found at the last in the very posture of the prayer he had counseled — as though the habit of a lifetime had simply carried him over into death. The catechesis he urged on his diocese was always ordered to this end: not information but the turning of the heart, the inner man at prayer in the closet of the heart. The school, the sermons, the Lives themselves were means; the end was the praying soul. His writings on prayer are therefore the most personal disclosure of what he hoped the whole of his pastoral labor would produce — and the most direct testimony of what he had himself become.

References

St. Dimitri of Rostov, The Inner Man in the Closet of the Heart (trans. Nun Christina / A. Skoubourdis, 2022). Summary and the “pray often / pray unceasingly” teaching at benjaminasimpson.com. (Unceasing prayer attained by frequent prayer; the inner closet of the heart.)
Dimitrii Rostovskii. Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, pravenc.ru/text/178011.html. (His ascetic and devotional writings; Christ-centred meditations and prayers.)
Jesus Crucified: The Baroque Spirituality of St Dimitri of Rostov. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, svspress.com. (Dimitri’s Christ-centred, Passion-focused devotion.)