The Meeting and Noetic Prayer

Around 1934, soon after settling at Katounakia, the young Ephraim met St. Joseph the Hesychast, the great teacher of noetic prayer then living in the nearby desert, and became his spiritual disciple in the inner life. From Joseph he received the “undeluded” practice of the Jesus Prayer of the heart — the noetic prayer that became, alongside obedience, the substance of his own life and teaching.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

The Encounter in the Desert

Not long after his arrival at Katounakia in 1933, the young monk Ephraim encountered St. Joseph the Hesychast (Frangiskos Kottis, c. 1897/98–1959), who with his companion Elder Arsenios was then living the most intense eremitic hesychasm in the caves of the Athonite desert nearby, at Little St. Anne’s and around Katounakia (biography Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, trans. Vassiliadou-Christodoulou, Katounakia, 2003, on the meeting with Joseph; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999, on Ephraim of Katounakia among Joseph’s disciples; on Joseph’s cave-life, see St. Joseph the Hesychast). The meeting is usually placed around 1934, in the first years of Ephraim’s monastic life (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003). [Disputed: the community biography and the Lives dependent on it place Ephraim's meeting with Joseph the Hesychast in the mid-1930s, soon after Ephraim's arrival at Katounakia (commonly c. 1934); this collection reports the early-to-mid-1930s as securely attested and the exact year as given by the devotional sources rather than independently documented.]

The encounter was decisive. Joseph the Hesychast was, in the judgment of the tradition and of modern scholarship alike, the outstanding teacher of noetic prayer on the Mountain in that generation — a man who had recovered, through extreme asceticism and under his own hard search for a living guide, the full practice of the prayer of the heart in a period when such teachers had become rare (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999; Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on Joseph as the reviver of noetic prayer). For a young monk hungry for the inner life, to find such a teacher in the neighboring desert was a gift of the first order, and Ephraim attached himself to Joseph as his guide in prayer (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003).

What He Received: Noetic Prayer

What Joseph gave Ephraim was the concrete method and the living transmission of noetic prayer (noera prosevchi) — the unceasing invocation of the Name, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” carried from the lips into the mind (nous) and from the mind into the heart, until the prayer becomes self-acting and the whole person is gathered in watchful attention before God (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003, on the program of noetic prayer he received from Joseph; the Jesus Prayer formula as taught to him is given in the Lives, full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com, per METHODOLOGY §2.3; on the prayer itself, see The Jesus Prayer and Jesus Prayer). The sources emphasize that Joseph taught him not merely to recite the words but the whole nepsis (watchfulness) that surrounds them: the guarding of the mind, the descent of the intellect into the heart, the discernment of the movements of grace and of temptation, and the ordering of the entire ascetic life — vigil, fasting, tears, and above all obedience — around the one work of prayer (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003; Hierotheos [Vlachos], A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain, 1991, recording Ephraim’s own detailed exposition of the prayer as he had received and practiced it).

The tradition repeatedly stresses that what Joseph transmitted was, in its phrase, the “undeluded” spiritual life — the prayer practiced in such a way as to be safe from plani (delusion) (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003, on the “undeluded” life Joseph taught; johnsanidopoulos.com, per METHODOLOGY §2.3). This safety, in Joseph’s teaching as in Ephraim’s, was secured by humility and obedience: the noetic prayer is not a technique to be seized by the strong-willed but a gift given to the humble and guarded by submission to a spiritual father (see Obedience and Prayer). It is no accident that the disciple who most fully absorbed Joseph’s prayer was also the one most devoted to obedience; in this tradition the two are inseparable.

Ephraim’s discipleship under Joseph has an importance beyond his own biography: it makes him one of the principal living conduits through which Joseph’s recovery of noetic prayer was transmitted and independently attested. Because Ephraim survived Joseph by nearly forty years (Joseph died in 1959; Ephraim in 1998) and himself became a sought-after teacher of the prayer, his own detailed accounts of noetic prayer serve to confirm, a generation on and in another voice, how Joseph had taught it (Hierotheos [Vlachos], A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain, 1991, recording a night’s conversation with Ephraim on the Jesus Prayer that reproduces Joseph’s doctrine in concrete terms; on this role, see St. Joseph the Hesychast: The Two Ephraims). Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos)’s widely-read A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain is precisely such a record: an account of a long night’s conversation with Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, in which the elder expounds the stages and practice of noetic prayer with a precision that has made the book one of the standard modern introductions to hesychast prayer (Hierotheos [Vlachos], A Night in the Desert, 1991). Through Ephraim, in other words, Joseph’s prayer reached a wide readership in a form Joseph himself never wrote down.

Prayer Within Obedience, Not Instead of It

The most important feature of Ephraim’s discipleship under Joseph — and the one that distinguishes his situation from that of Joseph’s other disciples — is that he received Joseph’s prayer without leaving the obedience of his own elder, Nikephoros. He did not become a member of Joseph’s brotherhood or place himself under Joseph as his ruling elder; he remained a monk of the hut of St. Ephraim the Syrian under Nikephoros, and drew from Joseph the instruction in prayer that Nikephoros did not give him — and this arrangement, the tradition insists, was Joseph’s own doing (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003, on his remaining under Nikephoros at Joseph’s insistence; see Why He Remained with Nikephoros). This is the crux of Ephraim’s whole spiritual identity: he received the highest prayer within, and never against, the framework of obedience. The next file follows this decision in detail; here it is enough to mark that for Ephraim, noetic prayer and obedience were not rivals but a single life — the prayer of the heart practiced in the safety of obedience, exactly as Joseph had taught (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999).

See Also

References

  • Elder Ephraim of Katounakia [Ὁ Γέρων Ἐφραίμ ὁ Κατουνακιώτης]. Trans. Tessy Vassiliadou-Christodoulou. Katounakia: Holy Hesychasterion of St. Ephraim, 2003. (The meeting with Joseph c. 1934; the “undeluded” noetic prayer received from him; remaining under Nikephoros at Joseph’s insistence.)
  • Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: Vatopaidi, 1999. (Ephraim of Katounakia among Joseph’s disciples; Joseph as teacher of noetic prayer.)
  • Hierotheos (Vlachos), Metropolitan. A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain. Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1991. (Ephraim of Katounakia’s detailed exposition of noetic prayer, reproducing Joseph’s doctrine.)
  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (Joseph as the reviver of noetic prayer.)
  • Derivative Lives (johnsanidopoulos.com; full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com), per METHODOLOGY §2.3.