The Psychosomatic Method Defended

The hesychasts of the fourteenth century practiced a prayer method involving a seated posture, the lowering of the gaze toward the breast or navel, and the controlling of the breath as aids to recollecting the mind in the heart. Barlaam of Calabria mocked them as omphalopsychoi — “people whose soul is in their navel.” In Triad I.ii St. Gregory Palamas answered with a measured defense: the bodily techniques are an aid for beginners, not the essence of prayer, grounded in the dignity of the body as a partner in salvation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

What the Method Actually Was

By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, several written “methods” of the Jesus Prayer circulated among Athonite and Sinaite monastics. They are preserved chiefly in three sources: the treatise On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart attributed to Nikephoros the Hesychast (Nikephoros the Monk, also called Nikephoros the Italian); the treatise On the Three Methods of Prayer transmitted under the name of St. Symeon the New Theologian but generally held by modern scholarship to be pseudonymous; and the works of St. Gregory of Sinai (On Stillness and On Prayer). All three describe a unified psychosomatic discipline (see The Jesus Prayer).

The method had three components:

  1. Posture. The one praying sits on a low stool, the head bowed and inclined toward the chest, the body gathered in upon itself in an attitude of recollection and contraction.
  2. The gaze. The eyes are directed downward and inward — fixed “on the breast or on the navel” as a point of concentration, so that the sight, which constantly “flows outwards,” is recalled into the interior (Palamas, Triads I.ii.8; trans. Gendle, CWS, pp. 45-46). Gendle notes the phrase “probably has the literal sense of fixing the gaze on the navel” (Gendle, n. 59, p. 127).
  3. The breath. Following Nikephoros, the prayer is joined to the rhythm of respiration. Nikephoros writes: “You know that we breathe our breath in and out, only because of our heart … Drive it, force it to go down to your heart with the air you are breathing in” (cited in Meyendorff’s introduction to the Triads, Gendle, p. 15). The breath is held back and slowed, so that “they will also be able to control the mind together with the breath” (Palamas, Triads I.ii.7; Gendle, p. 45).

None of these masters treated the technique as the substance of prayer. They are aids to nepsis (watchfulness) — physical scaffolding to recall the wandering mind into the heart, the spiritual center of the person. The goal throughout is the descent of the nous (the intellect or spiritual perception) from its scattered wandering among external things into the “heart” — understood not merely as the physical organ but as the deep center where the whole person is gathered and where the human being meets God. The posture, the gaze, and the breath are simply the bodily means by which a beginner, unable yet to still the mind directly, enlists the body to help quiet the soul. Gregory of Sinai is explicit that these are remedies for distraction, to be set aside as the prayer matures.

It should be stressed that the tradition itself flags the disputed authorship of one of its own texts. The treatise On the Three Methods of Prayer, printed in the Philokalia under the name of St. Symeon the New Theologian, is regarded by modern scholarship — following Irénée Hausherr’s 1927 critical edition — as pseudonymous, with Nikephoros the Monk among the suggested authors (see The Jesus Prayer). The provenance is a matter of honest record, not a discredit to the practice, which is attested across multiple independent witnesses.

Barlaam’s Mockery

Barlaam, encountering these methods (whether through naive practitioners or through the texts), seized on them for ridicule. He coined the jeer that the monks were omphalopsychoi — “people whose soul is in their navel” — because of the instruction to fix the gaze below the chest (Meyendorff, introduction, Gendle, pp. 13-14). He treated the breathing and the navel-gaze as a crude materialism, a quasi-magical technique for manufacturing visions, comparable (in later polemics) to the practices of the yogi. His attack was double-edged: it caricatured the method as superstition, and it implied that locating prayer in the body was unworthy of the intellect, which ought rather to be drawn out of the body toward immaterial contemplation.

Palamas’ Measured Defense (Triad I.ii)

Palamas’s reply, On the Methods of Prayer (Triad I.ii), does not defend the techniques as ends in themselves; he defends the principle behind them and assigns the techniques their proper, modest place.

First, he turns Barlaam’s premise against him. To draw the mind “out of the body itself … with the aim of contemplating intelligible visions — that is the greatest of the Hellenic errors, the root and source of all heresies” (Triads I.ii.4; Gendle, pp. 42-43). The Christian, by contrast, “recollects the mind not only within the body and heart, but also within itself.” Citing St. John Climacus — “The hesychast is one who seeks to circumscribe the incorporeal in his body” — Palamas insists that keeping the mind in the body is “exactly the tradition” handed down by the spiritual Fathers (Triads I.ii.6; Gendle, p. 44).

Then comes the careful qualification that defines the Palamite balance. The techniques are explicitly for beginners:

“On the other hand, it is not out of place to teach people, especially beginners, that they should look at themselves, and introduce their own mind within themselves through control of breathing. A prudent man will not forbid someone who does not as yet contemplate himself to use certain methods to recall his mind within himself, for those newly approaching this struggle find that their mind, when recollected, continually becomes dispersed again.” (Triads I.ii.7; Gendle, p. 44)

The breath-control is frankly provisional — “this, at any rate, until such time as they have made progress” (Triads I.ii.7; Gendle, p. 45). For the advanced, the technique falls away: “In the case of those who have made progress in hesychasm, all this comes to pass without painful effort and without their worrying about it, for the perfect entry of the soul within itself spontaneously produces such inner detachment. But with beginners none of these things comes about without toil” (Triads I.ii.8; Gendle, p. 45). The method is a crutch, dignified but dispensable — an aid, not the essence.

On the gaze, Palamas offers a positive rationale: “How should such a one not gain great profit if, instead of letting his eye roam hither and thither, he should fix it on his breast or on his navel, as a point of concentration? For in this way, he will not only gather himself together externally … he will also, by disposing his body in such a position, recall into the interior of the heart a power which is ever flowing outwards through the faculty of sight” (Triads I.ii.8; Gendle, pp. 45-46).

Palamas refuses to caricature the practice as Barlaam did, but he is equally careful not to exaggerate its importance. He grounds the inward turn of the mind in patristic psychology, citing Pseudo-Dionysius’s distinction between the mind’s “straight-line” motion (outward, toward sensible things) and its “circular” motion (returning upon itself and so mounting toward God), and St. Basil’s counsel that the mind “which is not dispersed abroad … returns to itself, and through itself mounts towards God” (Triads I.ii.5; Gendle, pp. 38, 43). The bodily method simply assists this circular return. He even gives the navel-gaze a moral rationale drawn from Scripture: since “the law of sin” has its seat in the appetites of the belly, one may fittingly place there “the law of the mind” armed with prayer, to drive out the evil spirit and guard the regenerate soul (Triads I.ii.9; Gendle, p. 46, alluding to Romans 7:23 and Matthew 12:43-45). The whole discussion is framed by Moses’s command, “Pay attention to yourself” — meaning, Palamas says, “to the whole of yourself, not just a part” (Triads I.ii.9; Gendle, p. 46). The body is included in that “whole.”

The Body’s Dignity in Prayer

Beneath the defense of technique lies Palamas’s deeper conviction: the body is not the prison of the soul but its partner in deification. He answers the Platonizing contempt for the flesh with the logic of the Incarnation — for if the Word “has clothed himself in the body,” then the hesychast must “circumscribe the mind in his body” to receive Him (Triads I.ii.6; Gendle, p. 44). The whole human being, body and soul, is the vehicle of grace. Palamas teaches that when the saints are filled with divine longing, “their flesh also is being transformed and elevated” along with the soul (Triads I.ii; Gendle, p. 51). The body shares now in the firstfruits of the glory it will receive at the resurrection. This anthropology — body as co-heir of grace, not obstacle to it — is the theological ground on which the bodily prayer method stands.

Continuity with Later Practice

The discipline Palamas defended did not end with him. The same threefold structure — posture, breath, the descent of the mind into the heart — passed through the Philokalia (compiled 1782) into the modern Orthodox prayer tradition, with the consistent caveat that the breathing is “a secondary tool, not the essence of the prayer,” and that imageless attention in the heart is the heart of the matter (see The Jesus Prayer). The nineteenth-century Russian systematizers and the twentieth-century Athonite elders inherited the same balance. St. Paisios of Mount Athos taught the Jesus Prayer in this lineage, emphasizing the warmth of the heart and divine consolation while subordinating all method to humility and grace (see St. Paisios: The Jesus Prayer).

Warnings and Safeguards

The tradition that transmitted the method also surrounded it with warnings, exactly as Palamas did when he limited it to beginners under guidance. The central danger is prelest (Greek plani) — spiritual delusion, in which the practitioner mistakes imagination, physical sensation, or demonic suggestion for divine grace. The safeguards are constant across the tradition: obedience to an experienced spiritual father; the refusal to seek visions, lights, or experiences; imageless prayer; humility and repentance as the only proper aim; and patience that lets grace work in its own time. The later Fathers — St. Ignatius Brianchaninov above all — cautioned that in an age when true elders are rare, the psychophysical methods should not be attempted alone, and that the simpler oral and mental forms of the Jesus Prayer are safe for all (see The Jesus Prayer). Palamas would not have dissented: for him the technique was always servant to the watchful, humble, grace-dependent labor of the heart, never a mechanism for compelling God.

See Also

References

  • Palamas, St. Gregory. The Triads. Edited by John Meyendorff. Translated by Nicholas Gendle. Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983. (Triad I.ii, “On the methods of prayer,” pp. 41-47; Meyendorff’s introduction on Nikephoros and the omphalopsychoi, pp. 13-15; editor’s notes, pp. 126-127.)
  • Nikephoros the Hesychast. On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4. Translated by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
  • On the Three Methods of Prayer (attributed to St. Symeon the New Theologian; pseudonymous per Hausherr’s 1927 edition), in The Philokalia, vol. 4.
  • St. Gregory of Sinai. On Prayer and On Stillness, in The Philokalia, vol. 4.
  • Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Translated by George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.