The Treatise on the Jesus Prayer

On the Prayer of Jesus — drawn from The Ascetical Experiences and translated into English by Father Lazarus (Moore) with a foreword by Bishop Kallistos (Ware) — is St. Ignatius’s classic account of the invocation of the name of Jesus. He sets out the method with rigorous patristic sobriety: the prayer is built on repentance, conducted with attention, and brought gradually from the lips into the mind and the heart — never forced, never sought for its sweetness, and never separated from the labor of self-knowledge.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Prayer and the Treatise

The Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (and its shorter forms) — is the continual invocation of the name of Jesus that stands at the center of the hesychast tradition of the Christian East (see The Jesus Prayer). Brianchaninov’s treatment of it, gathered as On the Prayer of Jesus (O molitve Iisusovoi), is a portion of The Ascetical Experiences (see The Ascetical Experiences) and is among the most influential modern Orthodox accounts of the practice. In English it reached a wide readership through the translation of Father Lazarus (Moore), published with a foreword by Bishop Kallistos (Ware) — a pairing that signals the work’s standing as a classic guide (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, trans. Father Lazarus, foreword by Kallistos Ware; Amazon and Holy Trinity Publications listings).

The treatise is notable for what it shares with, and how it differs from, the more famous popularization of the Jesus Prayer in The Way of a Pilgrim. Where the Pilgrim tells a story of the prayer’s sweetness and its self-multiplying power, Brianchaninov writes a careful, doctrinal, cautionary exposition — and the difference between the two is itself a topic in the modern Russian discussion of the prayer (Osipov and Hieromonk Adrian Pashin, “The Way of a Pilgrim” and Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov’s) Teaching on Prayer, orthochristian.com/53475.html).

Repentance as the Foundation

The first and most insistent point of Brianchaninov’s teaching is that the Jesus Prayer is not a technique for attaining experiences but a form of repentance. The prayer’s own words — “have mercy on me, a sinner” — declare its character: it is the cry of the penitent for mercy, and it can be prayed rightly only by one who genuinely knows himself a sinner in need of mercy. To approach the prayer seeking sweetness, visions, warmth, or spiritual sensation, rather than seeking mercy out of contrition, is to corrupt it at the root (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus; cf. Osipov, The Basics of Spiritual Life, orthochristian.com/53476.html). This is why, for Brianchaninov, the whole edifice of the spiritual life — self-knowledge, the recognition of one’s sinfulness, contrition — must precede and accompany the prayer; the prayer is not the beginning but the continual expression of repentance.

This grounding governs everything else. It is the reason he insists one must “begin at the beginning,” with repentance and with the moral alignment of one’s life to the Gospel, before any reaching after the higher gifts of prayer; the gifts sought out of sequence, “untimely,” become — in the image Osipov draws from him — “vipers in the soul” (Osipov, The Basics of Spiritual Life, orthochristian.com/53476.html).

Attention

The second pillar of the method is attention (vnimanie). The prayer must be said not absent-mindedly, with the lips while the mind wanders, but with the mind enclosed in the words of the prayer — gathered, vigilant, attending to the meaning of what is spoken. Brianchaninov teaches the disciplined recollection of the scattered mind into the prayer, the patient bringing-back of the attention each time it strays. Attention is the labor that makes the prayer prayer and not mere recitation; without it the words are empty, and with it the prayer slowly gathers the fragmented soul into unity before God (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus).

The Descent of the Mind into the Heart

The third element is the gradual movement of the prayer inward — from spoken (oral) prayer, to mental prayer said within the mind, toward the union of mind and heart in which, in the hesychast tradition, the prayer becomes the prayer of the heart. Brianchaninov describes this descent of the mind into the heart following the Fathers, but — and this is characteristic — he surrounds it with warnings. He is deeply cautious about the physical techniques sometimes associated with the prayer (the regulation of the breath, the bowing of the head, the fixing of attention on a bodily place). He does not forbid the inherited bodily aids absolutely, but he repeatedly warns that they are dangerous when used by the inexperienced, without a guide, and as a means of forcing an experience; the safe and essential thing is not the technique but the repentance and attention that the technique was only ever meant to serve (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus; cf. Against Delusion).

The descent of the mind into the heart, in his teaching, is given by grace in its own time to the soul that has labored faithfully in repentance and attention; it is not to be seized by method. To try to manufacture the prayer of the heart by technique, ahead of the purification that should ground it, is one of the surest roads to prelest — the delusion against which the whole next file is concerned (see Against Delusion).

Brianchaninov and The Way of a Pilgrim

The contrast between Brianchaninov’s treatise and The Way of a Pilgrim — the nineteenth-century Russian narrative that did more than any other text to popularize the Jesus Prayer in the West — repays attention, because it throws his distinctive emphasis into sharp relief, and because it has become a topic in the modern Russian discussion of the prayer (Osipov and Hieromonk Adrian Pashin, “The Way of a Pilgrim” and Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov’s) Teaching on Prayer, orthochristian.com/53475.html). The Way of a Pilgrim tells of a wanderer who, taught a method, takes up the Jesus Prayer and finds it multiplying of itself, filling him with sweetness and a sense of grace, almost as a self-acting gift bestowed early and abundantly. Read naively, the narrative can suggest that the prayer is a technique that quickly yields consoling experiences, and that the seeker may expect such experiences as the normal fruit of the practice.

Brianchaninov’s treatise is, in effect, the cautious corrective to that impression — not a rejection of the Jesus Prayer (which he holds to be the very center of the inner life) but a warning against the expectation of early sweetness and self-acting grace, and against the seeking of experiences rather than mercy. Osipov, drawing the contrast, presents Brianchaninov as the necessary sober counterweight: the seeker who comes to the Jesus Prayer expecting the Pilgrim’s consolations, without the Pilgrim’s (often understated) foundation of humility and repentance, is precisely the seeker most likely to fall into prelest (Osipov and Pashin, orthochristian.com/53475.html; see Against Delusion). The two texts are not enemies, but Brianchaninov supplies the discipline and the warnings that an incautious reading of the Pilgrim might omit. In the modern reception of the Jesus Prayer, the two are often read together, with Brianchaninov as the corrective lens.

The Degrees of Prayer

Following the Fathers, Brianchaninov describes prayer as passing through degrees, and his account of these degrees is itself a teaching in patience and sequence. The first and most accessible is oral or vocal prayer — the prayer said with the lips and the voice, in which the beginner must spend much labor, simply training the wandering attention to remain with the words. From this grows mental prayer (umnaya molitva) — prayer said within the mind, without the voice, the attention now enclosed in the meaning of the words. And beyond this lies the prayer of the heart (serdechnaya molitva) — the union of mind and heart in which, in the hesychast tradition, the whole person prays and the prayer becomes, by grace, self-acting and unceasing (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus).

Brianchaninov’s emphasis, characteristically, falls on the lower degrees and on the danger of grasping prematurely at the higher. He insists that the beginner’s long labor in attentive oral and mental prayer is not a preliminary to be hurried through but the very substance of the work for most people most of the time, and that the prayer of the heart is a gift of grace given in God’s time to the soul purified by repentance — never a state to be manufactured by technique or seized by the impatient. To reach for the prayer of the heart ahead of the purification that should ground it is, again, the road to delusion. The degrees of prayer, in his hands, become a counsel of patience: do the work proper to your state, and leave the higher gift to God.

The Patristic Sobriety

What distinguishes Brianchaninov’s treatise is its temper: it is the most cautious of the great modern accounts of the Jesus Prayer. Every step of the method is hedged with the reminder of human weakness, the warning against self-deception, and the insistence that the prayer’s purpose is mercy and not experience. He draws his whole method from the Fathers — from the hesychast masters of the Philokalia, from Climacus, from the desert tradition — but he reads them through the lens of his governing conviction that the present age is weak and prone to delusion (see Discernment for a Weakened Age). The result is a teaching on the Jesus Prayer that gives the inexperienced reader not a ladder to mystical heights but a safe, slow, repentant path — and that spends as much care on what must not be done as on what must.

See Also

• Against Delusion — the warnings against prelest that accompany the method
• The Ascetical Experiences — the larger work from which the treatise is drawn
• Reading the Fathers — the patristic sources of his method
• Discernment for a Weakened Age — the diagnosis that shapes his caution
• Orthodoxy Guide: The Jesus Prayer — the verified pan-Orthodox treatment of the practice
• St. Theophan the Recluse — his contemporary, the other great modern teacher of the prayer of the heart

References

• Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus (Moore); foreword by Bishop Kallistos (Ware). Boston: New Seeds / Shambhala, 2006 (and earlier eds.); also published in On the Prayer of Jesus, Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov (ISBN 0912927615). (Repentance as foundation; attention; the descent of the mind into the heart; caution on bodily technique.)
• Brianchaninov, Ignatius. O molitve Iisusovoi [On the Prayer of Jesus], in Asketicheskie opyty, Polnoe sobranie tvorenii, vols. 1–2.
• Osipov, Alexei Ilyich, and Hieromonk Adrian (Pashin). “The Way of a Pilgrim” and Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov’s) Teaching on Prayer. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/53475.html). (The contrast between the Pilgrim and Brianchaninov’s cautious method.)
• Osipov, Alexei Ilyich. The Basics of Spiritual Life, Based on the Writings of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/53476.html). (“Begin at the beginning”; untimely gifts as “vipers in the soul.”)
• Ware, Kallistos (Bishop). Foreword to On the Prayer of Jesus by Ignatius Brianchaninov. (The standing of the treatise as a classic guide.)