Purity of Heart and Hesychasm

St. John Cassian’s theology of prayer — the monologistic formula of Conference 10.10, the call to unceasing prayer and continual remembrance of God, the goal of purity of heart, and the “fiery prayer” beyond words — has long been read as a Western witness to the same desert spirituality that, in the Greek East, flowered into the hesychasm of the Jesus Prayer. This study draws that relationship carefully. Cassian and Byzantine hesychasm are best understood as parallel branches sharing a common ancestry in Egyptian monologistic prayer, not as a single line of descent in which Cassian fathered the Jesus Prayer. The formulae differ, the genealogy is indirect, and the honest claim is kinship, not paternity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West)

The Goal: Purity of Heart

Cassian’s whole account of the monastic life is organized around a distinction he places at its head: the difference between the ultimate end (telos) and the immediate goal (skopos) of the monk. In the first conference, that of Abba Moses, he teaches that the final end of the monastic life is the Kingdom of God, but its immediate goal — the target at which all ascetic labor is aimed — is purity of heart (puritas cordis), without which the Kingdom cannot be reached (Cassian, Conferences 1.4–7; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57; Stewart 1998). Everything in the ascetic discipline — fasting, vigils, poverty, the struggle against the eight vices — is instrumental, valuable only insofar as it conduces to this purity of heart (Conferences 1.7; Ramsey, ACW 57).

The phrase is Cassian’s Latin rendering of the desert’s katharotēs and, behind it, of the Lord’s beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). Cassian’s puritas cordis is functionally his Latin equivalent of the Greek apatheia of Evagrius — the state of a heart purified of disordering passion, free for the vision of God — though Cassian, writing for a Latin audience and perhaps wary of the term’s overtones, prefers the scriptural “purity of heart” to the philosophical “passionlessness” (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968). This goal is the hinge on which the link to the East turns: in the hesychast tradition too, the purification of the heart and the cleansing of the nous from the passions are the precondition of the unmediated knowledge and vision of God (see Prayer and Purity of Heart).

Unceasing Prayer and the Remembrance of God

Purity of heart, for Cassian, is both the condition for and the fruit of continual prayer. He takes with full seriousness the apostolic command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and the ninth and tenth conferences, attributed to Abba Isaac, are devoted to how a creature subject to distraction can obey it (Conferences 9–10; Ramsey, ACW 57; Stewart 1998). The answer is not a longer prayer but a constant one — a perpetual orientation of the mind to God, a continual remembrance of God (memoria Dei) that persists beneath all activity, so that the soul is never wholly turned away from him (Conferences 10.7; Ramsey, ACW 57; Stewart 1998).

This ideal of unceasing prayer and continual remembrance of God is precisely the soil from which both the desert’s monologistic practice and the later Jesus Prayer grow. The Eastern tradition would give the same apostolic command (1 Thessalonians 5:17) as the charter of the Jesus Prayer — the short invocation repeated until it becomes ceaseless, descending from lips to mind to heart (Ware 1986; see The Jesus Prayer). Cassian and the hesychasts answer the same scriptural summons; the question this study presses is how closely their answers coincide.

The Monologistic Formula of Conference 10.10

The most celebrated passage in all of Cassian on prayer is the famous chapter in which Abba Isaac gives the monk a single short verse to repeat without ceasing. The formula is the opening of Psalm 69 in the Septuagint numbering — Psalm 69:2 LXX (= Psalm 70:1 in the Hebrew/Masoretic numbering): “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me” (Deus, in adiutorium meum intende; Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina) (Conferences 10.10; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57). Isaac counsels that this verse should be turned over ceaselessly in the heart, carried into every circumstance — prosperity and trial, temptation and consolation — until the mind, narrowed to this single phrase, is freed from the multiplicity of thoughts and held fast on God alone (Conferences 10.10; Ramsey, ACW 57; Stewart 1998).

This is monologistic prayer — prayer reduced to a single brief formula (monologistos, “of one word/phrase”) repeated continually — and it is one of the clearest patristic descriptions of the method. Cassian’s exposition of why a short repeated formula suits the mind’s weakness, how it excludes distracting thoughts by occupying the heart, and how it can become continual, anticipates in striking ways the rationale that the hesychast tradition would give for the Jesus Prayer (Ware 1986; Stewart 1998). It is no surprise that Kallistos Ware and others cite Conference 10.10 as the classic Western parallel to the prayer of the Name (Ware 1986).

But the parallel must be stated with precision, and here is where care is owed:

[Disputed: the relationship between Cassian's monologistic formula and the hesychast Jesus Prayer is one of parallel and common ancestry, not direct descent. The texts differ in substance — Cassian's formula is a *Psalm verse* (Ps 69:2 LXX, "O God, come to my assistance"), whereas the Jesus Prayer is an invocation of the *Name of Jesus* ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me"); Kallistos Ware (*The Power of the Name*, 1986; *The Orthodox Way*) and other scholars present Cassian as a Western *witness* to the desert's monologistic prayer and a *parallel* to the Jesus Prayer, not as the source of Byzantine hesychasm. The honest position is common descent from the monologistic prayer of the Egyptian desert — attested in the *Apophthegmata* and in Evagrius as well as in Cassian — rather than Cassian being the ancestor of the Jesus Prayer; the genealogy should not be overstated].

The shared element is the method — a single short formula, ceaselessly repeated, to gather the scattered mind and keep it on God. The differing element is the content — Psalm verse versus invocation of the Name. And the connecting term is the common source — the Egyptian desert, where the practice of repeating a short scriptural phrase is attested independently of Cassian. Cassian did not invent the method; he recorded the desert’s, in Latin, and the Greek East developed its own monologistic practice — eventually crystallizing on the Name of Jesus — from the same desert root.

“Fiery Prayer” and the Prayer Beyond Words

Cassian does not stop at the repeated formula. The repetition is a means; its end is a state of prayer that transcends words altogether. He describes a “fiery prayer” (oratio ignita) — prayer enkindled beyond the reach of language and even of the formula that led to it, in which the soul, no longer using words or images, is caught up in an inexpressible and wordless outpouring toward God (Conferences 9.25–26, 10.11; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57; Stewart 1998). This is for Cassian the summit of prayer: pure prayer (oratio pura), the prayer of the purified heart, fire kindled by the Spirit.

The resonance with the hesychast tradition is real and worth naming, again with care. The hesychasts too describe the prayer of the heart passing beyond words into a contemplation suffused with the divine light, and the imagery of fire and light recurs in both traditions (Ware 1986; on the later development, St. John Climacus). But the resonance is again that of parallel witnesses to the same desert mysticism, not of a developed Palamite theology present in Cassian. Cassian has no doctrine of the divine energies, no theology of the uncreated light such as St. Gregory Palamas would articulate in the fourteenth century; to read these later distinctions back into the oratio ignita would be anachronistic (Stewart 1998). What can be said is that Cassian’s fiery prayer and the hesychast prayer of the heart are recognizably of one spiritual family, the family of the Egyptian desert.

The Eastern Parallel: Hesychia and the Ladder

The Greek East’s own articulation of this spirituality is best seen in St. John Climacus, whose Ladder of Divine Ascent (seventh century, Sinai) treats stillness (hesychia) and prayer in its final steps. Step 27 of the Ladder is on hesychia — the inner stillness and watchfulness of the solitary, the gathering of the mind into the heart — and Step 28 is on prayer, where Climacus, like Cassian, prizes brevity and continuity over many words: “Do not use many words when you pray, lest your mind be distracted in searching for words,” and he commends a short, concentrated prayer that holds the mind on God (Climacus, Ladder 28; trans. Luibheid and Russell, CWS, 1982). Climacus also gives an early and explicit witness to the invocation of the Name and to uniting the remembrance of Jesus with the breath (Ladder 27, 28; Luibheid and Russell, CWS, 1982; Ware 1986).

Set beside Cassian, Climacus shows the same desert inheritance developing along a Greek line: continual remembrance of God, brevity of prayer, stillness of the heart, and increasingly the centering of all of it on the Name of Jesus. This is the genuine relationship — two traditions, Latin and Greek, drawing the same water from the same desert spring, one of them (the Greek) going on to flower into the fully formed hesychasm of the Jesus Prayer and, much later, the theology of St. Gregory Palamas. Cassian stands in the Latin West as a witness that the spring was one (Ware 1986; Stewart 1998).

Holding the Relationship Honestly

The temptation, for a tradition that loves both Cassian and the Jesus Prayer, is to draw a straight line from Conference 10.10 to “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” The sources do not warrant the straight line, and the most careful Orthodox scholarship does not draw it. What they warrant is this: Cassian preserved, in Latin, the desert’s teaching on purity of heart, unceasing prayer, the short repeated formula, and the wordless prayer of fire; the Greek East preserved and developed the same desert teaching, and on its own line it converged upon the invocation of the Name and matured into hesychasm. The two are kin through their common Egyptian ancestor, not parent and child (Ware 1986; Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968).

This is the more impressive kinship for being indirect. That a Latin father of fifth-century Gaul and the hesychast masters of Sinai, Athos, and Byzantium should describe the prayer of the heart in such recognizably related terms is itself the strongest evidence that they drink from one source — the prayer of the Egyptian desert, the common patrimony of the undivided Church. And it is fitting that the Philokalia, the great Greek anthology of the prayer of the heart, should have made room for Cassian among its fathers (see A Greek Father Writing in Latin): the East recognized in the Latin author one of its own witnesses to the one tradition of unceasing prayer.

See Also

References

  • Cassian, John. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Purity of heart as skopos, Conf. 1.4–7; unceasing prayer and the remembrance of God, Conf. 9–10; the monologistic formula “O God, come to my assistance” = Ps 69:2 LXX / 70:1, Conf. 10.10; “fiery prayer” / oratio ignita and pure prayer, Conf. 9.25–26, 10.11.)
  • Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Puritas cordis and its relation to Evagrian apatheia; the theology of unceasing prayer; the formula of Conf. 10.10; fiery prayer; the absence of later Palamite distinctions in Cassian.)
  • Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (Cassian’s prayer-theology and Evagrian background; the desert sources.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1986. (Cassian’s Conf. 10.10 as the Western parallel to the Jesus Prayer; monologistic prayer; the invocation of the Name; the desert roots of the practice.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Bishop). The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. (The Jesus Prayer and the tradition of unceasing prayer.)
  • St. John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Step 27 on hesychia; Step 28 on prayer; brevity of prayer and the remembrance of Jesus.)