Prayer Teaching

St. John of Kronstadt taught that prayer is the breathing of the soul — that as the body cannot live without breath, the soul cannot live without converse with God. This file examines his teaching on attention and the heart, his unusually candid diary entries on his own coldness and dryness, his sense of priestly intercession for all Russia, and the way the later Name-glorifiers (imiaslavie) appealed to his writings — carefully distinguishing what he actually wrote from the use made of him in the 1910s controversy.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified ROCOR 1964, Moscow Patriarchate 1990)

Prayer as the Breathing of the Soul

The image most associated with St. John of Kronstadt’s teaching on prayer is respiratory: prayer is to the soul what breath is to the body. The closest diary wording is his statement that “as the breath is necessary for the body, and as without breathing men cannot live, so likewise the soul cannot truly live without the breath of God’s Spirit” (St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ, trans. E. E. Goulaeff). The accent here is on dependence: prayer is not an optional discipline added to spiritual life but its respiration, the continual exchange without which the soul suffocates. He prays in the same register directly — “O my strength, Jesus, Son of God!… do not leave me to dwell alone, without Thyself, the life-giver, my breath, my joy!” (ibid.) — naming Christ himself as the “breath” the soul draws.

[Attestation note: the crisp aphorism “prayer is the breathing of the soul,” often quoted of St. John, condenses this teaching; the wording given above is the form actually found in the Goulaeff translation of My Life in Christ. The compressed slogan circulates widely in devotional literature, but the diary’s own formulation is the respiratory analogy quoted here.]

The respiratory image carries a practical implication that runs through his whole teaching: prayer is meant to be continual, not occasional. One does not breathe at set hours and stop in between; neither, for Fr. John, should the soul pray only at appointed times and otherwise live without God. The ideal he holds out is a life so saturated with prayer that converse with God becomes as constant and as unnoticed-yet-indispensable as breathing — a vision that connects his parish spirituality to the unceasing-prayer tradition of the Christian East without his ever leaving the idiom of the diary. It is also why he treats the loss of the desire to pray as a kind of spiritual asphyxiation, an alarm to be heeded rather than a mood to be indulged.

Attention and the Heart

For St. John the substance of prayer is the engagement of the heart, governed by attention. He insists that the will must master the heart and direct it Godward: “When praying, we must absolutely subject our heart to our will, and turn it towards God… God requires our hearts. ‘My son, give Me thine heart’” (St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ, trans. Goulaeff; quoting Proverbs 23:26). The standard of true prayer is to stand before God as before a living, present person: those pray rightly who “during the whole time of their prayer, have their eyes fixed upon God, and pray to Him as to a living person, conversing face to face with them” (ibid.). His test for whether a word has been prayed is the “corresponding echo in the heart to each word” — attention is not strain of concentration but the heart’s living answer to what the words name (ibid.). This is recognizably the hesychast concern for uniting mind and heart, expressed in the idiom of a parish confessor rather than of an Athonite treatise.

Two practical principles follow. The first is reality: God is to be prayed to as someone actually present, not as an abstraction or an absent power. The “living person” standard is the same realism that governed his celebration of the Liturgy (see Liturgical Maximalism) — the conviction that the One addressed in prayer is genuinely there, listening, and to be spoken to accordingly. The second is sincerity: the heart must agree with the lips. A word recited while the heart is silent or elsewhere has not yet become prayer; it must be slowed and repeated until the heart answers. From this comes his counsel against haste — “for those who have not attained the capability of praying sincerely it is necessary to pray slowly, waiting for a corresponding echo in the heart to each word” (ibid.) — which applies to private prayer exactly as it applies to the Liturgy. He insists, against any notion that the mere quantity of prayers said is meritorious, that one truly felt petition is worth more than a multitude rattled off without the heart. The criterion is never how much has been recited but how much has been prayed.

The Battle with Coldness

What gives St. John’s teaching on prayer its unusual authority is his candor about his own failures. My Life in Christ is not a manual of attainment but the diary of a man at war with his own coldness, and he records the struggle without flattering himself. He warns the reader, out of his own experience, “do not… allow your heart to be cold, especially during prayer, and avoid in every way cold indifference” (St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ, trans. Goulaeff). He describes the enemy’s tactic against him in vivid terms — “the evil spirit tries to scatter prayer as if it were a sand-heap, tries to turn the words into dry sand, without coherency or moisture — that is to say, without fervour of heart” (ibid.). The realism is the point: a saint celebrated for the fire of his celebration nonetheless documents recurring dryness, distraction, and the labor of dragging a cold heart back to attention. He does not pretend that fervor is a permanent possession; he treats it as something repeatedly lost and repeatedly to be recovered, by force of will turned to God and, when that fails, by tears. His counsel to others on coldness is therefore the counsel of a fellow-sufferer who has found the way through, not of a man to whom prayer came effortlessly. This is part of why the diary spoke so directly to ordinary readers: they recognized their own struggle in his. Kizenko notes that this very intimacy and self-exposure — the diary’s willingness to show the priest’s own spiritual struggle — is part of what made the published diary so compelling to its enormous readership (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint). His teaching on prayer is therefore not delivered from above but reported from inside the struggle.

Intercession for All Russia

St. John understood the priesthood as an office of intercession, and as his fame grew his sense of intercessory responsibility expanded to national scale. Thousands of letters and telegrams reached him daily begging his prayers; he prayed by name for the sick and the troubled across the empire, and came to see himself as a priest interceding not merely for a parish but for the whole Russian people (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint, on the volume of correspondence and the national reach of his intercessory ministry). He held that the priest stands before God on behalf of others, and that intercessory prayer offered with faith is genuinely effective — a conviction borne out, in the eyes of his followers, by the many healings reported in answer to his prayers. The reported answers in turn drew more petitioners, so that his intercession became, in effect, a national institution: the burden of an entire people’s needs laid upon one priest’s prayer.

This priestly burden for all Russia is the same impulse that, in his last years, turned increasingly toward warning: the intercessor who prayed for the nation also wept over its drift from the faith (see Warnings to Russia). The two are inseparable in him — one prays most urgently for what one most fears to lose. His daily Liturgy was offered with this whole-nation intention in view, the particles on the diskos standing for a Church and a people he carried in prayer (see The Divine Liturgy, on the commemoration of the living and the departed at the Proskomedia). The intercessory and the prophetic are thus two faces of a single love for Russia.

Prayer and the Name: The Imiaslavie Connection

A delicate question of reception concerns the Name-glorifiers (imiaslavtsy, the imiaslavie or onomatodoxy movement). In My Life in Christ St. John wrote arrestingly of the power of the divine Name in prayer, including the much-quoted line “the Name of God is God Himself.” After 1907, when the schemamonk Ilarion’s book Na gorakh Kavkaza (“On the Mountains of the Caucasus”) sparked a movement on Mount Athos teaching an indissoluble link between the Name of God and God’s very being, the imiaslavtsy repeatedly cited St. John of Kronstadt as a witness for their position (Wikipedia, “Imiaslavie,” used to locate the controversy and its sources; cf. The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, chapter on the Name-Glorifiers controversy).

Two things must be held apart. First, what St. John actually wrote: devotional statements, in the diary’s characteristic register of immediacy, about the reality and power of the Name in prayer — meant to teach reverent, attentive invocation, not to settle a dogmatic question about the relation of name to essence. Second, the use made of him: he died on December 20, 1908 / January 2, 1909, before the controversy erupted, and could not have intervened in it. The movement’s appropriation of his phrases is therefore a posthumous attribution, and (as commentators note) his lines “can be argued [to have been] taken out of context to support a whole set of ideas that were not found in his own writings” (Wikipedia, “Imiaslavie”; cf. Oxford Handbook). The Most Holy Synod condemned the imiaslavie teaching as erroneous in 1913, and in July 1913 Russian troops forcibly removed several hundred Russian monks from Athos. None of this can be laid at St. John’s door: he is a source the controversialists quoted, not a party to the controversy. [Attestation note: the diary phrases about the Name are genuinely his; the systematic onomatodox doctrine built upon them in 1907–1913 is the work of others and was not endorsed by him.]

References

St. John of Kronstadt (Ivan Ilyich Sergiev). My Life in Christ, or Moments of Spiritual Serenity and Contemplation. Trans. E. E. Goulaeff. Public-domain English edition (text at Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ccel.org).
Kizenko, Nadieszda. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
“Imiaslavie.” Wikipedia (used to locate the controversy, the schemamonk Ilarion’s Na gorakh Kavkaza [1907], the 1913 Synodal condemnation, and the July 1913 events on Athos; the attribution of St. John’s phrases is traced to its primary context in My Life in Christ).
The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought. Oxford University Press (chapter on the Name-Glorifiers [Imiaslavie] controversy).
Proverbs 23:26 (Scripture quoted by St. John).